Private Terrorism Threats

Imagine this. You walk out of your house, grab the newspaper, look at the newspaper while you walk to your car, and finally get into your car. You start the car and drive to the bank. You were staring at the newspaper for so long that you weren’t paying attention to the person parked behind you. Now they know where your house is and what kind of car you drive. You drop your kids off at daycare. They now know what your kids look like and where they are during the day. This person follows you and when you go to the ATM, they now have your pin number and know where your money is. Does this worry you? Did you know this is considered stalking? Leaving your house is similar to getting on the internet or calling your friend. None of this is private …show more content…
Events such as 9/11 or the Boston bombing show that there is a real threat of destruction from terrorist organizations. Knowing the potential, the government is required to prevent as many attacks as possible before they take place. To do this job, the NSA uses surveillance to monitor people who are affiliated with terrorist groups and their activities. Without this tool, it would be harder for them to figure out the severity or reliability of the threats because they would only depend on tips (Bergen). Currently, ISIS is a major threat to the country and people are scared of terrorist attacks. The tensions will continue to increase and attacks will likely increase as well if ISIS isn’t under control yet. Current terrorism is so intimidating for the country due to the willingness for suicide and the nuclear weapons that are available today. Now terrorism hides behind intelligence systems and is much harder to find. This system allows quick metadata on people so that action can take place. However, some rights require modifications for this system to …show more content…
People are being criminally charged for innocent jokes or statements that resemble terrorism if the context is not evaluated. One example was a man named Joe Lipari, a stand-up comedian, who was forced to fight against charges for two years. What did this man do? He quoted a phrase from the movie Fight Club on Facebook. While he watched the movie, he put on Facebook, “Joe Lipari might walk into an Apple store on Fifth Avenue with an Armalite AR-10 gas powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges.” While this does seem like a terrorist threat towards Apple, anyone who has seen Fight Club knows that this is obviously changing a quote off of there to go with his poor experience. However, he was arrested and had the burden of fighting charges for two years (Booth). Obviously, context is a major issue when looking at large quantities of data. Rather than demanding more information, the government needs to find a more accurate way of analyzing this data. Humans need to be analyzing data as the computer systems do for reasons such as Joe Lipari. A human is better at evaluating context to assess the real level of risk for our