Managing Homeland Security

Homeland Security Measures

Introduction

An accountable examination of new homeland protection policies finds that they are not all cut from one legal , constitutional , or ethical cloth . They are not all equally reasonable they do not all have the same merit from a national security perspective , nor do they lift up the same level of concern about their effects on our rights . Several were immensely overdue when they were finally enacted in the wake of September 11 , 2001 several are quite reasonable some raise troubling questions and at least one major one

has yet to be introduced . One may well disagree on any of the specific evaluations of the various new security measures . What this is eager to illustrate , however , is an approach that neither condemns wholesale nor embraces all that the government does in the name of homeland protection . Rather , it seeks to assess each measure while keeping in mind the communitarian call for a carefully crafted balance between rights and the common good predominantly national security . Additionally , as new information becomes available about how measures are appropriately and effectively used or abused this evaluation may well change . This is how they have fared thus far

Overdue Measures

Several new safety measures are bringing the law in line with technological developments an updating that should have been carried out well before September 11 , 2001 . The most important of these changes involves a law little known before the terrorist attacks , the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA , enacted in the far away days of 1978 (Public Law pp . 95-511 . FISA provides guidelines under which a federal agent can obtain authorization to conduct surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes ' These purposes include protecting us from acts of foreign powers or their agents (such as terrorists ) within the United States , not just of foreigners , but also of Americans . A major tool of surveillance is wiretaps

Historically , wiretaps were limited to a given phone , say to the one in the suspect 's home or office , because that was the means of communication most people used in those technologically backward days Over the past decades , people acquired multiple phones , cell phones , and e-mail accounts , but federal officials engaged in surveillance under FISA could not follow suspects as they changed the instruments they were using-unless they wanted to get a new court for each communication device . The USA PATRIOT Act , enacted in October 2001 , overcame this limitation by amending the existing FISA law to allow what is called roving surveillance authority (Public Law

. 206 ) - making it legal for agents to follow one suspect , whatever instrument he or she uses Unless one holds that terrorists are entitled to benefit from new technologies but law enforcement is not entitled to catch up , this is an overdue and reasonable measure

Moreover , despite claims by the critics that such surveillance s are all too common , actually-given that nearly 40 million foreigners visit the United States each year , according to the Commerce Department (DOTT ) - rather few such s...