Security or Freedom - Assignment Example

The result was a manufactured hysteria that created a situation in which the American public became easily manipulated to blindly accept any measures that promised greater security against the threat of another attack. Pres. Bush wasted little time in applying pressure on Congress to pass legislation that intended to loosen restrictions on civil liberties and constitutional rights under the guise of expanding the ability of law enforcement to investigate terrorist activity and only terrorist activity.

The Patriot Act made it possible for investigators to more easily get search warrants and conduct eavesdropping. It also allows detainees to be held indefinitely and has led to racial profiling that has resulted in the detention of Middle Eastern immigrants for no other cause than that they resemble known terrorists (Finan 275). In other words, American has traded it in its longstanding tradition of fairness and equality for all in exchange for the security that comes with identifying criminals by the way they appear.

Of course, because the crime is terrorism and because the criminals behind the act that ignited these crimes possessed a definite ethnic stereotypical appearance, it becomes easier to accept. How easily would Americans accept the idea of detaining anyone who looks British or French The sacrifice of liberties clearly has a racially discriminatory tone to it that proves that despite the election of a black man as President, the United States still has a long path to walk before the issue of judging a person based on appearance is thoroughly addressed.

The argument that easy facilitation of search warrants is an incredibly powerful weapon in the war on terror is not the argument that is at stake at this point; increasingly the evidence is piling up that the abuse of the relaxation of rules regarding search warrants has been used not to protect American against a second attack by foreign terrorists, but to justify the invasion of the privacy of law-abiding Americans with no connection to terrorism whatever. Sec. 206 of the Patriot Act allowed law enforcement agencies for the first time to require just a single warrant that would cover the wiretapping of a home phone, a cell phone, and a computer (Schermer 107).

While the intent of such broad rewriting of the existing laws regarding wiretapping surveillance was to make it easier to investigate suspected terrorists, the most infamous example related to the expansion of surveillance laws resulted in an artist named Steve Kurtz being brought in for questioning on a very shaky foundation of suspicion that that bioterrorist weapons could be created from the ingredients he used in his art supplies. Under the auspices of the Patriot Act, and by definition under the concept that security means being willing to trade rights for protection, Mr.

Kurtz was not only held without ever being officially charged but while he was in custody law enforcement officers conducted a thorough search of his house and seized his computers. Worst of all was that during this prolonged investigation, the police even conducted an examination of his wife's body; she had died of cardiac arrest that morning. It was later determined that none of Kurtz's supplies could actually ever be used in the creation of a weapon (Sutton, Brind, McKenzie 131.)