Term Paper on "Patriot Act This Study Seeks to Investigate"

Term Paper 15 pages (4721 words) Sources: 15

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Patriot Act

This study seeks to investigate whether the Patriot Act has lived up to its goals of identifying and stopping terrorist attacks. The Patriot Act was put in place after the September 11th terrorist attacks by the former president George Bush and his government. The Act was designed to regulate all financial transactions dealing with anyone who had a connection with foreign government known for terrorist activities. This Act also applies to American citizens aiding and abetting suspected terrorists and domestic terrorism. At times, the Act can cause infringement of the constitution. The Patriot Act is connected to criminal justice in a variety of ways that it appears to be unconstitutional. This Act enables law enforcement agencies to detain suspected terrorists for long periods, allows individual homes and businesses to be searched without any permission by the owner, and allows individual financial records, emails and any other data of suspects to be searched without a court warrant. Laws guiding the criminal justice system are based from the U.S. constitution, which this Act violates some of their rights.

Chapter One

The creation of the Patriot Act

The Patriot Act is a U.S. law endorsed in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Its objectives are to fortify domestic security and widen the authority of law-enforcement organizations with respect to distinguishing and ceasing terrorists. The passing and reestablishment of this law has been greatly questionable. Supporters assert that it has been instrumental in various investigations and arrest of terrorists. However, opponents disapprove provisions of the Act that give the government excessive power undermines civil liberties and threatens the very democracy it was created to secure (Ball, 2008). This study examines the history of the Patriot Act, the criticisms and support on whether it is truly living up to expectations of the citizens.

The justification of the Act

The storm of criticisms and questions following the disclosures that the Bush government had various warnings of an impending terror attack soon after the Sept. 11 disaster have centered principally on the Nixon-time mantra. Although a congressional investigation concurs with Bush organization protestations that the warnings were not particular enough to recognize what to do, administration policies after Sept. 11 is set to require some explanation too (Ewing & Doyle, 2009).

The lack of specified warnings protection may support an absence of action soon after the airline hit the World Trade Center, it cannot illustrate the falsehoods offered to the Congress and the American quest after 9/11 to legitimize the administration's war on common emancipations. The Bush administration had been skeptically utilizing its flops to follow up insights that the then-existing laws advanced to support the Patriot Act at the cost of civil liberties (Stefoff, 2011). Before the 9/11 incident, the then Attorney General John Ashcroft bundled an old FBI list of things to get as the U.S. Patriot Act and requested Congress pass it without talks, due to the risk of yet an alternate Pearl Harbor-like attack. He explained that the administration required new "instruments" to avert sudden terrorist attacks; new wiretap power, the application of secret evidence, secret searches, lawyers and secret immigration hearings (Ball, 2008).

Through presidential pronouncement, the press had been sliced off from standard access to government information. Local law requirement seemed to be assigned for elected migration officers and Ashcroft allocated legal advisors representing terrorists independently. At the state level and spots like Minnesota, local law implementation has gotten on the fleeting trend with state "antiterrorism" charges aping the Ashcroft proposals (Cole & Smith, 2008). All these have been justified in the name of forestalling an alternate surprise attack. The administration had the right "instruments" set up before Sept. 11. Those instruments might have proven to be viable if the administration had known how to utilize them.

How the Patriot Act relates to criminal justice

The U.S. Patriot Act is an element of the Department's larger method to uproot terrorists from the streets. The Department expects to utilize its prosecutorial attentiveness, examining, arraigning, and disciplining criminal acts that have been neglected in the past. The Act has improved the Department's capability to seek after this technique by fortifying the country's criminal laws against terrorism, giving the Department a strong establishment to seek after what has turned into the Department's most elevated necessity (Ewing & Doyle, 2009). For instance, after the Act was implemented, federal crime gave material support to people or organizations that violated different terrorism laws. Previously, material help did not incorporate master consultation and support like common expert's counsel on the most proficient method to decimate a building or a natural chemist's consultation on the best way to make a biotic executor more deadly. The law likewise failed to indicate that furnishing financial support to a designated remote terrorist organization constituted material backing.

Section 805 of the U.S. Patriot Act supported the ban on furnishing material support to terrorists by obviously making it a crime to give terrorists "master counsel or help." Material assistance incorporates all manifestations of cash and not simply hard money when clearing the issue. Additionally, section 810 expanded the extreme punishment for giving material support to a terrorist alternately a terrorist organization from ten years to fifteen years in jail. The Department has adequately utilized the material support statute within various later cases such as those including fear units in Lackawanna, New York and Virginia. Between September 11, 2001 and May 5, 2004, the 9-department accused over fifty respondents of material support offenses in seventeen distinctive legal areas (Gordon & McBride, 2011).

Terrorist Financing

The U.S. Patriot Act likewise fortified the criminal laws against terrorism by making it less demanding to indict those answerable for funneling cash to terrorists. Under previous law, individuals who carried out unlicensed cash transmitting businesses depended on the positive defense that they had no information of material state authorizing prerequisites. Some of these organizations called hawalas have piped far-reaching measures of cash to terrorist aggregates abroad. This enabled them to mask their underhand activities in fostering terror activities. However, the Patriot Act has enabled the state to track such business practices and eventually curbing terror activities (Cole & Smith, 2008).

The U.S. Patriot Act authorizes government offices to share intelligence with the goal of compiling mosaic information to have better insights of terrorist plans and prevent the attacks. Former law, as implemented and interpreted had the impact of sharply restricting the capacity of law enforcers and intelligent officers to share informative data, which extremely hampered terrorism examiners' capacity to unite the specks (Stefoff, 2011). However, the U.S. Patriot Act, on top of progressions in Attorney General Guidelines and Foreign Discernment Surveillance Act (FISA) court methodology cut down this wall separating intelligence from law enforcement authorities. It has significantly improved intelligence sharing among national security personnel, intelligence agencies, federal law enforcement and other organizations entrusted with protecting the country from all acts of terror. This expanded capacity to share qualified data has been precious to the behavior of terrorism examinations. It has straightforwardly expedited the interruption of terrorist plots and various arrests, convictions, and prosecutions in terrorism cases.

The later prosecution and investigation of members of an al Qaeda unit in Lackawanna, New York shows the profits of the expanded qualified information sharing realized by the U.S.A. Loyalist Act. This case included some inhabitants of Lackawanna, who headed out to Afghanistan in 2001 to appropriate preparing at an al-Qaeda-associated camp close Kandahar. The investigation of the "Lackawanna Six" started throughout the hot time of 2001 when the FBI appropriated an unknown letter showing that these six people and others could be included in criminal activities and taking up with remote terrorists (Ball, 2008).

The FBI presumed that existing law needed the formation of two differentiate examinations to hold the alternative of utilizing FISA: a criminal investigation of conceivable drug criminal acts and insights investigations identified with terrorist threats. The following months, two squads carried on these two different investigations synchronously. In some case, intelligence officers and the law enforcement agencies reasoned that they could not examine the specifics and briefings of the investigations together. This expanded capacity to share qualified data has been precious to the behavior of terrorism examinations and has straightforwardly expedited the interruption of terrorist plots and various arrests, convictions, and prosecutions in terrorism cases.

History of the uses of the Patriot Act

In September 2003, the New York Times covered a case of the U.S. Patriot Act being utilized to research claimed potential drug traffickers without likely reason. The article shows a study by Congress that referenced many situations where the U.S. Patriot Act was utilized to examine non-terrorist asserted prospective criminal acts. Such non-terrorist examinations are important since President Bush and a section of Congress expressed the value that the U.S. Patriot Act had played in researching and appropriating potential terrorist acts (Cole & Smith, 2008).

This is additionally seen by a few as a violation of constitutional rights as Defined in Article One of the United States Constitution, which states, "No bill… READ MORE

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