Before the Act

The question for the United States government was “in an age of high-tech terror, what is the proper balance between national security and the privacy of millions of Americans, whose personal information is already more widely available than ever before?”*. For weeks, in a patriotic bi-partisanship movement, the Bush administration, Congress, and other government officials set out to find that right balance between protecting the United States from other terrorist attacks and not infringing on United States citizens’ rights. At the same time, they had to amend the Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Both of these acts limit the abilities of the intelligence officers to spy domestically and the use of tracking devices, pen registers, trap, and trace devices*. The United States government wanted to ease those restrictions to better track terrorists because intelligence officers and law enforcement community found it so restrictive in trying to track down terrorists, prevent other terrorist acts, and pass information to other intelligence officials. The laws of the United States was designed at a time were the idea of trying to stop and prevent this kind of terrorism was not on the forefront of governmental policies.

There have been some debate and attempts over the years to introduce terrorism bills and acts but nothing came about except the Anti-terrorism Act in 1996 after the Oklahoma City bombing incident. This was created in the initial reaction to do something to stop something like the Oklahoma City bombing from happening again. Now the Bush Administrators and Congressmen along with the Department of Justice sought to do the same thing. The House of Representatives, The Senate, and the Department of Justice, own behalf of the Bush administration, created their own version of what this new act should be. The House of Representatives created the PATRIOT Act, the Senate created the USA Act (S.1510), and Department of Justice proposed the Administration’s Draft Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001. After several revisions and conferences a final bill was created, H.R. 3162. This contained most of what the House of Representatives, Senate, and the Bush administration wanted. The bill was given to the White House on October 25, 2001.

 

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