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The Spy Amongst Us September 11 was a wake up call for the whole country, tragic events on that date brought the world’s biggest power to a complete halt. This also brought forth sweeping changes in many sectors, one of them being National Security. Agencies that use to have certain autonomy such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the U.S. Coast Guard, just to name a couple, were grouped into what is now called the Department of Homeland Security. While it is essential to protect the American population and national interests; the goverment is threading the thin line between national security and invasion of privacy. The whole notion of conspiracy theories and Big Brother has been a hot topic among liberals and civil liberty advocates for quite some time; but with the passing and implementation of the “Patriot Act”, the general population has a bigger interest for this topic. Unfortunately, the goverment is doing nothing to shed its new “spy” image, as Barry Steinhardt, a Director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) states: “the Administration’s penchant for secrecy is matched only by its contempt for accountability to the American people and their elected representatives” . As in a part of the movie Enemy of the State in which the wife of the persecuted lawyer asks “who is watching the ones who are watching us?”; we have the right to find out who is watching us and if it is being done appropiately, and hold them responsible. If not there is a possibility that these surveillance tools could create temptations to abuse them for personal purposes (aclu.org). We would have to turn to the Patriot Act, and its main advocate, Attorney General John Ashcroft. First off, we will focus our attention on is Attorney General John Ashcroft and his background. A hard-line conservative, he lost his Senate seat to the late Mel Carnahan, if this name does not sound familiar, it was the candidate who was killed in a plane crash before elections in 2000 and still one the seat.
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