2014/2015
Dr.ª Isabel Caldeira
Aluno: Diana de Pinho Ferreira
Main causes and effects of surveillance after the 9/11:
On September 11, 2001, nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorist hijacked four commercial U.S jetliners, deliberately crashing two of the planes into the North and South Towers of the
World Trade Center and a third plane into the Pentagon. After learning of the other attacks, passengers and crew members on the fourth plane attempted to commandeer control, and the plane was crashed into an empty field in Western Pennsylvania. Nearly
3.000 people were killed on that day, the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack on American soil.
The day after the horrific event of September 11, thousands of construction …show more content…
“The first result of escalating police surveillance authority is the diminution of civil privacy protection. Essentially, an inverse relationship exists between the two, whereby, as U.S. police surveillance power grows individual privacy declines (Bloss, 1996). Legal and procedural changes have facilitated a widened of police surveillance and search resulting in more citizens being watched by officials who are collecting data on their physical and electronic selves (i.e.,expression, personal data, virtual identity, and biometric identity) (see O’Harrow, 2005; EPIC,2006). Therefore, the identities, transactions, and movements of citizens are less private and more accessible to police through burgeoning databases of personal information; all derived from official surveillance and search activities.
Specifically, established U.S. constitutional privacy protections have been diluted through post-9/11 federal statutory provisions and court decisions. Once strict
requirements such mandatory judicial review, warrant and probable cause requirements, and primacy of citizen privacy, all designed to constrain police surveillance and …show more content…
In conclusion,
Obama’s speak about this issue:
“The horror of September 11th brought all these issues to the fore. Across the political spectrum, Americans recognized that we had to adapt to a world in which a bomb could be built in a basement, and our electric grid could be shut down by operators an ocean away. We were shaken by the signs we had missed leading up to the attacks -- how the hijackers had made phone calls to known extremists and traveled to suspicious places. So we demanded that our intelligence community improve its capabilities, and that law enforcement change practices to focus more on preventing attacks before they happen than prosecuting terrorists after an attack.
It is hard to overstate the transformation America’s intelligence community had to go through after 9/11. Our agencies suddenly needed to do far more than the traditional mission of monitoring hostile powers and gathering information