Patriot Act

Jason Wong
ASA2
Section 2
Week 6

"The USA Patriot Act: A Sketch" outlined some steps to be taken to address acts of terrorism, specifically prevention. Ways to tackle terrorism would be detecting terrorists before they can act which involved taping into emails, phone lines and etc.  A follow up article "ASNE memo on Patriot Act II" went more into explaining the government surveillance. What came to mind as I read these articles was, how far can the government go to ensure our safety? The act itself seems have good intentions in the regards to finding potential perpetrators and preventing large scale disasters, but then there are people who make us say, "This is why we cant have nice things". Although the goal is to prevent terrorist attacks, we never know when they will happen nor where it will happen, so to have a strict system to catch terrorists would require optimization. This optimization might make the government look more towards certain ethnic groups, but then that becomes racial profiling. The idea I'm getting at is there is no specific system that will help eliminate the potential threat. Though well intention, at what cost do we pay for this sense of security?  

Question: How much authority should the government have? Should the government have the authority to monitor civilian actions or are they overstepping their bounds?