SECURITY RESPONSES TO 9/11: CHALLENGE TO PRIVACY DATA PROTECTION RIGHTS
Introduction
Subsequent to the terrorist attacks on September 11, numerous countries have undertaken several courses of action that would allow them to avert the incident to take place again. A forerunner in this endeavor is the United States which has been the main pugilist against the propagation of terrorism. However, there is the issue in this manner whether the protection of the public, or its security, has in some ways meddled with its rights to privacy. This study will analyze the situation of both the United States and the European Union being the two most influential entities in the current world. for clarity and coherence, the discussions is going to be divided into several parts.
Security Responses after 9/11
Legislations Enacted
The USA-PATRIOT Act is probably the most renowned part of legislation in the world. Entitled, ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,’ it is the upshot of an outbreak of governmental schemes in return to the seizing and attacks on significant areas in the United States. In due course several bills were pooled collectively together with the Bush Administration’s ‘Anti-Terrorism Act’, the Lower House’s bill the PATRIOT Act, and the Upper House’s bill the USA Act, to produce the USA-PATRIOT Act. ( 2004)
The Patriot Act is a huge law with a lot of elements. It is more than 300-pages in length and makes correction on more than fifteen different decrees. It starts by reproving prejudice in opposition to Arab and Muslim Americans, and then progresses promptly. It augmented financial support for numerous agencies and departments. (, 2004) Improved surveillance authority was established, in addition to actions on fighting money laundering and terrorism funding, border management instruments and schemes, detention authority in opposition to alleged terrorists, prerequisites for global biometric identity papers, the compilation of DNA from terrorists and other violent offenders, admission of educational records, assistance to casualties of terrorism, improved data-distribution for critical infrastructure security, alterations to intelligence acquisition on foreigners, and a current explanation of terrorism and new connected offenses. ( 2004)
The surveillance and data-distribution elements of the bill are plentiful and frequently comprehensive. (, 2004) The most controversial features of the bill that are pertinent to this report are the development of communications surveillance authority as well as extensive demands for interception of communications and admission to communications traffic information; an amplified employment of subpoenas and gag orders averting the discovery of the information that a subpoena was given; admission to passenger travel information; the formation of biometric identifications; and the institution of an entry-and-exit border scheme
On the other hand, the European policy is ever more going on in closed institutions with diminutive discussion. Policies of important concern for the freedom of movement and freedom of expression are being carried out with modest talks. The Programme is perceived as having a drive of its own. This means that what was determined by the Council is striding onwards towards legislation. ( 2005) The parliament and other institutions are advised that they may not alter the course of the policies settled and protected into the Programme. At the same time as fingerprints were integrated into passports devoid of the permission of Parliament, so it seems that communications traffic data will possibly be held on to with no sufficient inspection of Parliament. Even at what time when the EU is requested to make a decision involving conflicting laws, as it was in the instance of admission to passenger records, it decided to concur to the U.S. commands in an attempt to authorize the formation of a policy of access to that similar information by Member States.
Similarly, when European regimes endorse a policy for the employment to battle terror, it hardly ever limits it to counter-terrorism. Passenger information, profiling, biometrics compilation and admission to communications data all begin with anti-terror decrees but are characteristically employed for all legal reasons. (, 2005) What Europe endures most significantly from is that the conduct of the European Union is short of public inspection. Media exposure of EU concerns is inadequate; non-governmental organizations have the propensity to be national purely and are lacking in access to EU institutions; and the European Parliament is infrequently provided the needed amount of power to settle on these policies.
Airline Security
Personal data on airline customers was employed in violation of federal privacy statutes for the duration of testing of the administration’s Secure Flight Airline Safety Program in the later part of 2004. ( 2006) The subject came up in the government’s experimenting of the Secure Flight agenda, which was instituted to battle aircraft terrorism by putting the names and information about local airline commuters side by side with the information on recognized or alleged terrorists. The agenda is being checked by the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which supervises antiterrorism endeavors on the country’s transportation structures. The Secure Flight agenda is the government’s subsequent shot at a preflight monitoring program for local airlines subsequent to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A previous scheme, labeled Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, was instituted in 2003 then discarded in 2004 on account of privacy issues. (, 2002)
Immigration
In an attempt to administer the current terrorist risk that immigration supposedly characterized, radical amendments in immigration procedures commenced in the few short months instantly subsequent the attack. There was no official law proscribing the immigration from nations alleged of being hotbeds for terrorists, but other significant restraints on immigration, and particularly, immigrants previously within the United States, were approved as an element of other decrees. As a division of the “Patriot Act” ratified in the House of Representatives in October of 2001, Congress permitted the long-term imprisonment of non-citizens whom the attorney general specified as terrorist risk. ( , 2001a) to previous gatekeeping activities, the inner, administrative judgments of the Office of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and currently of the Department of Homeland Security were similarly considerably changed to follow, manage, and capture immigrants assumed of terrorist action or those considered a possibly threat to national security Immigration officers silently changed their individual administrative rules and processes to provide themselves better control above all foreigners. Throughout November and December of 2001, the United States government agents aimed at two hundred college campuses nationally to gather data on Middle Eastern students. ( 2001b) In November the Justice Department extended the authority of its officers to arrest foreigners even following a federal immigration judge had commanded their release for lack of proof. The judicial order could be reserved if the immigration service deemed that a foreigner were a risk to the public or a flight risk. At the same time as immigration attorneys contended that the new law dispossessed the captives of the basic right of bond trials, advocates maintained that the alteration was essential in the new war in opposition to terrorism. Nevertheless others indicated that the agency seemed to be deliberately employing the new political environment to deal with old issues in relation to the authority of immigration courts. ( 2001c)
In 2002, the Justice Department put into practice SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System), which needs each and every one international students and exchange visitors to enlist with the federal government their basic information along with their educational purpose and keep that data recurrently posted. Not counting SEVIS, the federal government instituted a separate list to yearly fingerprint, take pictures of, and interrogate men from twenty-four typically Muslim states. (, 2001)
On the other hand, an important task of the EU is to guarantee the free flow of individuals across borders. The EU therefore functions a part in the assurances and processes instituted to administer and supervise border traffic. A noteworthy piece of this movement started with the Agreement in 1985, and has consequently carried on with the organization of new practices and schemes. (, 2003) The (SIS) started in 1995 and was perceived as payment tools for the elimination of internal borders connecting France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. (2003) It allows Member States to acquire data with regards to specific categories of individuals and property. Member States add by appending information on individuals wanted for seize, individuals to be positioned under surveillance or exposed to particular checks; persons to be denied entry at external borders; and missing or stolen articles.
In reply to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001, the EU choose to put into practice a Visa Information System (VIS). ( , 2004) VIS would cleave to personal data on each visa candidate to an EU member state together with their nationality at birth, reasons for denial, and connections to other requests. It will be an essential catalog that is balanced by national systems that jointly connect border checkpoints of every state. It is intended to administer biometric information. The Article 29 Working Party, a group of privacy watchdogs from the entire EU member nations have presented numerous fears with regards to the projected actions contained by VIS, particularly the compilation of fingerprint information. (2004) The Working Party is worried that the fingerprints could be employed for other functions, and could similarly bring about stolen identities. By itself the Working Party advocates that biometric information should not be kept in the central database except on occasions when it is completely essential. Rather the Working Party suggests that the biometrics be held in reserve simply on a chip on the visa itself. The Working party was mainly worried with the centralisation of biometrics for the reason that the admission to the VIS was informal and extensive. Ever since the London bombings in 2005 the impetus has developed for extra databases and trailing devices. (, 2005) The UK administration of the EU has been demanding for an expansion of the admission rights to VIS, authorizing law enforcement agencies all over the EU to have a right to use all the information held there.
Identification Cards and Biometrics
Gathering travel patterns and border activities needs the compilation of more data concerning the persons and their classifying marks, counting information on Americans. The Patriot Act entailed that the President confirm a biometric technology set for employment in recognizing foreigners looking for admittance into the U.S.. The timetable for its execution was sped up by another law, once more the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act 2002. That rule provided an obligation upon other states to put into operation a biometric passport. Following two years, the ICAO was finally capable of instituting a biometric standard: face detection. Consequently, all upcoming ICAO-acquiescent passports have to include a digital photograph. Nonetheless the ICAO similarly allowed states to take account of other biometrics together with fingerprints and iris-scans. ( 2006)
The compilation of biometrics in the EU is not being narrowed to visa-hopefuls and other aliens nonetheless. In its understanding of the ICAO standard on safe passports, the European Council came to a decision in 2003 to build up a common technique on biometric identifiers for papers for third country residents, European Union residents’ passports and EU information schemes (). (2004) In February 2004 the European Commission indicated its intent to follow through by obliging all EU travel papers to take account of the biometric of a facial figure, and therefore to follow the US imperative. Member States were allowed to go more by employing fingerprints additionally. Hitherto, EU documentation indicates to the enclosure of merely a couple of fingerprints on a microchip on the passport confined with a security device. (, 2004) This denotes that the information on the chip be connected with the fingerprint images can solely be read by certified individuals. The patterns of these security instruments stay indistinct and are not conversed openly.
Development in Surveillance
Substantial surveillance is acquired by the bureaucratic makeup that most people come across in their everyday lives as they obtain a driver’s license, extract money from banks, or attend school. Each of these ordinary activities creates a record which shapes an element of the “data double;” the electronic, visual or documentary outline of oneself that one abandon in their encounters with contemporary institutions. Single-handedly, or shared with other types of data by means of data matching methods, such data can be very enlightening ( 1993).
(2000) have presented the notion of a “surveillant assemblage” as a way to add up of this multiplying, decentralized and inept system of visibility. Their examination is chiefly relevant to how surveillance has improved ever since September 11th. The idea of an assemblage emphasizes the astounding collection of agencies and institutions which now control surveillance schemes.
The idea of a surveillant assemblage stands disputed to a more customary issues concerning surveillance, as demonstrated by ‘ s (1949) concept of “Big Brother,” which gives emphasis on the central, state-determined characteristics of surveillance. The surveillant assemblage is not a solitary physical unit or arrangement, but the whole of the surveillance capability that can be educated on a place or populace. By itself, it is not as much of a “thing” than it is a potentiality that can be realized to changeable levels anchored on what and how observational systems are shared and united.
Among the more contentious of these attempts is the U.S. National Security Agency’s scheme which intends to seize all communications. (2001) Instead of trying to examine all of these types of communications, the system handles this data by means of huge computers which look for key terms or phrases, by this means acquiring specific individuals and messages for individual notice. A less complicated case of such data shortcuts entails airline passenger profiling configurations, like the international CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System). Such schemes highlight doubtful travelers by automatically examining numerous of data relating to where they bought their ticket, the manner in which they bought it, their outfits, nationality, luggage, travel account, and even what they bought at the airport commissary (, 2002).
Conclusion
The study has presented the existing conditions in both the United States and the European Union regarding the state of their privacy rights. One could see that it is not sufficient to assert privacy as a legitimate entitlement, as necessary to a democratic system, and to put it down at that anticipation that no further attacks will take place. No legal right is supreme. With no institutional reinforcement these rights are more or less without sense. Unless there are organizations that will challenge policy, regardless on whether they are the mass media, civil organisations, opposition parties, then legal rights are helpless without the executive. However the consequence is especially biting than simply instituting appalling policy. Society’s outlooks therefore turn out to be the indicator of privacy as an essential entitlement. What is fair and sensible is uncertain. There was a moment when people deemed that national databases were problematical, that mass monitoring of communications was in the incorrect for the reason that surveillance has need of individual doubt. However it is seen currently that these systems and practices scattering, as in the case of the EU and the US.
References
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