Another domestic concern should be added to our list. On October 26, 2001, a massive bill designed to combat terrorism was signed into law by President George W. Bush. The bill, a revision of legislation the Bush administration proposed barely a week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, was re-introduced in early October, 2001 and passed through both houses of Congress following little debate and no formal hearings. The USA PATRIOT Act (full title: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, H.R. 3162) grants federal authorities expanded surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers (F

But at the same time that it unnecessarily expands law enforcement's power to investigate low-level crimes, the Anti-Terrorism Act does little to address immediate terrorist threats. Imagine the scenario I described earlier, in which the FBI receives an anonymous tip that a red van has just dumped biological weapons in the Central Park reservoir. Surely law enforcement officials should have the right to search red vans in the area, even if the tip turns out to be false. But the Supreme Court ruled in November, 2000 that random searches designed to investigate crime were unconstitutional. Cars couldn't be stopped and briefly surrounded by drug-sniffing dogs, the Court held, because random car searches could only be justified for reasons that had nothing to do with the investigation of crime, such as promoting highway safety by checking cars for drunk drivers. One solution, suggested by Stephen Saltzburg of the George Washington University Law School, would be to empower the attorney general personally to authorize searches in emergency situations that don't meet ordinary constitutional standards. (When an immediate decision has to be made, this authority might be delegated to an officer on the scene.) "Rather than rely on judges, whom I think are in no position to respond to a requirement for immediate action," says Saltzburg, "the attorney general could be required to report within a short period of time to a select committee of Congress, which would have the authority to expand or restrict the scope of the searches." But the Anti-Terrorism Act doesn't do anything of the kind.

A new era in America's fight against terrorism, made tragically necessary by the attacks of September 11, is about to begin. The legislation embodies two over-arching principles:

Peter Swire, privacy czar under President Clinton, notes other examples of unauthorized computer access that the current legislation would define as federal terrorism offenses, punishable by up to life in prison: employees of a credit agency tampering with their customer's credit history; a store manager fraudulently using the store's computers to pay off gambling debts; and the unauthorized use of an ATM. These are certainly crimes, but they're not terrorism. Swire also points to another new federal terrorist offense created by the bill: "intentionally causing damage without authorization to a protected computer" by transmitting a "program, information, code, or command." This language, intended primarily to prohibit hacking and the intentional spread of viruses, has been applied in the past to former employees who inadvertently delete files after accessing an old account. By defining these computer abuses as terrorism, the versions of the bill currently being debated would subject a great deal of low-level crimes to federal scrutiny.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2553
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)