Human Rights, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism

When it comes to protecting and saving lives of the American people, private invasion used in order to locate and capture potential terrorist should be unlimited.

The 911 attack has provided active proof to the American peoples of the damage that terrorist groups can impose on our society. Therefore, invading the privacy of individuals may prevent future terrorist attacks. Better technology and training to detect terrorist are important steps to reduce terrorist attacks.To achieve this objective, government must authorize national and local leaders to design programs, training, and funding. Thus, high priority should be given to developing programs to detect and prevent intended attacks before they occur. In this report, the Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals examines behavioral surveillance technologies in Counterterrorism programs and make decisions about deploying and evaluating those and other information programs of their effectiveness and risk to personal privacy.Modern data collection and analysis techniques have had remarkable success in solving information-related problems in the commercial sector; for example, they have been successful used to detect consumer fraud.

Highly automated tools and techniques can not be easily used to detecting and seizing a terrorist attack. Well managed tools, such as counterterrorism program are likely to return significant rates of false positives, because the law abiding citizens and businesses, false positives can result in privacy invasion.The government agencies and private-sector corporations detect the activity of terrorist groups through their communications, transaction, and behaviors. Everyone leaves personal digital tracks in systems whenever he or she make a purchase, takes a trip, uses a bank account, make a phone call, walks past a security camera, obtains a prescription, send or receives a package, files income tax forms, applies for a loan, e-mails a friend, ends a fax, rent a video, or engages in just about any other activity. The security camera increases the scope and nature of available data. Law-abiding citizens, criminal and terrorist leave extensive digital tracks. Gathering and analyzing electronic and behavioral information can play major roles in detecting and preventing terrorist attacks.

In my conclusion, the United States government should periodically review the nation laws, policies, and procedures that protect individuals’ private information for relevance and effectiveness in light of changing technologies and circumstances. Congress should reexamine existing law to consider how privacy should be protected in context of information based program for counterterrorism. Reference U. S. Congressional Research Service, Privacy: Total Information Awareness Programs and Related Information Access, Collection, and Protection Laws (RL31730)