Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Surely these words are familiar to us all, but now they have a new meaning. I'm referring to the Patriot act; an act that blatantly violates your personal security and freedoms as an American citizen. As a citizen your constitutional rights to free speech are protected in the 4th amendment. Now this will be challenged. In the advent of the new age, the age after the September 11th terror attack on us soil, what you say may now be intercepted, interpreted, saved, and depending on the results, you may be monitored for an undetermined duration of time. The best part? You will never know.
Under the act, if a website that is considered threatening to the united states government by the CIA, NSA, or department of homeland security, all access to it by us citizens will be monitored. The government will attempt to trace your access and will now have reason to monitor all forms of digital activity relating to communication from your computer. This might be a legitimate necessity for national security, however, what if your access was an accident? Then you are still subject to monitoring. What if a friend was using your computer and assessed the 'sensitive' information on a site, resulting on you being monitored. This is where such monitoring is blatantly unconstitutional. Its possible for citizens to scramble or block their IP addresses, so that it’s impossible to trace their activities on the internet, however the vast majority of American users do now know how to do this. But those who do may be persecuted as 'hackers' and will automatically be susceptible to the wide blanket of investigation hat the patriot act lies down.
Legitimate terrorists, or even government users could emulate an innocent Internet user for their own purposes. This would effectively frame that person, and they would fall under monitoring by the act. Monitoring which they should not be subjected to. This is further exemplification of how the act infringes on one’s rights as a citizen.
As a citizen, my primary concern is: where does this all end? With us bar-coded, rental scanned, and having no privacy at all? One of the founding principles that our founding fathers recognized was the need for privacy, and individuality. Surely, all that will be taken away if ‘Big Brother’ is completely watching us.
I hope more states exercise their free rights to ignore the act, while they still can.