Anti Terrorism Technology:
USA Patriot Act
Introduction

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, there has been a great desire to "do something" in order to prevent another attack. In an effort to bolster the power of the intelligence community in its effort to root out terrorism, Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, better known by its acronym, the USA PATRIOT Act. The Patriot Act gives sweeping powers to the federal government, allowing the controversial Carnivore and Magic Lantern technologies to be employed much more liberally.

Various technological tools for digital surveillance have been around for many years, and the debate over the benefits and dangers of such techniques has been going on for the past 25 years. The current state of technologies for digital sueveillance are discussed in other sections. Aside from the specific technologies, it is important to distinguish the different types of digital surveillance and determine what types of surveillance different technologies are capable of, because it is types of surveillance technologies, not technologies themselves, that have ethical implications. The different classes of digital surveillance are laid out clearly by Roger Clarke in his article "Information Technology and Dataveillance" (Clarke). The article was written in 1988, but the discussion applies well to the digital surveillance tools that will be used to monitor terrorists.

Clarke breaks up digital surveillance, which he terms dataveillance, into two categories: personal surveillance and mass surveillance. Personal surveillance is defined as "the surveillance of an identified person in cases [where] in general, a specific reason exists for the investigation or monitoring". Mass surveillance is defined as "the surveillance of groups of people, usually large groups, [where] in general, the reason for investigation or monitoring is to identify individuals who belong to some particular class of interest to the surveillance organization".

Personal surveillance and mass surveillance can be broken down into further categories. Below are tables describing the different types of dataveillance (Clarke).

In general, mass surveillance technologies are much more troublesome than personal surveillance technologies. Personal surveillance technologies fit easily within the bounds of the fourth amendment, pose a minimal privacy threat, and can only be applied in a limited number of cases. On the other hand, mass surveillance technologies allow large populations to be screened without good reason. The sole purpose of mass surveillance technologies is to root out potential 'problematic' individuals.