Can Security Countermeasures be Overdone Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Can Security Countermeasures be Overdone - Essay Example Iraq sans UN approval, to choking off funds-flow to terrorist elements, compulsory screening, finger printing, strip & search of all non-nationals or even suspect nationals at all points of entry and exit, installation of electronic eavesdropping devices / phone tapping / mail interception, passing of draconian laws in the face of strong opposition from Human Rights activists, etc. and a myriad of other methods. Orwellian ‘Big brother is watching you’ (Orwell, 1949) has become a fact of life. All these signify the hard line, no nonsense approach, led especially by the governments in the USA and UK. They were primarily intended to assuage the injured American pride in the name of ‘war on terror’. Institutions, businesses and citizens did not lag far behind in this era of panic and paranoia. Overdoing ‘hardware intensive’ and ‘legislative’ countermeasures seem to be only partly effective in containing terrorism. Afghanistan and Iraq, in dà ©jà   vu, will testify this premise. The sweeping actions of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ) and other investigation agencies on the one hand, and the poor record of conviction secured by them, point to the limited effectiveness of the countermeasures. That is not to say that there has been no success at all. On the contrary, some of the administrative countermeasures like enactment of The USA Patriot Act or the creation of the DHS certainly enabled putting a check on terrorist activities. â€Å"The USA PATRIOT Act equips federal law enforcement and intelligence officials with the tools they need to mount an effective, coordinated campaign against our nation’s terrorist enemies. The Act revised counterproductive legal restraints that impaired law enforcement’s ability to gather, analyze, and share critical terrorism-related intelligence information. The Act also updated decades-old federal laws to account for the technological breakthroughs seen in recent years. For example,