Since the unfortunate terror attacks on September 11 2001 the government of the United States of America have been conducting a so called "War on Terror." Well, with every war there are unintended casualties. The unintended casualties in this war just happen to be every American citizen, anyone who uses the services of American companies, or anyone who uses the internet in a normal capacity. Through the guise of national security the United States government has been able to gather massive amounts of data on American citizens without their knowledge or consent. Through laws like the USA PATRIOT ACT and CISA, the government has a stranglehold.

Knowing the state of internet privacy laws before September 11th 2001 is important to understand how the government was able to pass laws that violate the privacy of American citizens. The basis for U.S. law is always in the constitution, and the U.S. Constitution says extremely little about privacy. Maureen S. Dorney, a graduate from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, says that "Although the right to privacy is not expressly provided for in the United States Constitution, the courts have used the label 'privacy' for certain fundamental personal rights that are inferred from the Bill of Rights" (638).  The Privacy Act of 1974 was established to attempt to balance the need for the government to gather and use personal information and an individual's interest in controlling what information the government has. The act states that federal agencies may only have records that pertain information about an individual that is relevant to the agencies purpose.  This information must be accurate and it should be collected from the individual if at all possible (Dorney 645).  The Privacy Act was enacted due to the revelations of abuses of privacy made by the FBI, CIA, and the NSA during the Cold War, namely during the Nixon administration. The FBI had a close relationship with the executive branch during Nixon's Presidency. Nixon was provided with lists of political dissidents that he was then able to target with tax investigations. The FBI was one of the main offenders during this time period, contributing almost all of the information in the CIA's CHAOS program (Levinson-Waldman 6). At the end of the program's existence, it's computer system nicknamed "HYDRA" contained information about 300,000 Americans. The FBI and CIA were not alone in surveilling the general public.  The NSA made watch lists of American citizens and made copies of almost all correspondence leaving the United States, which was then analyzed by the CIA (Levinson-Waldman 7).  According to Rachel Levinson-Waldman, from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, "The Privacy Act, intended to help guard American's personal information, is increasingly little more than a fig leaf" (7).  The act requires that agencies must specify what the information stored in their databases are used for.  In reality, the uses are usually not very specific. Along with the non-specific uses, information can be shared with agencies that are not under the Privacy.  And even sharing information with other agencies under the Privacy Act is not at all regulated. This allows information that was originally gathered for one purpose to be used for a different one (Levinson-Waldman 7).  After most of this information became public there were efforts to suppress government agencies abilities to collect unnecessary information, such as the formal guidelines enacted by Attorney General Edward Lei for the Department of Justice in 1976 to limit the FBI and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which inhibited surveillance of First Amendment activities (Levinson-Waldman 8). 

All of the progress made in the late 1970's that helped protect American's privacy was quickly undone in the chaos that existed in post September 11th America.  According to Rachel Levinson-Waldman, "The legal and policy changes enacted in the subsequent years wrought two main changes: the government no longer needed a criminal predicate to gather information about Americans, and the information that was collected could be retained for long periods and often disseminated widely" (8). Six weeks after September 11th, the USA PATRIOT Act was enacted. Before the Patriot Act, sensitive information could only be collected about a person if that person was an agent of a foreign power.  Now, under the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may now order the release of any information to federal agencies and law enforcement if the information is relevant to the investigation. And according to Rachel Levinson-Waldman, "... the term 'relevance' has been interpreted since 2006 to allow bulk collection of Americans' phone records because some small number of them may at some point in the future be germane to an FBI investigation" (8). Another portion of the Act allows the use of National Security Letters. National Security Letters are similar to a subpoena where the federal government can request information about individual's financial history, communications, and other information collected by private companies. The National Security Letters are kept secret and the subject of investigation have no idea that the government are collecting information about said individual (Levinson-Waldman 4, 9).  Along with the Patriot Act, Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Michael Mukasey expanded the powers of the FBI post September 11th. Ashcroft allowed FBI agents to attend religious and political events to gather information without any suspicion that something illegal would happen or be discussed, and Mukasey gave the FBI the power to start an investigation with "no particular factual predication" (Levinson-Waldman 9).

With all of this information, you might be thinking about what you can do to protect yourself from these drastic invasions of privacy.  With a Presidential election happening in just a couple of months, the best way to change the political landscape is to vote for a President that shares similar views as you do. The two current democratic frontrunners are Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Senator Sanders is very outspoken against the Patriot Act, and similar government surveillance programs. Senator Sanders has stated that "The originally was passed by Congress in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I voted against it. I voted against reauthorizing the law in 2005 when I was still in the House and voted 'no' again in 2011 ... ". The senator believes that there needs to be balance between protecting American citizens from its enemies without undermining their freedom (Sanders).
