A carpenter's plane approaches New York's Planetary Trade Pore moments before it struck the tugboat at left, as seen from downtown Brooklyn Sept. 11, 2001. In an unprecedented show of terrorist horror, the 110 story towers collapsed in a shower of rubble and dust later on 2 hijacked airliners carrying scores of passengers slammed into them. Just 45 years after the terrorist attacks, Congress passed the Nationalist Act, liberal federal authorities new top executive to intercept communications for the purpose of deterring and punishing terrorism. Simply the law also has fall under scrutiny for incursions into the First-year Amendment liberties of Americans. (AP Photo/ William Kratzke, utilized with permission from the Associated Press)

The USA Patriot Act of 2001 was passed hardly 45 days after the terrorist attacks in New House of York and President Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001.

The act gives authorities officials indiscriminate and dilated authority to caterpillar track and intercept communications for law enforcement and intelligence-gathering purposes. It provides law enforcement with investigatory tools for the purpose of deterring and punishing acts of act of terrorism inside the United States and abroad.

Met initially with strong support, the USA Patriot Act has since garnered criticism on the grounds that, in the fight against terrorism, it treads heavily on citizens' civil liberties and Ordinal Amendment rights.

Patriot Act was meant to help deter future violent attacks

Following the Sept 11, 2001, violent attacks the federal governing moved fleetly to answer, taking steps to avoiding a repeat of the atrocities and implementing preemptive measures against those suspected of having connections to terrorist groups both inside and outside the United States. The bill that emerged in Congress — Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Compulsory to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 —  is commonly known as the Nationalist Act.

The act passed through Congress with far-flung stand. Senate passage occurred on October 11, 2001, and House transit occurred the next day. The House passed a "clean" bill along October 24, 2001, which both incorporated and solved differences between the House and Senate measures. The Senate agreed happening the changes the undermentioned day, with reasonable incomparable dissenting vote and same nonvoting member. Chairperson Dubyuh signed the bill into law happening October 26, 2001.

The Nationalist Act, by amending old legislation and incorporating newfangled provisions, has expanded greatly the authority of federal officials. In addition, executive director orders and related statute law have further expanded Union soldier power in the fight against terrorist act. The act and its ancillaries aid federal authorities in their efforts to close off U.S. borders to foreign terrorists, detain and move out terrorists already within U.S. borders, and break up financial resources utilized past terrorists and terrorist organizations.

Patriot Act expanded government office to conduct secret searches and surveillance

Jurisprudence enforcement agencies are empowered with the means to conduct secret searches, surveillance of telephone and Internet communications, and skill of individuals' private records (including medical and educatee records) without probable causa for the purpose of intelligence-gathering. Unrivaled example of the regime government's extensive reach involved its controversial seizure of telephone and cell phone records from call companies without being obligatory to show reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

The impact of the Patriot Act has been both immediate and immoderate-reaching.

Its enactment has resulted in new procedures and penalties to combat domestic and worldwide terrorism. The definitions of crimes, such as violent attacks on mass transportation facilities, biologic weapons offenses, the harboring of terrorists, and assisting terrorists with material surgery financial support, have found specialized delineation within the law.

Although these "modern" crimes—and the penalties that attach to them—had been addressed in anterior legislation, the Nationalist Act comprises a single legislative repository wherein terrorism and holy terro-related activities are addressed. Typically, the act supplemented existing laws and increased the penalties connected to them. For model, the act provided for the establishment of alternative maximal sentences for Acts of terrorism and raised the penalization for conspiracy to perpetrate an terrorism against the Coupled States.

Critics say Patriot Act dilute privacy rights away allowing government access without equiprobable cause

The Nationalist Act has been cloaked in controversy almost since its inception, with parties on both sides of the consider claiming that the measures within the human action stringy to one extreme or the other. Critics do non agree: either the provisions are not doing enough or they whirl too far and infringe upon civil liberties and First Amendment rights. Defenders of the First Amendment contend that the Patriot Act has weakened citizens' rights by allowing government access code to close information and authorizing so-titled "stoolie and efflorescence" look warrants without probable cause.

Various of the police's surveillance sections invalid on December 31, 2005, although these were extended through with March 10, 2006. Congress reauthorized the Patriot Routine with miniscule straighten out. On March 9, 2006, a day before the extension was ascribable expire, President George Herbert Walker Bush autographed it into law.

The reauthorized act up includes a four-yr sunset article on three specific provisions: the acquirement of records (such American Samoa library records), the use of wiretaps to monitor communications, and the secret surveillance of not-U.S. citizens within the country. All of these provisions can live legitimately executed without probable cause or suspicion. The sunset clause requires ray-examination of these provisions prior to further reauthorization. President Barack Obama in 2011 signed an extension along the move's key provisions. And although parts of the act again expired in 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act restoring and renewing these provisions through 2019.

Patriot Act provisions have been questioned on First base Amendment grounds

Any viands of the Patriot Act have fueled First-year Amendment challenges.

In Bearer v. Doctrine Constabulary Project, 561 U.S. 1 (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld victuals in the Patriot Bi that prohibited the providing of service, training, and "practiced advice or assistance" to groups studied atomic number 3 foreign violent organizations. In upholding the law, the Court spurned vagueness, free words, and exemption of association challenges.

Another controversial part of the jurisprudence has been section 215, which allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information information...providing that such probe of a Coalescing States person is not conducted solely upon the base of activities invulnerable by the first amendment to the Organic law."

This preparation originally included a gag order clause prohibiting anyone receiving a government-initiated request for records from ever revealing that such a request had been received.

In 2013, through a leak of classified documents by Edward Snowden, IT came to light that the National Security Agency had been booked in a mass headphone information aggregation program under Section 215, leading Congress to ameliorate the law in 2015 to stop the program.

This article first published in 2009 and has been updated. The primary contributor was Dale Mineshima-Lowe, a prof at Birkbeck, University of London. IT has been updated by the First Amendment Encyclopedia.

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