Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The USA Patriot Act Redux: Should We Reauthorize or Repudiate the Post-9/11 Authorities? (15 Jun 2005) The wrong answer is to balance civil liberties and government power – an approach that suggests we will have a little of both. The right answer is to engineer civil liberties with the same enthusiasm and attention that we are engineering additional powers for the government, and if we fail to do so we risk not only our liberties but the powers that we need to keep America safe. As evidence of this proposition, we need to look no further than the story behind CAPPS II – the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II that would evaluate passenger risk by data mining commercial and government data repositories. Here, the failure to address civil liberties concerns resulted in a failure of support across a broad spectrum of the political landscape and finally caused Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Ridge to terminate the program, replacing it with Secure Flight, which is raising many of the same concerns currently. Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-05/strickland.html Read 126 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Touch screens jog social memories     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy