When we started the semester and more specifically this Government class I knew I wasn't going to be best friends with everyone of my classmates. I do enjoy some civil discourse from time to time, and several times before class discussion would spring up and I identified a few classmates that have thought or beliefs contrary to mine. I had hope I would have had more chances to engage with these individuals during the semester through this blog, but the occasion never came up. Ironically with our last blog assignment, I searched and searched for someone's writing to catch a spark, and get me fired up to argue to the contrary on their opinion, and I found none.
I was pleasantly surprised to find an article by Yandy Gonzalez titled, "Wait Did Obama Do something Right?" Yandy and I have had several conversations in class on some controversial topics, gun control, national defense, etc. But here in the eleventh hour(literally) I was counting on him to give me an opinion to tear down, disassemble and Yandy let me down.He let me down because I agree with him, or more importantly, he agrees with me. The NSA and it's surveillance tactics have got to e changed, and the actions that President Obama is taking is a move in the right direction.
Fear is a great way to sell change. When the building came down in NY, we didn't need much convincing that our national security was full of holes. The answer President Bush(or Cheney) gave us was the Patriot Act, and the creation of another cabinet position, the Homeland Security Administration. Immediately we felt safer, we had colored terror threat charts to guide us as to when we needed to buy duct tape and plastic wrap, and now the military had the ability to deploy on our own soil, GREAT!
One thing I don't agree with Yandy about is that the people we need to watch are the ones traveling to foreign countries. Unfortunately it's not that simple. In order to catch a terrorist, you have to think like a terroist. If a terroist was here in the U.S. and was connected to a terrorist regime, let's say Syria, they aren't going to fly to Syria. They are going to fly to Turkey, an allie, and meet with their bad-guy friends there.
In conclusion, Yandy is right. The NSA needs to be reigned back in. The Patriot Act need to be reformed, or repealed, and our intelligence agencies need to start working on building actual intelligence, instead of relying on artificial intelligence collection methods.
