Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - Essay Example Other than the USA PATRIOT Act amendment of 2001, there have been several other amendments such as the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 is the most significant amendment of the three. This amendment gave powers to state authorities that were sufficient in protecting the homeland. The powers also gave these authorities the ability to protect the country from future attacks. These powers included the ability to monitor internet data and use, interception of emails and phone calls. The Act further granted state authorities the right to place wiretaps on conversations between American citizens and non-citizens3. In addition to surveillance, the state authorities were granted powers to detain individuals it deemed suspicious and dangerous. In comparison to other Acts, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the most controversial. This essay will assess and analyze its electronic surveillance provision. The Electronic Surveillance provision in the FISA Act grants state authorities to conduct electronic surveillance because of two scenarios. In the first scenario, the President can authorize state authorities to conduct electronic surveillance for one year. The President does this through the office of the Attorney General and the surveillance can only be done on foreigners4. This surveillance picks up any foreign intelligence information being exchanged between agents of a foreign power and the foreign power. This surveillance, according to the Act, may or may not substantiate to anything feasible5. It is the Attorney General’s responsibility to create a certification of the conditions necessary for the surveillance. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizes this certification by its seal. The A.G is then supposed to report to both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select

Essay of media analysis Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Of media analysis - Essay Example The book ‘carved in bone’ by Jefferson Bass conveniently covers the subject under study by virtue of an interesting plot where Dr Bill Brockton who is a Forensic Anthropologist studied the case of a deal mummified woman discovered in a cave. Brockton this makes use of quite intriguing techniques like analyzing the graphical decomposition of the corpse and using various experiments to put together pieces of the puzzle to unveil who the woman really was. He owns a research laboratory where he experiments with the techniques which may have been used during homicides. To de-flesh the bones, he boils them and bleaches them and later tries to determine patterns from fragments on bones and also from the kind of impact he finds on the bones to gather enough evidence to challenge the strong lobbies in the county (Bass 2006). This book, written by a forensic anthropologist himself proves to be an insightful account on how far can the subject matter go in solving mysteries of the c rime world . In the article ‘When Forensic Anthropology meets DNA’, another interesting aspect of the subject is unveiled. The forensics department was able to draw DNA samples from a corpse decomposed to such an extent that extracting any evidence of identity was nearly impossible. However, Laura Fulgitini, who`s a forensic anthropologist uses her impeccable skills to jot together the pieces of skull together by adding cement to the missing sections to conveniently unveil the identity of the corpse, who turns out to be one of the people missing from San Diego, Joy Risker. Under normal circumstances, drawing DNA from the sample would have been of no use since there would have been no one to compare the sample to, however, by re-creating the shape of the skull, the forensics was able to get a fine idea of what the person would have looked like. On comparing the image of the corpse with the person missing, they were able to get a breakthrough, which was only possible due to