By a show of hands; how many of you are regestired to vote? *give appropriate response* Well let me just start off by telling you that I am not. I dont really have a good reason for that. I would consider my self to be an opinionated person, and I do care about what happens to this world. But politics just never seemed that important to me. Not important that is, untill I started preparing for this speach, my topic today is on Americas privacy laws. I picked that topip only because I thought it had some kind of novelty value. I pictured conspiracy theorys, and bad hollywood movies; piece of cake. What I found, however, was such a gigantic can of worms, that I could stand here all day and talk about the important truths.
             I want to talk to you about the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Department of Homeland Security that enforces .
             The 9/11 attacks revealed some pretty nasty problems with our security. Terrorists were able to illegaly enter our country, and then train and plan for the attacks right here in our own backyard. After the tragedy, we began to fear of other terrorist groups (called sleeper cells) waiting and planning for the order to commit this terrorist attack. Congress almost immediately passed the Patriot Act, which gave the government substantially more powers to track down these terrorists. Security has been tightened at airports, ports, borders, etc. and a Department of Homeland Security has been created to oversee the efforts.
             As more government power has been added, many have charged that our privacy and civil rights are being slowly taken away. For example, people are being locked up without a trial or access to a lawyer. Another example, according to ( ) is the integrated system, called Total Information Awareness (TIA), which is a Department of Defense project being created to track data on everyone in the country, including credit card purchases, library book checkouts, group affiliations, cell phone
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