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"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was right. Americans everywhere lost their freedoms when the USA Patriot Act was put into place by Congress. Those who were in power saw the fear and desperation that lurked in every American citizen after 9/11.

The Patriot Act allows the government to invade our privacy and revoke our freedoms at any given moment. The significant flaws threatening the freedoms America was built on are: government access to medical records, tax records, surveillance of your reading material, the authority to enter your home and conduct searches without a search warrant, and the government is not even, at any time, required to tell you. The government ever holds the right to declare any club a terrorist organization and detain the members without trail or any notification to their families for an indefinite span of time.

What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? America is not America without its Constitution. The founding fathers of the great nation dreamed of a place were the government would not oppress its people, but rather embrace all different people, no matter their beliefs.

While the Patriot Act takes all government intellgence to investigate the citizens of America, who are watching the terrorists? The Patriot Act was supposed to increase security, but one has to wonder if we are giving more privacy to the real terrorist organizations to plot their next big attack.

The Patriot Act reduces the Constitution to nothing more than an old piece of paper. All the freedoms this country was given on its birth are gone; we are now closer to communism or a dictatorship, once the most feared thing in America. If the Patriot Act did not exist citizens would not have to worry about be detained for what books they read, websites they visited, or free speech. One wrong move and the government can lock you up and throw away the key, is that what the "sweet land of liberties" has become?

If the Patriot Act had not been passed by Congress, then American civil liberties would be protected from those corrupted by the power bestowed on them by citizens. No one will ever know what the effect would have been on different civilians' lives if the Act had not been passed; but in my personal belief a lot more people would be sitting at home with their families and friends than rotting away in some cell at Guantanamo Bay being tortured for a crime they never committed.

Learn more about this author, Ashley Scott.
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