Intelligence plays an extremely important role in our homeland security. If it were not for the numerous intelligence agencies in the United States, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there would very likely be many more successful terrorist attacks that occur on our home soil. Even though Sept 11th, 2001 prompted many changes to our doctrine that would make it easier for intelligence agencies to do their jobs, there are still restrictions placed on those agencies so they don’t obtain an unacceptable amount of private information on a U.S. citizen. The U.S. intelligence community is probably the most capable and well-resourced in the world, but with these capabilities also comes the risk of collecting too much information …show more content…
Homeland security is arguably one of the most important things our government can provide for us, and when it is compromised, it may also have the adverse effect of making people question how safe we all actually are. To combat this, the federal government has created scores of agencies, committees and delegations who are charged with ensuring our level of homeland security is as high as possible, whether it’s all the way up at the federal level in the ODNI, or towards the bottom at a fusion cell in …show more content…
For example, the PATRIOT Act possibly gave too much leniency to certain agencies when it came to collecting intelligence for homeland security purposes. There were allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) was abusing the power provided to it by the PATRIOT Act and was actually ingesting hundreds of millions of phone calls, text messages and emails that came into and went out of the United States everyday ACLU, 2016). Though the authorities to collect and ingest this much data were later scaled back by the USA Freedom Act, the perception of some of these homeland security agencies by the American people still hasn’t fully