Homeland security civil liberties for national security

Homeland security civil liberties for national security

Introduction

The events of September 11, 2001, marked a turning point in gauging American public opinion on terrorism. Polling has entered a new era of massive data collection with regard to public opinion on terrorism and related issues such as homeland security, airport security, risks to civil liberties, and the war on terrorism. This entry provides an overview of the poll data available today and, whenever possible, highlights the differences between public opinion before and after September 11, 2001. The data were collected from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research's online library (POLL) and the Gallup organization.

Homeland Security

Homeland security refers to the effort to secure the U.S. homeland from future terrorist attacks. In 2002, the George W. Bush administration released the National Strategy for Homeland Security, a plan for protecting the United States from future terror attacks. When considering homeland security, there are three key measures of public opinion: public assessment of the risk of a future attack, public confidence in the U.S. government to prevent future attacks, and public concern of a local attack.

It is important to assess Americans' perceived risk of a future attack since the perceived threat can influence support for policymaking (Huddy et al. 2002). As the data in Table 1 suggest, the perceived threat of future attacks was at its highest immediately after the attacks of September 11. In October 2001, 53 percent of Americans thought it was very likely there would be a major terrorist attack in the United States. This figure is up from 23 percent in 1991. However, the perceived threat shortly after the attack diminishes to pre-September 11 levels by January 2002, when only 18 percent of Americans reported a major attack as being very likely. In October 2002, close to the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks, this figure rose almost 10 percent to 27 percent.

In November 2002, the Homeland Security Act was passed overwhelmingly by both the House and Senate and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The main purpose of the act was to establish the framework for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency intended to coordinate domestic detection and prevention of terrorism. The 500-plus-page law also included language on a wide variety of issues affecting civil liberties. The law was viewed by many observers as the next step in the Bush administration's domestic war on terrorism, which had previously included the interrogation of many people of Middle Eastern descent, the establishment of military tribunals to hear terrorism cases, and the October 1991 passage of the Patriot Act, which granted the government extensive new powers of investigation.

The Homeland Security Act raised questions about the balance of national security versus civil liberties, how to shape the domestic response to an open-ended war against new foes, and whether too much authority was shifting to the executive branch without congressional or legal constraint. More specifically, civil liberties groups questioned broad new rules for evidence ...