Assignment task:
A fair amount of earlier work (Podesta 2002; Raab 2005-2006) was impacted by emotions and the lingering aspect of the Patriot Act when the Act was still a new addition to legislation. Those living in the United States shortly after the Patriot Act was passed watched laws that were once in place vanish right before them (Raab, 2005-2006). Later work views the Patriot Act in a different scope, being able to analyze the sequence of events both leading up to and after the Act. Later work offers insight and further analysis regarding how democracy was threatened by the Act. The Patriot Act was created in an effort to help prevent terrorism, but there is still an ongoing debate on how effective it actually was in that regard and if the civil liberty violations were worth it in the long run (Wadsworth, 2020). One gap in this research is the diversity of those reporting how the Act has affected them. Meaning, there needs to be more specificity regarding how the Patriot Act affected different ethnic groups. Additionally, knowing which states were the most affected would be beneficial. My research will contribute to pre-existing literature in an effort to prevent similar anti-terrorism legislation in future endeavors.