How to Best Balance Civil Liberties in Homeland Security

Civil Liberties and Homeland Security
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Civil Liberties and Homeland Security
Civil liberties entail being subject to regulations that are formed for the benefit of the country. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Homeland Defense emphasizes national security to preserve individual fairness, equality, and liberty by promoting compliance with the set law. For instance, it fosters community resilience to terrorism, natural disasters, and other emergencies. The critical element of the DHS is to safeguard the country against those who want to harm Americans (Sutherland, 2005). The paper focuses on how to best balance civil liberties in homeland security/defense in the future and the significant friction point between homeland security and civil liberties.
Civil liberties in homeland security should be balanced in a way to accommodate the technological changes in the future. In particular, without security Americans cannot have liberty. For example, racial profiling has been a significant issue in the United States of America (USA), where ethnicity and race are used as criteria for conducting searches and stops targeting specific groups of people (Sutherland, 2005). In the future, the government should ensure that all suspects regardless of their race, culture, ethnicity, or religion, are handled well to ensure that their constitutional rights are not compromised. The most significant thing that should be emphasized is how surveillance should be done by American intelligence agencies without compromising civil liberties. For instance, Edward Snowden made many individuals know that the National Security Agency (NSA) has access to citizens’ phone and email records (Rigoglioso, 2014). In that light, it is evident that technology can be used to enhance homeland security without violating people’s civil liberties. Data mining can be used to obtain large data sets and analyze them to predict individuals’ behaviors and make proper amendments to the homeland defense (Paretta, 2015). As such, the primary objective is to safeguard the nation by balancing homeland security and civil liberties.
The greatest point of friction between homeland security and civil liberties is privacy intrusion. Americans are not willing to sacrifice their civil liberties to prioritize national security (Doherty, 2013). However, they...