Homeland Security Legal and Ethical Issues

Homeland Security Legal and Ethical Issues
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Homeland Security Legal and Ethical Issues
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plays a relevant role in enhancing the security of the United States and protecting critical infrastructures from potential attacks. Intelligence and information gathering are key strategies that the agency utilizes to identify and address the different attacks. As a result, legal and ethical issues emerge related to the DHS operations. A consensus in the various readings is that border security is critical to public safety and national security. According to the findings in the week’s readings, the Privacy Act of 1974 is legislation that guides the collection, storage, usage, and dissemination of information. While the act only protected United States citizens, the Department of Homeland Security amended it to protect non-citizens.
Research findings indicate that DHS is at the forefront of enhancing the United States’ security while preventing the entry of unauthorized individuals into the country. As a result of the emergence of ethical and legal issues, the DHS has made significant efforts to ensure that information gathering complies with the privacy act. The agency has a secondary mission to uphold individuals’ privacy while enhancing the country’s borders. According to the reading materials, the DHS should inform individuals about collecting, maintaining, and using personal information (Nancy, 2017). Therefore, the law should prohibit the secret gathering of information without the knowledge or consent of the subjects. Following the numerous ethical breaches, individuals have control over their private information, with the DHS being committed to protecting individuals’ privacy.
The reading materials provide a comprehensive overview of legal and ethical issues related to homeland security. Equally, the various authors explore the various forms of homeland security legislation and executive order related to United States’ security (Trump, 2017). Therefore, readers can understand the declarations, conventions, and legislations on illegal immigration and the smuggling of goods to the United States. However, the central focus of the reading materials is objectives, strategies, and progress of effective homeland security while upholding the citizens’ civil liberties. Notably, intelligence and information gathering as a strategy of DHS has subjected the agency to numerous forms of ethical and legal breaches (Flammini et al., 2019). However, the authors of the various materials reveal issues regarding surveillance, cybersecurity, and immigration.
The readers of the assigned materials are likely to change their minds about privacy concerns based on the information and intelligence gathering. Notably, they must have only focused on the efforts of DHS without concern of related ethical and legal breaches that result from information gathering. In the contemporary world, the United States citizens encounter major threats from the use of modern technology, such as drones in surveillance (Rigoglioso, 2014). According to the authors, government agencies, such as the Dep...