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Who: the NSA, Obama Administration, US citizens, US allies and their citizens, and pretty much the rest of the world.

What: NSA surveillance, what it does, who it effects and how it over reaches it's hand.

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When Edward Snowden met journalists in his cramped room in Hong Kong's Mira hotel in June, his mission was ambitious. Amid the clutter of laundry, meal trays and his four laptops, he wanted to start a debate about mass surveillance.

He succeeded beyond anything the journalists or Snowden himself ever imagined. His disclosures about the NSA resonated with Americans from day one. But they also exploded round the world.

For some, like Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, it is a vitally important issue, one of the biggest of our time: nothing less than the defence of democracy in the digital age.

But the intelligence agencies dismiss such claims, arguing that their programs are constitutional, and subject to rigorous congressional and judicial oversight. Secrecy, they say, is essential to meet their overriding aim of protecting the public from terrorist attacks.

The debate has raged across time zones: from the US and Latin America to Europe and to Asia. Barack Obama cancelled a trip to Moscow in protest at Russian president Vladimir Putin's protection of Snowden. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff cancelled a state visit to Washington in protest at the US spying on her. Bolivian president Evo Morales's plane was forced down in Vienna amid suspicion that Snowden was being smuggled out of Russia.

In Germany, a "livid" Angela Merkel accused the US of spying on her, igniting a furore that has seen the White House concede that new constraints on the NSA's activities may be necessary. Meanwhile, in Britain, prime minister David Cameron accused the Guardian of damaging national security by publishing the revelations, warning that if it did not "demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act".

Much of the NSA's defence is that the public should be unconcerned, summed up by the dictum: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." But civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union warn that surveillance goes well beyond what Congress intended and what the US constitution allows.

Cell phones, laptops, Facebook, Skype, chat-rooms: all allow the NSA to build what it calls 'a pattern of life', a detailed profile of a target and anyone associated with them.

And the number of people caught up in this dragnet can be huge.

Calculations are based on an analysis of Facebook that reports a typical user has an average of 190 friends and 14% of those friends are friends with each other.

Faced with growing public and political concern over the quantities of data it is collecting, the NSA has sought to reassure people, arguing that it collected only a tiny proportion of the world's internet traffic, roughly equivalent to a "dime on a basketball court". But in reality, that is still a huge amount of data. The Library of Congress, one of the biggest libraries in the world, gathers 5 terabytes a month. The NSA sucks up much, much more.

Since you began reading this, the NSA has selected

of data for review. That's about
two-hour HD movies.

The NSA say it needs all this data to help prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. In order to find the needle in the haystack, they argue, they need access to the whole haystack.

Snowden recognises the value of the NSA in counter-terrorism, but thinks the spy agency has dangerously over-reached itself. He is a fugitive from US law, in exile in Russia. But the debate he wanted to start when he decided to become a whistleblower is now happening.

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NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations explained

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When Edward Snowden met journalists in his cramped room in Hong Kong's Mira hotel in June, his mission was ambitious. Amid the clutter of laundry, meal trays and his four laptops, he wanted to start a debate about mass surveillance. He succeeded beyond anything the journalists or Snowden himself ever imagined.

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Who: Corporations and the government.

What: Passed PCNA which allows corporations to share information about their customers with other corporations with the government as the intermediate. The government can also use the info even if there is no cyber security threat, allowing them to find the sources of journalists. It is also exempted from the FOIA.

When: April 2015

Where: The United states. Passed through the House.

Why: Because the government felt it was necessary even though the citizens have fought against nearly identical bills and acts under different names, such as CISPA.

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A letter signed by over 50 privacy groups concedes that the bill is "less pernicious" than other recent similar legislation, but notes that under the PCNA, data shared through the government could be exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, creating a "new secret cyber-intelligence coordinating body." Naturally, the government doesn't see it this way, and with high profile attacks on Sony and Target (among others) still in recent memory, it's likely corporations are eager for the senate to pass the bill too.

The issue appears to be the bill's lack of specificity. The PCNA would allow for data to flow between corporations via a government intermediary. Crucially, there are provisions that would allow the government to use these data outside of cyber threats. The civil liberties groups criticize the bill for allowing any data to also be used with the Espionage Act, making it ripe for abuse for things such as surveillance of journalists and their sources. While all this is going on, there's still the very real threat of more large scale attacks on corporations that could expose this very same data to anyone on the internet. The bill is still being finalized as it awaits approval from the Senate.

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House passes bill allowing corporations to share your data

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A letter signed by over 50 privacy groups concedes that the bill is "less pernicious" than other recent similar legislation, but notes that under the PCNA, data shared through the government could be exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, creating a "new secret cyber-intelligence coordinating body."

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PARIS - In 2007, Belgian police were keeping close watch on Malika el-Aroud, a fierce al-Qaida ideologue whose dark eyes smoldered above her veil.

The Moroccan-born Aroud had met Osama bin Laden while living in al-Qaida's stronghold in Afghanistan. She gained exalted status when her husband posed as a journalist to blow up the renowned Ahmed Shah Massoud, the chief of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, just two days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Aroud later returned to Europe, remarried and started an Islamist website that attracted a group of French and Belgian extremists. Led by her second husband, Moez Garsallaoui, half-a-dozen of them went to Waziristan, where they joined several thousand al-Qaida fighters, including a Latino convert from Long Island, learned to make bombs and plotted against the West with terrorist kingpins.

The authorities - American, Belgian, French, Swiss, Italian, Turkish - were all over them.

U.S. surveillance had tracked their radicalization, their emails from Pakistan, even calls made to their mothers before they trudged through snowy Iranian mountains. An intercepted photo that Garsallaoui sent his wife showed him holding a grenade launcher. He claimed to have killed U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and described his escape from a missile strike: "I came close to dying."

The militants took precautions, changing laptops and using Internet cafes. But they were no match for top-secret, real-time NSA intercepts. Some of the monitoring was approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"We were inside their computers," a source said.

As debate rages in the United States about the National Security Agency's sweeping data-mining programs, I've been on a reporting trip overseas, where I've been talking to sources about the controversy and how differing U.S. and European approaches to counterterrorism can complement each other.

On Tuesday, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, told a congressional committee that his agency's surveillance programs helped stop more than 50 terror plots in the U.S. and abroad. Five years ago, I was based in Europe covering terrorism, running from one attack or aborted plot to another. As the Brussels investigation shows, these cases frequently combined the high-tech reach of the U.S. counterterror apparatus with the street skills of foreign agencies.

In November 2008, Pakistani and U.S. agents swooped into Kandahar and nabbed Bryant Neal Viñas, the convert from Long Island and al-Qaida militant. He cooperated with the FBI, admitting that he discussed an attack on the Long Island Rail Road with top al-Qaida figures.

Days later, a drone strike killed Rashid Rauf, a Pakistani-British operative who helped plan the London transport bombings and the "liquid bomb" plot to blow up planes in 2006. Three Belgian and French militants returned home, where police arrested them after intercepts picked up menacing chatter.

Viñas pleaded guilty. Aroud went to prison, and investigators believe her second husband Garsallaoui died in the land of jihad.

Other cases benefited from close cooperation. In Germany in 2007, U.S. monitoring detected a suspect checking the draft file of an email box at an Internet cafe in Stuttgart. Armed with that lead, German security services deployed surveillance at numerous Internet cafes in the city. The investigation resulted in the dismantling of a Pakistan-trained group plotting to attack U.S. military targets in Germany.

As several European sources told me, if an extremist in Marseilles was talking about nefarious activities with an extremist in Geneva over the Internet, chances were good that U.S. intelligence agencies would find out and inform the French and Swiss. Not because of sources on the ground, but because U.S. agencies could detect the communications through computer servers in the United States.

The reaction here to the U.S. debate has been bemused.

European terrorist hunters seem surprised that the revelation of the NSA data-monitoring programs is big news. The technological capacities of U.S. agencies have been an integral component of dramatically improved teamwork against terrorism during the past decade.

"In the fight against terrorism, intelligence-sharing is essential," said Jean-Louis Bruguière, who served for more than two decades as a top French antiterror magistrate before retiring in 2007. (He declined to discuss the NSA's role in investigations.) "Cooperation with American services has always been trusting and excellent."

At the same time, some European experts see the furor as a sign that the strengths of the American giant intertwine with its weaknesses. U.S. agencies devote huge resources to sophisticated technology to the detriment of analysis and human spying, they say. As a result, they say, U.S. agencies sometimes appear overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information.

"The problem is not collecting information, it's understanding it," said Alain Bauer, a well-connected French criminologist who has served as a presidential adviser. "What is the sense of such programs? They are too big. They will not work. We are a former colonial empire. We know the value of human intelligence. It is more efficient and less expensive than technological fetishism. Fortunately, we do not have enough money to do it the other way."

Spy agencies such as France's DCRI and Britain's MI5 have long experience cultivating human sources. In early 2008, Spain's Civil Guard broke up a plot to bomb the Barcelona subway thanks to a French informant. He was a Pakistani who infiltrated the network in the training camps and traveled with the would-be bombers to Spain. He sounded the alarm when the attack seemed imminent.

I have met many American agents who are adept at operating in foreign cultures. Diversity adds value. U.S. agencies can send Pakistani-Americans to work in Islamabad and Mexican-born officers to Mexico City.

Nonetheless, U.S. agencies have less experience with Islamic terrorism at home. That's partly the result of a good thing: Overall, the United States does a better job than most countries of integrating immigrants, including those of Muslim heritage.

In Europe, decades of religious, nationalist and political violence have bred an arsenal of counterterror tools. The security forces have developed extensive knowledge of large Muslim populations with subgroups involved in crime, extremism or both. The security forces recruit informants, interpreters, analysts and investigators from those communities.

As Bruguière pointed out, France staved off Islamic terrorist violence from 1996 to 2012, when an extremist named Mohamed Merah killed seven people in shooting attacks on French soldiers and a Jewish school in Toulouse.

"Gathering intelligence is the linchpin of the fight against terrorism," Bruguière said. "In France, the emphasis is on humint [human intelligence]. But technological intelligence has not been neglected, in fact it has been notably reinforced."

To be sure, the Europeans have experienced failures. The transport bombings in London in 2005 and Madrid in 2004 took place despite the fact that some of the suspects had been under surveillance.

Though sectors of the European media and public complain about the prospect that the NSA might spy on them, at home they are accustomed to invasive practices. In Italy, electronic surveillance routinely targets tens of thousands of citizens. Italian law has made it easy to wiretap and hard to do undercover operations. In 2010, the Italian justice ministry reported that law enforcement had monitored more than 112,000 phones the previous year.

In France, political parties across the spectrum accept the existence of a vast grid of domestic spying. In 2004, I went to see a police intelligence chief in a French city. It was a Thursday in August. I wanted to know if he was concerned that a newly announced ban on Islamic headscarves in schools might incite unrest when the academic year began.

"I don't expect any problems," he said. "But tomorrow is Friday. It's a good day to gauge the mood based on the sermons at the mosques, especially the fundamentalist ones. Come back tomorrow afternoon, and I will have a better idea."

The next day he repeated his assessment, which was accurate. It was clear that the police monitored - presumably with a mix of human and technical methods - Muslim houses of worship, including the clandestine prayer rooms in basements and garages frequented by hard-core extremists. Each week, the intelligence web collected and analyzed Friday sermons and generated a report that was on the chief's desk in a few hours.

The U.S. reaction to NSA data mining strikes my European interlocutors as somewhat academic - a debate about potential rather than actual abuse. They don't see a scandal.

"Something that is more dangerous to individual liberties and data protection than the secret American metadata programs, such as Echelon or PRISM," said Bruguière, "is the insufficiently controlled commercial availability of innovative technological products such as social networks or the Google Earth and Google Street programs, which can be easily diverted toward criminal or terrorist ends."

Some here see quite another problem: They think the U.S. intelligence community has overreacted to Islamic terrorism, acting as if the networks have the dimensions and discipline of Cold War-era state adversaries. That can cause excessive rigidity and secrecy.

A veteran European police investigator told me an anecdote. He once shared intelligence with a U.S. counterpart about a terrorism case. Some time later, he talked to the American official again. The conversation led him to believe that the U.S. agency had misunderstood or misinterpreted the intelligence.

The investigator recalled: "I told him that we needed to go over a couple of points. He said: 'I can't talk to you about it any further.' I said, 'But it's about a lead we gave you.' He told me: 'Sorry, it doesn't matter. It's secret now.'"

The European investigator speaks Arabic and has spent years on the front lines. He says the U.S. emphasis on technology can be counterproductive, distancing the watchers from their target.

"In our work, there is no substitute for this," he said, gesturing across a cafe table. "Face-to-face contact. Empathy."
Before joining ProPublica, Sebastian Rotella worked at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006 for his coverage of terrorism and Muslim communities in Europe.

Sebastian Rotella is a senior reporter at ProPublica. An award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, Sebastian's coverage includes terrorism, intelligence and organized crime.

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How the NSA's High-Tech Surveillance Helped Europeans Catch Terrorists - ProPublica

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PARIS - In 2007, Belgian police were keeping close watch on Malika el-Aroud, a fierce al-Qaida ideologue whose dark eyes smoldered above her veil. The Moroccan-born Aroud had met Osama bin Laden while living in al-Qaida's stronghold in Afghanistan.

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This article discuses the problems with current cyber security legislation, specifically anti-terrorism laws, and how we can learn from them to pass more effective laws in the future.

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On June 5, 2013, the world learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), America's largest intelligence-gathering organization, had been gathering the metadata of all the phone calls made by Verizon customers since early April 2013. The next day, two prominent newspapers reported that PRISM, a top secret NSA program, had been vacuuming up customer data from some of the world's largest and best known information technology (IT) firms-including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft-directly from their servers. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper later clarified that specific requests for customer data from these IT firms were subject to tight legal controls and only targeted non-US citizens. But Clapper's comments did little to calm frayed nerves.

A public outcry ensued, with some loudly opposing the NSA's surveillance programs and others forcefully defending them. The New York Times condemned the NSA surveillance in an editorial and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the NSA, challenging the constitutionality of the NSA telephone call metadata collection program. Former Vice President Al Gore called the surveillance "obscenely outrageous" on Twitter. But others came out in support of the NSA's efforts. Senator Lindsay Graham said "I am a Verizon customer...it doesn't bother me one bit for the NSA to have my phone number." Max Boot, a senior fellow with the think tank Council on Foreign Relations, credited the NSA surveillance with helping to reduce the number of terrorist incidents on US soil since the attacks of September 11, 2001. A Pew Research Center poll suggested that there was significant support among the American public for the NSA's surveillance efforts. Despite the heated rhetoric on both sides of the surveillance debate, the NSA's collection of telephone call metadata appears to be legal based upon the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's (FISC) interpretation of section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Perhaps the most interesting remarks about the NSA controversy thus far came from Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the USA PATRIOT Act. He wrote that when the Act was first drafted, one of the most controversial provisions concerned the process by which government agencies obtain business records for intelligence or law enforcement purposes. Sensenbrenner stated that particular provision of the Act requires government lawyers to prove to the FISC that a request for specific business records is linked to an "authorized investigation" and further stated that "targeting US citizens is prohibited" as part of the request. Sensenbrenner argued that the NSA telephone metadata collection is a bridge too far and falls well outside the original intended scope of the Act: "[t]he administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this [NSA surveillance] is an abuse of that law."

Acknowledging that Sensenbrenner's statements may have been motivated in part by political interests, the perceived creeping expansion of the USA PATRIOT Act-the "abuse" that Sensenbrenner describes in the context of the NSA surveillance controversy-is consistent with what is known as the "ratchet effect" in legal scholarship.

The ratchet effect is a unidirectional change in some legal variable that can become entrenched over time, setting in motion a process that can then repeat itself indefinitely.[1] For example, some scholars argued that anti-terrorism laws tend to erode civil liberties and establish a new baseline of legal "normalcy" from which further extraordinary measures spring in future crises.[2] This process is consistent with the ratchet effect, for it suggests a "stickiness" in anti-terrorism laws that makes it harder to scale back or reverse their provisions. Each new baseline of legal normalcy represents a new launching pad for additional future anti-terrorism measures.

There is not universal consensus on whether or not the ratchet effect is real, nor on how powerful it may be. Posner and Vermeule call ratchet effect explanations "methodologically suspect."[3] They note that accounts of the ratchet effect often ring hollow, for they "fail to supply an explanation of such a process...and if there is such a mechanism [to cause the ratchet effect], it is not clear that the resulting ratchet process is bad."[4]

I argue that the recent controversy surrounding the NSA's intelligence collection efforts underscores the relevance of the ratchet effect to scholarly discussions of anti-terrorism laws. I do not seek to prove or disprove that the recent NSA surveillance controversy illustrates the ratchet effect at work, nor do I debate the potential strength or weakness of the ratchet effect as an explanation for the staying power or growth of anti-terrorism laws. As Sensenbrenner's recent comments make clear, part of the original intent of the USA PATRIOT Act appears to have been lost in interpretation. It is reasonable to suggest that future anti-terrorism laws may suffer a similar fate. Scholars can therefore benefit from exploring how the USA PATRIOT Act took shape and evolved, and why anti-terrorism laws can be difficult to unwind.
The USA PATRIOT Act: a Sticky History
A brief survey of the history of the USA PATRIOT Act provides a glimpse of how anti-terrorism laws can form after terrorist attacks, how the effects of these laws can quickly expand, and how efforts to modify or repeal portions can prove challenging. An initial draft of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001 developed within a week of the September 11 th terrorist attacks.[5] At approximately the same time, government officials' and popular media outlets' offices nationwide received anonymous letters containing weapons-grade anthrax.

After then-President George W. Bush signed the Act, it increased law enforcement powers within the United States, began to break down historical barriers against information sharing between police and intelligence agencies, and expanded the definition of terrorism in 18 USC § 2331.[6] Moreover, the Act assigned lead investigative authority in terrorism cases to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Previously, this responsibility was spread among a number of agencies, including the Department of the Treasury (DOT), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the DOJ.[7]

The Act provoked controversy after it was passed and, as the recent NSA surveillance revelations make clear, it continues to do so today. Putting aside section 215 of the Act, which relates directly to the NSA's collection of telephone call metadata from Verizon, another contentious area is the Act's permitting searches of personal library records and other organizational files via issuance of National Security Letters (NSLs). Federal agencies use NSLs to demand disclosure of certain records from an organization; they are a form of administrative subpoena that can be issued without judicial review.[8] The number of NSLs drastically increased after the Act took effect. In 2000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued approximately 8,000 NSLs. In 2004, by contrast, the FBI issued 56,000 NSLs. IT firms like Google, Twitter, and Yahoo have also been issued NSLs, though secrecy rules bar their lawyers from discussing the nature of these NSLs openly.

In the twelve years since the Act's entrance into use, governments, civic organizations, and citizens sought repeatedly to modify and repeal portions of the Act without success. Two years after the Act became law, local governments in Ann Arbor, Oklahoma City, New York, and Philadelphia passed resolutions against it.[9] Members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives introduced separate pieces of legislation seeking to scale back the Act's original scope. The American Library Association (ALA) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lobbied against provisions of the Act. Doe v. Gonzales-a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court- raised serious questions about the Act's constitutionality. Yet despite this steady drumbeat of concern around the Act's expansion of government power, both Republican and Democratic administrations renewed provisions of the Act that had been set to expire.

This brief history reflects the difficulties governments, civic groups, and citizens face in attempting to modify or repeal portions of the USA PATRIOT Act. This difficulty is for good reason. Al-Qaeda has been degraded significantly since 9/11, but terrorism remains a significant threat to the United States, as the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing vividly illustrates. In light of the continuing threat of terrorism in the United States, it is worth exploring the reasons why anti-terrorism laws like the USA PATRIOT Act can prove difficult to scale back. The list of causes below is not meant to be exhaustive, but to show how a constellation of variables can help to cement anti-terrorism laws in place.
The ratchet effect can occur because anti-terrorism laws are effective.
Anti-terrorism laws may stick simply because they work. If so, then scaling back or reversing an effective anti-terrorism law would increase a nation's vulnerability to terrorism, pulling it back toward a condition that existed before the law initially went into effect. This goes against national security interests, so it makes sense to leave these laws on the books.
The ratchet effect can occur because anti-terrorism laws may address multiple threats.
Anti-terrorism laws may come about because of a particular terrorist group or incident. But that does not necessarily mean the laws will work only for that group, or apply only to similar types of terrorist attacks. Al-Qaeda's attack on 9/11 spurred the creation of the USA PATRIOT Act. Yet today the Act's provisions can also impede domestic terrorist organizations like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) by facilitating intelligence sharing for law enforcement purposes.
The ratchet effect can occur because it is challenging to repeal laws in democracies.
Absent "sunset" provisions, which force certain portions of a law to expire after a pre-determined amount of time, it can be difficult to repeal a law under normal circumstances-let alone when that law concerns something as serious as terrorism. It requires careful political maneuvering to reverse an anti-terrorism law because the law itself may enjoy popular support, be seen as effective, or be linked to vested economic interests. These obstacles can promote a legal inertia that resists efforts to scale back or reverse the law.
The ratchet effect can occur because elected officials do not want to risk repealing anti-terrorism laws.
Here is a political nightmare: for whatever reason, a legislator or government executive spearheads an effort to reverse an anti-terrorism law. The anti-terrorism law is repealed. Within a week, a terrorist attack occurs. Being wrong about terrorism can carry devastating political consequences for incumbents. But being specifically identified as the one who "turned off the alarm system" is a political death sentence. Under this scenario, even if there is no direct causal link between the law's repeal and the attack, the two are easily correlated because of their temporal proximity to each other. It makes no sense for an elected official to open herself to the possibility of this scenario without a clear, compelling reason-and, even then, scaling back an anti-terrorism law may still be too politically risky a proposition to entertain seriously. For these reasons, anti-terrorism laws can remain in effect beyond the end of the crisis that brought them into existence.
The ratchet effect can occur because there is increased public deference to government during crises.
Legal scholars and political scientists have explored the effect of terrorism on public deference to democratic governments.[10] While the specific reasons for this vary, the research overwhelmingly points toward increased trust in government authorities in the immediate wake of terrorist attacks, though this can wane over time. Popular support can provide the political capital necessary for legislators and executives to quickly craft and implement anti-terrorism laws. Over time, despite some slippage, public approval of these laws can continue-particularly when the crisis that prompted the laws' creation continues.
The ratchet effect can occur because anti-terrorism laws create a new security paradigm.
An aggressive anti-terrorism law can fundamentally alter societal approaches to terrorism. Surveillance may increase. Police powers can expand. Intelligence efforts may grow. Public expectations of privacy can diminish. In the aggregate, these types of changes can represent a drastic change in a government's approach to terrorism, and effectively create a "new normal" level of security. Because this "new normal" is linked to the law itself, reversing the law begins to dismantle the new security paradigm. From the public's perspective, this might be an unacceptable option because it may increase societal vulnerability to terrorism. Government agencies also risk losing resources-personnel, money, and political support-by returning to the status quo ante.
What the NSA Surveillance Controversy Can Teach Us about the Ratchet Effect and Anti-Terrorism Laws
After a terrorist attack, creating laws quickly to contend with terrorism is reasonable and appropriate. It is equally reasonable and appropriate, however, to build hedges into those laws to guard against unsound initial judgments or assumptions. The set of policy recommendations below provides a starting point to mitigate the potential impact of the ratchet effect upon anti-terrorism laws. Taking these steps does not guarantee that anti-terrorism laws will be easy to scale-back or reverse, nor can it completely prevent unintentional interpretations of anti-terrorism laws. But these recommendations can increase policymakers' awareness of the ratchet effect, which can lead to more thoughtfully crafted and effective anti-terrorism laws.

First, initial changes may be difficult to undo.The early legislative moves after a terrorist attack are pivotal. They set the tone for future, related legislation. Moreover, as argued earlier in this article, changing laws can be difficult under normal circumstances, let alone when the laws concern an issue as serious as terrorism. It is vital for leaders to get the beginning stages of a nation's anti-terrorism legislationright; a bad start can lead to a pattern of subsequent bad laws.This is not a call for perfection, but a plea for greater awareness of this reality and for leaders to use this awareness when drafting laws.

Second, policymakers should beware of reflexive legislation.Terror attacks create conditions in which emotions can run high; feelings of terror, anger, sadness, confusion, and frustration are natural consequences of these circumstances. Behavioral psychology teaches us that human beings' higher-order thinking skills (e.g. logic, reasoning, analysis, reflection) are poorly integrated with baser, emotionally-rooted thinking (e.g. irrational prejudices, unreasonable fears, self-destructive desires).[11] One researcher has gone so far as to say that the amygdala-the portion of the brain that controls reactive emotion-can hijack the higher-order parts of the brain, impeding effective decision-making in crises.[12] Considering this, it is reasonable to suggest that laws passed in the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks may be rooted more in baser, emotionally-driven thinking than in careful, analytical, higher-order thinking. In other words, they may be mostly reflexive, not reflective. This is not to say that all laws passed after terrorist attacks are emotionally-driven. Nor is it the case that all laws created in these circumstances are somehow "bad" laws. But during and after terrorist attacks, leaders' judgment of what may or may not be good law can become clouded by emotion. Similarly, terrorist attacks can drive public support for reflexive anti-terrorism legislation. And this is not an instinct that can be somehow "shut off" or "tuned out." Legislators and citizens should be aware of this potential, and must walk a fine line between meeting immediate post-crisis needs and championing laws that will remain effective for the long haul.

Third, "sunset" provisions are prudent and reasonable.Given that anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of terrorist attacks may be partly driven by emotion and that initial laws may prove difficult to undo, it is wise for government leaders to include "sunset" provisions in new anti-terrorism laws. Generally "sunset" provisions allow portions of a law to expire if not renewed by a pre-determined date. In a sense, democracies must deliver a new mandate for the law-or at least part of the law-to avoid this expiration. With "sunset" provisions in place, unwise, irrelevant, or ineffective components of a law can be allowed to wither and die when necessary. Letting these provisions lapse requires virtually no political capital from government leaders, unlike actively changing or removing a law, which can require a great deal. For elected officials, this means that letting part of an anti-terrorism law expire is relatively easy. Re-examining and pruning anti-terrorism laws in this way is a healthy practice. It can head off potential abuses of particularly aggressive anti-terrorism measures and forces a continual re-thinking of anti-terrorism laws as circumstances change over time.

The recent NSA surveillance controversy highlights the relevance of the ratchet effect to broader discussions of anti-terrorism laws. The ratchet effect can affect anti-terrorism laws generally, entrenching and expanding them over time and potentially leading to those laws being interpreted in unexpected and undesirable ways. The USA PATRIOT Act, developed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has been difficult to scale back since then, and has now been interpreted in a way that at least one of the Act's authors did not intend. This unintended interpretation of the Act led, in part, to today's NSA surveillance controversy. Scholars can benefit from future explorations of the ratchet effect, which may help illuminate further why anti-terrorism laws remain in place and how their influence can expand in unanticipated ways.

*Austen D. Givens is a PhD student in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. His forthcoming book with Nathan E. Busch, The Business of Counterterrorism: Public-Private Partnerships in Homeland Security, will be published by Peter Lang.

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The NSA Surveillance Controversy: How the Ratchet Effect Can Impact Anti-Terrorism Laws

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On June 5, 2013, the world learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), America's largest intelligence-gathering organization, had been gathering the metadata of all the phone calls made by Verizon customers since early April 2013.

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https://www.eff.org/issues/cyber-security-legislation

Who: Congress, Federal Government, Private companies, and the United States citizens.

What: Hundreds of bills are introduced to Congress to allow private companies and the federal government to share users personal information, but the bills are written broadly, allowing for hundreds of interpretations.

When: The first major bill was in 1996, and it is still going on.

Where: This focuses mainly on the United States, but includes countries from around the world.

Why: It is an issue that needs to be properly addressed and we don't want to give unlimited power to the government and private corporations. Cyber attacks are also becoming more common and there needs to be laws in place that are fair to everybody while still punishing malicious people.