Patriot ACT Legal Authority Conduct Covert Surveilance.

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The Patriot Act represents perhaps one of the most important legal instruments created since 2001 to provide legitimacy of covert actions that would contribute to the fight against terrorism that the United States is fighting since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The Patriot Act introduced new legal protection for actions that relate to covert surveillance conducted through all means such as wiretapping, electronic communication, or any type of electronic communication.

The Patriot Act provided the legal framework to conduct such operations by amending existing laws such as "The Wiretap Statute," "Electronic Communications Privacy Act," or "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" (Dept. Of Justice, 2012)

The enactment of the Patriot Act has determined a lot of controversy in terms of the privacy restrictions it imposes. This is largely due to the fact that the most important aspects of the Act relate to the surveillance and interception of communications, regardless of their nature. In this sense, the important laws the Act changes reflect a widening of the spectrum of surveillance to include the Internet and telephone calls, among others.

The legal framework the Act changed in terms of communication and surveillance relates to the definition of certain terms such as Pen registers, "trap and trace" to include additional information and a wider range of uses from the law enforcement agencies. In this sense, "Section 216 of the Act significantly expanded law enforcement authority to use trap and trace and pen register devices. (…) The new legislation redefined a pen register as "a device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is transmitted." A trap and trace device is now "a device or process which captures the incoming electronic or other impulses which identify the originating number or other dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information reasonably likely to identify the source or a wire or electronic communication." (Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2012) This redefinition of the terms reflects the expansion of the range of options the law enforcement agencies have to gather information and provide a proactive stand on the fight against terrorism.

In terms of the legal aspects related to covert surveillance, the Department of Justice considered the Act a clear improvement because it dealt with the shortcomings of current legal instruments that did not permit the investigation of all arrays of crimes that are currently ongoing and part of the terrorist range of actions. Once the Patriot Act was agreed upon and enacted, "it enabled investigators to gather information when looking into the full range of terrorism-related crimes, including: chemical-weapons offenses, the use of weapons of mass destruction, killing Americans abroad, and terrorism financing." (Dept. Of Justice, 2012)