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Security After 9/11

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Security After 9/11 Billowing smoke, rolling flames, flying debris, and people dying was what September 11, 2001 looked like to a nation attacked by terrorists. Two airplanes crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center on a clear, normal Tuesday morning in New York City. People all over the nation were watching; kids and teachers in classrooms, healthcare workers, military, business employees, and others. A scene of destruction and death was witnessed that morning. People were jumping to their death from the 110-story skyscrapers to escape the death of burning alive or smoke inhalation. While watching this horrific scene, the south tower collapsed killing people instantly on its route down to the bottom of the street. …show more content…

Due to the 9/11 attacks, terrorist watch lists have increased drastically by government agencies. The terrorist watch list, also known as the no-fly list only contained 16 peoples names on September 11, 2001 according to government documents (Markon). After the attacks multiple watch list were created, but the largest is the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). This list not only contains 875,000 names it feeds everything to other smaller lists. TIDE receives thousands of names, aliases, birth dates, and other potential terrorist threats each day; they match it with biometric data, names, and faces sent by different agencies (Clayton). This list is created to hold the names of suspicious people thought to be involved with terrorist activities or groups. People are nominated to being on the list by government agencies. All known terrorist watch lists make up the Terrorism Screening Database (TSDB). These names are vital for airports, governments national and globally, military, and others. If the government would have had a more thorough list of names, they may have been able to stop the September 11 attacks before the terrorists ever boarded the plane. These database have succeededaly improved security global due to matching of suspected people, but have some downfalls to information on databases. For example, Mark Clayton describes that some people are delayed …show more content…

Resulting from the attacks September 11 government activity has expanded. This includes new agencies/organizations, legislations, bills, and etc. Contained in the article “9/11 to now: Ways we have changed” by Jason Villemez, more than 130 pieces of legislation related to 9/11 have been introduced into Congress one year after the attacks and 48 bills have been passed into law (Villemez). All of these legislations and bills were related directly to the terrorism experienced on American soil. Within these papers multiple acts were formed including the following: Aviation and Transportation Security Act, Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, and many others. Following different acts came new organization and agencies to oversee the nation’s security. According to the Washington Post, 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11 (Priest, Arkin). There are hundreds of other organizations that do work related to counter-terrorism, security, and intelligence. The Department of Homeland Security is one of the big organizations created in response to the attacks. The Department of Homeland Security is to oversee and protect the country against terrorism and respond to future attacks or threats (Creation of the Department of Homeland Security). All government activity has been an accomplishment since 9/11 and used for the people of the United

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