It was not until the events of September 11th, that Congress was able to get a consensus to pass these items. Among the changes fitting this description were; the expanded ability for law enforcement officers to conduct wire taps, the trapping of computer transmissions over the Internet, and to refinement of technology "hacking laws." .
Prior to the events of September 11th, there were legal benchmarks that required law enforcement officials to have a "reasonable suspicion" regarding suspected terrorist activity to obtain search warrants, pen trap and trace authorization, or wire tap authorizations. Now the Department of Justice, by virtue of the authority granted the FBI under the provisions of federal law, "the Act", can place software such as {"Magic Lantern," "Carnivore," or DCS1000;"} on every Internet Service Provider in the country. In fact, every US based ISP is currently in compliance. The result being, that effectively, all U.S. law enforcement and Intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and others, now have the ability to monitor every transmission on the U.S. Internet backbone without the requirement for prior review and authorization. The law states that law enforcement personnel are not allowed review the contents of any transmission, only the first 65 bytes of headers, which mainly provide the source and destination of the communication. Now while the "spirit of the law" is to only collect information after there has been a finding of "probable cause" that a crime or terrorist act is occurring. There are no provisions for any monitoring methods. Leaving the question, "who's watching the watchers? (Joseph and Worlton, 2002)" .
How the USA Patriot Act is affecting Businesses.
Responses to IT security surveys by Information Security magazine and CSO (Chief Security Officer) magazine, indicate that most companies are focusing upon the security of their IT infrastructure, but do not have any plans to increase their security protocols targeting external attacks.
