Comment Submitted by Luis Miquel Aceves, LAPD

How important is national security? It feels as if this is a question that is rarely on people’s minds anymore. It’s normal for everyday people to lose sight of what’s important when the issue is no longer in front of them. When assessing the importance of national security and with taking every precaution in order to have an advantage against terrorism, it is imperative to look into the proposed rule of The Privacy Act of 1974: Implementation of Exemptions; U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcements and the reason why this needs to be implemented. In 2001, terrorists orchestrated a horrific attack on the United States, in which they utilized hijacked airplanes to destroy American landmarks. In the attack approximately 3,000 people died, 6,000 were injured and millions were affected. Prior to 2001, there were a few terrorist attacks that were not as successful, but nevertheless should be events that would help us learn valuable lessons from. We need to ask ourselves, if we allowed the people in charge of national security to have access to all information. If not, could any of these terrorist attacks been prevented? Today, the United States is dealing with the issue of immigration. In the year 2008, the number of people that migrated to the United States was approximately 33 million. They have approximated that around 12 million of these people came into this country illegally. http://www.endillegalimmigration.com/Illegal_Immigration_Facts_&_Statistics/index.shtml. If we have the ability to make the background process more efficient for national security, then why shouldn’t we? By making a few exceptions to the Privacy Act, we could make a greater impact by providing extremely helpful resources and information to ICE agents. If the Privacy Act was to remain as is, credible threats to this country could go undetected much like the attackers of 2001. The more pressing matter is the fact that people that are being investigated have the ability to find out what the government is investigating, how long they have been investigated, and the people that are informants for the investigators. Allowing this type of information to be released would not allow investigators to conduct proper cases against aliens. If a possible terrorist was being investigated and he was able to obtain his records, he would find out where the agent is doing his background and collecting intelligence from. This could put the lives of informants on the line and discourage informants from giving out intelligence from fear of their safety. There are many other issues that come up such as concealing information from investigators and tampering with information. Prior to the 2001 attacks of the World Trade Towers, the 19 terrorists involved in the occurrences were going through a series of preparation before the attack. One of the main issues that the terrorists were dealing with was the fact that they needed to learn how to fly in order for them to complete their atrocious mission. While the attackers were learning to fly, a number of them informed their flight instructors that they were not interested in landing a plane, they just wanted to learn how to fly it in the air. They also wanted to learn at an increasingly fast pace. One of the flight instructors found this to be very odd and began to write letters to the FBI about this flight student. At this time, the terrorists were also involved in the Visa application process. If the 2001 attackers were able to obtain their personal records and discover that one of their flight instructors was writing the FBI on their actions, it could have allowed the terrorist the opportunity to try and prevent the flight instructor from writing to the federal government. This could also put the flight instructors life in danger. Despite the fact that the World Trade Tower’s attacks were not averted, we still need information similar to the intelligence coming from citizens much like this flight instructor. Why are we going to give these threats to our country the chance to endanger more American lives? We need to maintain every upper hand possible when dealing with the safety of our citizens. I personally work in law enforcement and understand the importance of keeping any and all advantages over possible criminals. When conducting search warrants on narcotics locations, we don’t allow drug dealers to look at our search warrants and find out at which time we plan on kicking down their door to conduct a search for drugs. If we give them that advantage, then we lose out on the element of surprise and ultimately creating it extremely difficult to arrest organized criminal groups. As far as this proposed rule, I am in agreement with what is being proposed. We need to think about the security of this country and do our best to learn from our mistakes in efforts to make today and tomorrow a safer place for all Americans.