Jabatan Perdagangan

Reaction Paper
AE101: Communication English

Student Name: Mazuin Binti Muin

Matrix’s no: 07DAT10F1005
program: Diploma in Accountancy (DAT1A)
Due Date: 27th of August 2010
Lecturer: Miss Georginia Alicia Ajus
Department: Commerce
 COURSE: AE101 COMMUNICATIVE ENGLISH

TYPE OF ITEM-REACTION PAPER

Instruction:-

Find two articles on any current issues from two different media forms. Attach/paste your
articles in the space below. State the source of each article. Submit the articles together with
the question paper.

Article 1:
 The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves
By Adam Cohen Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS
device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate
your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of
privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't
tracking your movements.That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in
California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,
which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this
way virtually any time it wants — with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America
into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive
because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal
privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to
monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing
marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his
driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the
vehicle's underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth
Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of
judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this
month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to
manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his
motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)
In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For
starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people
have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "cartilage," a fancy legal
term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet
away was clearly in this zone of privacy.
The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway
was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and
neighbourhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to
reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The
court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences
and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who
cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.
Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his
dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the
bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people
are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the
majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."
The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device
has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant.
There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the
stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS
devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are
one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or
the East German Stasi.
Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's —
including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That
court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an
invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme
Court.
In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and
liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was
unanimous — decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush
and Bill Clinton.
Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge
Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than
predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's
totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon,
we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Copied from Time Magazine

Article 2:

Does America Have a Muslim Problem?

By Bobby Ghosh / Dearborn, Mich. Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010

You don't have to be prejudiced against Islam to believe, as many Americans do, that the
area around Ground Zero is a sacred place. But sadly, in an election season, such
sentiments have been stoked into a political issue. As the debate has grown more heated,
Park51, as the proposed Muslim cultural centre and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero
is called, has become a litmus test for everything from private-property rights to religious
tolerance. But it is plain that many of Park51's opponents are motivated by deep-seated
Islamophobia.The proposed site is close not just to Ground Zero; it's also a stone's throw
from strip clubs, liquor stores and other establishments typical of lower Manhattan.
Muslims have been praying in the building for nearly a year, a fact that has got lost in the
noise of the protests. But since early August, it has been the scene of frequent
demonstrations, with signs saying things such as "All I Need to Know About Islam, I
Learned on 9/11." The husband-and-wife team behind Park51, Imam Feisal Rauf and Daisy
Khan, seem stunned into paralysis: while opponents cast them as extremists sympathetic to
al-Qaeda, they have given very few interviews themselves. Pressure is mounting on the
couple to move their centre to a less polarizing location.
The controversy has also brought new scrutiny to other examples of anti-Islam and anti-
Muslim protests, raising much larger questions: Does America have a problem with Islam?
Have the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — and other attempts since — permanently excluded
Muslims from full assimilation into American life?
Although the American strain of Islamophobia lacks some of the traditional elements of
religious persecution — there's no sign that violence against Muslims is on the rise, for
instance — there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that hate speech against Muslims and Islam
is growing both more widespread and more heated. Meanwhile, a new TIME–Abt SRBI
poll found that 46% of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to
encourage violence against nonbelievers. Only 37% know a Muslim American. Overall,
61% oppose the Park51 project, while just 26% are in favor of it. Just 23% say it would be
a symbol of religious tolerance, while 44% say it would be an insult to those who died on
9/11.
Islamophobia in the U.S. doesn't approach levels seen in other countries where Muslims are
in a minority. But to be a Muslim in America now is to endure slings and arrows against
your faith — not just in the schoolyard and the office but also outside your place of worship
and in the public square, where some of the country's most powerful mainstream religious
and political leaders unthinkingly (or worse, deliberately) conflate Islam with terrorism and
savagery. In France and Britain, politicians from fringe parties say appalling things about
Muslims, but there's no one in Europe of the stature of a former House Speaker who would,
as Newt Gingrich did, equate Islam with Nazism.
Copied from the internet, Newsweek Magazine

Read and answer the following questions:

1) State the title of both articles:
The title for article one is The Government Can use GPS To Track Our Move. For
article two is Does America Have a Muslim Problem?
(1 mark)

2) Identify the main idea of the first paragraph in each article.

Main idea of Article 1: The government can track our moves by tracking us with
GPS.
Main idea of Article 2: Many American’s cant respect Muslim’s.
(2marks)
3) Explain in less than 15 words, what each articles is about?
(a) Article 1: The article is about the disadvantages of government tracking us down
by GPS.
(1 mark)

(b) Article 2: It is about American ‘s that have a Muslim problem.

(1 mark)

1) Give your opinion on ONE of the articles read. Why did choose this article? Do
you agree with the writer? Write your answer in not less than 100 words. Do not
copy or allowed your work to be copied.
(10 marks)
From article 2, I have chosen the title Does American Have a Muslim Problem?. The
reason I have chosen this title is because religious topic’s always have been one of the
famous topic nowadays. A lot of people are confused in what is right and wrong. I do
agree with the writer to say that most of American does have a problem with Muslim.
I think that the American has got it all wrong. If a person is a Muslim, it doesn’t mean
that he/she is a terrorist. Islam is a universal religion, same as other religions such as
Buddha, Christian and many others. Anyone can be part of it, there is no boundaries
on type of race, age and gender to be part of Islam. For example, Islam is not for
Arabic race only, it is also for other race’s such as Chinese or Indian. That is why
American’s should give a little respect on Muslim’s as they respect others religion on
their states. This is because Muslims on America also consist of American’s, and they
should not excluded Muslim’s not just in the schoolyard and the office but also
outside place of worship and in the public square. If they are really a Islamphobia,
then they should try give Muslim’s there a privacy of their own instead of protesting
them.
(224 words)