1NC—T Curtail
A. Interpretation
The topic requires the affirmative to reduce surveillance itself, not to just limit
the methods of surveillance
1. CURTAIL MEANS DECREASE
Burton's 7 Burton's Legal Thesaurus, 4E. Copyright © 2007 by William C. Burton. Used with
permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. http://legaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/curtail
curtail verb abate, abbreviate, abridge, clip, coartare, cut, cut down, cut short, decrease, diminish,
halt, lessen, lop, make smaller, minuere, pare, pare down, retrench, shorten, subtract, trim See also:
abate, abridge, allay, arrest, attenuate, bowdlerize, commute, condense, decrease, diminish, discount,
lessen, minimize, palliate, reduce, restrain, retrench, stop
2. SURVEILLANCE IS PROCESS OF GATHERING INFORMATION, AS
DISTINGUISHED FROM THE TECHNIQUES OF GATHERING
Webster's New World Law 10 Webster's New World Law Dictionary Copyright © 2010
by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons,
Inc. http://www.yourdictionary.com/surveillance
surveillance - Legal Definition n
A legal investigative process entailing a close observing or listening to a person in effort to
gather evidentiary information about the commission of a crime, or lesser improper behavior
(as with surveillance of wayward spouse in domestic relations proceedings). Wiretapping,
eavesdropping, shadowing, tailing, and electronic observation are all examples of this lawenforcement technique.
B. 2 violations
1) Getting rid of backdoors gets rid of a technique for surveillance, but not the
process itself. Nothing under the plan stops gathering information in other
ways
2) They don’t decrease net surveillance—their plan just calls for the USFG to
support encryption
C. Standards
1. Limits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their
interpretation makes the topic too big. Permitting limits on methods of
surveillance, but not surveillance itself, permits the affirmative to avoid the
issues of less surveillance and forces the negative to debate a huge number of
different techniques
Constitution Committee 9 Constitution Committee, House of Lords, Parliament, UK 2009,
Session 2008-09 Publications on the internet, Constitution Committee - Second Report, Surveillance:
Citizens and the State Chapter 2
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldconst/18/1804.htm
18. The term "surveillance" is used in different ways. A literal definition of surveillance as "watching
over" indicates monitoring the behaviour of persons, objects, or systems. However surveillance is not
only a visual process which involves looking at people and things. Surveillance can be undertaken in
a wide range of ways involving a variety of technologies. The instruments of surveillance
include closed-circuit television (CCTV), the interception of telecommunications ("wiretapping"),
covert activities by human agents, heat-seeking and other sensing devices, body scans,
technology for tracking movement, and many others.
2. Ground—only getting rid of surveillance mechanisms allows the aff to spike
out all Ks, CPs and disads that are predicated on a reduction of surveillance.
That takes away almost all negative ground
3. Effects T - At best the aff is effects T because getting rid of a method of
surveillance might lead to a decrease of surveillance in the future but not
directly.
4. Extra Topicality – They garner advantages of fully supporting encryption
standards which is obviously not curtailing surveillance.
D. T IS A VOTER for fairness and education
1NC—T Domestic
Interpretation:
Domestic surveillance is surveillance done on US persons in US territory
Jordan 6 DAVID ALAN JORDAN, LL.M., New York University School of Law (2006); J.D., cum
laude, Washington and Lee University School of Law (2003). Member of the District of Columbia Bar.
Boston College Law Review May, 2006 47 B.C. L. Rev 505 ARTICLE: DECRYPTING THE
FOURTH AMENDMENT: WARRANTLESS NSA SURVEILLANCE AND THE ENHANCED
EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY PROVIDED BY ENCRYPTED VOICE OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL
lexis
n100 See FISA, 50 U.S.C. § 1801(f). Section 1801(f) of FISA defines four types of conduct that are
considered "electronic surveillance" under FISA. Signals collection operations that target U.S.
persons outside the United States do not fit within any of these four definitions. The first three
definitions require the targeted individual to be located inside of the United States to be
considered "electronic surveillance." The fourth definition applies only to the use of
surveillance devices within the United States. Therefore, the NSA's signals monitoring stations in
the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are not regulated by FISA. U.S. personnel
located at these foreign stations presumably may monitor U.S. persons who are outside the United
States, and that conduct technically would not be considered electronic surveillance under FISA's
definitions. This highlights the fact that FISA was meant to govern only domestic surveillance
taking place within U.S. borders. Although such efforts would not fall under FISA's definition of
"electronic surveillance," USSID 18's minimization procedures still would apply and offer some
protection to the rights of U.S. persons abroad. See generally USSID 18, supra note 13.
The NSA can collect data from backdoors on foreign companies
Mathis-Lilley 14 (Ben editor for Slatest 6/12/14“NSA Reportedly Intercepts, Bugs, Repackages
Network Equipment Being Sold Abroad”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/05/12/nsa_router_bugging_glenn_greenwald.html)
An excerpt of investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald's new book No Place to
Hide published today in The Guardian asserts that the National Security Agency
"routinely" bugs computer network equipment made in the United States and sent to
customers abroad:¶ A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target
Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or
intercepts – routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported
from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.¶ The agency
then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal,
and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users.
The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very
hands-on (literally!)".
2 Violations:
1. The NSA surveils foreign people in and out of United States territory
2. The plan eliminates the use of backdoors—that means that applies to the
NSA’s usage of backdoors in countries not located in the US
Standards:
1. Limits: They make the domestic limit meaningless. All surveillance becomes
topical by their standards which gives them access to a huge number of
international impacts that aren’t feasible under the resolution.
2. Ground: We lose core negative arguments like circumvention which are core
neg ground because the aff could just argue foreign countries don’t have the
ability to circumvent.
3. The aff is extra T, the aff gets rid of backdoors in foreign airports
D. T IS A VOTER for fairness and education
1NC—Neolib
The aff’s criticism of state surveillance reproduces neoliberal social relations –
privacy protection is undergirded by the assumption of economic individualism
– that papers over the coercive functions of the market and prevents use of the
state to challenge corporate power
Fuchs 11
Christian Fuchs 11, Professor of Social Media at University of Westminster, “Towards an
alternative concept of privacy,” Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,
Vol. 9, Iss. 4, p. 232-3, fwang
Etzioni (1999) stresses that liberal
privacy concepts typically focus on privacy invasions by the state, but
ignore privacy invasions by companies. The contemporary undermining of public goods by
overstressing privacy rights would not be caused by the state, but rather stem:
[...] from the
quest for profit by some private companies. Indeed, I find that these corporations now
regularly amass detailed accounts about many aspects of the personal lives of millions of individuals,
profiles of the kind that until just a few years ago could be compiled only by the likes of the East German Stasi. [...] Consumers,
employees, even patients and children have little protection from marketeers, insurance
companies, bankers, and corporate surveillance (Etzioni, 1999, p. 9f).
The task of a socialist privacy conception is to go beyond the focus of privacy concepts as
protection from state interference into private spheres, but to identify those cases, where
political regulation is needed for the protection of the rights of consumers and workers.
It is time to break with the liberal tradition in privacy studies and to think
about alternatives. The Swedish socialist
privacy concepts imply “that one cannot only own
self and personal things, but also means of production” and that the consequence is “a very
closed society, clogged because of the idea of business secret, bank privacy, etc.” (Tännsjo¨, 2010, p.
186). Tännsjö argues that power structures should be made transparent and not be able to hide
themselves and operate secretly protected by privacy rights. He imagines based on utopian socialist ideas an
philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö (2010) stresses that liberal
open society that is democratic and fosters equality so that (Tännsjö, 2010, pp. 191-8) in a democratic socialist society, there is, as
Tännsjö indicates, no need for keeping power structures secret and therefore no need for a liberal concept of privacy. However, this
does in my view not mean that in a society that is shaped by participatory democracy, all forms of privacy vanish. There
are
some human acts and situations, such as defecation (Moore, 1984), in which humans tend to want to be
alone. Many humans would both in a capitalist and a socialist society feel embarrassed having to defecate next to others, for
example by using toilets that are arranged next to each other without separating walls. So solitude is not a pure
ideology, but to a certain desire also a human need that should be guaranteed as long as it
does not result in power structures that harm others. This means that it is necessary to question the
liberal-capitalist privacy ideology, to struggle today for socialist privacy that protects workers
and consumers, limits the right and possibility of keeping power structures secret and makes
these structures transparent. In a qualitatively different society, we require a qualitatively different concept of privacy,
but not the end of privacy. Torbjrn Tännsjö’s work is a powerful reminder that it is necessary not to idealize privacy,
but to think about its contradictions and its relation to private property
The impact is extinction – neoliberal social organization ensures extinction from
resource wars, climate change, and structural violence – only accelerating
beyond neoliberalism can resolve its impacts
Williams & Srnicek 13
(Alex, PhD student at the University of East London, presently at work on a thesis entitled
'Hegemony and Complexity', Nick, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London
School of Economics, Co-authors of the forthcoming Folk Politics, 14 May 2013,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationistpolitics/)
At the begin-ning of the second dec-ade of the Twenty-First Cen-tury, global civilization faces a
new breed of cataclysm. These com-ing apo-ca-lypses ridicule the norms and organ-isa-tional
struc-tures of the polit-ics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of
cap-it-al-ism, and a Twen-ti-eth Cen-tury of unpre-ced-en-ted wars. 2. Most significant is the
break-down of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens the continued existence
of the present global human population. Though this is the most crit-ical of the threats which
face human-ity, a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist along-side
and inter-sect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves,
offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold
wars. Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the para-lyz-ing death spiral
policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and
stagnating wages. Increasing automation in production processes includ­ing ‘intel­lec-tual
labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of
maintaining current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global north.
3. In con-trast to these ever-accelerating cata-strophes, today’s politics is beset by an inability
to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to
confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gath-ers force and speed, polit-ics
with-ers and retreats. In this para-lysis of the polit-ical ima-gin-ary, the future has been
cancelled. 4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found
in some vari-ant through-out the lead-ing eco-nomic powers. In spite of the deep struc-tural
chal-lenges the new global prob-lems present to it, most imme-di-ately the credit, fin-an-cial,
and fiscal crises since 2007 – 8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of
deep-en-ing. This continuation of the neo-lib-eral pro-ject, or neo-lib-er-al-ism 2.0, has begun to
apply another round of structural adjustments, most sig-ni-fic-antly in the form of encour-aging
new and aggress-ive incur-sions by the private sec-tor into what remains of social demo-cratic
insti-tu-tions and ser-vices. This is in spite of the immediately negative eco-nomic and social
effects of such policies, and the longer term fun-da-mental bar-ri-ers posed by the new global
crises.
The alternative articulates a “counter-conduct” – voting neg pushes towards a
cooperative conduct that organizes individuals around a collectively shared
commons – affirming this conduct creates a new heuristic that de-couples
government from the demand for competition and production
Dardot & Laval 13
(Pierre Dardot, philosopher and specialist in Hegel and Marx, Christian Laval, professor of
sociology at the Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense, The New Way of the World: On
Neoliberal Society, pgs. 318-321)
This indicates to what extent we must take on board in our own way the main lesson of neoliberalism: the subject is always to be constructed. The whole question is then how to
articulate subjectivation with resistance to power. Now, precisely this issue is at the heart of all of Foucault’s thought. However, as
Jeffrey T. Nealon has recently shown, part of the North American secondary literature has, on the contrary, stressed the alleged break between Foucault’s research on power
and that of his last period on the history of subjectivity.55 According to the ‘Foucault consensus’, as Nealon aptly dubs it, the successive impasses of the initial neo-structuralism,
and then of the totalizing analysis of panoptical power, led the ‘last Foucault’ to set aside the issue of power and concern himself exclusively with the aesthetic invention of a
style of existence bereft of any political dimension. Furthermore, if we follow this de-politicizing reading of Foucault, the aestheticization of ethics anticipated the neo-liberal
mutation precisely by making self-invention a new norm. In reality, far from being oblivious of one another, the issues of power and the subject were always closely articulated,
even in the last work on modes of subjectivation. If one concept played a decisive role in this respect, it was ‘counter-conduct’, as developed in the lecture of 1 March 1978.56
‘forms of resistance of conduct’
that are the correlate of the pastoral mode of power. If such forms of resistance are said to be
‘of conduct’, it is because they are forms of resistance to power as conduct and, as such, are
themselves forms of conduct opposed to this ‘power-conduct’. The term ‘conduct’ in fact
admits of two meanings: an activity that consists in conducting others, or ‘conduction’; and
the way one conducts oneself under the influence of this activity of conduction.57 The idea of
‘counter-conduct’ therefore has the advantage of directly signifying a ‘struggle against the
procedures implemented for conducting others’, unlike the term ‘misconduct’, which only
refers to the passive sense of the word.58 Through ‘counter-conduct’, people seek both to
escape conduction by others and to define a way of conducting themselves towards others.¶
What relevance might this observation have for a reflection on resistance to neo-liberal
governmentality? It will be said that the concept is introduced in the context of an analysis of
the pastorate, not government. Governmentality, at least in its specifically neo-liberal form,
precisely makes conducting others through their conduct towards themselves its real goal. The
peculiarity of this conduct towards oneself, conducting oneself as a personal enterprise, is that
it immediately and directly induces a certain conduct towards others: competition with
others, regarded as so many personal enterprises. Consequently, counter-conduct as a form of resistance to this
governmentality must correspond to a conduct that is indivisibly a conduct towards oneself and
a conduct towards others. One cannot struggle against such an indirect mode of conduction by
appealing for rebellion against an authority that supposedly operates through compulsion
external to individuals. If ‘politics is nothing more and nothing less than that which is born with
resistance to governmentality, the first revolt, the first confrontation’,59 it means that ethics
and politics are absolutely inseparable.¶ To the subjectivation-subjection represented by ultrasubjectivation, we must oppose a subjectivation by forms of counter-conduct. To neo-liberal
governmentality as a specific way of conducting the conduct of others, we must therefore
oppose a no less specific double refusal: a refusal to conduct oneself towards oneself as a
This lecture was largely focused on the crisis of the pastorate. It involved identifying the specificity of the ‘revolts’ or
personal enterprise and a refusal to conduct oneself towards others in accordance with the
norm of competition. As such, the double refusal is not ‘passive disobedience’.60 For, if it is
true that the personal enterprise’s relationship to the self immediately and directly
determines a certain kind of relationship to others – generalized competition – conversely, the
refusal to function as a personal enterprise, which is self-distance and a refusal to line up in
the race for performance, can only practically occur on condition of establishing cooperative
relations with others, sharing and pooling. In fact, where would be the sense in a self-distance
severed from any cooperative practice? At worst, a cynicism tinged with contempt for those who are dupes. At best, simulation or double
dealing, possibly dictated by a wholly justified concern for self-preservation, but ultimately exhausting for the subject. Certainly not a counter-conduct. All the more so in that
such a game could lead the subject, for want of anything better, to take refuge in a
compensatory identity, which at least has the advantage of some stability by contrast with the
imperative of indefinite self-transcendence. Far from threatening the neo-liberal order, fixation
with identity, whatever its nature, looks like a fall-back position for subjects weary of
themselves, for all those who have abandoned the race or been excluded from it from the
outset. Worse, it recreates the logic of competition at the level of relations between ‘little
communities’. Far from being valuable in itself, independently of any articulation with politics,
individual subjectivation is bound up at its very core with collective subjectivation. In this
sense, sheer aestheticization of ethics is a pure and simple abandonment of a genuinely ethical
attitude. The invention of new forms of existence can only be a collective act, attributable to
the multiplication and intensification of cooperative counter-conduct. A collective refusal to ‘work more’, if only
local, is a good example of an attitude that can pave the way for such forms of counter-conduct. In effect, it breaks what André Gorz quite rightly called the ‘structural
complicity’ that binds the worker to capital, in as much as ‘earning money’, ever more money, is the decisive goal for both. It makes an initial breach in the ‘immanent constraint
The genealogy of neo-liberalism attempted in this book teaches us
that the new global rationality is in no wise an inevitable fate shackling humanity. Unlike
Hegelian Reason, it is not the reason of human history. It is itself wholly historical – that is,
relative to strictly singular conditions that cannot legitimately be regarded as
untranscendable. The main thing is to understand that nothing can release us from the task of promoting a different rationality. That is why the belief that the
of the “ever more”, “ever more rapidly”‘.61¶
financial crisis by itself sounds the death-knell of neo-liberal capitalism is the worst of beliefs. It is possibly a source of pleasure to those who think they are witnessing reality
running ahead of their desires, without them having to move their little finger. It certainly comforts those for whom it is an opportunity to celebrate their own past
‘clairvoyance’. At bottom, it is the least acceptable form of intellectual and political abdication. Neo-liberalism is not falling like a ‘ripe fruit’ on account of its internal
There
are only human beings who act in given conditions and seek through their action to open up a
future for themselves. It is up to us to enable a new sense of possibility to blaze a trail. The
government of human beings can be aligned with horizons other than those of maximizing
performance, unlimited production and generalized control. It can sustain itself with selfgovernment that opens onto different relations with others than that of competition between
‘self-enterprising actors’. The practices of ‘communization’ of knowledge, mutual aid and
cooperative work can delineate the features of a different world reason. Such an alternative
reason cannot be better designated than by the term reason of the commons.
contradictions; and traders will not be its undreamed-of ‘gravediggers’ despite themselves. Marx had already made the point powerfully: ‘History does nothing’.62
Specifically, the alternative re-appropriates the Internet to create collective
responsibility and empathy – dismantles neoliberal individualism and inequality
Warf 11 – [Barney – Professor of Geography @ University of Kansas] [Google Bombs, Warblogs, and Hacktivism The Internet
as Agent for Progressive Social Change] (http://tinyurl.com/p24kcfj) (accessed 7-17-15) //MC
More broadly, the
internet may help to foster a relational ontology of space and place and
corresponding alternative geographic imaginaries, in which identity is defined through lines of
power and feelings of belonging and responsibility rather than simple proximity (Bennett, 2003;
Massey, 2009). Vivid pictures and films of atrocities and injustices circulating over the internet can have powerful impacts in raising
awareness about a variety of issues. Indeed, formal
ideologies, political parties, and elections may be giving
way to network-based identity and lifestyle politics. In facilitating rhizomatic networks of power, the
internet can be an agent for the generation of geographies of compassion and empathy that
stand in sharp contrast to xenophobic discourses of hate and exclusion. Such a view is in keeping with
the emerging literature on geographies of care and the ethics of responsibility (Lawson, 2007), particularly in the face of
the neoliberal assault on state-funded interventions in the sphere of reproduction and the associated growth of
dis-courses of individual, rather than collective, responsibility. In such a context, the moral community to
which each person owes an obligation is, by definition, worldwide, generating an obligation to “care at a distance,” in which the
concerns of distant strangers are held to be as important as those of people nearby (cf. Ginzburg, 1994; Corbridge, 1998).
1NC—Cybercrime
Terrorists cannot steal nuclear weapons from Russia
KAMP 1996 (Karl-Heinz, heads the foreign and security policy section of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Sankt Agustin, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July)
the military organizations responsible for nuclear weapon security in the
former Soviet Union have proven more reliable than feared a few years ago. There has been no illegal
passing on of complete nuclear weapons or key components. And none of the reports about
the marketing of ex-Soviet nuclear materials has involved critical items taken from weapon
stocks. There seem to be two decisive reasons for the stability of the ex-Soviet nuclear weapons sector, particularly in Russia. First, even if Russian
leaders did not take Western fears about nuclear-weapon security seriously, they would still be
concerned about the risks that uncontrolled nuclear proliferation could pose to their own
country. As far as possible, resources have been channeled into the nuclear armed forces sector to
guarantee its workability. Soldiers in this sector are better paid and facilities have been better
maintained than in other areas. Second, the military's nuclear elites have met very high
standards in the past. It is hard to imagine that nuclear units trained during the Soviet era would
neglect their tasks under hostile conditions and abuse the goods placed under their command. It
would be extremely difficult for terrorists to steal complete nuclear weapons from depots or
to obtain them with the help of security personnel. Of course, there is no guarantee that the current stability in the military nuclear
Well, maybe. But it must be noted that
sector will continue in the indefinite future.
One in three billion chance of nuclear terrorism
Mueller 10 John, professor of political science at Ohio State University, Calming Our Nuclear Jitters, Issues in Science & Technology, Winter2010, Vol. 26, Issue 2
In contrast to these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire
and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the
possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous
effort required is scarcely likely to be successful.
The most plausible route for terrorists, according to most experts, would be to manufacture
an atomic device themselves from purloined fissile material (plutonium or, more likely, highly enriched uranium). This
task, however, remains a daunting one, requiring that a considerable series of difficult hurdles be
conquered and in sequence.
Outright armed theft of fissile material is exceedingly unlikely not only because of the
resistance of guards, but because chase would be immediate. A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders
to smuggle out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a host of greedy confederates, including brokers and money-transmitters, any one
of whom could turn on them or, either out of guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is useless. Insiders might also consider the possibility that once the heist
was accomplished, the terrorists would, as analyst Brian Jenkins none too delicately puts it, "have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their
confederates."
If terrorists were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material,
they would then probably have to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and
probably while being pursued by security forces. Crossing international borders would be
facilitated by following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they
appear and are often under the watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators. If border
personnel became suspicious of the commodity being smuggled, some of them might find it in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward
money that would probably be offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft had been discovered.
Once outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists would need to set up a large
and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb and then to populate it with a very
select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, machinists, and administrators. The group would
have to be assembled and retained for the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and
sudden absence from normal pursuits back home.
Members of the bomb-building team would also have to be utterly devoted to the cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and certainly their
careers at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would probably become the targets of an intense worldwide dragnet operation.
Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material. But Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel
Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerland's Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the task "could hardly be accomplished by a subnational
group." They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group would most
certainly be forced to redesign. They also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the technical requirements in several fields verge on
the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a similar argument, pointing out that uranium is
"exceptionally difficult to machine" whereas "plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how
it is processed." Stressing the "daunting problems associated with material purity, machining, and a host of other issues," Younger concludes, "to think that a terrorist
group, working in isolation with an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies" could fabricate a bomb "is farfetched at best."
Under the best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take months or even a
year or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in utter secrecy. In addition, people in the area, including criminals, may observe with increasing
curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians unlikely to be locals.
If the effort to build a bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would then have to be transported to and smuggled into the relevant target
country where it would have to be received by collaborators who are at once totally dedicated and technically proficient at handling, maintaining, detonating, and perhaps
assembling the weapon after it arrives.
The financial costs of this extensive and extended operation could easily become
monumental. There would be expensive equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay off. Some operatives might work for free out of utter
dedication to the cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of a considerable array of criminals and opportunists, each of whom has every incentive to
push the price for cooperation as high as possible. Any criminals competent and capable enough to be effective allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see
boundless opportunities for extortion and psychologically equipped by their profession to be willing to exploit them.
Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each
although it may not be impossible to surmount each individual step, the
likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small.
case is "not impossible." But
Table 1 attempts to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome under the scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them,
would-be atomic terrorists would effectively be required to go though an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do, they will undoubtedly conclude that their
prospects are daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting.
Adopting probability estimates that purposely and heavily bias
the case in the terrorists' favor — for example, assuming the terrorists have a 50% chance of
overcoming each of the 20 obstacles — the chances that a concerted effort would be
successful comes out to be less than one in a million. If one assumes, somewhat more
realistically, that their chances at each barrier are one in three, the cumulative odds that
they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in well over three billion .
It is possible to calculate the chances for success.
Other routes would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb are even more problematic.
They are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-minded nuclear state for
delivery abroad because the risk would be high, even for a country led by extremists, that the
bomb (and its source) would be discovered even before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor
would not approve, including on the donor itself. Another concern would be that the terrorist group might be
infiltrated by foreign intelligence.
Cybersecurity is a particular manifestation of securitization that is enhanced by
technical discourse --- their framing translates into further surveillance
measures
Jin et al 14
Dal Yong Jin et al, Andrew Feenberg, Catherine Hart, *Associate Professor at the School of
Communication at Simon Fraser University, **Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of
Technology in the School of Communication, ***masters student in the School of
Communication at Simon Fraser University, “The Insecurity of Innovation: A Critical Analysis of
Cybersecurity in the United States,” International Journal of Communication, Vol. 8, p. 2863-4,
fwang
Further cementing the influence of hegemonic power structures are cybersecurity’s focus on
“hypothetical futures” or estimations of risk and threat (Buzan et al., 1998), and the reliance in security
and technical fields on “experts” who are not always held accountable. Bigo remarked on the
“lack of precision required for threats identified by the professionals who know some secrets.
Amateurs always need to prove their claims, whereas professionals, whether international, national, or local, corporate or public, can evoke without
demonstrating” (2002, p. 74). Indeed, Hansen and Nissenbaum (2009, p. 1168) argue that although cybersecurity is not uniquely reliant on technical,
expert discourse, it is the field where “[technifications] have been able to take on a more privileged
position than in any other security sector,” as computer security often requires knowledge that is unavailable to
the general public. This is important because the effect of “technifications,” as speech acts similar to
securitization, is that “they construct an issue as reliant upon technical, expert knowledge, but
they also simultaneously presuppose a politically and normatively neutral agenda, that
technology serves” (ibid., p. 1167). The simultaneous use of both securitization and technification in
cybersecurity discourse is therefore significant because they “work to prevent it from being
politicized in that it is precisely through rational, technical discourse that securitization may
‘hide’ its own political roots” (ibid., p. 1168).
security agencies and law enforcement advance the securitizing argument. Resultant
attempts to control the development of networked computing reflect a desire to know and to
secure that is central to both the security of the state and society’s normalization and
productive functioning. Foucault discussed this as governmentality, a method of governance that protects, controls, and fosters economic expansion, and as
such is inextricable from economic liberalism (2007). Surveillance in response to insecurity is a way of knowing a
population, rendering it calculable and thereby manageable. It not only informs state action but also influences the way
Increasingly,
subjects think about themselves. This is evident in Foucault’s illustration of the panopticon: surveillance (or the assumption of surveillance) induces in the subject “a state of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (1995, p. 201). Theoretically, this produces a disciplined, ordered, productive society
Neocleous addressed police as a form
of governmental power for the administration of society and active fabrication of social order
without the need to enforce, punish, or necessarily carry out the surveillance in the first place. Similarly,
(2000, p. 14).
Nuke terror has a small impact
Mueller, professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and Karl Mueller, assistant professor of Comparative Military Studies at the School
of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, May/June 1999, Foreign Affairs, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” p. Lexis
John
Nuclear weapons clearly deserve the “weapons of mass destruction” designation because they can indeed destroy masses of people in a single blow. Even so, it is worth noting
any nuclear weapons acquired by terrorist groups or rogue states, at least initially, are likely to be small. Contrary
to exaggerated Indian and Pakistani claims, for example, independent analyses of their May 1998 nuclear tests have concluded that the yields
were Hiroshima-sized or smaller. Such bombs can cause horrible though not apocalyptic damage.
Some 70,000 people died in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. People three miles away from the blast
sites received only superficial wounds even when fully exposed, and those inside bomb shelters at Nagasaki were uninjured even though they
that
were close to ground zero. Some buildings of steel and concrete survived, even when they were close to the blast centers, and most municipal services were restored within
A Hiroshima-sized bomb exploded in a more fire-resistant modern city would likely be considerably
less devastating. Used against well-prepared, dug-in, and dispersed troops, a small bomb might actually
cause only limited damage. If a single such bomb or even a few of them were to fall into dangerous
hands, therefore, it would be terrible, though it would hardly threaten the end of civilization.
days.
Even if terrorists got Russian bombs, security features would prevent usage
John
Mueller, Department of Political Science at Ohio State University, 1/1/2008, The Atomic Terrorist: Assessing the Likelihood, p.
http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/APSACHGO.PDF
Russia has an intense interest in controlling any weapons on its territory since it is likely to
be a prime target of any illicit use by terrorist groups, particularly, of course, Chechen ones with whom it has been waging an vicious on-andoff war for over a decade (Cameron 2004, 84). Officials there insist that all weapons have either been destroyed or
are secured, and the experts polled by Linzer (2004) point out that "it would be very difficult for
terrorists to figure out on their own how to work a Russian or Pakistan bomb" even if they did
obtain one because even the simplest of these "has some security features that would have to be defeated before it could be
used" (see also Kamp 1996, 34; Wirz and Egger 2005, 502; Langewiesche 2007, 19). One of the experts, Charles Ferguson, stresses You'd
have to run it through a specific sequence of events, including changes in temperature, pressure
and environmental conditions before the weapon would allow itself to be armed, for the fuses to fall into place and then for it to allow itself to be fired.
You don't get off the shelf, enter a code and have it go off. Moreover, continues Linzer, most bombs that
could conceivably be stolen use plutonium which emits a great deal of radiation that could relatively easily
be detected by passive sensors at ports and other points of transmission.
It might be added that
Russian nuclear security is strong
FROST 2005 (Robin, teaches political science at Simon Fraser University, British Colombia, “Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11,” Adelphi Papers, December)
Russian nuclear weapons appear to be under the generally good control of élite
troops. There is no evidence in open-source material that a single nuclear warhead, from any national
arsenal or another source, has ever made its way into the world's illegal arms bazaars, let alone
into terrorist hands. No actual or aspiring nuclear-weapon state has ever claimed to have
nuclear weapons without also having all of the technical infrastructure necessary to produce
them ab initio, although they could, if the ‘loose nukes’ arguments were sound, easily have bought a
few on the black market. Even the extravagant sums sometimes mentioned as the alleged asking
price for stolen weapons would be tiny fractions of the amount required to develop an
indigenous nuclear-weapon capability, yet circumstances seem to have compelled states to
choose the more expensive course.
Russian nuclear weapons.
Most likely response would be conventional – 9/11 proves.
Ayson ‘10
Robert Ayson, Centre for Strategic Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. “After a Terrorist
Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects”. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7
July 2010 , pages 571 – 593. InformaWorld.
Even if the actual perpetrators of the nuclear violence and any leaders of the
terrorist group were identified and could be targeted militarily, it does not
necessarily follow that such a reaction would need to be enormously violent. One
possible option would be an attempt to seize the terrorist leadership alive and have
them tried for crimes against humanity, even if some sort of retrospective
international legal arrangements might be needed to cover the actions of a
non-state group. Another option would be a “surgical” strike, including perhaps by
the use of drones, if the attacked country still felt it necessarily to highlight an
asymmetry between the indiscriminate and illegitimate violence of the
attackers and the carefully crafted response of the attacked country. Any
violent action against states that had been harboring or assisting the terrorists
might also be limited so as to protect the international reputation of the victim .
The importance of limiting the use of force might grow if there was some
uncertainty about the identity of the attacking group and their state (and nonstate) supporters, to reduce the political costs should that identification later prove
to have been erroneous. Alternatively if the terrorist group was thought to possess additional nuclear weapons,
some might counsel a cautious military response in case any violent response led to further attacks. However, one would expect
this last argument to get fairly short shrift: few would want to be accused of appeasing proven nuclear terrorists. Of course the
state victim of the nuclear attack might well decide to use much higher levels force against the terrorist group and any of its state
supporters, (and especially if any of the latter were considered to have helped the group acquire the nuclear weapon that had
been used). If the leadership of the terrorist group that authorized the attack were thought to be operating from a particular
overseas location, one might expect aerial bombing and missile attacks, the deployment of a battle group task force offshore
(depending on the geography) and then perhaps the insertion of larger numbers of regular forces. Of course, this begs the
assumption that the state victim was a country such as the United States whose armed forces do have the global reach these
options could require (although there is also the very real possibility that the United States might respond in this way even if it
the precedent of the international
response to the 9/11 attacks suggests that a large international military coalition in
support of the state victim could be organized reasonably quickly. But it is not obvious that
had not been the direct victim of the nuclear terrorist attack). Indeed,
this coalition would be presented with a carbon copy of the Al Qaeda-Taliban nexus as a readily available target for its mission. In
any case, it
is likely that a number of governments would want to join together in what
would amount to a significant show of force.
1NC—Cybervulnerability
Privacy violations inevitable – tech and corporations
Goldsmith, 2015
Jack the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, The Ends of Privacy, The New
Rambler, Apr. 06, 2015 (reviewing Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)). Published Version
http://newramblerreview.com/images/files/Jack- Goldsmith_Review-of-Bruce-Schneier.pdf
The truth is that consumers
love the benefits of digital goods and are willing to give up traditionally
private information in exchange for the manifold miracles that the Internet and big data bring.
Apple and Android each offer more than a million apps, most of which are built upon this model, as are countless other Internet
services. More generally, big
data promises huge improvements in economic efficiency and
productivity, and in health care and safety. Absent abuses on a scale we have not yet seen, the
public’s attitude toward giving away personal information in exchange for these benefits will
likely persist, even if the government requires firms to make more transparent how they collect
and use our data. One piece of evidence for this is that privacy-respecting search engines and email services do not capture
large market shares. In general these services are not as easy to use, not as robust, and not as efficacious as their personal-dataheavy competitors. Schneier understands and discusses all this. In
the end his position seems to be that we
should deny ourselves some (and perhaps a lot) of the benefits big data because the costs to
privacy and related values are just too high. We “have to stop the slide” away from privacy, he
says, not because privacy is “profitable or efficient, but because it is moral.” But as Schneier also
recognizes, privacy is not a static moral concept. “Our personal definitions of privacy are both cultural and situational,”
he acknowledges. Consumers are voting with their computer mice and smartphones for more digital goods in exchange for more
personal data. The
culture increasingly accepts the giveaway of personal information for the
benefits of modern computerized life. This trend is not new. “The idea that privacy can’t be invaded at
all is utopian,” says Professor Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. “There are amounts and kinds of information which
previously were not given out and suddenly they have to be given out. People adjust their behavior and conceptions accordingly.”
That is Fried in the 1970 Newsweek story, responding to an earlier generation’s panic about big data and data mining.
The same
point applies today, and will apply as well when the Internet of things makes today’s data
mining seem as quaint as 1970s-era computation.
Creating zones of privacy against state intrusion reinforces rather than
challenges the security state
Henry 13 (PhD candidate at Carleton University reading Sociology and Political Economy)
(Aaron, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 9 (2) Winter 2013, THE PERPETUAL OBJECT OF REGULATION:
PRIVACY AS PACIFICATION)
There is a conviction today that privacy is in a state of irretrievable crisis. In addition to the collection and sale of day-to-day
personal activity by telecommunications services and social networking sites, programmes of surveillance and registration
have allegedly eroded what were previously understood as the firm borders between public and private spheres of relations.
That this has happened or is in the process of materializing has taken on the weight and opacity of a social fact. Yet, while
privacy is said to be in a state of crisis,
the ‘right to privacy’ is often trumpeted by liberals as the
counterweight to balance the intrusion of state projects into the lives of individuals .
Indeed, this appears to be the general sentiment that rests behind initiatives like the ‘Orwell Award’ given to companies that
have violated privacy, or the American Civil Liberties Union recent mobilization against Drones as a privacy concern. Thus,
privacy is presented as means to make intrusions into the life of the individual
proportional to the objectives of security projects, and in some instances security
projects are legitimized for the forms of privacy they safeguard (Cavoukian, 1999, 13). To this
end, privacy
is subject to a rather peculiar positioning as both a relation threatened by security and
as a regulative principle capable of ensuring the ‘acceptable’ limits of security
projects.
What I want to demonstrate in this paper is that the relation of privacy to security as both an object threatened by security
and as a means of regulating security projects is the product of a longstanding relation between privacy, security and capital.
This relation is expressed in two ways. First, while privacy has been invoked as a means to resist projects of security, I argue
that privacy is in fact deployed as a means to structure the fields of relations
through which security interventions are made.2 In this sense, when the power of state or capital
intervenes upon the individual, privacy emerges as a concept. Privacy, a retroactive concept, exists as a means to assuage
individuals that the duration and scope of security projects will be ‘reasonable or proportional’; thus, security presupposes
and delimits privacy. Second, in the course of defending the individual's freedom and autonomy over their inner world,
privacy reinforces private property and private life, the very relations projects of security safeguard. Thus, privacy
acclimatizes us to a mode of existence where we are alienated from our collective
social power, and so we confront relations of domination and exploitation as private individuals. This
commodification of our selves is, I suggest, part of the condition of pacification.
First, I attempt to theorize how security and its relation to capital render it not only generative of privacy but structure its
perimeters. I demonstrate the formation of this relationship between security and privacy through a critical reading of
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Second, I offer a contemporary example of this relation between privacy and security through an
analysis of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreement between the United States and the EU. Finally, I conclude by
reviewing how privacy
as desirable form of existence constitutes a form of pacification
insofar as it not only fails to challenge capital but has further entrenched the logics of
security into social life.
Internet freedom is used to crush dissent
Siegel 11 (Lee Siegel, a columnist and editor at large for The New York Observer, is the author of “Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and
Commerce — and Why It Matters. “‘The Net Delusion’ and the Egypt Crisis”, February 4, 2011, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/the-net-delusion-and-the-egyptcrisis)
Morozov takes the ideas of what he calls “cyber-utopians” and shows how reality
perverts them in one political situation after another. In Iran, the regime used the internet
to crush the internet-driven protests in June 2009. In Russia, neofascists use the internet to
organize pogroms. And on and on. Morozov has written hundreds of pages to make the point that technology is amoral and cuts
many different ways. Just as radio can bolster democracy or — as in Rwanda — incite
genocide, so the internet can help foment a revolution but can also help crush it. This seems obvious,
yet it has often been entirely lost as grand claims are made for the internet’s positive, liberating qualities. ¶And suddenly here are Tunisia and, even more dramatically, Egypt,
simultaneously proving and refuting Morozov’s argument. In both cases, social networking allowed truths that had been whispered to be widely broadcast and commented
In Tunisia and Egypt — and now across the Arab world — Facebook and Twitter
have made people feel less alone in their rage at the governments that stifle their lives. There is nothing more
upon.
politically emboldening than to feel, all at once, that what you have experienced as personal bitterness is actually an objective condition, a universal affliction in your society that
Yet at the same time, the Egyptian government shut off the internet,
misinformation is being spread through
Facebook — as it was in Iran — just as real information was shared by anti-government protesters. This is the “dark side of internet
freedom” that Morozov is warning against. It is the freedom to wantonly crush the forces
of freedom. ¶All this should not surprise anyone. It seems that, just as with every other type of technology of communication, the internet is not a
solution to human conflict but an amplifier for all aspects of a conflict. As you read about
pro-government agitators charging into crowds of protesters on horseback and camel, you
realize that nothing has changed in our new internet age. The human situation is the same as it always was, except that it
therefore can be universally opposed. ¶
which is an effective way of using the internet. And according to one Egyptian blogger,
is the same in a newer and more intense way. Decades from now, we will no doubt be celebrating a spanking new technology that promises to liberate us from the internet. And
the argument joined by Morozov will occur once again.
No Moral Objections to Surveillance – even new concerns don’t assume the
strength of activist potential
Sagar 15—Rahul Sagar, Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, 2015 (“Against
Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden,” Cambridge Journals Online, June
12th, Available online at
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9749725&fileId=S
0892679415000040, Accessed on 7/15/15)
I have challenged the conspiratorial view that state surveillance serves to reinforce the
hegemony of a shadowy elite. A basic premise of the discussion that follows is that in
contemporary liberal democracies, communications surveillance is a legitimate activity. What, then,
ought to be the bounds of such surveillance and how far can we be confident that these bounds are being observed? In order to
ascertain the rightful bounds on communications surveillance we need to weigh the interests it furthers against those it threatens.
The interest it furthers is national security. Greenwald questions this link on a number of grounds. He argues that surveillance is a
disproportionate response to the threat of terrorism, which has been “plainly exaggerated” because the “risk of any American dying
reat of
terrorism is real, surveillance isunjustified because to “venerate physical safety above all other values” means accepting “a life of
ed to
further other national or commercial interests. He asks how, for instance, does “spying on negotiation sessions at an economic
miss the
mark. That terrorist plots thus far have been amateurish does not mean that terrorists will not learn and eventually succeed in
The terror
in terrorism comes from the unpredictability and the brutality of the violence inflicted on
civilians. There is a difference between voluntarily undertaking a somewhat risky bicycle ride in
rush hour traffic and being unexpectedly blown to bits while commuting to work. Finally, it is
widely accepted that countries have a right to pursue their national interests, subject of course
to relevant countervailing ethical considerations. It is not hard to imagine how intercepting Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s conversation could serve the United States’ national security interests (for example, it could provide intelligence on
Europe’s dealings with Russia). What are the countervailing values that have been overlooked in this case? The President’s Review
Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, set up in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures, warns that surveillance of
foreign leaders must be “respectful.” But the justification offered is strategic rather than moral: the group urges caution out of
recognition for “the importance of cooperative relati
American allies, including Germany, reportedly engage in similar practices
acknowledges, the NSA’s surveillance of foreign leaders is “unremarkable” because “countries have spied on heads of state for
warns that mass
surveillance undermines national security because “it swamps the intelligence agencies with so much data that they cannot possibly
it has little to show in
terms of success in combating terrorism. But these criticisms are equally unpersuasive. It is certainly possible that a surveillance
program could generate so much raw data that an important piece of information is overlooked. But in such a case the appropriate
response would not be to shut down the programbut rather to bulk up the processing power and manpower devoted to it. Finally,
both the President’s Review Group and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have examined the efficacy of the NSA’s
programs. Both report that the NSA’s foreign surveillance programs have contributed to more than fifty counterterrorism
investigations, leading them to conclude that the NSA “does in fact play an important role in the nation’s effort to prevent terrorist
ational
security is not the only value liberal democracies and their citizens deem important. Hence we need to consider how far
communications surveillance impinges on other important interests and values. Greenwald identifies two major harms. The first is
political in nature. Mass surveillance is said to stifle dissent because “a citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly
becomes a compliant and fearful one.” Compliance
occurs because, anticipating being shamed or condemned for
nonconformist behavior, individuals who know they are being watched “think only in line with what is
expected and demanded.”
“indifference or support of those who think themselves exempt invariably allows for the misuse of power to spread far beyond its
se claims strike me as overblown.
The more extreme claim, that surveillance furthers
thought control, is neither logical nor supported by the facts. It is logically flawed because
accusing someone of trying to control your mind proves that they have not succeeded in doing
so. On a more practical level, the fate met by states that have tried to perfect mass control—the Soviet
Union and the German Democratic Republic, for example—suggests that surveillance cannot
eliminate dissent. It is also not clear that surveillance can undermine dissident movements as easily as Greenwald posits.
The United States’ record, he writes, “is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed
under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights
t
surveillance did not prevent the end of segregation, retreat from Vietnam, and the rise of
environmental consciousness. This record suggests that dissident movements that have public opinion
on their side are not easily intimidated by state surveillance (a point reinforced by the Arab Spring).
Surveillance may make it harder for individuals to associate with movements on the far ends of the political spectrum. But why
must a liberal democracy refrain from monitoring extremist groups such as neo-Nazis and
anarchists? There is the danger that officials could label as “extreme” legitimate movements seeking to challenge the prevailing
order. Yet the possibility that surveillance programs could expand beyond their original ambit does
not constitute a good reason to end surveillance altogether. A more proportionate response is to see that
surveillance powers are subject to oversight. The second harm Greenwald sees surveillance posing is personal in nature. Surveillance
is said to undermine the very essence of human freedom because the
“range of choices people consider when
they believe that others are watching is . . . far more limited than what they might do when
acting in a private realm
-based surveillance is viewed as especially damaging in this respect because this is
“where virtually everything is done” in our day, making it the place “where we develop and express our very personality and sense
of self.” Hence, “to permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction,
planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive sta
it
exaggerates the extent to which our self-development hinges upon electronic communication
channels and other related activities that leave electronic traces. The arrival of the Internet
certainly opens new vistas, but it does not entirely close earlier ones. A person who fears what her
browsing habits might communicate to the authorities can obtain texts offline. Similarly, an
individual who fears transmitting materials electronically can do so in person, as Snowden did when
communicating with Greenwald. There are costs to communicating in such “old-fashioned” ways, but these costs are neither new
nor prohibitive. Second, a
substantial part of our self-development takes place in public. We become
who we are through personal, social, and intellectual engagements, but these engagements do
not always have to be premised on anonymity. Not everyone wants to hide all the time, which is why public
engagement—through social media or blogs, for instance—is such a central aspect of the contemporary Internet.
1NC—Solvency
The Aff can’t undo the overwhelming perception of US surveillance
Fontaine 14 (President of the Center for a New American Security)
(Richard, Bringing Liberty Online: Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden Era,
SEPTEMBER 2014, Center for New American Security)
Such moves are destined to have only a modest effect on foreign reactions. U.S.
surveillance will inevitably continue under any reasonably likely scenario (indeed, despite
the expressions of outrage, not a single country has said that it would cease its surveillance
activities). Many of the demands – such as for greater transparency – will not be met, simply
due to the clandestine nature of electronic espionage. Any limits on surveillance that a
govern- ment might announce will not be publicly verifiable and thus perhaps not fully
credible. Nor will there be an international “no-spying” convention to reassure foreign citizens
that their communications are unmonitored. As it has for centuries, state- sponsored espionage
activities are likely to remain accepted international practice, unconstrained by international
law. The one major possible shift in policy following the Snowden affair – a stop to the bulk
collection of telecommunications metadata in the United States – will not constrain the activity most disturbing to foreigners; that is, America’s surveillance of them. At the same
time, U.S. offi- cials are highly unlikely to articulate a global “right to privacy” (as have the U.N.
High Commissioner for Human Rights and some foreign officials), akin to that derived from the
U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment, that would permit foreigners to sue in U.S. courts to
enforce such a right.39 The Obama administration’s January 2014 presidential directive on
signals intelligence refers, notably, to the “legiti- mate privacy interests” of all persons,
regardless of nationality, and not to a privacy “right.”40
Loopholes still exist that allow the NSA access
EFF, 14
(Electronic Freedom Foundation, “Security Backdoors are Bad News—But Some Lawmakers Are
Taking Action to Close Them,” 12-9-14, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/securitybackdoors-are-bad-news-some-lawmakers-are-taking-action-close-them, BC)
The legislation isn’t comprehensive, of course. As some have pointed out, it only prohibits agencies from
requiring a company to build a backdoor. The NSA can still do its best to convince companies to
do so voluntarily. And sometimes, the NSA’s “best convincing” is a $10 million contract with a
security firm like RSA.∂ The legislation also doesn’t change the Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act (CALEA.) CALEA, passed in 1994, is a law that forced telephone companies to redesign
their network architectures to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap telephone calls. In 2006, the D.C.
Circuit upheld the FCC's reinterpretation of CALEA to also include facilities-based broadband Internet access and VoIP service,
although it doesn't apply to cell phone manufacturers.
Other countries won’t follow—Australia proves
Hanson
10/25/12,
Nonresident
Fellow,
Foreign
Policy,
Brookings
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/10/25-ediplomacy-hanson-internet-freedom
Another challenge is dealing with close partners and allies who undermine internet freedom. In August
2011, in the midst of the Arab uprisings, the UK experienced a different connection technology infused movement, the London Riots.
On August 11, in the heat of the crisis, Prime Minister Cameron told the House of Commons: Free flow of information can be used for
good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it
would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and
Mubarak,
ordered the shut-down of Egypt’s largest ISPs and the cell phone network, a move the United States
had heavily criticized. Now the UK was contemplating the same move and threatening to create a rationale
criminality. This policy had far-reaching implications. As recently as January 2011, then President of Egypt, Hosni
for authoritarian governments everywhere to shut down communications networks when they threatened “violence, disorder and
like Australia are also pursuing restrictive internet policies. As OpenNet reported it:
When these allies pursue
policies so clearly at odds with the U.S. internet freedom agenda, several difficulties arise. It undermines
the U.S. position that an open and free internet is something free societies naturally want. It also
gives repressive authoritarian governments an excuse for their own monitoring and filtering activities. To an extent,
criminality.” Other allies
“Australia maintains some of the most restrictive Internet policies of any Western country…”
U.S. internet freedom policy responds even-handedly to this challenge because the vast bulk of its grants are for open source
circumvention tools that can be just as readily used by someone in London as Beijing, but so far,
the United States has been
much more discreet about criticising the restrictive policies of allies than authoritarian states.