NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA Affirmative
NSA Affirmative ..................................................................................................................................................... 1
Summary ................................................................................................................................................................. 3
Glossary .................................................................................................................................................................. 4
1st Affirmative Constructives
NSA 1AC (4-min Version) (1/4) ........................................................................................................................ 5
NSA 1AC (Short Version) (1/6) ......................................................................................................................... 9
NSA 1AC (Long Version) (1/18) ..................................................................................................................... 15
Privacy Extensions
Answers to NSA not Invasive ........................................................................................................................... 33
Answer to Privacy Invasions Inevitable ........................................................................................................... 35
Answers to “Corporations violate privacy ” ..................................................................................................... 36
Answers to Security Comes First ...................................................................................................................... 39
Answers to “Posner – Balancing Good” ........................................................................................................... 41
Privacy is a Gateway Right ............................................................................................................................... 44
Privacy is key to Autonomy.............................................................................................................................. 45
Surveillance Hurts Freedom ............................................................................................................................. 46
Surveillance causes a Chilling Effect ............................................................................................................... 48
Fear Magnifies Privacy Loss ............................................................................................................................ 50
Answer to “Nothing to Hide” ........................................................................................................................... 51
Economy Extensions
Economy Advantage – Internal Link Magnifier ............................................................................................... 52
Answers to Hurts Foreign Companies More .................................................................................................... 54
Answers to Companies won’t leave cloud ........................................................................................................ 55
Answers to Tech industry not hurt .................................................................................................................... 56
Answers to Economic Decline Doesn’t Cause War ......................................................................................... 57
Answers to Cybersecurity Sector Turn ............................................................................................................. 58
Internet Freedom Extensions
Answers to USA Freedom Act Solves .............................................................................................................. 59
Answers to Internet Freedom Doesn’t Spur Democracy .................................................................................. 60
Answers to Internet Freedom is about Profits................................................................................................... 61
Answers to International Surveillance matters more ........................................................................................ 62
Answers to US not modelled ............................................................................................................................ 63
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NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Democracy doesn’t solve war ........................................................................................................ 64
Inherency/Harms Extensions
Answers to USA Freedom Act Solves .............................................................................................................. 65
Answers to Domestic Collection is Small ........................................................................................................ 67
Solvency Extensions
Limiting Section 702 Solves ............................................................................................................................. 69
Plan Solves PRISM ........................................................................................................................................... 70
Answers to Reforming domestic surveillance alone doesn’t solve .................................................................. 71
Answers to Circumvention ............................................................................................................................... 74
Topicality Answers (JV & V Only)
Topicality Domestic (JV & V Only) ................................................................................................................. 78
Terrorism DA Answers
NSA Surveillance doesn’t stop terrorism (Terror DA Ans) ............................................................................. 82
Surveillance causes false positives ................................................................................................................... 84
Surveillance creates too much data ................................................................................................................... 86
Surveillance creates bad data ............................................................................................................................ 87
Answer to: would have solved 9/11 .................................................................................................................. 88
Executive Order CP Answers (JV & V Only)
Answer to the Executive Counterplan (JV & V Only) ..................................................................................... 90
Politics DA Answers (V Only)
Answers to Politics – Plan is popular (V Only) ................................................................................................ 91
2/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Summary
This affirmative case argues that the National Security Administration (NSA) current data
collection practices are harmful and should be reformed. The affirmative focuses on domestic
data collection.
You can choose to construct a case with up to 3 advantages (Privacy, Economy, or Internet
Freedom). Read the file select your favorite advantages and practice to make sure you can finish
in 8 minutes. Remember the solvency cards to.
Privacy- the NSA currently collects data on millions of internet users who are connected in some
way to international communications that the organization is monitoring. This advantage argues
that this domestic surveillance practice is a violation of the rights of US citizens and not needed to
protect the country from a terrorist attack.
Economy- this advantage argues that NSA domesitic spying programs have hurt the American
technology sector as businesses around the world avoid using American products like Dropbox
and Google since their content could be monitored by the government. This economic slow down
could hurt the world economy and lead to wars.
Internet Freedom- this advantage argues that a domestic surveillance program run by the NSA
hurts the ability of the US to persuade dictatorships and other authoritarian governments to
maintain a free internet. Access to the internet is crucial to fostering democratic transitions
around the world. Democratic governments increase peace and are less likely to start wars.
The affirmative would solve this advantages by placing limits on the collection of data to only
communication to or from a suspect in an active investigation. This would prevent the
government from stockpiling information on every citizen and help make the search for
terrorists and other dangerous groups more efficient.
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NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Glossary
FISA- The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ("FISA" Pub.L. 95–511, 92 Stat. 1783, 50 U.S.C. ch.
36) is a United States federal law which prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and
collection of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign powers" and "agents of foreign powers"
Moore’s Law- is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled
approximately every two years. In other words, computers get twice as powerful every 2 years.
NSA- is an intelligence organization of the United States government, responsible for global monitoring,
collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purpos
PRISM- s a clandestine surveillance program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA)
collects internet communications from at least nine major US internet companies.
Upstream- term used by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States for intercepting telephone
and internet traffic from the internet backbone, i.e. major internet cables and switches, both domestic and
foreign.
4/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (4-min Version) (1/4)
Observation 1 –The USA Freedom Act did not reform the NSA’s mass collection of domestic
communication. The agency still has authority to gather data under Section 702 of the FISA
Amendments Act.
Goitein, Co-Director Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program 2015,
(Elizabeth, , 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform)
Even under USA Freedom, however, the government is still able to pull in a great deal of information about
innocent Americans. Needless to say, not everyone in contact with a suspected terrorist is guilty of a crime; even terrorists call for pizza delivery. Intelligence officials also may
need to obtain records – like flight manifests – that include information about multiple people, most of whom have nothing to do with terrorism. Some of this “overcollection” may be
inevitable, but its effects could be mitigated. For instance, agencies could be given a short period of time to identify information relevant to actual suspects, after which they would have to
destroy any remaining information. USA Freedom fails to impose such limits. More fundamentally, bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that
Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within the United States, wished to obtain
communications between Americans and foreigners, it had to convince the FISA Court that the
individual target was a foreign power or its agent. Today, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments
Act, the NSA may target any foreigner overseas and collect his or her communications with Americans
without obtaining any individualized court order. Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the NSA’s activities when it conducts surveillance
overseas, the standards are even more lax. The result is mass surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty in comparison.
Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they “incidentally” sweep in massive
amounts of Americans’ data, including the content of calls, e-mails, text messages, and video chats. Limits on
keeping and using such information are weak and riddled with exceptions. Moreover, foreign targets are not limited to suspected terrorists or even
abandoned the individualized suspicion approach after 9/11.
agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration recently acknowledged, foreigners have privacy rights too, and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner overseas is an indefensible
violation of those rights. Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA Freedom because they hoped it would relieve the post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their likely long-term goal
is to avoid changes to Section 702, Executive Order 12333, and the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection without any individualized showing of wrongdoing. Privacy
advocates who supported USA Freedom did so because they saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return to the principle of
individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance. If intelligence officials are correct in their calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the law clears the way for
further reforms across the full range of surveillance programs, history will vindicate the privacy advocates who supported it. The answer to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not
in the text of the law, but in the unwritten story of what happens next.
5/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (4-min Version) (2/4)
Observation 2: This creates massive privacy violations, which are more dangerous than any risk
of terrorism
Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2014
Bruce 1-6-2014, "Essays: How the NSA Threatens National Security," Schneier On Security, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_threaten.html
We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander
responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number
downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego
man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have
been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was
on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an
ineffective counterterrorism tool.
Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue
to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It
breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any
meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people
are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer
products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very
protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom,
and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.
And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many
episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy,
Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the
Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy
for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.
6/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (4-min Version) (3/4)
We find the current state of affairs troubling and offer the following Plan: The United States
federal government will limit the scope of its domestic surveillance under Section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to communications whose sender or recipient is a valid
intelligence target and whose targets pose a tangible threat to national security.
7/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (4-min Version) (4/4)
Observation 3 – Limiting the scope of the Section 702 authority is critical to solve overcollection
of American communications.
Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security
at Center for Democracy and Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy & Technology., 7-22-2014,
https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significant-section-702-reform/
Where Do We Go From Here?
There are sensible reforms that can significant limit the collateral damage to privacy caused by Section
702 without impeding national security. Limiting the purposes for which Section 702 can be conducted
will narrow the degree to which communications are monitored between individuals not suspected of
wrongdoing or connected to national security threats. Closing retention loopholes present in the Minimization
Guidelines governing that surveillance will ensure that when Americans’ communications are incidentally collected, they
are not kept absent national security needs. And closing the backdoor search loophole would ensure that
when Americans’ communications are retained because they communicated with a target of Section 702
surveillance, they couldn’t be searched unless the standards for domestic surveillance of the American
are met.
8/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Short Version) (1/6)
Observation 1 – The government engages in mass surveillance
1. The USA Freedom Act did not reform the NSA’s mass collection of domestic communication.
The agency still has authority to gather data under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.
Goitein, Co-Director Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program 2015,
(Elizabeth, , 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform)
Even under USA Freedom, however, the government is still able to pull in a great deal of information about
innocent Americans. Needless to say, not everyone in contact with a suspected terrorist is guilty of a crime; even terrorists call for pizza delivery. Intelligence officials also may
need to obtain records – like flight manifests – that include information about multiple people, most of whom have nothing to do with terrorism. Some of this “overcollection” may be
inevitable, but its effects could be mitigated. For instance, agencies could be given a short period of time to identify information relevant to actual suspects, after which they would have to
destroy any remaining information. USA Freedom fails to impose such limits. More fundamentally, bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that
Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within the United States, wished to obtain
communications between Americans and foreigners, it had to convince the FISA Court that the
individual target was a foreign power or its agent. Today, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments
Act, the NSA may target any foreigner overseas and collect his or her communications with Americans
without obtaining any individualized court order. Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the NSA’s activities when it conducts surveillance
overseas, the standards are even more lax. The result is mass surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty in comparison.
Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they “incidentally” sweep in massive
amounts of Americans’ data, including the content of calls, e-mails, text messages, and video chats. Limits on
keeping and using such information are weak and riddled with exceptions. Moreover, foreign targets are not limited to suspected terrorists or even
abandoned the individualized suspicion approach after 9/11.
agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration recently acknowledged, foreigners have privacy rights too, and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner overseas is an indefensible
violation of those rights. Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA Freedom because they hoped it would relieve the post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their likely long-term goal
is to avoid changes to Section 702, Executive Order 12333, and the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection without any individualized showing of wrongdoing. Privacy
advocates who supported USA Freedom did so because they saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return to the principle of
individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance. If intelligence officials are correct in their calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the law clears the way for
further reforms across the full range of surveillance programs, history will vindicate the privacy advocates who supported it. The answer to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not
in the text of the law, but in the unwritten story of what happens next.
2. The NSA has massively expanded its surveillance. Since 2008, American internet
communication have been intercepted far more often than legitimate surveillance targets.
Gellman, Washington Post Staff Write, 2014
Barton 7-5-2014, "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are," Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the
communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month
investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations ,
which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were
caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly
high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or
“minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that
could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents. The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are
discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been
willing to address.
9/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Short Version) (2/6)
Observation 2: This creates massive privacy violations
1. These privacy violations are more dangerous than any risk of terrorism
Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2014
Bruce 1-6-2014, "Essays: How the NSA Threatens National Security," Schneier On Security, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_threaten.html
We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander
responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number
downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego
man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have
been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was
on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an
ineffective counterterrorism tool.
Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue
to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It
breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any
meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people
are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer
products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very
protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom,
and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.
And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many
episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy,
Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the
Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy
for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.
10/92
NSA Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Short Version) (3/6)
2. Privacy is a gateway right, it enables all of our other freedoms.
PoKempne, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, 2014,
(Dinah, , “The Right Whose Time Has Come (Again): Privacy in the Age of Surveillance” 1/21/14 http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/essays/privacy-in-age-ofsurveillance)
Technology has invaded the sacred precincts of private life, and unwarranted exposure has imperiled our security, dignity, and most basic values. The law must rise to
the occasion and protect our rights. Does this sound familiar? So argued Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article announcing
“The Right to Privacy.” We are again at such a juncture. The technological developments they saw as menacing—photography and the rise of the mass circulation
press—appear rather quaint to us now. But the harms to emotional, psychological, and even physical security from unwanted exposure seem just as vivid in our digital
age.Our renewed sense of vulnerability comes as almost all aspects of daily social life migrate online . At the
same time, corporations and governments have acquired frightening abilities to amass and search these endless digital records, giving them the power to “know” us in
extraordinary detail.
In a world where we share our lives on social media and trade immense amounts of personal information for the ease and convenience of online living, some have
questioned whether privacy is a relevant concept. It is not just relevant, but crucial.
privacy is a gateway right that affects our ability to exercise almost every other right, not least our
freedom to speak and associate with those we choose, make political choices, practice our religious beliefs,
seek medical help, access education, figure out whom we love, and create our family life. It is nothing less
than the shelter in which we work out what we think and who we are; a fulcrum of our autonomy as
individuals.
Indeed,
The importance of privacy, a right we often take for granted, was thrown into sharp relief in 2013 by the steady stream of revelations from United States government
files released by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, and published in the Guardian and other major newspapers around the
revelations, supported by highly classified documents, showed the US, the UK, and other governments engaged in
global indiscriminate data interception, largely unchecked by any meaningful legal constraint or
oversight, without regard for the rights of millions of people who were not suspected of wrongdoing.
world. These
11/92
NSA Affirmative
1st Affirmative Constructive
NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Short Version) (4/6)
We find the current state of affairs troubling and offer the following Plan: The United States
federal government will limit the scope of its domestic surveillance under Section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to communications whose sender or recipient is a valid
intelligence target and whose targets pose a tangible threat to national security.
12/92
NSA Affirmative
1st Affirmative Constructive
NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Short Version) (5/6)
Observation 3 – Our plan solves.
1. Limiting the scope of the Section 702 authority is critical to solve overcollection of American
communications.
Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security
at Center for Democracy and Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy & Technology., 7-22-2014,
https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significant-section-702-reform/
Where Do We Go From Here?
There are sensible reforms that can significant limit the collateral damage to privacy caused by Section
702 without impeding national security. Limiting the purposes for which Section 702 can be conducted
will narrow the degree to which communications are monitored between individuals not suspected of
wrongdoing or connected to national security threats. Closing retention loopholes present in the Minimization
Guidelines governing that surveillance will ensure that when Americans’ communications are incidentally collected, they
are not kept absent national security needs. And closing the backdoor search loophole would ensure that
when Americans’ communications are retained because they communicated with a target of Section 702
surveillance, they couldn’t be searched unless the standards for domestic surveillance of the American
are met.
13/92
NSA Affirmative
1st Affirmative Constructive
NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Short Version (6/6)
2. The plan eliminates the collection of communication “about” targets that prevents upstream
collection.
Nojeim, Director, Project on Freedom, Security & Technology, 2014
Greg, Comments To The Privacy And Civil Liberties Oversight Board Regarding Reforms To Surveillance Conducted Pursuant To Section 702 Of Fisa April 11, 2014
https://d1ovv0c9tw0h0c.cloudfront.net/files/2014/04/CDT_PCLOB-702-Comments_4.11.13.pdf
C. Collection
of communications “about” targets that are neither to nor from targets should be prohibited.
The Government takes the position that Section 702 permits it to collect not only communications that are to or from a foreign intelligence target, but also
communications that are “about” the target because they mention an identifier associated with the target.17 The practice directs the focus of surveillance away from
suspected wrongdoers and permits the NSA to target communications between individuals with no link to national security investigations.
Because this is inconsistent with the legislative history of the statute, and raises profound constitutional
and operational problems, PCLOB should recommend that “about” collection be ended, and that Section
702 surveillance be limited to communications to and from targets. Section 702 authorizes the government to target the
communications of persons reasonably believed to be abroad, but it never defines the term “target.” However, throughout Section 702, the term is used to refer to the
targeting of an individual rather content of a communication.18 Further, the entire congressional debate on Section 702 includes no reference to collecting
communications “about” a foreign target, and significant debate about collecting communications to or from a target.19
To collect “about” communications, the NSA engages in “upstream” surveillance on the Internet
backbone,20 meaning “on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past,”21 temporarily copying the content of the entire data
stream so it can be searched for the same “selectors” used for the downstream or “PRISM” surveillance.
As a result, the NSA has the capability to search any Internet communication going into or out of the U.S.22 without particularized intervention by a provider.
Direct access creates direct opportunity for abuse, and should not be permitted to a military intelligence agency.
This dragnet scanning also results in the collection of “multi-communication transactions,” (MCTs) which
include tens of thousands wholly domestic communications each year.23 The FISC required creation of new minimization rules
for MCTs in 2011, but did not limit their collection.24 The mass searching of communications content inside the United States, knowing that it the communications
searched include tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications each year, raises profound constitutional questions.
Abandoning collection of communications “about” targets would remove any justification for upstream
collection, eliminate the serious problems posed by direct government access to the Internet
infrastructure, eliminate the collection of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications in
contravention of the statute, an make surveillance under Section 702 consistent with the congressional
intent.
14/92
NSA Affirmative
1st Affirmative Constructive
NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Long Version) (1/18)
Observation 1 – The USA Freedom Act did not reform the NSA’s mass collection of domestic
communication. The agency still has authority to gather data under Section 702 of the FISA
Amendments Act.
Goitein, Co-Director Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program 2015,
(Elizabeth, , 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform)
Even under USA Freedom, however, the government is still able to pull in a great deal of information about
innocent Americans. Needless to say, not everyone in contact with a suspected terrorist is guilty of a crime; even terrorists call for pizza delivery.
Intelligence officials also may need to obtain records – like flight manifests – that include information about multiple people, most of whom have nothing to do with
terrorism. Some of this “overcollection” may be inevitable, but its effects could be mitigated. For instance, agencies could be given a short period of time to identify
information relevant to actual suspects, after which they would have to destroy any remaining information. USA Freedom fails to impose such limits. More
fundamentally, bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that abandoned the individualized suspicion approach after 9/11.
Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within the United States, wished to obtain communications between
Americans and foreigners, it had to convince the FISA Court that the individual target was a foreign
power or its agent. Today, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA may target any
foreigner overseas and collect his or her communications with Americans without obtaining any
individualized court order. Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the NSA’s activities when it conducts surveillance overseas, the standards are
even more lax. The result is mass surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty
in comparison. Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they “incidentally”
sweep in massive amounts of Americans’ data, including the content of calls, e-mails, text messages, and
video chats. Limits on keeping and using such information are weak and riddled with exceptions. Moreover, foreign targets are not limited to
suspected terrorists or even agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration recently acknowledged, foreigners have privacy
rights too, and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner overseas is an indefensible violation of those rights. Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA
Freedom because they hoped it would relieve the post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their likely long-term goal is to avoid changes to Section 702, Executive Order
12333, and the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection without any individualized showing of wrongdoing. Privacy
advocates who
supported USA Freedom did so because they saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in
surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return to the principle of individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance. If intelligence officials
are correct in their calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the law clears the way for further reforms across the full range of surveillance
programs, history will vindicate the privacy advocates who supported it. The answer to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not in the text of the law, but in
the unwritten story of what happens next.
15/92
NSA Affirmative
1st Affirmative Constructive
NAUDL 2015-16
NSA 1AC (Long Version) (2/18)
Observation 2. The NSA has massively expanded its surveillance. Since 2008, American internet
communication have been intercepted far more often than legitimate surveillance targets.
Gellman, Washington Post Staff Write, 2014
Barton 7-5-2014, "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are," Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in
the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a fourmonth investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted
conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets
but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the
surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA
marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect
Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are
discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale
that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
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We find the current state of affairs troubling and offer the following Plan: The United States
federal government will limit the scope of its domestic surveillance under Section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to communications whose sender or recipient is a valid
intelligence target and whose targets pose a tangible threat to national security.
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Observation 3 – Our plan solves.
1. Congressional action should be taken to limit the scope of data collection.
Sinha, Fellow at Human Rights Watch, 2014
(G. Alex July 2014 “With Liberty to Monitor All How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy” Human Rights Watch,
http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
Narrow the purposes for which all foreign intelligence surveillance may be conducted and limit such surveillance to individuals, groups, or entities who pose a tangible
threat to national security or a comparable state interest.
o Among other steps, Congress
should pass legislation amending Section 702 of FISA and related surveillance authorities to
narrow the scope of what can be acquired as “foreign intelligence information,” which is now defined
broadly to encompass, among other things, information related to “the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United
States.” It should be restricted to what is necessary and proportionate to protect legitimate aims identified in the ICCPR, such as national security. In practice, this
should mean that the government may acquire information only from individuals, groups, or entities who
pose a tangible threat to national security narrowly defined, or a comparable compelling state interest.
2. Limiting the scope of the Section 702 authority is critical to solve overcollection of American
communications.
Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security
at Center for Democracy and Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy & Technology., 7-22-2014,
https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significant-section-702-reform/
Where Do We Go From Here?
There are sensible reforms that can significant limit the collateral damage to privacy caused by Section
702 without impeding national security. Limiting the purposes for which Section 702 can be conducted
will narrow the degree to which communications are monitored between individuals not suspected of
wrongdoing or connected to national security threats. Closing retention loopholes present in the Minimization
Guidelines governing that surveillance will ensure that when Americans’ communications are incidentally collected, they
are not kept absent national security needs. And closing the backdoor search loophole would ensure that
when Americans’ communications are retained because they communicated with a target of Section 702
surveillance, they couldn’t be searched unless the standards for domestic surveillance of the American
are met.
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3. The plan eliminates the collection of communication “about” targets that prevents upstream
collection.
Nojeim, Director, Project on Freedom, Security & Technology, 2014
Greg, Comments To The Privacy And Civil Liberties Oversight Board Regarding Reforms To Surveillance Conducted Pursuant To Section 702 Of Fisa April 11, 2014
https://d1ovv0c9tw0h0c.cloudfront.net/files/2014/04/CDT_PCLOB-702-Comments_4.11.13.pdf
C. Collection
of communications “about” targets that are neither to nor from targets should be prohibited .
The Government takes the position that Section 702 permits it to collect not only communications that are to or
from a foreign intelligence target, but also communications that are “about” the target because they mention an
identifier associated with the target.17 The practice directs the focus of surveillance away from suspected
wrongdoers and permits the NSA to target communications between individuals with no link to national
security investigations.
Because this is inconsistent with the legislative history of the statute, and raises profound constitutional
and operational problems, PCLOB should recommend that “about” collection be ended, and that Section
702 surveillance be limited to communications to and from targets. Section 702 authorizes the government to target the
communications of persons reasonably believed to be abroad, but it never defines the term “target.” However, throughout Section 702, the term is used to refer to the
targeting of an individual rather content of a communication.18 Further, the entire congressional debate on Section 702 includes no reference to collecting
communications “about” a foreign target, and significant debate about collecting communications to or from a target.19
To collect “about” communications, the NSA engages in “upstream” surveillance on the Internet
backbone,20 meaning “on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past,”21 temporarily copying the content of the entire data
stream so it can be searched for the same “selectors” used for the downstream or “PRISM” surveillance.
As a result, the NSA has the capability to search any Internet communication going into or out of the U.S.22 without particularized intervention by a provider.
Direct access creates direct opportunity for abuse, and should not be permitted to a military intelligence agency.
This dragnet scanning also results in the collection of “multi-communication transactions,” (MCTs) which
include tens of thousands wholly domestic communications each year.23 The FISC required creation of new minimization rules
for MCTs in 2011, but did not limit their collection.24 The mass searching of communications content inside the United States, knowing that it the communications
searched include tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications each year, raises profound constitutional questions.
Abandoning collection of communications “about” targets would remove any justification for upstream
collection, eliminate the serious problems posed by direct government access to the Internet
infrastructure, eliminate the collection of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications in
contravention of the statute, an make surveillance under Section 702 consistent with the congressional
intent.
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4. These limits restore US leadership on privacy and rights issues.
Edgar, visiting scholar at the Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, 2015
Timothy H, 4-13-2015, "The Good News About Spying," Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2015-04-13/good-news-about-spying
The United States should also pivot from its defensive position and take the lead on global privacy. The United States
has an impressive array of privacy safeguards, and it has even imposed new ones that protect citizens of every country. Despite their weaknesses,
these safeguards are still the strongest in the world. The U.S. government should not be shy about
trumpeting them, and should urge other countries to follow its lead. It could begin by engaging with close
allies, like the United Kingdom, Germany, and other European countries, urging them to increase
transparency and judicial supervision of their own communications surveillance activities.
5. Finally, the plan is a critical step to fight the politics of fear and regain privacy rights.
Snowden, director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. 2015,
(Edward J, . 6-4-2015, "Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/opinion/edward-snowden-theworld-says-no-to-surveillance.html)
Though we have come a long way, the right to privacy — the foundation of the freedoms enshrined in the United States Bill of Rights
— remains under threat. Some of the world’s most popular online services have been enlisted as partners
in the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs, and technology companies are being pressured by governments around the world to work against
their customers rather than for them. Billions of cellphone location records are still being intercepted without regard
for the guilt or innocence of those affected. We have learned that our government intentionally weakens the fundamental security of the
Internet with “back doors” that transform private lives into open books. Metadata revealing the personal associations and interests
of ordinary Internet users is still being intercepted and monitored on a scale unprecedented in history: As
you read this online, the United States government makes a note.
Spymasters in Australia, Canada and France have exploited recent tragedies to seek intrusive new powers despite evidence such programs would not have prevented
attacks. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain recently mused, “Do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” He soon
found his answer, proclaiming that “for too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: As long as you obey the law, we will leave you
alone.”
At the turning of the millennium, few imagined that citizens of developed democracies would soon be
required to defend the concept of an open society against their own leaders.
Yet the balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror
generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason.
With each court victory, with every change in the law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear. As a
society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it protects.
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Advantage One is Privacy
1. Surveillance under Section 702 is a substantial invasion of privacy because of the broad
targeting guidelines in the FISA Amendments Act.
Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security
at Center for Democracy and Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy & Technology., 7-22-2014,
https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significant-section-702-reform/
Section 702 Surveillance Is Fundamentally More Invasive
While incidental collection of the communications of a person who communicates with a target is an inevitable feature of communications surveillance, it is tolerated
In other instances of communications
surveillance conducted in the US, surveillance requires court approval of a target, and that target must
be a suspected wrongdoer or spy, a terrorist, or another agent of a foreign power. Section 702 requires
neither of these elements.
when the reason for the surveillance is compelling and adequate procedural checks are in place.
Under Section 702, targeting can occur for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information even
though there is no court review of any particular target. Instead, the super secret FISA court merely determines whether the guidelines
under which the surveillance is conducted are reasonably designed to result in the targeting of non-Americans abroad and that “minimization guidelines” are
This means incidental surveillance may occur purely because someone communicated with an
individual engaged in activities that may have broadly defined “foreign intelligence” value. For example, the
communications of someone who communicates with a person abroad whose activities might relate to the
conduct of U.S. foreign affairs can be collected, absent any independent assessment of necessity or accuracy.
reasonable.
As another example, under traditional FISA – for intelligence surveillance in the U.S. of people in the U.S. – your communications could be incidentally collected only
if you were in direct contact with a suspected agent of a foreign power, and additionally if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had affirmed this suspicion based
Under Section 702, your personal information could be scooped up by the NSA simply
because your attorney, doctor, lover, or accountant was a person abroad who engaged in peaceful
political activity such as protesting a G8 summit.
on probable cause.
2. Indiscriminate wide-scale NSA Surveillance erodes privacy rights and violates the constitution
Sinha, Fellow at Human Rights Watch, 2014
(G. Alex July 2014 “With Liberty to Monitor All How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy” Human Rights Watch,
http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
The questions raised by surveillance are complex. The government has an obligation to protect national
security, and in some cases, it is legitimate for government to restrict certain rights to that end. At the same
time, international human rights and constitutional law set limits on the state’s authority to engage in activities like
surveillance, which have the potential to undermine so many other rights. The current, large-scale, often
indiscriminate US approach to surveillance carries enormous costs. It erodes global digital privacy and
sets a terrible example for other countries like India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and others that are in the process of
expanding their surveillance capabilities. It also damages US credibility in advocating internationally for internet freedom, which the US has listed as an important
foreign policy objective since at least 2010.As this report documents, US
surveillance programs are also doing damage to some of
the values the United States claims to hold most dear. These include freedoms of expression and association,
press freedom, and the right to counsel, which are all protected by both international human rights law and
the US Constitution.
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3. These privacy violations are more dangerous than any risk of terrorism
Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2014
Bruce 1-6-2014, "Essays: How the NSA Threatens National Security," Schneier On Security, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_threaten.html
We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander
responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number
downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego
man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have
been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was
on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an
ineffective counterterrorism tool.
Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue
to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It
breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any
meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people
are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer
products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very
protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom,
and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.
And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many
episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy,
Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the
Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy
for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.
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4. The First impact is the loss of personal autonomy and agency. Privacy is a gateway right, it
enables all of our other freedoms.
PoKempne, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, 2014,
(Dinah, , “The Right Whose Time Has Come (Again): Privacy in the Age of Surveillance” 1/21/14 http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/essays/privacy-in-age-ofsurveillance)
Technology has invaded the sacred precincts of private life, and unwarranted exposure has imperiled our security, dignity, and most basic values. The law must rise to
the occasion and protect our rights. Does this sound familiar? So argued Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article announcing
“The Right to Privacy.” We are again at such a juncture. The technological developments they saw as menacing—photography and the rise of the mass circulation
press—appear rather quaint to us now. But the harms to emotional, psychological, and even physical security from unwanted exposure seem just as vivid in our digital
age.Our renewed sense of vulnerability comes as almost all aspects of daily social life migrate online . At the
same time, corporations and governments have acquired frightening abilities to amass and search these endless digital records, giving them the power to “know” us in
extraordinary detail.
In a world where we share our lives on social media and trade immense amounts of personal information for the ease and convenience of
online living, some have questioned whether privacy is a relevant concept. It is not just relevant, but crucial.
privacy is a gateway right that affects our ability to exercise almost every other right, not least our
freedom to speak and associate with those we choose, make political choices, practice our religious beliefs,
seek medical help, access education, figure out whom we love, and create our family life. It is nothing less
than the shelter in which we work out what we think and who we are; a fulcrum of our autonomy as
individuals.
Indeed,
The importance of privacy, a right we often take for granted, was thrown into sharp relief in 2013 by the steady stream of
revelations from United States government files released by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, and published in the
Guardian and other major newspapers around the world . These revelations, supported by highly classified documents, showed the US, the UK,
and other governments engaged in global indiscriminate data interception, largely unchecked by any
meaningful legal constraint or oversight, without regard for the rights of millions of people who were not
suspected of wrongdoing.
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5. The Second impact is Totalitarianism, the loss of autonomy due to surveillance enables
“turnkey totalitarianism,” destroying democracy.
Haggerty, Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Alberta, 2015
Kevin D., “What’s Wrong with Privacy Protections?” in A World Without Privacy: What Law Can and Should Do? Edited by Austin
Sarat p. 230
emphasis on the threat of authoritarian forms of rule inherent in populations open to
detailed institutional scrutiny will be portrayed as overblown and over dramatic, suggesting I veer towards the lunatic fringe of
unhinged conspiracy theorists.66 But one does not have to believe secret forces are operating behind the scenes to recognize
that our declining private realm presents alarming dangers. Someone as conservative and deeply embedded in the security
establishment as William Binney – a former NSA senior executive – says the security surveillance infrastructure
he helped build now puts us on the verge of “turnkey totalitarianism.”67
Still others will say I am being alarmist. My
The contemporary expansion of surveillance, where monitoring becomes an ever-more routine part of our lives, represents a
tremendous shift in the balance of power between citizens and organizations. Perhaps the greatest danger of
this situation is how our existing surveillance practices can be turned to oppressive uses. From this point forward our
expanding surveillance infrastructure stands as a resource to be inherited by future generations of politicians,
corporate actors, or even messianic leaders. Given sufficient political will this surveillance infrastructure can be repurposed to monitor – in unparalleled detail – people who some might see as undesirable due to their political opinions,
religion, skin color, gender, birthplace, physical abilities, medical history, or any number of an almost limitless
list of factors used to pit people against one another.
The twentieth century provides notorious examples of such repressive uses of surveillance. Crucially,
those tyrannical states exercised fine-grained political control by relying on surveillance infrastructures that
today seem laughably rudimentary, comprised as they were of paper files, index cards, and elementary telephone tapping.68
It is no more alarmist to acknowledge such risks are germane to our own societies than it is to recognize the
future will see wars, terrorist attacks, or environmental disasters – events that could themselves prompt
surveillance structures to be re-calibrated towards more coercive ends. Those who think this massive
surveillance infrastructure will not, in the fullness of time, be turned to repressive purposes are either innocent as to the
realities of power, or whistling past a graveyard.
But one does not have to dwell on the most extreme possibilities to be unnerved by how enhanced
surveillance capabilities invest tremendous powers in organizations. Surveillance capacity gives
organizations unprecedented abilities to manipulate human behaviors, desires, and subjectivities towards
organizational ends – ends that are too often focused on profit, personal aggrandizement, and institutional self-interest
rather than human betterment.
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6. Freedom and dignity are ethically prior to security.
Cohen, Ph.D., ethicist and political analyst, 2014
(Elliot D.. Technology of Oppression: Preserving Freedom and Dignity in an Age of Mass, Warrantless Surveillance.. DOI: 10.1057/9781137408211.0011. )
The threat posed by mass, warrantless surveillance technologies
Presently, such a threat to human freedom and dignity lies in the technological erosion of human privacy
through the ever-evolving development and deployment of a global, government system of mass,
warrantless surveillance. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a systematic means of spying on, and ultimately
manipulating and controlling, virtually every aspect of everybody's private life—a thoroughgoing, global dissolution of personal
space, which is supposed to be legally protected. In such a governmental state of "total (or virtually total) information awareness,"
the potential for government control and manipulation of the people's deepest and most personal beliefs, feelings, and values
can transform into an Orwellian reality—and nightmare.
As will be discussed in Chapter 6, the technology that has the potential to remove such scenarios from the realm of science fiction to that of true science is currently
the exceptional disruption of privacy for
legitimate state reasons cannot and should not be mistaken for a usual and customary rule of mass
invasion of people's private lives without their informed consent. Benjamin Franklin wisely and
succinctly expressed the point: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they
deserve, either one." In relinquishing our privacy to government, we also lose the freedom to control, and
act on, our personal information, which is what defines us individually, and collectively, as free agents
and a free nation. In a world devoid of freedom to control who we are, proclaiming that we are "secure"
is an empty platitude.
being developed. This is not to deny the legitimate government interest in "national security"; however,
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Advantage Two is the Economy.
1. NSA surveillance has put the US economy at risk because of losses in the technology sector.
Mindock, Reporting Fellow at International Business Times – Internally quoting The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. ITIF is a non-partisan
research and educational institute, 2015
(Clark “NSA Surveillance Could Cost Billions For US Internet Companies After Edward Snowden Revelations” - International Business Times - June 10 2015
http://www.ibtimes.com/nsa-surveillance-could-cost-billions-us-internet-companies-after-edward-snowden-1959737)
Failure to reform National Security Administration spying programs revealed by Edward Snowden could be more
economically taxing than previously thought, says a new study published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Tuesday. The study suggests the programs could be affecting the technology sector as a whole, not just the
cloud-computing sector, and that the costs could soar much higher than previously expected. Even modest
declines in cloud computing revenues from the revealed surveillance programs, according to a previous report, would cost between $21.5
billion and $35 billion by 2016. New estimates show that the toll “will likely far exceed ITIF’s initial $35 billion estimate.” “The U.S.
government’s failure to reform many of the NSA’s surveillance programs has damaged the competitiveness
of the U.S. tech sector and cost it a portion of the global market share,” a summary of the report said. Revelations by defense
contractor Snowden in June 2013 exposed massive U.S. government surveillance capabilities and showed the NSA collected American phone records in bulk, and
without a warrant. The bulk
phone-record revelations, and many others in the same vein, including the required complacency of American telecom and
Internet companies in providing the data, raised questions about the transparency of American surveillance
programs and prompted outrage from privacy advocates. The study, published this week, argues that unless the American
government can vigorously reform how NSA surveillance is regulated and overseen, U.S. companies will lose
contracts and, ultimately, their competitive edge in a global market as consumers around the world choose
cloud computing and technology options that do not have potential ties to American surveillance
programs. The report comes amid a debate in Congress on what to do with the Patriot Act, the law that provides much of
the authority for the surveillance programs. As of June 1, authority to collect American phone data en masse expired, though
questions remain as to whether letting that authority expire is enough to protect privacy. Supporters of the programs argue that
they provide the country with necessary capabilities to fight terrorism abroad. A further reform made the phone records collection
process illegal for the government, and instead gave that responsibility to the telecom companies.
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2. Reform is necessary to regain US leadership in the global marketplace.
Castro and Mcquinn, Director of the Center for Data Innovation and Research Assistant, 2015
(Daniel & Alan, 6/9/15, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness” “Information Technology & Innovation
Foundation” http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subverts-us-competitiveness
When historians write about this period in U.S. history it could very well be that one of the themes will be how the United States
lost its global technology leadership to other nations. And clearly one of the factors they would point to is
the long-standing privileging of U.S. national security interests over U.S. industrial and commercial
interests when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.
This has occurred over the last few years as the U.S.
government has done relatively little to address the rising commercial
challenge to U.S. technology companies, all the while putting intelligence gathering first and foremost. Indeed, policy
decisions by the U.S. intelligence community have reverberated throughout the global economy. If the
U.S. tech industry is to remain the leader in the global marketplace, then the U.S. government will need
to set a new course that balances economic interests with national security interests. The cost of inaction
is not only short-term economic losses for U.S. companies, but a wave of protectionist policies that will
systematically weaken U.S. technology competiveness in years to come, with impacts on economic growth, jobs,
trade balance, and national security through a weakened industrial base. Only by taking decisive steps to
reform its digital surveillance activities will the U.S. government enable its tech industry to effectively
compete in the global market.
3. The US is the driving force behind global economic recovery
Economist 2015 “American shopper,” 2-14, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21643188-world-once-again-relying-too-much-american-consumerspower-growth-american-shopper
A Global economy running on a single engine is better than one that needs jump leads. The American
economy is motoring again, to the relief of exporters from Hamburg to Hangzhou. Firms added more than 1m net new
jobs in the past three months, the best showing since 1997 (see article). Buoyed up by cheap petrol, Americans are spending; in January consumer sentiment jumped to
its highest in more than a decade. The
IMF reckons that American growth will hit 3.6% in 2015, faster than the world
economy as a whole. All this is good. But growing dependence on the American economy—and on consumers in particular—has unwelcome echoes. A
decade ago American consumers borrowed heavily and recklessly. They filled their ever-larger houses with goods from China; they fuelled gas-guzzling cars with
imported oil. Big exporters recycled their earnings back to America, pushing down interest rates which in turn helped to feed further borrowing. Europe was not that
different. There, frugal Germans financed debt binges around the euro area’s periphery.After the financial crisis, the hope was of an end to these imbalances. Debtaddicted Americans and Spaniards would chip away at their obligations; thrifty German and Chinese consumers would start to enjoy life for once. At first, this seemed
to be happening. America’s trade deficit, which was about 6% of GDP in 2006, had more than halved by 2009. But now
the world is slipping back
into some nasty habits. Hair grows faster than the euro zone, and what growth there is depends heavily on
exports. The countries of the single currency are running a current-account surplus of about 2.6% of
GDP, thanks largely to exports to America. At 7.4% of GDP, Germany’s trade surplus is as large as it
has ever been. China’s growth, meanwhile, is slowing—and once again relying heavily on spending
elsewhere. It notched up its own record trade surplus in January. China’s exports have actually begun to drop, but imports are down by more. And over the past
year the renminbi, which rose by more than 10% against the dollar in 2010-13, has begun slipping again, to the annoyance of American politicians. America’s
economy is warping as a result. Consumption’s contribution to growth in the fourth quarter of 2014 was
the largest since 2006. The trade deficit is widening. Strip out oil, and America’s trade deficit grew to more than 3% of GDP in 2014, and is approaching
its pre-recession peak of about 4%. The world’s reliance on America is likely to deepen. Germans are more interested in shipping savings
abroad than investing at home (see article). Households and firms in Europe’s periphery are overburdened with debt, workers’ wages squeezed and banks in no mood to
lend. Like Germany, Europe as a whole is relying on exports. China is rebalancing, but not fast enough: services have yet to account for more than half of annual
Chinese output.
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4. The impact of economic decline is great power war.
James, Professor of History at Princeton, 2014
(Harold, “Debate: Is 2014, like 1914, a prelude to world war?”, 7-2, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globedebate/read-and-vote-is-2014-like-1914-a-prelude-to-world-war/article19325504/)
Some of the dynamics of the pre-1914 financial world are now re-emerging. Then an economically
declining power, Britain, wanted to use finance as a weapon against its larger and faster growing
competitors, Germany and the United States. Now America is in turn obsessed by being overtaken by China – according to
some calculations, set to become the world’s largest economy in 2014. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, financial
institutions appear both as dangerous weapons of mass destruction, but also as potential instruments for the application of
national power. In managing the 2008 crisis, the dependence of foreign banks on U.S. dollar funding constituted a major weakness, and required the provision of large
swap lines by the Federal Reserve. The United States provided that support to some countries, but not others, on the basis of an explicitly political logic, as Eswar
Prasad demonstrates in his new book on the “Dollar Trap.” Geo-politics is intruding into banking practice elsewhere. Before the
Ukraine crisis, Russian banks were trying to acquire assets in Central and Eastern Europe. European and U.S. banks are playing a much reduced role in Asian trade
finance. Chinese banks are being pushed to expand their role in global commerce. After the financial crisis, China started to build up the renminbi as a major
international currency. Russia and China have just proposed to create a new credit rating agency to avoid what they regard as the political bias of the existing
(American-based) agencies. The
next stage in this logic is to think about how financial power can be directed to
national advantage in the case of a diplomatic tussle. Sanctions are a routine (and not terribly successful) part of the pressure applied to
rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. But financial pressure can be much more powerfully applied to countries that are deeply embedded in the world economy.
The test is in the Western imposition of sanctions after the Russian annexation of Crimea. President Vladimir Putin’s calculation in response is that the European Union
and the United States cannot possibly be serious about the financial war. It would turn into a boomerang: Russia would be less affected than the more developed and
complex financial markets of Europe and America. The
threat of systemic disruption generates a new sort of uncertainty,
one that mirrors the decisive feature of the crisis of the summer of 1914. At that time, no one could really
know whether clashes would escalate or not. That feature contrasts remarkably with almost the entirety of the Cold War, especially since the
1960s, when the strategic doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction left no doubt that any superpower conflict would inevitably escalate. The idea of
network disruption relies on the ability to achieve advantage by surprise, and to win at no or low cost.
But it is inevitably a gamble, and raises prospect that others might, but also might not be able to, mount
the same sort of operation. Just as in 1914, there is an enhanced temptation to roll the dice, even though
the game may be fatal.
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Advvantage 3 is Internet Freedom
1. NSA spying has undermined American foreign policy. It undercut any credibility to push for
democratic freedom in repressive regimes, repressive surveillance is growing worldwide as a
result.
Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School 2015
(Bruce, Inc 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World. P. 106)
In 2010, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton gave a speech declaring Internet freedom a major US foreign
policy goal. To this end, the US State Department funds and supports a variety of programs worldwide, working to counter censorship, promote encryption, and
enable anonymity, all designed "to ensure that any child, born anywhere in the world, has access to the global
Internet as an open platform on which to innovate, learn, organize, and express herself free from undue
interference or censorship." This agenda has been torpedoed by the awkward realization that the US and
other democratic governments conducted the same types of surveillance they have criticized in more repressive
countries.
Those repressive countries are seizing on the opportunity, pointing to US surveillance as a justification
for their own more draconian Internet policies: more surveillance, more censorship, and a more
isolationist Internet that gives individual countries more control over what their citizens see and say . For
example, one of the defenses the government of Egypt offered for its plans to monitor social media was
that "the US listens in to phone calls, and supervises anyone who could threaten its national security."
Indians are worried that their government will cite the US's actions to justify surveillance in that country. Both China and Russia publicly called out US hypocrisy.
This affects Internet freedom worldwide. Historically, Internet governance—what little there was—was largely left
to the United States, because everyone more or less believed that we were working for the security of the Internet instead of against it. But now that the
US has lost much of its credibility, Internet governance is in turmoil. Many of the regulatory bodies that influence the Internet
are trying to figure out what sort of leadership model to adopt. Older international standards organizations like the International Telecommunications Union are trying
to increase their influence in Internet governance and develop a more nationalist set of rules.
This is the cyber sovereignty movement, and it threatens to fundamentally fragment the Internet. It's not
new, but it has been given an enormous boost from the revelations of NSA spying. Countries like Russia,
China, and Saudi Arabia are pushing for much more autonomous control over the portions of the
Internet within their borders.
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2. This hypocrisy created the conditions that will accelerate the global rise of authoritarianism.
Chenoweth & Stephan, political scientist at the University of Denver & Senior Policy Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, 2015
(Erica,.& Maria J, , 7-
7-2015, "How Can States and Non-State Actors Respond to Authoritarian Resurgence?," Political Violence @ a Glance,
http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/07/07/how-can-states-and-non-state-actors-respond-to-authoritarian-resurgence/
Chenoweth:
Why is authoritarianism making a comeback?
Stephan: There’s obviously no single answer to this. But part of the answer is that democracy is losing its allure in parts of the world.
When people don’t see the economic and governance benefits of democratic transitions, they lose hope. Then there’s the compelling “stability first” argument.
Regimes around the world, including China and Russia, have readily cited the “chaos” of the Arab
Spring to justify heavy-handed policies and consolidating their grip on power. The “color revolutions” that toppled
autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine inspired similar dictatorial retrenchment.
There is nothing new about authoritarian regimes adapting to changing circumstances. Their resilience is
reinforced by a combination of violent and non-coercive measures. But authoritarian paranoia seems to
have grown more piqued over the past decade. Regimes have figured out that “people power” endangers their grip on power and they are
cracking down. There’s no better evidence of the effectiveness of civil resistance than the measures that
governments take to suppress it—something you detail in your chapter from my new book.
Finally, and importantly, democracy in this country and elsewhere has taken a hit lately. Authoritarian
regimes mockingly cite images of torture, mass surveillance, and the catering to the radical fringes happening in the US political
system to refute pressures to democratize themselves. The financial crisis here and in Europe did not inspire much confidence in
democracy and we are seeing political extremism on the rise in places like Greece and Hungary. Here in the US we need to get our own house
in order if we hope to inspire confidence in democracy abroad.
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3. American surveillance is the primary driver behind this authoritarian acceleration. Curtailing
the surveillance of the NSA is necessary to restore US credibility.
Jackson, M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations 2015
(Dean, 7-14-2015, "The Authoritarian Surge into Cyberspace,"
International Forum For Democratic Studies, http://www.resurgentdictatorship.org/the-authoritarian-surge-into-cyberspace/)
This still leaves open the question of what is driving authoritarian innovation in cyberspace. Deibert identifies increased government emphasis on cybersecurity as one
driver: cybercrime and terrorism are serious concerns, and governments have a legitimate interest in combatting them. Unfortunately, when
democratic
governments use mass surveillance and other tools to police cyberspace, it can have the effect of
providing cover for authoritarian regimes to use similar techniques for repressive purposes—especially, as
Deibert notes, since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosure of US mass surveillance programs.
Second, Deibert observes that authoritarian
demand for cybersecurity technology is often met by private firms
based in the democratic world—a group that Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls the “Corporate Enemies of the Internet.” Hacking Team, an
Italian firm mentioned in the RSF report, is just one example: The Guardian reports that leaked internal documents suggest Hacking Team’s clients include the
“in a world where
‘Big Brother’ and ‘Big Data’ share so many of the same needs, the political economy of cybersecurity
must be singled out as a major driver of resurgent authoritarianism in cyberspace.”
governments of “Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.” Deibert writes that
Given these powerful forces, it will be difficult to reverse the authoritarian surge in cyberspace. Deibert offers some possible solutions: for starters, he writes that the
“political economy of cybersecurity” can be altered through stronger export controls, “smart sanctions,” and a monitoring system to detect abuses. Further, he
recommends that cybersecurity trade fairs open their doors to civil society watchdogs who can help hold governments and the private sector accountable.
Similarly, Deibert suggests that opening regional cybersecurity initiatives to civil society participation could mitigate violations of user rights. This might seem unlikely
to occur within some authoritarian-led intergovernmental organizations, but setting a normative expectation of civil society participation might help discredit the efforts
of bad actors.
Deibert concludes with a final recommendation that society develop “models of cyberspace security that
can show us how to prevent disruptions or threats to life and property without sacrificing liberties and
rights.” This might restore democratic states to the moral high ground and remove oppressive regimes’
rhetorical cover, but developing such models will require confronting powerful vested interests and seriously examining
the tradeoff between cybersecurity and Internet freedom. Doing so would be worth it: the Internet is far
too important to cede to authoritarian control.
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4. The spread of democracy prevents nuclear war.
Sharansky, Israel’s Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affair, 2004,
(Nathan, The Case for Democracy, p. 88
Now we can see why nondemocratic
regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling
their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression
and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured. The result is that while the mechanics of democracy
make democracies inherently peaceful, the mechanics of tyranny make nondemocracies inherently beliligerent. Indeed, in
order to avoid collapsing from within, fear societies must maintain a perpetual state of conflict. Nondemocratic societies have always
been powder kegs ready to explode, but today the force of that explosion can be far more lethal than it was in the past. In an age of weapons of mass
destruction and global terrorism, the dangers of ignoring the absence of democracy in any part of the
world have increased dramatically. For a half century, the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang has threatened the security of South Korea. Once it
developed long-range missiles, it threatened the security of neighboring Japan and endangered other countries with the proliferation of ballistic missile technology.
Now that Pyongyang has reportedly developed nuclear weapons— weapons that can be provided to international terrorist
organizations—it endangers the security of the entire world. The threat posed by North Korea is not a function of the increase of the
destructive capacity of its weapons. Rather, it is the enhanced capacity of its weapons coupled with the nature of its regime that is the source of the problem. Just as
nuclear weapons in the hands of a democratizing Russia do not pose the same threat as they did in the
hands of the Soviet Union, the weapons of a democratic North Korea would pose no greater danger to the
world than if they would be in the hands of a democratic South Korea. In the hands of leaders whose power is dependent on people who see war as a last resort,
weapons of mass destruction will be a weapon of last resort. But in the hands of leaders whose survival depends on maintaining a
constant state of tension, the danger of these weapons being used directly, or via terrorist proxies,
increases enormously. That is not to say that nondemocratic regimes will never sign peace agreements. From time to time, if it suits their interests, they
will. But we must remember that for these regimes, the decision to wage war or make peace is not based upon its impact on the public welfare but on whether it
strengthens the regime’s control. To democratic governments, whose power is ultimately dependent on the popular will, peace is always an interest. To nondemocratic
regimes, peace and war are merely interchangeable methods of subjugation. One day staying in power will necessitate making peace. The next, it will necessitate
waging war. That is why a genuine and lasting peace can only be made with democracies.
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Answers to NSA not Invasive
(___)
(__) Section 702 is a unique invasion of privacy, incidental collection is extremely broad and
poorly defined.
Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security at Center for Democracy and
Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy
& Technology., 7-22-2014, https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significantsection-702-reform/
Section 702 Surveillance Is Fundamentally More Invasive
While incidental collection of the communications of a person who communicates with a target is an inevitable
feature of communications surveillance, it is tolerated when the reason for the surveillance is compelling and
adequate procedural checks are in place. In other instances of communications surveillance conducted in
the US, surveillance requires court approval of a target, and that target must be a suspected wrongdoer
or spy, a terrorist, or another agent of a foreign power. Section 702 requires neither of these elements.
Under Section 702, targeting can occur for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information even
though there is no court review of any particular target. Instead, the super secret FISA court merely
determines whether the guidelines under which the surveillance is conducted are reasonably designed to result
in the targeting of non-Americans abroad and that “minimization guidelines” are reasonable. This means
incidental surveillance may occur purely because someone communicated with an individual engaged in
activities that may have broadly defined “foreign intelligence” value. For example, the communications of
someone who communicates with a person abroad whose activities might relate to the conduct of U.S.
foreign affairs can be collected, absent any independent assessment of necessity or accuracy.
As another example, under traditional FISA – for intelligence surveillance in the U.S. of people in the U.S. –
your communications could be incidentally collected only if you were in direct contact with a suspected agent
of a foreign power, and additionally if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had affirmed this suspicion
based on probable cause. Under Section 702, your personal information could be scooped up by the NSA
simply because your attorney, doctor, lover, or accountant was a person abroad who engaged in peaceful
political activity such as protesting a G8 summit.
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Answers to NSA not Invasive
(___)
(___) NSA programs can access online user accounts and personal communication across the
globe.
Gellman, Washington Post Staff Write, 2014
Barton 7-5-2014, "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are,"
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-nottargeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly
intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health
crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000
account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless. In order to allow time for analysis and
outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of
intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the
broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government
officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instantmessage conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online
accounts. The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the
NSA’s domestic collection. Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes
wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods
that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named
PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading
Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses
the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks. No government oversight body, including the Justice
Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy
and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually
collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.
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Answer to Privacy Invasions Inevitable
(___)
(__) Privacy is not dead, its just complex – we need to figure out the balance.
Richards, Professor of Law, Washington University. 2015,
Neil M., “Four Privacy Myths” Revised form, "A World Without Privacy?" (Cambridge Press, Austin Sarat, ed.
2015), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2427808
My purpose in these examples is not to pick on these organizations. On the contrary, when used appropriately,
privacy rules like trade and government secret protection can advance important social interests. I am
trying instead to make a point that is easy to overlook: When the very entities that are used as examplars of
the “Death of Privacy” use suites of robust legal tools to preserve their own privacy, it makes no sense to
claim that privacy is dead. On the contrary, these examples show that privacy is a complex phenomenon,
and that we should be talking about the balance between different kinds of privacies and different rules
for managing flows of information rather than privacy’s demise. When viewed from this perspective,
neither Facebook nor the NSA reject privacy; on the contrary, they have a complicated relationship to
privacy, embracing (like to many other people and institutions) privacy for themselves but somewhat less
privacy for others, especially where they have institutional incentives to make money or protect
government interests.
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Answers to “Corporations violate privacy ”
(___)
(__) Government surveillance is much more important than private surveillance – it has a
greater reach and far more powerful consequences attached.
Heymann, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, 2015,
(Philip B, “An Essay On Domestic Surveillance” Lawfare Research Paper Series Vol 3.2,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Lawfare-Philip-Heymann-SURVEILLANCE-forpubl-10-May-2015.pdf)
Is Government Surveillance Particularly Important? Why should we care particularly about government
surveillance in a world where private surveillance on the internet and the information and predictions
that can be derived from a mass of such information are driving much of the economy of the internet as
companies seek knowledge useful for developing and selling new products?
Government surveillance has far greater reach. FBI and other law enforcement agents can – without any
need of a predicate or judicial warrant – do whatever private individuals are allowed to do to discover
information, using one of the “not-a-search” exceptions. But they can do much more. They can demand, with
the assistance of a federal prosecutor, any records that “might” be useful to a grand jury – a standard much more
far-reaching than probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The government can be, and is, empowered to
demand access to any records kept by third parties, including the vast array of electronic records now
kept by businesses about their customers. What private businesses can obtain by requiring a waiver of
privacy rights as a condition of access to their goods or services, the government can also obtain without
even that strained form of consent and without the alerting knowledge that consent gives to the individual
being monitored.
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Answers to “Corporations violate privacy ”
(__) Government surveillance is worse – there’s no opt-out and government force carries greater
weight.
Fung, covers technology for The Washington, 2013
(Brian, “Yes, there actually is a huge difference between government and corporate surveillance” – Washington
Post - November 4, 2013 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/yes-there-actuallyis-a-huge-difference-between-government-and-corporate-surveillance/)
Yes, there actually is a huge difference between government and corporate surveillance When it comes to
your online privacy — or what little is left of it — businesses and governments act in some pretty similar
ways. They track your credit card purchases. They mine your e-mail for information about you. They may
even monitor your movements in the real world. Corporate and government surveillance also diverge in
important ways. Companies are looking to make money off of you, while the government aims to prevent
attacks that would halt that commercial activity (along with some other things). But the biggest difference
between the two has almost no relation to who's doing the surveillance and everything to do with your options
in response. Last week, we asked you whether you'd changed your online behavior as a result of this year's
extended national conversation about privacy — and if so, which form of snooping annoyed you more. Looking
through the responses so far, this one caught my eye: The government because I can't *choose* not to be spied
on by them. The government also has the power to kill or imprison me which no private company has. I
am a firm believer that our founding fathers created a system that respected individual privacy and to see it
eroded by the federal government concerns me deeply. I am a strong believer in the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th
amendments. Putting aside the government's power to capture or kill, your inability to refuse the government
is what distinguishes the NSA from even the nosiest companies on Earth. In a functioning marketplace,
boycotting a company that you dislike — for whatever reason — is fairly easy. Diners who object to eating
fake meat can stop frequenting Taco Bell. Internet users that don't like Google collecting their search terms
can try duckduckgo, an anonymous search engine. By contrast, it's nearly impossible to simply pick up
your belongings and quit the United States. For most people, that would carry some significant costs —
quitting your job, for instance, or disrupting your children's education, or leaving friends and family. Those
costs can be high enough to outweigh the benefits of recovering some hard-to-measure modicum of privacy.
Besides, leaving the country would ironically expose you to even greater risk of surveillance, since you'd no
longer be covered by the legal protections granted to people (even foreign terror suspects) that arrive to U.S.
shores. There are still some ways to shield yourself from the NSA. To the best of our knowledge, the
government has yet to crack the encryption protocols behind Tor, the online traffic anonymizing service. But
Tor's users are also inherently the object of greater suspicion precisely because they're making efforts to cover
their tracks. In the business world, no single company owns a monopoly over your privacy. The same can't
really be said about the government.
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Answers to “Corporations violate privacy ”
(___)
(__) Government violations are worse. Even if they’re now - corporate privacy violations
shouldn’t condone government violations.
Sklansky, Professor of Law. UCLA, 2002
(David A. “BACK TO THE FUTURE: KYLLO, KATZ, AND COMMON LAW” - University of California,
Los Angeles School of Law Research Paper Series. Mississippi Law Journal, Forthcoming Research Paper No.
02-17 - July 27. 2002 - www.isrcl.org/Papers/sklansky.pdf)
There are two relatively straightforward ways out of this dilemma, but both would require the Supreme Court to
rethink certain aspects of Fourth Amendment law.252 The first and simplest way out would be to recognize that
government surveillance differs from private snooping, and therefore that the latter, no matter how
common, should not eliminate protection against the former. This was the approach one lower court took
when it found that government agents intruded on a reasonable expectation of privacy by using a telescope to
peer into a suspect's apartment. The court expressly rejected the government's claim that any expectation of
privacy was rendered unreasonable by the widespread use of telescopes by private citizens to spy on people
living in high-rises. Private snooping, the court reasoned, had "no bearing" on the legality of government
surveillance, because the government spies "for different purposes than private citizens." and sometimes
"with more zeal." Accordingly, a person's "lack of concern about intrusions from private sources has
little to do with an expectation of freedom from systematic governmental surveillance," and "[t]he fact
that Peeping Toms abound does not license the government to follow suit."253
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Answers to Security Comes First
(___)
(__) Can’t trade privacy for security, rights are presumptively more important.
Moore, Associate Professor Information School Program on Values in Society University of
Washington, 2011
(Adam D. "Privacy, security, and government surveillance: WikiLeaks and the new accountability." Public
Affairs Quarterly (2011): 141-156.)
One could easily challenge Premise 2—there are numerous harms associated with allowing surveillance that are
conveniently minimized or forgotten by the "nothing to hide" crowd. Daniel Solove notes that "privacy is
threatened not by singular egregious acts but by a slow series of small, relatively minor acts, which
gradually begin to add up."24 Solove also points out, as I have already highlighted, that giving governments
too much power undermines the mission of providing for security—the government itself becomes the
threat to security. The point was put nicely by John Locke: "This is to think, that Men are so foolish, that they
take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety,
to be devoured by Lions."25 It is also important to note the risk of mischief associated with criminals and
terrorists compared to the kinds of mischief perpetrated by governments—even our government. In cases
where there is a lack of accountability provisions and independent oversight, governments may pose the
greater security risk.
Moreover, there is sensitive personal information that we each justifiably withhold from others, not because it
points toward criminal activity, but because others simply have no right to access this information. Consider
someone's sexual or medical history. Imagine someone visiting a library to learn about alternative lifestyles not
accepted by the majority. Hiding one's curiosity about, for example, a gay lifestyle may be important in certain
contexts. This is true of all sorts of personal information like religious preferences or political party affiliations.
Consider a slight variation of a "nothing to hide" argument related to what might be called physical privacy.
Suppose there was a way to complete body cavity searches without harming the target or being more than a
mere nuisance. Perhaps we search the targets after they have passed out drunk. Would anyone find it plausible
to maintain a "nothing to hide" view in this case? I think not—and the reason might be that we are more
confident in upholding these rights and policies that protect these rights than we are of almost any cost-benefit
analysis related to security. Whether rights are viewed as strategic rules that guide us to the best
consequences, as Mill would argue, or understood as deontic constraints on consequentialist sorts of
reasoning, we are more confident in them than in almost any "social good" calculation. I am not saying
that rights are absolute—they are just presumptively weighty. This line of argument is an attack on the first
premise of the "nothing to hide" position. Rights are resistant to straightforward cost-benefit or
consequentialist sort of arguments. Here we are rejecting the view that privacy interests are the sorts of
things that can be traded for security.
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Answers to Security Comes First
(___)
(__) Security does not trump privacy.
Moore, Associate Professor Information School Program on Values in Society University of
Washington, 2011
(Adam D. "Privacy, security, and government surveillance: WikiLeaks and the new accountability." Public
Affairs Quarterly (2011): 141-156.)
The "Nothing to Hide" Argument
According to what might be called the “security trumps” view, whenever privacy and security conflict,
security wins—that is, security is more fundamental and valuable than privacy. First, without arguments, it
is not clear why a “security trumps” view should be adopted over a “privacy trumps” view. Privacy or perhaps
self-ownership seems at least as fundamental or intuitively weighty as security. Foreshadowing things to
come, it is not at all clear—at least in some cases—that privacy does not enhance security and vice versa.
Suppose that rights afforded their holders specific sorts of powers. For example, Fred’s privacy rights generate
in him a god-like power to completely control access to his body and to information about him. If we had such
powers, we would also have increased security. Furthermore, if we had complete security in our bodies and
property, including informational security, we would have secured privacy as well. The tension between
privacy and security arises because these values cannot be protected by individuals acting alone.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that as these services are contracted out to other agents, like
governments, we grant these parties power over us—power that may undermine security and privacy.
Continuing with the “security trumps” argument, it would seem odd to maintain that any increase in security
should be preferred to any increase in privacy or any decrease in privacy is to be preferred to any
decrease in security. Such a view would sanction massive violations of privacy for mere incremental and
perhaps momentary gains in security. Also, given that others will provide security and power is likely a
necessary part of providing security, we have strong prudential reasons to reject the “security trumps” view. If
those who provide security were saints, then perhaps there would be little to worry about. The cases
already presented are sufficient to show that we are not dealing with saints.
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Answers to “Posner – Balancing Good”
(___)
(__) The Constitution enshrines fundamental principles as side constraints that guide cost-benefit
policy analysis. It’s not just a question of balancing — Posner is wrong.
Cole, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, 2007
(David, 2007 (“‘How to Skip the Constitution’: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, January 11th,
Available Online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jan/11/how-to-skip-the-constitution-anexchange/, Accessed 06-28-2015)
More generally, Judge Posner shies away from his own constitutional theory when he says that to declare a
practice constitutional is not the same as saying that it is desirable as a policy matter. That is certainly true as a
theoretical matter, at least where one’s constitutional theory is not reducible to one’s policy preferences. But as
my review points out, Posner views questions of constitutionality as simply a matter of weighing all the
costs and benefits, which is surely the same utilitarian calculus the policymaker would use to determine
whether a practice is desirable. Under Posner’s approach, then, it’s hard to see why there would be any
room between what is desirable and what is constitutional.
Judge Posner accuses me, in effect, of subscribing to the same constitutionalism-as-policy approach that he uses
by asserting, without evidentiary support, that my constitutional views simply track my own policy preferences;
“the rest is rhetoric.” But I believe that there is a critical distinction between constitutionalism and mere
policy preferences. In fact, our Constitution gives judges the authority to declare acts of democratically
elected officials unconstitutional on the understanding that they do not simply engage in the same costbenefit analyses that politicians and economists undertake.
My own view is that the very sources Judge Posner dismisses—text, precedent, tradition, and reason—are
absolutely essential to principled constitutional decision-making. Posner suggests that because none of
these elements necessarily provides a determinate answer to difficult questions, we may as well abandon
them for his seat-of-the-pants, cost-benefit approach. It is true that text, precedent, tradition, and reason
do not determine results in some mechanistic way. That is why we ask judges, not machines, to decide
constitutional cases. But these sources are nonetheless critically important constraints on and guides to
constitutional decision-making. They are what identify those principles that have been deemed
fundamental—and therefore constitutional—over our collective history. That there are differences over
principle in no way excludes the need for reasoned argument about them.
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Answers to Mass Surveillance Solves Discrimination
(__)
(__) No, Mass Surveillance is discriminatory – privacy is critical to stop this.
Richards, Professor of Law, Washington University. 2015,
Neil M., “Four Privacy Myths” Revised form, "A World Without Privacy?" (Cambridge Press, Austin Sarat, ed.
2015), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2427808
On the one hand, the increased efficiency of sorting enabled by the information revolution has many useful
applications. Largedataset analytics has many powerful applications that don’t even use personal data, such as
weather and traffic forecasting, the design of better automotive components, spell-checkers, and search
engines.77 Analytics based on personal data are useful, too, enabling better decisions in the medical, credit and
insurance contexts, as well as the prevention of terrorism and other crimes.78 But this increased power to sort
can be used for bad or morally ambiguous purposes as well. Lawyers have another word for this kind of
sorting, which is “discrimination.” Consider the use of consumer profiles to determine the likelihood we
would buy products at a given price. Such relatively simple analytic techniques could enable a website (say, like
Amazon.com) in which all prices were optimized to the highest value we might be willing to pay.
Sophisticated analytics could also raise the spectre of a new kind of “redlining” – the denial or
discrimination of services to people on the basis of race or other suspect criteria. Of course, predictive
analytics need not use race directly; they could be designed to ignore race and use other variables that correlate
with race. Or perhaps such algorithms might not use race indirectly, but impose a brutal individualized
economic rationalism upon us all as consumers and citizens.
Thankfully, the strong form of that society is not upon us yet, but some of its weaker cousins are. And if we
dismiss the problems caused by privacy or personal data as nothing more than bad people hiding bad
deeds, we will miss the transformative power effects of the digital revolution entirely. For better or worse,
we use the term “privacy” as a shorthand to capture all of the issues raised by personal data. As a result,
privacy is not just for those of us with something to hide. Of course, we all have something to hide. But more
fundamentally, questions of privacy include many of the most fundamental questions of civil liberties,
economic, and political power in a digital society. From that perspective, privacy is for everyone.
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Answers to Mass Surveillance Solves Discrimination
(__)
(__) Surveillance exacerbates existing inequality.
Magi, Librarian, University of Vermont- Burlington, 2011
(Trina J. "Fourteen Reasons Privacy Matters: A Multidisciplinary Review of Scholarly Literature1." The
Library 81.2 (2011)
Privacy helps prevent sorting of people into categories that can lead to lost opportunities and deeper
inequalities.—Many scholars are concerned that the gathering of data about individuals and the sorting of
people into categories can lead to lost opportunities, deeper inequalities, destabilized political action, and
victimization by error, oversimplification, and decontextualization. Using the panopticon metaphor, Gandy
discusses what he calls the “panoptic sort,” a “discriminatory process that sorts individuals on the basis
of their estimated value or worth” and “reaches into every aspect of individuals’ lives in their roles as
citizens, employees, and consumers” [33, p. 1]. Gandy claims the panoptic sort is a defensive technology more
concerned with avoiding risk and loss than with realizing a gain [33, p. 17]. Such sorting has been facilitated by
computer technology that has made it cost-effective to collect, store, and analyze data, and match it with other
data sets. Gandy is troubled by the fact that those in power use this information to predict future behavior of an
individual not on the basis of the behavior of that particular individual but rather on the more general basis of
the past behavior of other individuals in the group or class to which the person has been assigned based on some
attributes [33, p. 144]. Based on this sorting, individuals will be presented with limited options from which
to choose, leading to an increased knowledge gap between the haves and the have-nots and a generalized
lowering of the average level of public understanding [33, p. 2]. Reiman agrees that the panopticon is a more
fitting metaphor than the fishbowl for this new threat to privacy, because the modern means of collecting
information gathers various publicly observable activities that are dispersed over space and time and makes
them visible from a single point [27, p. 196]. Many writers express concern about the way administrative
systems for collecting data about people must necessarily oversimplify the nature of individuals and
communities. James Scott says “a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily
yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae” [35, p. 23], yet when governments collect standardized records
and documents, the information in these records easily becomes the only information to be considered by
the state. “An error in such a document can have far more power—and for far longer—than can an
unreported truth,” he says [35, p. 83].
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Privacy is a Gateway Right
(__) Privacy is a gateway right. Surveillance threatens it.
PoKempne, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, 2014,
(Dinah, , “The Right Whose Time Has Come (Again): Privacy in the Age of Surveillance” 1/21/14
http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/essays/privacy-in-age-of-surveillance)
Technology has invaded the sacred precincts of private life, and unwarranted exposure has imperiled our
security, dignity, and most basic values. The law must rise to the occasion and protect our rights.
Does this sound familiar?
So argued Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article announcing
“The Right to Privacy.” We are again at such a juncture. The technological developments they saw as
menacing—photography and the rise of the mass circulation press—appear rather quaint to us now. But the
harms to emotional, psychological, and even physical security from unwanted exposure seem just as vivid in
our digital age.
Our renewed sense of vulnerability comes as almost all aspects of daily social life migrate online. At the
same time, corporations and governments have acquired frightening abilities to amass and search these endless
digital records, giving them the power to “know” us in extraordinary detail.
In a world where we share our lives on social media and trade immense amounts of personal information for the
ease and convenience of online living, some have questioned whether privacy is a relevant concept. It is not just
relevant, but crucial.
Indeed, privacy is a gateway right that affects our ability to exercise almost every other right, not least
our freedom to speak and associate with those we choose, make political choices, practice our religious
beliefs, seek medical help, access education, figure out whom we love, and create our family life. It is
nothing less than the shelter in which we work out what we think and who we are; a fulcrum of our
autonomy as individuals.
The importance of privacy, a right we often take for granted, was thrown into sharp relief in 2013 by the
steady stream of revelations from United States government files released by former National Security Agency
(NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, and published in the Guardian and other major newspapers around the
world. These revelations, supported by highly classified documents, showed the US, the UK, and other
governments engaged in global indiscriminate data interception, largely unchecked by any meaningful
legal constraint or oversight, without regard for the rights of millions of people who were not suspected of
wrongdoing.
The promise of the digital age is the effortless, borderless ability to share information. That is its threat as well.
As the world’s information moves into cyberspace, surveillance capabilities have grown commensurately.
The US now leads in ability for global data capture, but other nations and actors are likely to catch up, and
some already insist that more data be kept within their reach. In the end, there will be no safe haven if privacy is
seen as a strictly domestic issue, subject to many carve-outs and lax or non-existent oversight.
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Privacy is key to Autonomy
(___)
(__) Privacy links rational agency and moral autonomy.
Magi, Librarian, University of Vermont- Burlington, 2011
(Trina J. "Fourteen Reasons Privacy Matters: A Multidisciplinary Review of Scholarly Literature1." The
Library 81.2 (2011).
Gavison admits that there have always been some autonomous individuals in totalitarian societies, and therefore
privacy may not be necessary for autonomy. But she says the fact that most people require privacy is enough to
justify it as a value, because “we are not all giants, and societies should enable all, not only the exceptional, to
seek moral autonomy” [16, p. 450]. Charles Fried describes a “most basic” form of complete privacy in
which privacy serves not to protect things we will share only with friends but to protect certain thoughts
from the whole world. Although the sharing of certain thoughts with a lover or friend, he says, would be a
“hostile act,” the thinking of those thoughts is completely consistent with friendship and love because “these
thoughts, prior to being given expression, are mere unratified possibilities for action” [29, p. 485]. Only when
we express thoughts do we adopt them and choose to make them part of ourselves, he says, and this is
why privacy is essential to the freedom to define ourselves. Julie Inness also talks about privacy providing a
sphere of autonomy in which a person can develop a self-concept as an originator of love, liking, and care [30,
p. 107].
In their theory of privacy as a fundamental moral right, Alfino and Mayes contend that a person requires
personal space in order to reason about his/her choices, that reasoning activity is what links rational
agency and moral autonomy, and that to deprive a person of her ability to reason is to fundamentally
interfere with a person’s capacity for self-government. According to this framework, privacy is “the
condition of having secured one’s personal space, by which we mean the right to exercise our practical
reason without undue interference from others” [18]
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Surveillance Hurts Freedom
(___)
(__) Surveillance threatens human freedom and dignity.
Cohen, Ph.D., ethicist and political analyst, 2014
(Elliot D.. Technology of Oppression: Preserving Freedom and Dignity in an Age of Mass, Warrantless
Surveillance.. DOI: 10.1057/9781137408211.0011. )
The threat posed by mass, warrantless surveillance technologies
Presently, such a threat to human freedom and dignity lies in the technological erosion of human privacy
through the ever-evolving development and deployment of a global, government system of mass,
warrantless surveillance. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a systematic means of spying on, and
ultimately manipulating and controlling, virtually every aspect of everybody's private life—a
thoroughgoing, global dissolution of personal space, which is supposed to be legally protected. In such a
governmental state of "total (or virtually total) information awareness," the potential for government
control and manipulation of the people's deepest and most personal beliefs, feelings, and values can
transform into an Orwellian reality—and nightmare.
As will be discussed in Chapter 6, the technology that has the potential to remove such scenarios from the realm
of science fiction to that of true science is currently being developed. This is not to deny the legitimate
government interest in "national security"; however, the exceptional disruption of privacy for legitimate
state reasons cannot and should not be mistaken for a usual and customary rule of mass invasion of
people's private lives without their informed consent. Benjamin Franklin wisely and succinctly expressed
the point: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." In
relinquishing our privacy to government, we also lose the freedom to control, and act on, our personal
information, which is what defines us individually, and collectively, as free agents and a free nation. In a
world devoid of freedom to control who we are, proclaiming that we are "secure" is an empty platitude.
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Surveillance Hurts Freedom
(__) Government Surveillance risks total invasion of liberty.
Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School 15
(Bruce, Inc 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. P.
106)
The biggest cost is liberty, and the risk is real enough that people across political ideologies are objecting
to the sheer invasiveness and pervasiveness of the surveillance system. Even the politically conservative and
probusiness Economist magazine argued, in a 2013 editorial about video surveillance, that it had gone too far:
"This is where one of this newspaper's strongly held beliefs that technological progress should generally be
welcomed, not feared, runs up against an even deeper impulse, in favour of liberty. Freedom has to include
some right to privacy: if every move you make is being chronicled, liberty is curtailed.'
ACCUSATION BY DATA
In the 17th century, the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "Show me six lines written by the
most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.
Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police in the old Soviet Union, declared, "Show me the man,
and I'll show you the crime." Both were saying the same thing: if you have enough data about someone,
you can find sufficient evidence to find him guilty of something. It's the reason many countries' courts
prohibit the police from engaging in "fishing expeditions." It's the reason the US Constitution specifically
prohibits general warrants documents that basically allow the police to search for anything. General
warrants can be extremely abusive; they were used by the British in colonial America as a form of social
control.
Ubiquitous surveillance means that anyone could be convicted of lawbreaking, once the police set their
minds to it. It is incredibly dangerous to live in a world where everything you do can be stored and brought
forward as evidence against you at some later date. There is significant danger in allowing the police to dig
into these large data sets and find "evidence" of wrongdoing, especially in a country like the US with so
many vague and punitive laws, which give prosecutors discretion over whom to charge with what, and
with overly broad material witness laws. This is especially true given the expansion of the legally loaded
terms "terrorism," to include conventional criminals, and "weapons of mass destruction," to include almost
anything, including a sawed-off shotgun. The US terminology is so broad that someone who donates $10 to
Hamas's humanitarian arm could be considered a terrorist.
Surveillance puts us at risk of abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of
surveillance. The definition of "wrong" is often arbitrary, and can quickly change. For example, in the US
in the 1930s, being a Communist or Socialist was a bit of an intellectual fad, and not considered wrong among
the educated classes. In the 1950s, that changed dramatically with the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy,
when many intelligent, principled American citizens found their careers destroyed once their political history
was publicly disclosed. Is someone's reading of Occupy, Tea Party, animal rights, or gun rights websites
going to become evidence of subversion in five to ten years?
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Surveillance causes a Chilling Effect
(___)
(__) Surveillance creates conformity, that chills dissent.
Desai, Associate Professor of Law and Ethics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014
Deven "Constitutional Limits on Surveillance: Associational Freedom in the Age of Data Hoarding." Notre
Dame L. Rev. 90 (2014): 579.
As scholars of association might say, with surveillance the room to disagree about what the common good
is diminishes. n261 [*623] One way to think of the problem is as the need for anonymity. Christopher
Slobogin has explained that perspective: "Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open
society. Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society." n262 He calls this
problem "public privacy." n263 That seeming oxymoron captures the need to be public, yet private from
government oversight. It is anonymity to the government that matters. That anonymity may be based on
protections from direct surveillance or protections from the government accessing third party, private sector
records of recent and past communications and acts. Julie Cohen has shown why that is so. n264 Surveillance
changes behaviors, because "the experience of being watched will constrain, ex ante, the acceptable
spectrum of belief and behavior." n265 Instead of robust, diverse, and challenging ideas, we will favor the
"the bland and the mainstream." n266 We end up with a diminished "capacity to act and to decide,"
which leads to "the highest possible degree of compliance with [what the state determines is] the model ...
citizen." n267 This problem is a type of chilling effect. n268
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Surveillance causes a Chilling Effect
(___)
(__) Surveillance destroys democracy because it chills free expression and dissent.
Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School 15
(Bruce, Inc 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. P.
190)
Surveillance has a potentially enormous chilling effect on society. US Supreme Court Justice Sonia
Sotomayor recognized this in her concurring opinion in a 2012 case about the FBI's installing a GPS tracker in
someone's car. Her comments were much broader: "Awareness that the Government may be watching chills
associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government's unrestrained power to assemble data that
reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making
available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantity of intimate information about any person whom the
Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and
government in a way that is inimical to democratic society. “ Columbia University law professor Eben
Moglen wrote that "omnipresent invasive listening creates fear. And that fear is the enemy of reasoned,
ordered liberty." Surveillance is a tactic of intimidation.
In the US, we already see the beginnings of this chilling effect. According to a Human Rights Watch report,
journalists covering stories on the intelligence community, national security, and law enforcement have
been significantly hampered by government surveillance. Sources are less likely to contact them, and they
themselves are worried about being prosecuted. Human Rights Watch concludes that stories in the national
interest that need to be reported don't get reported, and that the public is less informed as a result. That's
the chilling effect right there. Lawyers working on cases where there is some intelligence interest—foreign
government clients, drugs, terrorism—are also affected. Like journalists, they worry that their conversations are
monitored and that discussions with their clients will find their way into the prosecution's hands.
Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain
subjects; they’re careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad. A Pew Research
Center study conducted just after the first Snowden articles were published found that people didn't want to talk
about the NSA online. A broader Harris poll found that nearly half of Americans have changed what they
research, talk about, and write about because of NSA surveillance. Surveillance has chilled Internet use by
Muslim Americans, and by groups like environmentalists, gun-rights activists, drug policy advocates, and
human rights workers. After the Snowden revelations of 2013, people across the world were less likely to
search personally sensitive terms on Google.
A 2014 report from the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights noted, "Even the mere possibility of
communications information being captured creates an interference with privacy, with a potential
chilling effect on rights, including those to free expression and association.
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Fear Magnifies Privacy Loss
(___)
(__) Fear and perception magnify privacy loss.
Heymann, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, 2015,
(Philip B, “An Essay On Domestic Surveillance” Lawfare Research Paper Series Vol 3.2,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Lawfare-Philip-Heymann-SURVEILLANCE-forpubl-10-May-2015.pdf)
The presence of fear, even unreasonable fear, has important effects on the confident and free social and
political life on which democracy depends. Fear of discovery alone could easily affect with whom I
associate, for example, or what use I make of psychiatrists or drugs. The fear is far deeper and more lasting
if a warrant from a judge is not required. Internal agency processes are not an adequate substitute. The deep
suspicions that are valuable in an agency charged with preventing terrorism or preventing crime have a dark
side; they will infect its judgment of when there is a genuine need to see the required information. Important
consequences turn on the citizens’ trust that data the government has acquired will not be used without
there being a “real” need for its use. Much of the population would not trust any such assurance by the NSA
or the FBI alone.
Perceptions of government prying do matter. Whether a dramatic growth in the capacity for, and fruits
of, government surveillance would be experienced as harmful to individual freedom, civil society and
democratic institutions depend on more than how the information would, in fact, be used. Fear also
depends on what other potential uses citizens would suspect; the exercise of individual liberty and
autonomy additionally depend on what citizens suspect might happen with that information and the
precautionary steps – curtailment of entirely lawful activities, for example – citizens might take. Attitudes
toward government and one’s freedoms also depend upon a number of broader contextual factors: the extent of
the perceived danger sought to be prevented; the current level of suspicion or trust in the government; the
history and culture of privacy in the society; and much else. Some few would argue that the loss of privacy
might not be a concern at all. After all, most people do not harbor a crime or a scandal that they must
hide behind claims to privacy; their lives are too proper for that. But those voices are a small minority; for
most people, the value of privacy is to protect the possibility of association and, particularly, intimacy with
others, irrespective of whether one has anything to hide in the way of crime or scandal.
One fact is clear. The fear and the prospect of rapidly expanding government surveillance in the United
States are plainly there on the near horizon. The children of the Snowden age take it for granted that
they are being monitored and they fear the social effects of that monitoring.
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Answer to “Nothing to Hide”
(__)
(__) Privacy is not about hiding bad deeds, but is essential for individuality and selfdetermination,
Richards, Professor of Law, Washington University. 2015,
Neil M., “Four Privacy Myths” Revised form, "A World Without Privacy?" (Cambridge Press, Austin Sarat, ed.
2015), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2427808
A second reason why the “Nothing to Hide” argument is misleading is that it reduces privacy to an individual’s
right to hide big secrets. Such a crude reduction of the issue ignores both the complexity of privacy, as well as
the social value that comes from living in a society that not everything about us is publicly available all of the
time. This is the insight of legal scholar Daniel Solove in his book “Nothing to Hide.” Solove shows how
thinking of privacy as the hiding of discreditable secrets by individuals is a mistake because privacy is
about more than hiding secrets, and can mean a wide variety of things. Moreover, he notes that “privacy is
“often eroded over time, little bits dissolving almost imperceptibly until we finally begin to notice how much is
gone.”64 Privacy, in this view, is a social value rather than merely an individual one. Rather than thinking
about privacy as merely the individual right to hide bad deeds, we should think more broadly about the
kind of society we want to live in. A society in which everyone knew everything about everyone else would
be oppressive because it would place us all under the glare of publicity all the time; there would be no
“free zones for individuals to flourish.”65 Legal scholar Julie Cohen goes further, arguing that privacy is
necessary for humans to be able to decide who they are. In Cohen’s account, our selves are fluid, constantly
being built and changed by our activities, thoughts, and interactions with other people. Privacy, in her view,
shelters the development of our dynamic selves “from the efforts of commercial and government actors to
render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable.” Privacy protects our ability to
manage boundaries between ourselves and others so that self-determination is possible.66 It helps us avoid the
calculating, quantifying tyranny of the majority. Privacy is thus essential for individuality and selfdetermination, with substantial benefits for society.
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Economy Advantage – Internal Link Magnifier
Additionally, NSA surveillance has created a global move towards “data nationalisation” which
threatens to fragment the internet.
Omtzigt, Dutch politician, 2015,
(Pieter Herman “Explanatory memorandum by Mr Pieter Omtzigt, rapporteur” Committee on Legal Affairs and
Human Rights, Mass surveillance Report, 1/26/2015, http://websitepace.net/documents/19838/1085720/20150126-MassSurveillance-EN.pdf)
108. In response to growing discontent with US surveillance, one political response has been to push for
more “technological sovereignty” and “data nationalisation”. The Snowden disclosures have therefore
had serious implications on the development of the Internet and hastened trends to “balkanize” the
Internet to the detriment of the development of a wide, vast and easily accessible online network. The
Internet as we knew it, or believed we knew it, is a global platform for exchange of information, open and
free debate, and commerce. But Brazil and the European Union, for example, announced plans to lay a
$185 million undersea fibre-optic cable between them to thwart US surveillance. German politicians also
called for the development of a “German internet” for German customers’ data to circumvent foreign servers
and the information to stay on networks that would fully be under Germany’s control.
159 Russia passed a law obliging internet companies to store the data of Russian users on servers in
Russia.160 After a six-month inquiry following the Snowden disclosures, the European Parliament adopted a
report on the NSA surveillance programme in February 2014 161, which argues that the EU should suspend
bank data and ‘Safe Harbour’ agreements on data privacy (voluntary data protection standards for non-EU
companies transferring EU citizens’ personal data to the US) with the United States. MEPs added that the
European Parliament should only give its consent to the EU-US free trade deal (TTIP) that is being negotiated,
if the US fully respects EU citizens’ fundamental rights. The European Parliament seeks tough new data
protection rules that would place US companies in the difficult situation of having to check with EU
authorities before complying with mandatory requests made by US authorities. The European Parliament’s
LIBE Committee also advocated the creation of a “European data cloud” that would require all data from
European consumers to be stored or processed within Europe, or even within the individual country of the
consumer concerned. Some nations, such as Australia, France, South Korea, and India, have already
implemented a patchwork of data-localisation requirements according to two legal scholars.162
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Economy Advantage – Internal Link Expander
This regional fragmentation of the internet would collapse the global economy and create the
necessary conditions for global instability.
Jardine, Center for International Governance Innovation Research Fellow, 2014
(Eric, 9-19-2014, "Should the Average Internet User in a Liberal Democracy Care About Internet
Fragmentation? ," Cigi, https://www.cigionline.org/blogs/reimagining-internet/should-average-internet-userliberal-democracy-care-about-internet-fragme)
Even though your average liberal democratic Internet user wouldn’t see it, at least at the content level, the fragmentation
of the Internet would matter a great deal. If the Internet was to break apart into regional or even national
blocks, there would be large economic costs in terms of lost future potential for global GDP growth . As a
recent McKinsey & Company report illustrates, upwards of 15 to 25 percent of Global GDP is currently
determined by the movement of goods, money, people and data. These global flows (which admittedly include
more than just data flows) contribute yearly between 250 to 400 billion dollars to global GDP growth. The contribution
of global flows to global GDP growth is only likely to grow in the future, provided that the Internet
remains a functionally universal system that works extraordinarily well as a platform for e-commerce. Missing out
on lost GDP growth harms people economically in liberal democratic countries and elsewhere. Average users in the
liberal democracies should care, therefore, about the fragmentation of the broader Internet because it will cost them
dollars and cents, even if the fragmentation of the Internet would not really affect the content that they themselves access.
Additionally, the same Mckinsey & Company report notes that countries that are well connected to the global system have
GDP growth that is up to 40 percent higher than those countries that have fewer connections to the wider world. Like
interest rates, annual GDP growth compounds itself, meaning that early gains grow exponentially. If the non-Western
portions of the Internet wall themselves off from the rest (or even if parts of what we could call the liberal
democratic Internet do the same), the result over the long term will be slower growth and a smaller GDP per
capita in less well-connected nations. Some people might look at this situation and be convinced that excluding
people in non-liberal democracies from the economic potential of the Internet is not right. In normative terms, these
people might deserve to be connected, at the very least so that they can benefit from the same economic boon as those in
more well connected advanced liberal democracies. In other words, average Internet users in liberal democracies should
care about Internet fragmentation because it is essentially an issue of equality of opportunity.
Other people might only be convinced by the idea that poverty, inequality, and relative deprivation, while by no
means sufficient causes of terrorism, insurgency, aggression and unrest, are likely to contribute to the
potential for an increasingly conflictual world. Most average Internet users in Liberal democracies would likely
agree that preventing flashes of unrest (like the current ISIL conflict in Iraq and Syria) is better than having to expend
blood and treasure to try and fix them after they have broken out. Preventive measures can include ensuring solid
GDP growth through global interconnection in every country, even if this is not, as I mentioned before, going to
be enough to fix every problem every time.
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Answers to Hurts Foreign Companies More
(___)
(__) NSA spying has cost American companies billions of dollars.
Donohue, Professor at Georgetown Law Center 2015
Laura, , “High Technology, Consumer Privacy, and U.S. National Security.” (2015). Business Law Review,
Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2563573
The NSA programs, and public awareness of them, have had an immediate and detrimental impact on the
U.S. economy. They have cost U.S. companies billions of dollars in lost sales, even as companies have seen
their market shares decline. American multinational corporations have had to develop new products and
programs to offset the revelations and to build consumer confidence. At the same time, foreign entities have
seen revenues increase. Beyond the immediate impact, the revelation of the programs, and the extent to
which the NSA has penetrated foreign data flows, has undermined U.S. trade agreement negotiations. It
has spurred data localization efforts around the world, and it has raised the spectre of the future role of
the United States in Internet governance. Even if opportunistic, these shifts signal an immediate and longterm impact of the NSA programs, and public knowledge about them, on the U.S. economy.
54/92
NSA Affirmative
Economy Advantage
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Companies won’t leave cloud
(___)
(__) NSA domestic surveillance gave new life global data localization movements which threaten
to undermine the internet economy
Kehl et al, Policy Analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, 2014
(Danielle, New America’s Open Technology Institute Policy Paper, Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on
the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity, July 2014)
Internet jurisdiction and borders were contentious issues long before the Snowden leaks, but the debate
has become significantly more complex in the past year. For decades, the border- less nature of
cyberspace103 has raised concerns about sovereignty and how governments can regulate and access their
citizens’ personal infor- mation or speech when it is stored on servers that may be located all over the world.104
Various data localization and national routing proposals have been put forth by governments that seek great- er
control of the information that flows within their borders, often in order to make censorship and surveillance
over the local population eas- ier.105 On the other side, free speech advocates, technologists, and civil society
organizations generally advocate for a borderless cyberspace governed by its own set of internationally-agreed
upon rules that promote the protection of human rights, individual privacy, and free expression.106 The
revelations about NSA surveillance have heightened concerns on both sides of this debate. But the disclosures
appear to have given new ammunition to proponents of greater governmental control over traffic and
network infrastructure, accelerating the number and scope of national control proposals from both longtime advocates as well as governments with relatively solid track records on human rights.
There are now more than a dozen countries that have introduced or are actively discussing data
localization laws.108 Broadly speaking, data localization can be defined as any measures that “specifically
encumber the transfer of data across national borders,” through rules that prevent or limit these information
flows.109 The data localiza- tion proposals being considered post-Snowden generally require that foreign ICT
companies maintain infrastructure located within a coun- try and store some or all of their data on that country’s
users on local servers.110 Brazil, for example, has proposed that Internet companies like Facebook and Google
must set up local data centers so that they are bound by Brazilian privacy laws.111 The Indian government’s
draft policy would force companies to maintain part of their IT infrastructure in-country, give local authorities
access to the encrypted data on their servers for criminal investigations, and prevent local data from being
moved out of country.112 Germany, Greece, Brunei, and Vietnam have also put forth their own data
sovereignty proposals. Proponents argue that these policies would provide greater security and privacy
protection because local servers and infrastructure can give governments both physical control and legal
jurisdiction over the data being stored on them—although the policies may come with added political and
economic benefits for those countries as well. “Home grown and guaranteed security in data storage, hardware
manufacture, cloud computing services and routing are all part of a new discussion about ‘technological
sovereignty,’” write Mascolo and Scott. “It is both a political response and a marketing op- portunity.” 113 At
the same time, data localization can also facilitate local censorship and surveil- lance, making it easier for
governments to exert control over the Internet infrastructure.
55/92
NSA Affirmative
Economy Advantage
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Tech industry not hurt
(___)
(__) The latest evidence indicates that the tech industry is losing billions. And it has spilled over
to other areas of the economy.
Castro and Mcquinn, Director of the Center for Data Innovation and Research Assistant, 2015
(Daniel & Alan, 6/9/15, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness” “Information Technology & Innovation Foundation”
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subverts-uscompetitiveness
Almost two years ago, ITIF described how revelations about pervasive digital surveillance by the U.S.
intelligence community could severely harm the competitiveness of the United States if foreign customers
turned away from U.S.-made technology and services.1 Since then, U.S. policymakers have failed to take
sufficient action to address these surveillance concerns; in some cases, they have even fanned the flames of
discontent by championing weak information security practices.2 In addition, other countries have used anger
over U.S. government surveillance as a cover for implementing a new wave of protectionist policies
specifically targeting information technology. The combined result is a set of policies both at home and
abroad that sacrifices robust competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector for vague and unconvincing promises of
improved national security.
ITIF estimated in 2013 that even a modest drop in the expected foreign market share for cloud computing
stemming from concerns about U.S. surveillance could cost the United States between $21.5 billion and $35
billion by 2016.3 Since then, it has become clear that the U.S. tech industry as a whole, not just the cloud
computing sector, has under-performed as a result of the Snowden revelations. Therefore, the economic
impact of U.S. surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIF’s initial $35 billion estimate. This report
catalogues a wide range of specific examples of the economic harm that has been done to U.S. businesses. In
short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies. The policy implication of this is clear: Now that
Congress has reformed how the National Security Agency (NSA) collects bulk domestic phone records
and allowed private firms—rather than the government—to collect and store approved data, it is time to
address other controversial digital surveillance activities by the U.S. intelligence community.
The U.S. government’s failure to reform many of the NSA’s surveillance programs has damaged the
competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector and cost it a portion of the global market share.5 This includes
programs such as PRISM—the controversial program authorized by the FISA Amendments Act, which allows
for warrantless access to private-user data on popular online services both in the United States and abroad—and
Bullrun—the NSA’s program to undermine encryption standards both at home and abroad. Foreign companies
have seized on these controversial policies to convince their customers that keeping data at home is safer
than sending it abroad, and foreign governments have pointed to U.S. surveillance as justification for
protectionist policies that require data to be kept within their national borders. In the most extreme cases,
such as in China, foreign governments are using fear of digital surveillance to force companies to surrender
valuable intellectual property, such as source code.6
56/92
NSA Affirmative
Economy Advantage
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Economic Decline Doesn’t Cause War
(___)
(__) Statistics prove decline does cause war
Blomberg & Hess,Professor of Economics at Wellesley & Oberlin respectively, 2002
(Brock & Gregory, February 2002, “The Temporal Links between Conflict and Economic Activity,” Journal of
Conflict Resolution
To begin this temporal “causal” investigation, we first need to develop a statistical framework to estimate the
joint, dynamic determination of the occurrence of internal conflict, external conflict, and growth. Because
conflict is measured as a discrete variable, researchers typically estimate the occurrence as a probability, or if
we consider both internal and external conflict, we can always estimate the joint probability distribution. But are
there similar interpretations of economic activity as a discrete state? Indeed, a broad literature considers the
evolution of states in the economy as the natural progression of phases. In fact, one of the key historical
studies of U.S. and international business cycles, undertaken by Burns and Mitchell (1944), treated the state
of the economy as either an expansion or contraction, on which the National Bureau of Economic
Research’s dating procedure for recessions was founded. 4 The relevance for our study is that breakpoints
in the state of the economy, either expansion or recession, are analogous to break points in peace—internal
or external conflicts.5 Using an unbalanced panel of data covering 152 countries from 1950 to 1992, we
therefore consider the joint determination of internal conflict, external conflict, and the state of the
economy as measured by the aforementioned discrete variables. We find that the relationship between the
variables is not a simple one. Conflict does appear to be highly related to the economy for the entire
sample. However, it seems to be most highly related when considering certain nation-groups. For
nondemocracies or in regions highly populated by nondemocracies, there seems to be an intimate link
between a poor economy and the decision to go to war—both internally and externally. These results
confirm much of the original hypotheses put forth in Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2001)—namely, that there
is compelling evidence of a conditional poverty-conflict trap.
57/92
NSA Affirmative
Economy Advantage
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Cybersecurity Sector Turn
(__)
(__) The mass surveillance model hurts cybersecurity and global Internet freedom.
Kehl et al, Policy Analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, 2014
(Danielle, New America’s Open Technology Institute Policy Paper, Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on
the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity, July 2014)
Costs to Cybersecurity: The NSA has done serious damage to Internet security through its weakening of
key encryption standards, insertion of surveillance backdoors into widely-used hardware and software
products, stockpiling rather than responsibly disclosing information about software security
vulnerabilities, and a variety of offensive hacking operations undermining the overall security of the
global Internet. The U.S. government has already taken some limited steps to mitigate this damage and begin
the slow, difficult process of rebuilding trust in the United States as a responsible steward of the Internet.
But the reform efforts to date have been relatively narrow, focusing primarily on the surveillance programs’
impact on the rights of U.S. citizens. Based on our findings, we recommend that the U.S. government take the
following steps to address the broader concern that the NSA’s programs are impacting our economy, our
foreign relations, and our cybersecurity: Strengthen privacy protections for both Americans and non-Americans,
within the United States and extraterritorially. Provide for increased transparency around government
surveillance, both from the government and companies. Recommit to the Internet Freedom agenda in a way
that directly addresses issues raised by NSA surveillance, including moving toward international humanrights based standards on surveillance. Begin the process of restoring trust in cryptography standards through
the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Ensure that the U.S. government does not undermine
cybersecurity by inserting surveillance backdoors into hardware or software products. Help to eliminate security
vulnerabilities in software, rather than stockpile them. Develop clear policies about whether, when, and under
what legal standards it is permissible for the government to secretly install malware on a computer or in a
network. Separate the offensive and defensive functions of the NSA in order to minimize conflicts of interest.
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NSA Affirmative
Economy Advantage
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to USA Freedom Act Solves
(___)
(__) Freedom Act insufficient to restore US technology reputation
The Nation 15
June 11, 2015, http://www.cfr.org/latin-america-and-the-caribbean/snowden-come-between-us-latinamerica/p31109, “New Headlight;Study shows cost of whistle-blower Snowden's revelations to US tech firms”
US technology companies are getting hit harder than anticipated by revelations about surveillance
programmes led by the National Security Agency, a study showed yesterday. The study by the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think-tank, said the impact would be greater than its
estimate nearly two years ago of losses for the cloud- computing sector. In 2013, the think-tank estimated that
US cloud computing firms could lose between $22 billion and $35 billion (Bt739.8 billion and Bt1.1 trillion) in
overseas business over three years. It now appears impossible to quantify the economic damage because the
entire sector has been tarnished by the scandal from revelations in documents leaked by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden, the report said. "These revelations have fundamentally shaken international
trust in US tech companies and hurt US business prospects all over the world," the report said. Study coauthor Daniel Castro said the impact is now open-ended, with the NSA scandal having tarnished a wide range
of US tech firms. Since 2013, he said, "we haven't turned this around; it's not just cloud companies. It's all
tech firms implicated by this," he said. "It doesn't show any signs of stopping." @New Subhead;New law
insufficient @BT New Screen/briefs Text - no indent;The report said foreign customers are increasingly
shunning US companies, and governments around the world "are using US surveillance as an excuse to enact a
new wave of protectionist policies". One survey cited by the researchers found 25 per cent of businesses in
Britain and Canada planned to pull company data out of the United States as a result of the NSA revelations.
Some companies in Europe do not want their data hosted in North America due to these concerns, the
researchers said. Meanwhile, foreign companies have used the revelations as a marketing opportunity.
"There is also an increasingly distressing trend of countries, such as Australia, China, Russia, and India,
passing laws that prevent their citizens' personal information from leaving the country's borders,
effectively mandating that cloud computing firms build data centres in those countries or risk losing access to
their markets." The report said several US tech firms including Apple and Salesforce have already started to
build data centres abroad "to appease foreign watchdogs and privacy advocates". While this "data nationalism"
may create some jobs in the short term, Castro said that countries enacting these policies "are hurting
themselves in the long term by cutting themselves off from the best technology". Castro said the passage of a
reform measure last week called the USA Freedom Act is not sufficient to repair the reputation of US tech
firms. The report recommends further reforms including boosting transparency of surveillance practices,
opposing government efforts to weaken encryption and strengthening its mutual legal assistance treaties with
other nations. "Over the last few years, the US government's failure to meaningfully reform its surveillance
practices has taken a serious economic toll on the US tech sector and the total cost continues to grow each day,"
Castro said. Castro said the USA Freedom Act, which curbs bulk data collection among its reforms, is "good
legislation and a step in the right direction. We have ignored the economic impact of US surveillance".
59/92
NSA Affirmative
Internet Freedom Advantage
NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Internet Freedom Doesn’t Spur Democracy
(___)
(__) US norms on internet freedom can change global behavior. Not all nations are holdouts and
plan still moves the needle everywhere.
Fontaine and Rogers, Senior Fellow & Research Assocaite at the Center for New American
Security, 2011
(Richard & Will, “Internet Freedom A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age” – June, 2011 http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_InternetFreedom_FontaineRogers_0.pdf
The Bush and Obama administrations have both sought to promote Internet freedom by shaping
international norms. Developing international norms is a long-term, global objective. Some countries that
currently repress that Internet access – like China, Iran and Burma – are unlikely to be moved by
normative trends in the near term; statements at the United Nations and policy declarations supporting
Internet freedom are highly unlikely to change their current policies. But promoting Internet freedom is not
only a near-term effort, and current efforts may pay off in the long run. Many countries have not yet fully
developed their own Internet policies or thought through all of the implications of Internet freedom and
repression even in the short run – including states in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Shaping
the behavior of those states should be an important goal of the United States and likeminded partners.
(__) Internet freedom solves. It is key to global democracy.
Tkacheva et al., Researchers at the RAND Corporation, 2013
(Olesya, and Lowell H. Schwartz, Martin C. Libicki, Julie E. Taylor, Jeffrey Martini, and Caroline Baxter,
RAND Corporation, Internet Freedom and Political Space, Report prepared for USDOS)
Online information can undermine the stability of non- democratic regimes by triggering an information
cascade. The impact of protests is frequently proportional to the number of protesters who appear on the streets.
The Internet can facilitate social protests by enabling citizens to anonymously express their true opinions
and coordinate collective action, which can create a domino effect. Online mobilization in both Egypt and
Russia triggered a wave of protests with long-term consequences—most notably the stunningly swift
collapse of the Mubarak regime. Although social media in Egypt did not cause the popular upris- ing that came
to center in Tahrir Square, it substantially increased the number of people who participated in the first
demonstration. The size of the crowd in the Square caught Egyptian authori- ties by surprise and triggered the
defection of some high-ranking army officials. In Russia, the information about electoral fraud triggered a
wave of online mobilization that manifested itself in a series of mass demonstrations. Syria’s activists used
the Internet to publicize elite defection from the regime, albeit with more limited success against a brutal and
determined foe. • The Internet can make political coalitions more inclusive by opening up deliberations
that cut across socioeconomic cleav- ages, thereby spreading information to people who do not normally
interact on a daily basis. This conclusion emerges pri- marily from the review of theoretical literature on the
diffusion of information online and the literature on social movements. While weak ties facilitate the diffusion
of information online, strong ties create peer pressure that contributes to offline social mobilization.
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NSA Affirmative
Internet Freedom Advantage
NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Internet Freedom is about Profits
(___)
(__) The US internet freedom agenda is about promoting human rights and freedom of
expression.
Sinha, Fellow at Human Rights Watch, 2015
(G. Alex From the article “Better Privacy Protections Key to US Foreign Policy Coherence” – Defense One –
March 25th - http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/03/better-privacy-protections-key-us-foreign-policycoherence/108469/)
G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights
Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.. For all its interest in promoting human rights around the
world, you’d think the United States would be more sensitive to the ways its own surveillance policies
undermine those very rights. Over the last few years, U.S. officials say they have spent more than $125
million to advance Internet freedom, which the State Department describes as a “foreign policy priority.”
The U.S. rightly links Internet freedom with the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and
association, as well as with the work of human rights defenders. It makes sense, therefore, that the U.S.
also actively funds human rights defenders, and calls out other governments for mistreating them. Yet
surveillance conducted by the U.S. government—some of it unconstitutional and contrary to international
human rights law—compromises Internet freedom, undermines the rights the government seeks to
promote, and directly harms human rights defenders.
61/92
NSA Affirmative
Internet Freedom Advantage
NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to International Surveillance matters more
(___)
(__) We’ve lost the moral high ground and ability to work with civil society groups around
the world to ensure democratic progress.
Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab @ School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto 2015,
(Ron,. He was a co-founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, 7-1-2015, "Cyberspace Under
Siege," Journal Of Democracy,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v026/26.3.deibert.html#back
While the value of Snowden’s disclosures in helping to start a long-needed discussion is undeniable, the
revelations have also had unintended [End Page 74] consequences for resurgent authoritarianism and
cyberspace. First, they have served to deflect attention away from authoritarian-regime cyberespionage
campaigns such as China’s. Before Snowden fled to Hong Kong, U.S. diplomacy was taking an aggressive
stand against cyberespionage. Individuals in the pay of the Chinese military and allegedly linked to Chinese
cyberespionage were finding themselves under indictment. Since Snowden, the pressure on China has eased.
Beijing, Moscow, and others have found it easy to complain loudly about a double standard supposedly
favoring the United States while they rationalize their own actions as “normal” great-power behavior and
congratulate themselves for correcting the imbalance that they say has beset cyberspace for too long.
Second, the disclosures have created an atmosphere of suspicion around Western governments’
intentions and raised questions about the legitimacy of the “Internet Freedom” agenda backed by the
United States and its allies. Since the Snowden disclosures—revealing top-secret exploitation and
disruption programs that in some respects are indistinguishable from those that Washington and its allies
have routinely condemned—the rhetoric of the Internet Freedom coalition has rung rather hollow. In
February 2015, it even came out that British, Canadian, and U.S. signals-intelligence agencies had been
“piggybacking” on China-based cyberespionage campaigns—stealing data from Chinese hackers who had not
properly secured their own command-and-control networks.28
Third, the disclosures have opened up foreign investment opportunities for IT companies that used to run
afoul of national-security concerns. Before Snowden, rumors of hidden “backdoors” in Chinese-made
technology such as Huawei routers put a damper on that company’s sales. Then it came out that the United
States and allied governments had been compelling (legally or otherwise) U.S.-based tech companies to do
precisely what many had feared China was doing—namely, installing secret backdoors. So now Western
companies have a “Huawei” problem of their own, and Huawei no longer looks so bad.
62/92
NSA Affirmative
Internet Freedom Advantage
NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to US not modelled
(___)
(__) Domestic surveillance limits are modelled.
Deeks, Associate Professor, University of Virginia Law School, 2015
(Ashley.. "An International Legal Framework for Surveillance." Virginia Journal of International Law 55
(2015): 2014-53)
In considering the inspiration for the norms that should emerge, the Article argues that the most promising
source of new international norms is domestic law. Domestic laws can and do serve as the basis for
international legal developments, particularly in the face of highly politicized issues, non-reciprocal
incentive structures, issue complexity, and different conceptions of the proper legal framework — all of
which are present in the surveillance debate.5 Further, domestic surveillance laws have been test-driven in
the real world and reflect concerted efforts by particular polities to balance liberty and security. As a
result, the Article draws from the domestic surveillance laws of various states to extract six procedural
principles that states should adopt on the international plane. The norms that first emerge will not immediately
constitute customary international law (“CIL”), but will serve as the grain of sand around which the pearl of
CIL can form.
In effect, this Article rejects both an aggressively cynical approach to foreign surveillance and an unduly
optimistic view that states will converge around robust international privacy protections in the short
term. The cynics assume that whatever pressures currently exist to modify the status quo will diminish in short
order, overtaken by subsequent geopolitical crises.
6 The optimists argue that states should develop the substantive principle of privacy contained in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), and have robust aspirations for what that
principle should contain.7 Both of these approaches are flawed, normatively and predictively. The cynics
underestimate both the enduring nature of human rights pressures on states and the benefits to states of
creating new international legal rules in this area. The optimists underestimate the difficulty of agreeing on
concrete, substantive norms in a multilateral setting among states with varied incentives. For this reason,
states should focus first on establishing procedural limitations that reduce (though not eliminate) differences
between their treatment of citizens and foreigners.
63/92
NSA Affirmative
Internet Freedom Advantage
NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Democracy doesn’t solve war
(___)
(__) Democracy incrementally reduces the risk of war and systemic harms
Rummel, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, 2007
(R.J., 9/7, Why Freedom? Let Me Count the Reasons, http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2007/09/whyfreedom-let-me-count-reasons.html,)
Democratically free people do not make war on each other Why? The diverse groups, cross-national bonds,
social links, and shared values of democratic peoples sew them together; and shared liberal values dispose
them toward peaceful negotiation and compromise with each other. It is as though the people of democratic
nations were one society This truth that democracies do not make war on each other provides a solution for
eliminating war from the world: globalize democratic freedom Second: The less free the people within any two
nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the wars between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely
such wars become And third: The more freedom the people of a nation have, the less bloody and destructive
their wars What this means is that we do not have to wait for all, or almost all nations to become liberal
democracies to reduce the severity of war. As we promote freedom, as the people of more and more nations
gain greater human rights and political liberties, as those people without any freedom become partly free, we
will decrease the bloodiness of the world’s wars. We have already seen this in the sharp decrease in world
violence with the great increase in the number of democracies. In short: Increasing freedom in the world
decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our
history, without causing a greater evil, must be a moral good. And this is freedom In conclusion, then, we have
wondrous human freedom as a moral force for the good. Freedom produces social justice, creates wealth and
prosperity, minimizes violence, saves human lives, and is a solution to war. In two words, it creates human
security. Moreover, and most important: People should not be free only because it is good for them. They
should be free because it is their right as human beings In opposition to freedom is power, its antagonist. While
freedom is a right, the power to govern is a privilege granted by a people to those they elect and hold
responsible for its use. Too often, however, thugs seize control of a people with their guns and use them to
make their power total and absolute. Where freedom produces wealth and prosperity, such absolute power
causes impoverishment and famine. Where freedom minimizes internal violence, eliminates genocide and
mass murder, and solves the problem of war, such absolute power unleashes internal violence, murders
millions, and produces the bloodiest wars. In short, power kills; absolute power kills absolutely.
64/92
NSA Affirmative
Solvency
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to USA Freedom Act Solves
(___)
(__) Reforming PRISM is more important than metadata and the USA Freedom Act.
Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, 2015
(Fred, 6-8-2015, "One Thing About the NSA That Should Still Worry Us," Slate Magazine,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/the_national_security_agency_s_surveilla
nce_and_the_usa_freedom_act_the.html)
For now, surveillance through telephone metadata is pretty sparse. In 2012, the NSA queried the database
for 288 U.S. telephone numbers. As a result of those queries, the agency passed just 12 tips to the FBI. None of
those tips led to the capture of a single terrorist or the halting of a terrorist plot. In fact, according to President
Obama’s independent commission on NSA reform, the telephone metadata program has never had any impact
on countering terrorism.
A separate program called PRISM—authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act—lets the NSA track foreign terrorists and adversaries by intercepting their Internet
traffic as it zips through U.S.–based servers. (Because of the nature of the technology, about 80 percent of the
world’s Internet traffic passes through U.S. servers at some point.) PRISM was another highly classified NSA
program that Snowden uncovered. The Washington Post and the Guardian made it the subject of their Day 2
Snowden stories (right after the revelations about telephone metadata). Yet PRISM isn’t touched at all by the
USA Freedom Act, nor does any serious politician propose overhauling it. This is the case, even though
PRISM data-mining is a much bigger program than telephone metadata ever was, and it’s potentially
more intrusive, since it’s hard to know whether, at first glance, an IP address belongs to an American or
a foreigner.
65/92
NSA Affirmative
Solvency
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to USA Freedom Act Solves
(__) Section 702 needs to be limited, the Freedom Act did not go far enough.
Vladeck, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and Law Professor at American University, 2015,
(Stephen,6-1-2015, "Forget the Patriot Act – Here Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,"
Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continuesfisa-court-metadata/)
To put the matter bluntly, whereas the Section 215 debate has addressed whether the government can
collect our phone records, Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments Act allow the
government to collect a lot of what we’re actually saying, whether on the phone, in our emails, or even to
our search engines.
There is no question that, from a privacy perspective, these programs are far more pernicious than
what’s been pegged to Section 215. There is also no question that such collection raises even graver
constitutional questions than the phone records program. Whereas there is an open debate over our
expectation of privacy in the metadata we voluntarily provide to our phone companies, there’s no doubt that we
have an expectation of privacy in the content of our private communications.Why, then, has all the fuss been
around Section 215 and the phone records program, while the far more troubling surveillance authorities
provided by Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments Act have flown under the radar?
Part of it may be because of the complexities described above. After all, it’s easy for people on the street to
understand what it means when the government is collecting our phone records; it’s not nearly as obvious why
we should be bothered by violations of minimization requirements. Part of it may also have to do with the
government’s perceived intent. Maybe it seems more troubling when the government is intentionally collecting
our phone records, as opposed to “incidentally” (albeit knowingly) collecting the contents of our
communications. And technology may play a role, too; how many senders of emails know where the server is
located on which the message is ultimately stored? If we don’t realize how easily our communications might get
bundled with those of non-citizens outside the United States, we might not be worried about surveillance
targeted at them. But whatever the reason for our myopic focus on Section 215, it has not only obscured
the larger privacy concerns raised by these other authorities, but also the deeper lessons we should have
taken away from Snowden’s revelations. However much we might tolerate, or even embrace, the need for
secret government surveillance programs, it is all-but-inevitable that those programs will be stretched to — and
beyond — their legal limits. That’s why it’s important not only to place substantive limits upon the
government’s surveillance authorities, but also to ensure that they are subject to meaningful external
oversight and accountability as well. And that’s why the denouement of Section 215 debate has been so
disappointing. This should have been a conversation not just about the full range of government surveillance
powers, including Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, but also about the role of the
FISA Court and of congressional oversight in supervising those authorities. Instead, it devolved into an overheated debate over an over-emphasized program. Congress has tended to a paper cut, while it ignored the
internal bleeding. Not only does the expiration of Section 215 have no effect on the substance of other
surveillance authorities, it also has no effect on their oversight and accountability.
66/92
NSA Affirmative
Solvency
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Domestic Collection is Small
(___)
(__) Section 702 surveillance is very big and is more invasive.
Goitein, Co-Director Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program 2015,
(Elizabeth, , 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC,
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform)
More fundamentally, bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that
abandoned the individualized suspicion approach after 9/11. Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within
the United States, wished to obtain communications between Americans and foreigners, it had to
convince the FISA Court that the individual target was a foreign power or its agent. Today, under
Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA may target any foreigner overseas and collect his or
her communications with Americans without obtaining any individualized court order. Under Executive
Order 12333, which governs the NSA’s activities when it conducts surveillance overseas, the standards are even
more lax.
The result is mass surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty in
comparison. Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they “incidentally” sweep
in massive amounts of Americans’ data, including the content of calls, e-mails, text messages, and video
chats. Limits on keeping and using such information are weak and riddled with exceptions. Moreover, foreign
targets are not limited to suspected terrorists or even agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration
recently acknowledged, foreigners have privacy rights too, and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner
overseas is an indefensible violation of those rights.
Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA Freedom because they hoped it would relieve the
post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their likely long-term goal is to avoid changes to Section 702,
Executive Order 12333, and the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection without any
individualized showing of wrongdoing. Privacy advocates who supported USA Freedom did so because they
saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return to
the principle of individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance.
If intelligence officials are correct in their calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the
law clears the way for further reforms across the full range of surveillance programs, history will vindicate the
privacy advocates who supported it. The answer to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not in
the text of the law, but in the unwritten story of what happens next.
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Answers to Domestic Collection is Small
(___)
(__) Section 702 affects millions of internet users.
Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security at Center for Democracy and
Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy
& Technology., 7-22-2014, https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significantsection-702-reform/
The Washington Post recently released what may be the most comprehensive review of the impact of Section
702 of FISA – which authorizes the NSA’s PRISM and upstream programs – on average Internet users. The
scale and sensitive nature of communications being collected should generate widespread concern
regarding the law’s use, and create demand for reform. Fortunately, Congress can enact measures that limit
the collateral damage to privacy needlessly caused by this over-broad surveillance law.
Section 702 Programs Affect Millions of Average Internet Users
While the government has framed Section 702 as a “targeted” program that primarily affects suspected
terrorists rather than normal individuals – a sentiment echoed by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight
Board in a report which CDT and others roundly criticized – the Washington Post report tells a troublingly
different story: Based on a study of the largest sample of Section 702 data analyzed to date,
approximately 90% of the text messages, emails, instant messages, and other communications retained by
NSA, even after the application of minimization procedures, are to or from accounts who are not
surveillance targets.
It is not surprising that a large portion of these accounts belong to non-targets; electronic surveillance of a target
inevitably collects the communications of people who talk to the target about matters unrelated to the purpose
of the surveillance. Considering the large number of individuals one regularly emails, texts, and calls, a 9:1
ratio does not seem that extreme. However, while this inevitable incidental collection might be tolerable in
small levels when the surveillance target is suspected of wrongdoing and communications monitoring is
approved by a judge, it is difficult to justify when the purpose of the surveillance is as broad as is
authorized in Section 702, and the resulting scope is so enormous.
Further, because the 9:1 ratio is based on “accounts,” it might significantly underscore the number of
non-targeted individuals affected. As 89,138 “persons” were targets last year, the Post concluded
communications from over 800,000 non-targeted accounts were retained. The actual number is likely much
larger. As Julian Sanchez notes, while there are 89,138 persons targeted, most targeted persons (a term that can
include corporations and organizations) have many electronic communications accounts, meaning the number
of accounts targeted is likely much higher. This would place the number of non-targeted accounts to or
from which communications were retained in the millions.
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Limiting Section 702 Solves
(__) Limiting Section 702 searches will adequately constrain the NSA to protect citizens..
Human Rights Watch, 2014,
"Letter to President Obama Urging Surveillance Reforms," 1-16-2014
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/16/letter-president-obama-urging-surveillance-reforms
Adopt the review group’s recommendation to limit the scope of collection under 702 and any other
authority that authorizes surveillance abroad to what is “directed exclusively at the national security of
the United States or [its] allies” and ensure that surveillance is not used for illegitimate ends such as
commercial gain.[4] Under Section 702, the US can collect “foreign intelligence information.” But this
term is defined extremely broadly to include things that need only “relate to” terrorism, intelligence
activities of another government, the national defense, or the foreign affairs of the United States. The
content of communications can be obtained, not just metadata, as can communications “about” the
targets. Indeed, according to media reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden, the NSA taps into main communication links of data centers around the world and collects millions
of records every day, including metadata text, audio, and video.[5] This type of over-collection cannot
possibly be proportionate or necessary to US national security goals.
(__) Limiting surveillance to tangible threats is an effective reform.
Nojeim, Director, Project on Freedom, Security & Technolog, 2014
Greg, y Comments To The Privacy And Civil Liberties Oversight Board Regarding Reforms To Surveillance
Conducted Pursuant To Section 702 Of Fisa April 11, 2014
https://d1ovv0c9tw0h0c.cloudfront.net/files/2014/04/CDT_PCLOB-702-Comments_4.11.13.pdf
To address the problem of overbreadth in Section 702 collection, PCLOB should recommend that Section 702
surveillance be conducted only for carefully defined national security purposes. While there are different ways
to do this, the best way would be to turn the “use restrictions” in PPD-28 that govern bulk collection into the
permissible purposes for Section 702 surveillance. This would require that collection pursuant to Section 702
only occur for purposes of detecting and countering: (1) espionage and other threats and activities directed by
foreign powers or their intelligence services against the United States and its interests, (2) threats to the United
States and its interests from terrorism, (3) threats to the United States and its interests from the development,
possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass destruction, (4) cybersecurity threats, (5) threats to U.S. or
allied Armed Forces or other U.S or allied personnel, and (6) transnational criminal threats, including illicit
finance and sanctions evasion related to the other purposes named above. This change would provide significant
comfort to non-U.S. persons abroad who are concerned about the impact on their human rights that Section 702
surveillance would otherwise have. Indeed, it would increase the likelihood that Section 702 surveillance would
meet human rights standards.
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Plan Solves PRISM
(___)
(__) The plan would eliminate major parts of PRISM and Upstream collection.
Liu, Nolan & Thompson, Legislative Attorneys at the Congressional Research Service 2015,
(Edward C; Andrew and Richard M. “Overview of Constitutional Challenges to NSA Collection Activities”
Congressional Research Service May 21, 2015 http://fas.org:8080/sgp/crs/intel/R43459.pdf)
PRISM and Upstream Acquisition of Internet Communications
Contemporaneously with the origination of the telephony metadata program in 2001, the NSA also began
acquiring Internet-based communications of overseas targets without the use of a traditional law enforcement
warrant or an electronic surveillance order under Title I of FISA.90 Ultimately, new statutory authority for
this type of acquisition was provided, at first, temporarily under the Protect America Act (PAA) of 2007;91
and on a longer term basis by the FAA.92 According to a partially declassified 2011 opinion from the FISC,
NSA collected 250 million Internet communications per year under this program.93 Of these
communications, 91% were acquired “directly from Internet Service Providers,” referred to as “PRISM
collection.”94 The other 9% were acquired through what NSA calls “upstream collection,” meaning
acquisition while Internet traffic is in transit from one unspecified location to another.95 NSA also has two
methods for collecting information about a specific target: “to/from” communications collection, in which
the target is the sender or receiver of the Internet communications; and “about” communications
collection, in which the target is only mentioned in communications between non-targets.96 The Obama
Administration also acknowledged to the FISC that technical limitations in the “upstream” collection result in
the collection of some communications that are unrelated to the target or that may take place entirely between
persons located in the United States.97
The PRISM and upstream collections differ from the telephony metadata program in two key respects.
First, the PRISM and upstream collections acquire the contents of those communications. Second, as this
program targets the “to/from” and “about” communications of foreigners who are abroad, the collection
of Internet-based communications may be considered by some to be more discriminating than the bulk
collection of telephony metadata.
.
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Answers to Reforming domestic surveillance alone
doesn’t solve
(__)
(__) Domestic surveillance and foreign surveillance standards shouldn’t be exactly the same,
innovation in domestic protections create broader privacy rights.
Margulies, professor at Roger Williams University School of Law,, 2015
(Peter, 7-4-2015, "Sweeping Claims and Casual Legal Analysis in the Latest U.N. Mass Surveillance Report,"
Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/sweeping-claims-and-casual-legal-analysis-latest-un-mass-surveillancereport
Ironically, the Emmerson report's insistence on identical standards for domestic and international
surveillance actually sabotages efforts to protect privacy. States are most likely to try innovative
measures to protect privacy when these measures protect state nationals within the state’s territory. If
those measures also keep the homeland safe, a state may well expand them to include aspects of
international surveillance. Enforcing a lockstep approach to domestic and international surveillance
chills that experimentation.
(__) Structural differences make domestic surveillance different.
Posner, Professor of Law, University of Chicago, 2014,
(Eric A., Statement to the Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Board March 14, 2014 http://lawfare.s3-us-west2.amazonaws.com/staging/s3fs-public/uploads/2014/03/Eric-A.-Posner.pdf)
The case for requiring the U.S. government to respect the privacy of Americans is greater than the case
for requiring it to respect the privacy of foreigners because the U.S. government has coercive power over
Americans, while it almost never does over foreigners. Thus, the U.S. government could misuse private
information in order to inflict harm against Americans, but not against foreigners, who benefit from the
protection of their own governments.
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Answers to Reforming domestic surveillance alone doesn’t solve
(___)
(__) Obama has already extended equal privacy to non-US persons, that solves foreign privacy
invasions.
Ratnam, senior staff writer at Foreign Policy, 2015,
(Gopal, 2-3-2015, "Obama’s Surveillance Reform Extends Unmatched Privacy to Foreigners," Foreign Policy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/03/obamas-surveillance-reform-extends-unmatched-privacy-to-foreigners/)
Though criticized by advocates for not going far enough, an Obama administration report Tuesday on steps
to protect privacy and civil liberties has nevertheless achieved at least one thing: extending to foreigners the
same protections available to Americans. The report on surveillance reform, issued by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), banned U.S. spy agencies from disseminating information about
foreigners to other countries’ intelligence agencies without considering their privacy. “Intelligence community
personnel are now specifically required to consider the privacy interests of non-U.S. persons when
drafting and disseminating intelligence,” the report said. The report on surveillance reform also said that
U.S. intelligence agencies last year obtained secret court permissions to seize phone records in 164 cases where
they had sufficient suspicion to seek such approvals. The number of targets tracked last year fell from the 423
queried by intelligence agencies in 2013, according to data released by the intelligence. Following former
government contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that U.S. spy agencies were snooping in on
emails and phone calls of foreigners, including several heads of state, President Barack Obama in January 2014
said U.S. intelligence agencies must protect the privacy of foreigners on par with that of Americans. “You can’t
simply say, ‘Oh, this is not a U.S. person’ and disseminate his or her personal information,” the ODNI’s
top lawyer, Bob Litt, told reporters. Instead, Litt said, officials must examine a non-citizen’s information
and determine if releasing it is essential for foreign intelligence purposes. The decision to give equal
privacy protections to foreigners is unprecedented in the annals of global spying, said David Medine, chairman
of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent U.S. agency charged with protecting such
rights. “There’s no country on the planet that has gone this far to improve the treatment of non-citizens in
government surveillance,” Medine said. “That alone is remarkable after the events of the last year and
half because in most countries non-citizens are fair game” for spying.
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Answers to Domestic alone doesn’t solve
(__) Domestic surveillance limits are modelled, that solves foreign surveillance.
Deeks, Associate Professor, University of Virginia Law School, 2015
(Ashley.. "An International Legal Framework for Surveillance." Virginia Journal of International Law 55
(2015): 2014-53)
In considering the inspiration for the norms that should emerge, the Article argues that the most promising
source of new international norms is domestic law. Domestic laws can and do serve as the basis for
international legal developments, particularly in the face of highly politicized issues, non-reciprocal
incentive structures, issue complexity, and different conceptions of the proper legal framework — all of
which are present in the surveillance debate.5 Further, domestic surveillance laws have been test-driven in
the real world and reflect concerted efforts by particular polities to balance liberty and security. As a
result, the Article draws from the domestic surveillance laws of various states to extract six procedural
principles that states should adopt on the international plane. The norms that first emerge will not immediately
constitute customary international law (“CIL”), but will serve as the grain of sand around which the pearl of
CIL can form.
In effect, this Article rejects both an aggressively cynical approach to foreign surveillance and an unduly
optimistic view that states will converge around robust international privacy protections in the short
term. The cynics assume that whatever pressures currently exist to modify the status quo will diminish in short
order, overtaken by subsequent geopolitical crises.
6 The optimists argue that states should develop the substantive principle of privacy contained in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), and have robust aspirations for what that
principle should contain.7 Both of these approaches are flawed, normatively and predictively. The cynics
underestimate both the enduring nature of human rights pressures on states and the benefits to states of
creating new international legal rules in this area. The optimists underestimate the difficulty of agreeing on
concrete, substantive norms in a multilateral setting among states with varied incentives. For this reason,
states should focus first on establishing procedural limitations that reduce (though not eliminate) differences
between their treatment of citizens and foreigners.
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Answers to Circumvention
(___)
(__) Restoring strong regulatory language is sufficient to end circumvention.
Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, 2014
(Jennifer, “USA Freedom Act: Oh, Well. Whatever. Nevermind.” – Just Security - May 21, 2014
http://justsecurity.org/10675/usa-freedom-act-oh-well-whatever-nevermind/
The initially promising USA Freedom Act could have ended the previously secret government practices of
collecting Americans’ calling records, internet transactional information and who knows what else in bulk.
Today’s version would allow broad collection to continue under the guise of reform. The initial version of
the bill would have reinforced existing statutory language requiring a showing of “relevance to an
authorized investigation” before agents can get an order requiring production of business records, dialing
and routing information, and other data, and would have added other limits to ensure massive collection
would stop. It also would have implemented mild reforms to content surveillance under section 702 of the
FISA Amendments Act, stopping “back door” searches for Americans’ communications. Last week, a
Managers’ Amendment watered those provisions down, substituting new language that would allow
agents to use a “specific selection term” as the “basis for production”. The bill defined “specific selection
term” as something that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or account.” Given the intelligence
community’s success at getting FISA judges to reinterpret obvious language—e.g. “relevance”—in counterintuitive ways, people wondered what this new language might mean. There’s deep public mistrust for the
intelligence community and for the FISA court, which conspired to allow bulk collection under spurious legal
justifications for years. Worse, there’s deep public mistrust for the law itself, since the intelligence community’s
“nuanced” definitions of normal words have made the public realize that they do not understand the meaning of
words like “relevance”, “collection”, “bulk”, or “target”.
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Answers to Circumvention
(___)
(__) Non-compliance is unlikely.
Deeks, Associate Professor, University of Virginia Law School, 2015
(Ashley.. "An International Legal Framework for Surveillance." Virginia Journal of International Law 55
(2015): 2014-53)
There is a danger is that states will adopt these norms publicly but continue to conduct foreign
surveillance much as they do today. Because it may be relatively difficult to ascertain whether states actually
are complying with some of the six norms, there is ample room for a hypocritical embrace of the norms
without a corresponding change in behavior. Two factors potentially mitigate this concern. The first is that
many Western (and some non-Western) states refuse to adopt international norms publicly unless they
genuinely plan to comply with them.288 In this view, formally accepting international rules without the
intention or ability to comply with them serves to weaken, not strengthen, the international regime. Where these
states view the international rules at issue as beneficial, they view their ability to comply with those rules as a
sine qua non for formally adopting them in the first place. The second mitigating factor is that public
revelations about surveillance programs are on the rise. As a result, non-compliance with stated norms is
more likely to come to light. In democracies, non-compliance with publicly accepted norms is more costly
to states, whose publics are accustomed to holding their governments to the laws they have adopted.
Citizens are more likely to call for compliance with domestic laws than international laws, yet most states have
a contingent of elites who seek to hold their governments accountable for international legal compliance as
well.
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Answers to Circumvention
(__) The NSA has no interest in subverting the law, circumvention doesn’t make sense.
Ackerman, National Security editor for the The Guardian, 2015,
(Spencer, 6-1-2015, "Fears NSA will seek to undermine surveillance reform," Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-congress-secret-law)
Despite that recent history, veteran intelligence attorneys reacted with scorn to the idea that NSA lawyers
will undermine surveillance reform. Robert Litt, the senior lawyer for director of national intelligence, James
Clapper, said during a public appearance last month that creating a banned bulk surveillance program
was “not going to happen”.
“The whole notion that NSA is just evilly determined to read the law in a fashion contrary to its intent is
bullshit, of the sort that the Guardian and the left – but I repeat myself – have fallen in love with. The
interpretation of 215 that supported the bulk collection program was creative but not beyond reason, and it was
upheld by many judges,” said the former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker, referring to Section 215 of the
Patriot Act.
This is the section that permits US law enforcement and surveillance agencies to collect business records and
expired at midnight, almost two years after the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the Guardian that
the Patriot Act was secretly being used to justify the collection of phone records from millions of Americans.
With one exception, the judges that upheld the interpretation sat on the non-adversarial Fisa court, a
body that approves nearly all government surveillance requests and modifies about a quarter of them
substantially. The exception was reversed by the second circuit court of appeals.
Baker, speaking before the Senate voted, predicted: “I don’t think anyone at NSA is going to invest in
looking for ways to defy congressional intent if USA Freedom is adopted.”
(__) Noncompliance isn’t a reason not to do the plan — the real problems are the laws that
authorize the surveillance.
Jaffer ACLU Deputy Legal Director and Director of ACLU Center for Democracy, 2013
(Jameel “"There Have Been Some Compliance Incidents": NSA Violates Surveillance Rules Multiple Times a
Day,” ACLU Blog, August 16th, https://www.aclu.org/blog/there-have-been-some-compliance-incidents-nsaviolates-surveillance-rules-multiple-times-day?redirect=blog/national-security/nsa-privacy-violations-evenmore-frequent-we-imagined, Accessed 06-05-2015)
One final note: The NSA's noncompliance incidents are a big deal, but we shouldn't let them become a
distraction. The far bigger problem is with the law itself, which gives the NSA almost unchecked
authority to monitor Americans' international calls and emails. The problem arises, in other words, not just
from the NSA's non-compliance with the law, but from its compliance with it.
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Answers to Circumvention
(__) The NSA doesn’t try to circumvent.
McCutcheon, editor for Congressional Quarterly , 2013
(Chuck (2013, August 30). Government surveillance. CQ Researcher, 23, 717-740. Retrieved from
http://library.cqpress.com/)
Deputy Attorney General James Cole noted that the FISA court approves only requests that meet the
standard of a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of potential terrorist activity. “Unless you get that step
made, you cannot enter that database and make a query of any of this data,” he said . Footnote 33
Timothy Edgar, a former American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney who later worked for the
director of National Intelligence as its first deputy for civil liberties, says he was surprised — and that
Americans would be as well — by how cautious spy agencies are about using their surveillance powers.
When he was at the ACLU, “I thought that the government would take whatever power you had given
them and always interpret it in the broadest possible way,” says Edgar, who now teaches national security
and technology law at Brown University. But he said he came to view government officials as
“conscientious” and realized they did not habitually interpret their powers as broadly as civil liberties groups
fear.
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Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality Domestic (JV & V Only)
1. We Meet —the plan limits the surveillance of domestic communication which the NSA has
been collecting “incidentally” via Section 702.
Tushnet 15,
Mark professor of law at Harvard Law School., 2015, "The Presidential Empire," Dissent Magazine,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-presidential-empire
Edward Snowden’s revelations brought home the fact that one of the main tasks of the National Surveillance
State is indeed surveillance. Much of what Snowden brought to public attention were modernized versions of
classical espionage conducted by U.S. spies outside the United States. That sort of espionage was completely
consistent with U.S. law. Technology meant, though, that surveillance outside the United States inevitably
included information about activities by U.S. citizens both outside the nation’s borders and within them. The
statutes creating the framework for this surveillance have provisions aimed at limiting its domestic use to
cases with a substantial connection to international terrorism. But, Snowden showed us, those provisions
were not fully effective, and the scale of modern surveillance meant that even reasonably effective
protections against domestic surveillance still left large numbers of innocent people subject to it.
2. Counter-Interpretation – Domestic surveillance deals with information transmitted within a
country
HRC 14
Human Rights Council 2014 IMUNC2014 https://imunc.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/hrc-study-guide.pdf
Domestic surveillance: Involves the monitoring, interception, collection, analysis, use, preservation,
retention of, interference with, or access to information that includes, reflects, or arises from or a
person’s communications in the past, present or future with or without their consent or choice, existing
or occurring inside a particular country.
3. Prefer our interpretation—
a) Aff ground—they over limit because they take out all NSA and surveillance agency affs, which are
core of the topic
b) They overlimit—very few affs that meet their interpretation would also have solvency advocates.
4. Default to reasonability—we don’t have to win offense on t, but competing interpretations
causes a race to the bottom
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Topicality NSA Can be Domestic (JV & V)
(___)
(__) Even if the law tried to limit the NSA’s domestic surveillance, it didn’t work.
Vladeck, professor of law at American University, 2015,
(Stephen, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security. Steve is a Washington College of Law, 6-1-2015, "Forget the
Patriot Act – Here Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About," Foreign Policy,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/)
The answer, we now know, has everything to do with technology. Although the government is only allowed
to “target” non-citizens outside the United States, it is inevitable, given how it collects information under
both of these regimes, that the communications of U.S. citizens and non-citizens lawfully present in the
United States will also be collected, albeit “incidentally,” as the government puts it. After all, when thousands
of unrelated emails and other electronic communications are bundled together in a packet that travels
through an Internet switch that’s physically located in the United States (for the 2008 statute) or overseas
(for Executive Order 12333), it’s simply not possible for the government to only collect the
communications between non-U.S. citizens and leave the others untouched, any more so than it’s possible
for a vacuum to segregate particles of dirt.
To be sure, the U.S. government doesn’t dispute that it routinely collects the communications of U.S. citizens.
Instead, it has argued that any potential for abuse is mitigated by so-called “minimization requirements” —
procedural rules that require the relevant intelligence agency to take steps to avoid the improper retention and
use of communications collected under these authorities. The government’s defense, as we’ve come to learn, is
flawed in two vital respects: First, as several since-disclosed opinions from the FISA Court have made clear,
the government’s minimization requirements under the 2008 statute were often too skimpy, allowing the
retention and use of information that both the statute and the Fourth Amendment prohibit. Second —
and perhaps more importantly — even where the minimization rules were legally sufficient, there have been
numerous instances in which government officials violated them, with the FISA Court only discovering the
abuses after they were voluntarily reported by Justice Department lawyers. As a result, the government
collected and retained a large volume of communications by U.S. citizens that neither Congress nor the
Constitution allowed it to acquire
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Off Case Answers
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Answers to – Topicality Domestic (JV & V)
(___)
(__) Modern communication blurs the line between Foreign and Domestic.
Sanchez, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, 2014
Julian,, 6-5-2014, "Snowden: Year One," Cato Unbound, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/05/juliansanchez/snowden-year-one
The second basic fact is that modern communications networks obliterate many of the assumptions about the
importance of geography that had long structured surveillance law. A “domestic” Internet communication
between a user in Manhattan and a server in Palo Alto might, at midday in the United States, be routed through
nocturnal Asia’s less congested pipes, or to a mirror in Ireland, while a “foreign” e-mail service operated from
Egypt may be hosted in San Antonio. “What we really need to do is all the bad guys need to be on this section
of the Internet,” former NSA director Keith Alexander likes to joke. “And they only operate over here. All good
people operate over here. All bad guys over here.” It’s never been quite that easy—but General Alexander’s
dream scenario used to be closer to the truth. State adversaries communicated primarily over dedicated circuits
that could be intercepted wholesale without much worry about bumping into innocent Americans, whereas a
communication entering the United States could generally be presumed to be with someone in the United
States. The traditional division of intelligence powers by physical geography—particularized warrants on this
side of the border, an interception free-for-all on the other—no longer tracks the reality of global information
flows.
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Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to —Topicality Domestic (JV & V)
(___)
(__) “Domestic” has no limiting value — the NSA has a classified definition of “US person.”
Schulberg and Reilly, reporters for the Huffington Post, 2015
(Jessica and Ryan J, reporter who covers the Justice Department and the Supreme Court for The Huffington
Post, 2015 (“Watchdog Finds Huge Failure In Surveillance Oversight Ahead Of Patriot Act Deadline,”
Huffington Post, May 21st, Available Online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/21/section-215oversight_n_7383988.html, internal Tweet URL
https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/601395637184286720, Accessed 06-05-2015)
The government's requests were also not limited to material about individuals involved in an FBI investigation.
And while defendants of the program insist that information on Americans is gathered as an incidental
byproduct rather than a targeted effort, Abdo noted that the definition of a “U.S. person” is still
classified in the recently released report:
Alex Abdo @AlexanderAbdo
The FBI has a classified understanding of "U.S. persons" . . .
7:34 AM - 21 May 2015
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NSA Surveillance doesn’t stop terrorism (Terror DA
Ans)
(___) Their argument is a fallacy. Surveillance doesn’t work, hasn’t stopped terrorism and their
evidence is propaganda.
Van Buren, State Department whistleblower, 2014,
(Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction
in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. 114-2014, "Peter Van Buren: We Have to Destroy Our Constitution to Save It," Guernica / A Magazine of Art
& Politics, https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/peter-van-buren-we-have-to-destroy-our-constitution-tosave-it/)
9) We’ve stayed safe. Doesn’t that just prove all the government efforts have worked?
No, that’s called false causality. There simply is no evidence that it’s true, and much to the contrary. It’s the
same as believing government efforts have prevented Martian attacks or wild lions in our bedrooms. For
one thing, we already know that more NSA spying would not have stopped 9/11; most of the needed
information was already held by the U.S. government and was simply not properly shared or acted upon. 9/11
was a policy failure, not a matter of too-little snooping. Today, however, it remains a straw-man
justification for whatever the NSA wants to do, a way of scaring you into accepting anything from the
desecration of the Fourth Amendment to taking off our shoes at airport security. But the government uses this
argument endlessly to promote what it wants to do. Even the NSA’s talking points recommend their own people
say: “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were
not able to prevent.” At the same time, despite all this intrusion into our lives and the obvious violations of
the Fourth Amendment, the system completely missed the Boston bombers, two of the dumbest, least
sophisticated bro terrorists on the planet. Since 9/11, we have seen some 364,000 deaths in our schools,
workplaces, and homes caused by privately owned firearms, and none of the spying or surveillance identified
any of the killers in advance. Maybe we should simply stop thinking about all this surveillance as a matter of
stopping terrorists and start thinking more about what it means to have a metastasized global surveillance
system aimed at spying on us all, using a fake argument about the need for 100% security in return for ever
more minimal privacy. So much has been justified in these years—torture, indefinite detention, the Guantanamo
penal colony, drone killings, wars, and the use of Special Operations forces as global assassination teams—by
some version of the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. It’s worth getting it through our heads: there has
never been an actual ticking time bomb scenario. The bogeyman isn’t real. There’s no monster hiding
under your bed.
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Off Case Answers
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NSA Surveillance does not stop terrorism- extension
(__) Mass Surveillance is less effective than traditional law enforcement.
Schneier, fellow at Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2015
(Bruce 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.)
Mass surveillance didn’t catch underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in 2006, even though his
father had repeatedly warned the U.S. government that he was dangerous. And the liquid bombers (they’re
the reason governments prohibit passengers from bringing large bottles of liquids, creams, and gels on airplanes
in their carry-on luggage) were captured in 2006 in their London apartment not due to mass surveillance but
through traditional investigative police work. Whenever we learn about an NSA success, it invariably comes
from targeted surveillance rather than from mass surveillance. One analysis showed that the FBI identifies
potential terrorist plots from reports of suspicious activity, reports of plots, and investigations of other,
unrelated, crimes.
This is a critical point. Ubiquitous surveillance and data mining are not suitable tools for finding dedicated
criminals or terrorists. We taxpayers are wasting billions on mass-surveillance programs, and not getting the
security we’ve been promised. More importantly, the money we’re wasting on these ineffective surveillance
programs is not being spent on investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: tactics that have been
proven to work. The NSA's surveillance efforts have actually made us less secure.
Mass surveillance and data mining are much more suitable for tasks of population discrimination: finding
people with certain political beliefs, people who are friends with certain individuals, people who are members
of secret societies, and people who attend certain meetings and rallies. Those are all individuals of interest to a
government intent on social control like China. The reason data mining works to find them is that, like
credit card fraudsters, political dissidents are likely to share a well-defined profile. Additionally, under
authoritarian rule the inevitable false alarms are less of a problem; charging innocent people with
sedition instills fear in the populace.
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Off Case Answers
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Surveillance causes false positives
NSA surveillance fails to prevent terrorism – false positives overwhelm government resources.
Schneier, fellow at Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2015
(Bruce 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.)
The US intelligence community also likens finding a terrorist plot to looking for a needle in a haystack.
And, as former NSA director General Keith Alexander said, “you need the haystack to find the needle.” That
statement perfectly illustrates the problem with mass surveillance and bulk collection. When you’re looking
for the needle, the last thing you want to do is pile lots more hay on it. More specifically, there is no
scientific rationale for believing that adding irrelevant data about innocent people makes it easier to find
a terrorist attack, and lots of evidence that it does not. You might be adding slightly more signal, but you’re
also adding much more noise. And despite the NSA’s “collect it all” mentality, its own documents bear this
out. The military intelligence community even talks about the problem of “drinking from a fire hose”:
having so much irrelevant data that it’s impossible to find the important bits. We saw this problem with
the NSA’s eavesdropping program: the false positives overwhelmed the system. In the years after 9/11, the
NSA passed to the FBI thousands of tips per month; every one of them turned out to be a false alarm.
The cost was enormous, and ended up frustrating the FBI agents who were obligated to investigate all the tips.
We also saw this with the Suspicious Activity Reports —or SAR — database: tens of thousands of reports, and
no actual results. And all the telephone metadata the NSA collected led to just one success: the conviction of a
taxi driver who sent $8,500 to a Somali group that posed no direct threat to the US — and that was probably
trumped up so the NSA would have better talking points in front of Congress.
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NSA Affirmative
Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Mass Surveillance creates false positives- extensions
(__) Surveillance causes false positives that overwhelm law enforcement.
Parra-Arnau and Castelluccia, Privatics research team, 2015
(Javier & Claude, “Dataveillance and the False-Positive Paradox”. 2015. INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes
(France), https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01157921/document)
We observe an extremely large number of false positives, except in the scenario where the distributions of
terrorists and innocents are orthogonal, as effectively captured by the cosine distance. In order to be orthogonal,
the terrorist profiles and features have to be unique and very distinctive from other people profiles. Defining
such profiles is challenging since scientists do not have access to the data of many terrorists. Besides,
current results tend to show that terrorists have personality traits that are indistinguishable from traits of the
general population [11]. Also, it is very likely that terrorists will use tools such as encryption tools or
proxies, in order to perturb their profiles.
• Our results show that the total cost increases linearly with the ratio of terrorists, but the rate of increase is
relatively low in the six scenarios considered. As depicted in Fig. 7, the total cost is similar regardless of the
percentage of terrorists. This is a quite interesting observation because this means that, when the security
agency has to decide the 9 budget, it will not need to be very accurate in estimating the percentage of terrorists
within the population. On the other hand, this figure also shows that the efficiency of the system increases with
the number of suspects, but is very low when the number of terrorist is small compared to the population size,
which is fortunately the case. Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if the number
of persons to identified is high, which happens in McCarthy-type national paranoia or political espionage [12].
In closing, this paper demonstrates that dataveillance is not a very economical solution to fight against
terrorism. More false positive will only overstress technologies, thus causing even more work for signalsintelligence agents, who are already overloaded [13]. In fact, the Charlie Hebdo terrorists were known by
the French security agency prior to their attack. They were not followed and tracked anymore for budget
and resource reasons. One might wonder how a dataveillance system that generates so many false
positive, and is so easy to circumvent, will help improving the situation.
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Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Surveillance creates too much data
(___) Mass surveillance creates a Tsunami of data, undermining counterterror efforts.
Maass , national security reporter for The Intercept, 2015
(Peter , 5-28-2015, "Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize "Collect It All" Surveillance," Intercept,
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/28/nsa-officials-privately-criticize-collect-it-all-surveillance/)
AS MEMBERS OF CONGRESS struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before
the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National
Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a
leaked document, that you are standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread,
which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smucker’s. It can be paralyzing. “We in the agency are at risk of a
similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in
2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much
time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals
intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the
best ones.” The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually
heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort
to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear
to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global
communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.
The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet
surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone metadata from American companies. But the
documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for
them to find the real threats. The titles of the documents capture their overall message: “Data Is Not
Intelligence,” “The Fallacies Behind the Scenes,” “Cognitive Overflow?” “Summit Fever” and “In Praise of
Not Knowing.” Other titles include “Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept” and “Overcome by
Overload?”
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NSA Affirmative
Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Surveillance creates bad data
(___) The NSA’s collect all the data strategy fails to find terrorists and instead creates incentives
to find imaginery needles in the haystack of data.
Hu, Assistant Professor of Law, Washington and Lee School of Law, 2015
(Margaret,. "Small Data Surveillance v. Big Data Cybersurveillance." Pepp. L. Rev. 42 (2015): 773-883.)
As discussed above, big data cybersurveillance and mass dataveillance depend upon a “collect-it-all”
approach or a “connect-the-dots” theory of mass surveillance.271 This new approach to intelligence
gathering is highly controversial.272 Levinson-Waldman has explained that it is a put-the- ”haystackbefore-the-needle approach to information gathering.”273 Stephen Vladeck framed the controversy in
this way: there is a presumption that there is, in fact, a needle in the haystack.274 Vladeck’s point
appears to be that presuming there is a needle in the haystack creates a justification for the view that all
persons are suspects.
Also worthy of caution is the fact that this presumption presents the potential for multiple challenges,275
including integrating biases into datadriven systems (e.g., confirmation bias, implicit bias, cognitive bias);
path dependency (e.g., building systems to guarantee a correlative “hit” or “miss” that is intended to indicate
data is suspicious; and assuming statistical certainty that suspicious data proves guilt of terroristic or criminal
threat); overreliance on automation and risk of undertrained analysts; and exacerbation of perverse
incentives (e.g., metrics of success designed to track number of suspects identified rather than assess whether
intelligence can independently verify suspect classification). In other words, presuming that there is a
digitally constructed needle (e.g., suspect or terrorist target or precrime-preterrorist threat that can be digitally
identified through big data tools) in the government’s digitally constructed haystack276 (e.g., government’s
attempt to store and analyze all digitally produced data in order to, purportedly, preempt crime and
terrorism)277 can create incentives to construct imaginary needles.
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Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answer to: would have solved 9/11
(__) Would not have solved 9/11.
Geiger, Advocacy Director & Senior Counsel at Center for Democracy & Technology, 2015.
(Harley, 5-11-2015, "Senators’ Questionable Claims about NSA Bulk Collection," Lawfare,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/05/senators-questionable-claims-about-nsa-bulk-collection/)
Claim 2: The bulk collection program could have stopped 9/11. “Here is the truth. If this program had
existed before 9/11, it is quite possible we would have known that 9/11 hijacker Khalid Al Mihdhar was
living in San Diego and was making phone calls to an Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen.” – Senator Marco
Rubio
A bulk collection program was not necessary to find Al Mihdhar prior to 9/11. As the PCLOB report
details, the NSA had already begun intercepting calls to and from the safe house in Yemen in the late 1990s.
Since the government knew the number of the safe house, and Al Mihdhar was calling that number, it would
only be necessary to collect the phone records of the safe house to discover Al Mihdhar in San Diego. This is, in
fact, an example of how targeted surveillance would have been more effective than bulk collection. The
9/11 Commission Report and other sources note that the CIA was aware of Mihdhar well before the
attack and missed multiple opportunities to deny him entry to the U.S. or intensify their surveillance of
him.
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NSA Affirmative
Off Case Answers
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Answer to: would have solved 9/11- extensions
(___)
(__) Can’t connect all the dots, 9/11 proves.
Hirsh, national editor for Politico Magazine, 2013
(Michael,"The Surveillance State: How We Got Here and What Congress Knew," nationaljournal,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/the-surveillance-state-how-we-got-here-and-what-congressknew-20130607)
The challenge is that even now, in spite of these programs, the intelligence community remains overwhelmed
by data, and as the Boston Marathon bombings in April showed, it is very difficult to piece together clues
in time to stop an attack. "There are massive gaps in our ability to actually analyze data. Much of the
data just sits there and nobody looks at it," says one former NSA official who would discuss classified
programs only on condition of anonymity. "People can do pretty horrific things on their own. Whether with
explosive devices, or chemicals or biological agents. Everybody's walking around with these devastating
weapons. How are you going to stop that?" Intelligence professionals say that it is only with mass data
collection that they can find the key "intersections" of data that allow them to piece together the right
clues. For example, if an individual orders a passport and supplies an address where some suspicious people are
known to be, that might raise some concerns – without, however, leading to a definite clue to a plot. Yet if
the same person who ordered the passport also buys a lot of fertilizer at another address, then only the
intersection of those two data points will make the clues add up to a threat that authorities can act on. In a Jan.
30, 2006 op-ed in The New York Times headlined "Why We Listen," former NSA senior director Philip
Bobbitt provided a vivid example of how this "threat matrix" works. On Sept. 10, 2001, he wrote, the NSA
intercepted two messages: ''The match begins tomorrow'' and ''Tomorrow is zero hour.'' They were
picked up from random monitoring of pay phones in areas of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was active.
No one in the intel community knew what to make of them, and in any case they were not translated or
disseminated until Sept. 12. But, Bobbitt wrote, "had we at the time cross-referenced credit card accounts,
frequent-flyer programs and a cellphone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have
picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day at the same time on four flights."
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Off Case Answers
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Answer to the Executive Counterplan (JV & V Only)
1. The executive can’t limit its own power. Only the affirmative solves.
Donohue, 2008
Laura Donohue is Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, The cost of counterterrorism: power,
politics, and liberty. Cambridge University Press.
These are just examples of checks that could be instituted within the executive — an immensely complex
problem that deserves further scrutiny. Yet I am skeptical about the ability of the executive, as an organ, to
limit its quest for more power. After all, because it falls directly to this branch to take responsibility for
crime and threats to national security, it is to be expected that it would seek the broadest range of powers
available.
The judiciary also has an important role to play in setting the limits of state authority. It was Brandenburg v.
Ohio that established protections for political speech in the United States (see Chapter whereas Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld restricted executive expansion in the context of habeas claims (see Chapter 2). 10 On the other side of
the Atlantic, A and others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department led to the repeal of indefinite
detention (see Chapter 2).11 The courts' role, though, ought not to be overemphasized, as their ability to
check the executive is, as I have shown, limited. And most of the remedies available to the courts are
inadequate for stemming expansions in counterterrorist law. In other words, we should care about what the
judiciary does and says, but not assume that it is the most important player, or even the final word, in respect to
counterterrorism.
Instead, I see the legislature as the crucial player. This body acts as an enabler, providing the executive
with legal legitimacy. It is the most representative of the people. It can lead and respond to them. And it
has the authority to hold the government to account for the immediate and ongoing need for
extraordinary provisions. The legislature can demand that the executive show that the powers are being used
appropriately and demonstrate the efforts being made to mitigate the broader costs. Insisting that the
government makes its case, releasing into the public domain whatever it can of relevant information,
reverses the usual course of counterterrorism- where the executive is able to put through many of its
demands immediately following a terrorist attack, leaving to those who find the provisions excessive and want
to repeal them the impossible task of proving either that no violence will follow repeal or that some violence is
acceptable. The legislature has the power to reverse the counterterrorist spiral.
2. Obama doesn’t think that he can unilaterally end bulk collection.
Levine, 2015
Sam Levine 15, 5-26-2015, "Rand Paul: Obama Started NSA Bulk Collection And Can End It By Himself,"
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/26/rand-paul-nsa_n_7442448.html
Speaking generally about Paul's comments, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that
Obama could not unilaterally end bulk data collection. "The authorities that are used by our national
security professionals to keep us safe are authorities that are given to those national security
professionals by the Congress, and those authorities can only be renewed by the United States Congress
through an act of Congress," Earnest said.
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Off Case Answers
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Answers to Politics – Plan is popular (V Only)
(__)
(__) Snowden turned the tide, surveillance is unpopular.
The Hill 15, 6-3-2015, "Spy critics eye next targets," http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/243983-spycritics-eye-next-targets
Perhaps no single event helped propel reform more than the leaks from Snowden, which exposed the
sweeping nature of the NSA’s previously secret warrantless collection of data about millions of phone
calls made in the U.S.
But the action was also spurred by a new political climate, especially the increasing influence of the
libertarian wing of the Republican Party.
No one felt that new political reality more than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who
appeared dumbfounded at his repeated inability to push through an unchanged reauthorization of the
Patriot Act laws, even with Republicans in command of both chambers of Congress.
One of the biggest obstacles in McConnell’s path was Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has made his opposition to
federal surveillance one of the pillars of his campaign for the White House.
Paul refused to vote for the USA Freedom Act, arguing the reforms didn’t go far enough, and he held up
the legislation long enough to force a temporary lapse in the surveillance powers.
(__) The plan is popular
Politico 15,
"Prospects dim for 11th-hour PATRIOT Act deal," POLITICO, 5-26-2015,
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/prospects-dim-for-11th-hour-patriot-act-deal-118300.html?hp=t3_r
The PATRIOT Act used to have overwhelming support in Congress — reauthorization passed in 2010 by a
voice vote. But minimal dissent gradually turned into a firestorm of opposition after contractor Edward
Snowden exposed the breadth of the bulk data collection program in 2013. For the first time, a clean
extension of the bill couldn’t garner a majority on the Senate floor on Saturday and attracted just two
Democratic supporters, an unprecedented level of opposition.
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Off Case Answers
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Answers to Politics – Plan is popular with public (V Only)
(___)
(__) Voters hate surveillance.
Ackerman, National Security editor for the The Guardian, 2015,
(Spencer, "NSA surveillance opposed by American voters from all parties, poll finds," Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/18/us-voters-broadly-opposed-nsa-surveillance
(Spencer, 6-1-2015, "Fears NSA will seek to undermine surveillance reform," Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-congress-secret-law)
More than three-quarters of likely voters the poll interviewed opposed related aspects of current
surveillance authorities and operations. Eighty-two percent are “concerned” about government collection and
retention of their personal data. Eighty-three percent are concerned about government access to data stored by
businesses without judicial orders, and 84% want the same judicial protections on their virtual data as exist
for physical records on their property. The same percentage is concerned about government use of that data
for non-counter-terrorism purposes. “Consensus on this issue is bipartisan,” said Strimple. “There’s real
concern about what the government’s accessing about your personal life.”
(__) Voters support NSA reform.
Ackerman, National Security Editor at the Gaurdain,2015
(Spencer, "NSA surveillance opposed by American voters from all parties, poll finds," Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/18/us-voters-broadly-opposed-nsa-surveillance
Neema Singh Giuliani of the ACLU said the poll results show a “disconnection” between anti-surveillance
fervor by voters and a congressional debate bounded by retained surveillance powers at one pole and what she
described as the “modest reform” of the USA Freedom Act on the other.
“The fact that a lot of members of Congress are still pushing forward to try to reauthorize provisions of the law
that many people find concerning is not reflective of the view of the vast majority of the public of both parties,”
she said.
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