1NC vs. EE
1
A. Interpretation
The topic requires the affirmative to reduce surveillance itself, not to just limit
the methods of surveillance
1. CURTAIL MEANS DECREASE
Burton's 7 Burton's Legal Thesaurus, 4E. Copyright © 2007 by William C. Burton. Used with
permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. http://legaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/curtail
curtail verb abate, abbreviate, abridge, clip, coartare, cut, cut down, cut short, decrease, diminish,
halt, lessen, lop, make smaller, minuere, pare, pare down, retrench, shorten, subtract, trim See also:
abate, abridge, allay, arrest, attenuate, bowdlerize, commute, condense, decrease, diminish, discount,
lessen, minimize, palliate, reduce, restrain, retrench, stop
2. SURVEILLANCE IS PROCESS OF GATHERING INFORMATION, AS
DISTINGUISHED FROM THE TECHNIQUES OF GATHERING
Constitution Committee 9
Constitution Committee, House of Lords, Parliament, UK 2009,
Session 2008-09 Publications on the internet, Constitution Committee - Second Report, Surveillance:
Citizens and the State Chapter 2
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldconst/18/1804.htm
18. The term "surveillance" is used in different ways. A literal definition of surveillance as "watching
over" indicates monitoring the behaviour of persons, objects, or systems. However surveillance is not
only a visual process which involves looking at people and things. Surveillance can be undertaken
in a wide range of ways involving a variety of technologies. The instruments of
surveillance include closed-circuit television (CCTV), the interception of
telecommunications ("wiretapping"), covert activities by human agents, heat-seeking and
other sensing devices, body scans, technology for tracking movement, and many others.
B. Violation
Getting rid of backdoors gets rid of a technique for surveillance, but not the
process itself. Nothing under the plan stops gathering information in other
ways
C. Standards
1. Limits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their
interpretation makes the topic too big. Permitting limits on methods of
surveillance, but not surveillance itself, permits the affirmative to avoid the
issues of less surveillance and forces the negative to debate a huge number of
different techniques
2. Effects T - At best the aff is effects T because getting rid of a method of
surveillance might lead to a decrease of surveillance in the future but not
directly
D. T IS A VOTER because the aff is bad for debate
2
The 1AC’s use of the state as an ethical actor re-enforces the antagonism of
blackness in white civil society - this whitewashes anti-black violence and reenforces the racist power-structures that render the USFG coherent
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, “Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society” an American
writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American
studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 6-8, AF)
The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black
subject, lies in the Black subject’s potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital
formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker
demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the
proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its
ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black
subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with
the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries,
and the generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-accumulation crisis, the Black
(incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure
marxist conflict: the categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by
way of the Black subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it
mean to be free? that grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up
against a grammar of suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering
beyond signification itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous terror of
White supremacy is as much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared
pleasures as it is upon a logic—the logic of capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking about
this terror, Cornel West uses the term “black invisibility and namelessness” to designate , at the
level of ontology, what we are calling a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting
assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that of
black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the
first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central
preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic
scars, and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and selfannihilation. This
is why the "ur-text" of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it
is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than
for recognition. (80-81) Thus, the Black subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand
that can not be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics ;
whereas the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by
way of a successful War of Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into
question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of
productivity itself. From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the
question hides the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed
and answered the question, What does it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized
around the categories of exploitation (unfair labor relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the
only category of oppression which concerns Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of
the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again,
this is inadequate, because it would call White supremacy
"racism" and articulate it as a derivative phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than
incorporating White supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the base itself.
What I am saying is that the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means
that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)—
the Black body can not give its consent because “generalized trust,” the precondition for the
solicitation of consent, “equals racialized whiteness” (Lindon Barrett). Furthermore, as Orland Patterson points
out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say that a slave has no
symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange: a slave does not enter into a
transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct relations of force, which is to say
that a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. White
supremacy’s despotic irrationality is as foundational to American institutionality as
capitalism’s symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it… …dictates the limits of the operation
of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb vital to its
sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the necessary condition for the flourishing
of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what Richard Wright meant
when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor." (72) And it is well known that a metaphor comes
into being through a violence which kills, rather than merely exploits, the object, that the concept
might live. West's interventions help us see how marxism can only come to grips with America's
structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot come to grips
with America's structuring irrationality: the libidinal economy of White supremacy, and its
hyper-discursive violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society, may live. In other words,
from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of White life. This is
important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements today) which is so
dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles
over hegemony are seldom, if ever,
asignifying—at some point they require coherence, they require categories for the record—
which means they contain the seeds of anti-Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of a hypothetical scenario.
In the early part of the 20th century, civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will, around emerging industries such as meat packing. In
his notes on “Americanism and Fordism” (280-314), Gramsci explores the “scientific management” of Taylorism, the prohibition on
alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of civil society in
places like turn of the century Chicago:
The state will always be bad for blackness – black bodies are in a perpetual
state of warfare against systems of oppression
Rodriguez 2010, Dylan Rodriguez is a Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, “The Terms
of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition”,
http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151, NN
Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil
liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the
next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken
politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare
as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of normalized
and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential
violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the
unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that
compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond
the USA) really does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US
domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of
the present and future . The non-profit and NGO left, in particular, seems content to engage in
desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic
warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically
addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. In so many ways, the US
progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has
called the violent 'abandonments' of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social
welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and
(productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities —which Gilmore (2007b: 44—5)
says are guided by a 'frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice' . Yet, at the same
time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle
against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively
unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival,
grass roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and
everyday terms of the very domestic war(s ) that the state has so openly and repeatedly
declared as the premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the
common narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question
remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this statecraft as the state of
emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally encompasses (war!). Perhaps it is
because critical intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating
the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have generally
undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates)
sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf 'dissent' and counter-state, antiracist,
and antiviolence organizing. Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramscis thoughts on the
formation of contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The State does have and
request consent, but it also 'educates' this consent, by means of the political and syndical
associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling
class. (Gramsci 1995: 259).
The objectification of blackness means that we are ontologically murdered over
and over again with no contingency, Black flesh becomes the enslaved profit for
white society
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, professor at the University of Vanderbilt, 1987, The John Hopkins
University Press, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”,
http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/6/14, KM)
Among the myriad uses to which the enslaved community was put, Goodell identifies its value
for medical research: “Assortments of diseased, damaged, and disabled Negroes, deemed
incurable and otherwise worthless are bought up, it seems … by medical institutions, to be
experimented and operated upon, for purposes of ‘medical education’ and the interest of
medical science” [86-87; Goodell’s emphasis ]. From the Charleston Mercury for October 12, 1838, Goodell notes this
advertisement: ¶ ‘To planters and others. – Wanted, fifty Negroes, any person, having sick Negroes, considered
incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected with
scrofula, or king’s evil, confirmed hypochrondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder
and its appendages, diarrhea, dystentery, etc. The
highest cash price will be paid, on application as above.’ At No. 110
profitable “atomizing” of the captive body provides
another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of
relatedness between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures
adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community
becomes a living laboratory. ¶ The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social
realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative
emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the captive flesh/body has been
“liberated,” and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling
Church Street, Charleston. [87; Goodell’s emphasis] ¶ This
episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and
mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the
human
subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous
archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. Faulkner’s young Chick Mallison in The Mansion calls “it” by other
names – “the ancient subterrene atavistic fear…” [227]. And I would call it the Great Long National Shame. But
people do not talk like that anymore – it is “embarrassing,” just as the retrieval of mutilated
female bodies will likely be “backward” for some people. Neither the shameface of the
embarrassed, nor the not-looking-back of the self-assured is of much interest to us, and will not
help at all if rigor is our dream. We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but
words will most certainly kill us.
The alternative is to wallow in the permutation of present and past to return
and depart from the violence created by slavery – this opens up new avenues to
challenge the normalized violence in modernity
Hartman 02, (Columbia University African American literature and history professor,
02(Saidiya V., Fall 2002, “The time of Slavery”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101,
Number 4, pp.757-777, CLF)
The point here is not to condemn tourism, but to rigorously examine the politics of memory and
question whether ‘‘working through’’ is even an appropriate model for our relationship with
history. In Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra opts for working through as kind of middle road
between redemptive totalization and the impossibility of representation and suggests that a
degree of recovery is possible in the context of a responsible working through of the past. He
asserts that in coming to terms with trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable
aspects of the past that might be used in rebuilding a new life. 23 While LaCapra’s arguments are persuasive,
I wonder to what degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to build a new life?
To what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the present or, as Marx warned, can
we only draw our poetry from the future and not the past? 24 Here I am not advancing the impossibility of
representation or declaring the end of history, but wondering aloud whether the image of enslaved ancestors
can transform the present. I ask this question in order to discover again the political and ethical relevance of the past. If
the goal is something more than assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of
memory , the pressing question is,Why need we remember ? Does the emphasis on remembering
and working through the past expose our insatiable desires for curatives, healing, and anything
else that proffers the restoration of some prelapsarian intactness? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing
history? Can remembering potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the
routine of violence constitutive of black life in the United States? Or is it that remembering has become the
only conceivable or viable form of political agency? Usually the injunction to remember insists that memory can
prevent atrocity, redeem the dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both
individuals and collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slavery’s crime, and ably standing in the other’s shoes.
Case
SQ
Loopholes exist for the FBI and NSA
Cushing 14
Tim Cushing, Techdirt contributor, 12-5-14, "Ron Wyden Introduces Legislation Aimed At
Preventing FBI-Mandated Backdoors In Cellphones And Computers," Techdirt.,
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141204/16220529333/ron-wyden-introduces-legislationaimed-preventing-fbi-mandated-backdoors-cellphones-computers.shtml//SRawal
Here's the
actual wording of the backdoor ban [pdf link], which has a couple of loopholes in it. (a) IN
GENERAL.—Except as provided in subsection (b), no agency may mandate that a manufacturer, developer, or seller of covered products design or alter
the security functions in its product or service to allow the surveillance of any user of such product or service, or to allow the physical search of such
product, by any agency. Subsection
(b) presents the first loophole, naming the very act that Comey is pursuing
to have amended in his agency's favor. (b) EXCEPTION.—Subsection (a) shall not apply to mandates
authorized under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (47 U.S.C. 1001 et seq.).
Comey wants to alter CALEA or, failing that, get a few legislators to run some sort of encryptiontargeting legislation up the Congressional flagpole for him. Wyden's bill won't thwart these efforts and it does
leave the NSA free to continue with its pre-existing homebrewed backdoor efforts -- the kind
that don't require mandates because they're performed off-site without the manufacturer's
knowledge.
They will still have access- government can still influence companies
Newman 14
Lily Hay Newman, 12-5-2014, "Senator Proposes Bill to Prohibit Government-Mandated
Backdoors in Smartphones," Slate Magazine,
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/12/05/senator_wyden_proposes_secure_data
_act_to_keep_government_agencies_from.html//SRawal
It's worth noting, though, that the Secure Data Act doesn't actually prohibit backdoors—it just
prohibits agencies from mandating them. There are a lot of other types of pressure
government groups could still use to influence the creation of backdoors, even if they couldn't
flat-out demand them. Here's the wording in the bill: "No agency may mandate that a
manufacturer, developer, or seller of covered products design or alter the security functions in
its product or service to allow the surveillance of any user of such product or service, or to allow
the physical search of such product, by any agency."
Adv. 1
Turn - Internet freedom is used to crush dissent
Siegel 11 (Lee Siegel, a columnist and editor at large for The New York Observer, is the author of “Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and
Commerce — and Why It Matters. “‘The Net Delusion’ and the Egypt Crisis”, February 4, 2011, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/the-net-delusion-and-the-egyptcrisis)
Morozov takes the ideas of what he calls “cyber-utopians” and shows how reality
perverts them in one political situation after another. In Iran, the regime used the internet
to crush the internet-driven protests in June 2009. In Russia, neofascists use the internet to
organize pogroms. And on and on. Morozov has written hundreds of pages to make the point that technology is amoral and cuts
many different ways. Just as radio can bolster democracy or — as in Rwanda — incite
genocide, so the internet can help foment a revolution but can also help crush it. This seems obvious,
yet it has often been entirely lost as grand claims are made for the internet’s positive, liberating qualities. ¶And suddenly here are Tunisia and, even more dramatically, Egypt,
simultaneously proving and refuting Morozov’s argument. In both cases, social networking allowed truths that had been whispered to be widely broadcast and commented
In Tunisia and Egypt — and now across the Arab world — Facebook and Twitter
have made people feel less alone in their rage at the governments that stifle their lives. There is nothing more
upon.
politically emboldening than to feel, all at once, that what you have experienced as personal bitterness is actually an objective condition, a universal affliction in your society that
Yet at the same time, the Egyptian government shut off the internet,
which is an effective way of using the internet. And according to one Egyptian blogger, misinformation is being spread through
Facebook — as it was in Iran — just as real information was shared by anti-government protesters. This is the “dark side of internet
freedom” that Morozov is warning against. It is the freedom to wantonly crush the forces
of freedom. ¶All this should not surprise anyone. It seems that, just as with every other type of technology of communication, the internet is not a
solution to human conflict but an amplifier for all aspects of a conflict. As you read about
pro-government agitators charging into crowds of protesters on horseback and camel, you
realize that nothing has changed in our new internet age. The human situation is the same as it always was, except that it
therefore can be universally opposed. ¶
is the same in a newer and more intense way. Decades from now, we will no doubt be celebrating a spanking new technology that promises to liberate us from the internet. And
the argument joined by Morozov will occur once again.
Adv. 2 - CyberCrime
Backdooring is specifically key to combat cyber terrorist attacks
Goldsmith 13 (Jack, a contributing editor at New Republic, teaches at Harvard Law School and
is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, “We Need an
Invasive NSA,” New Republic, 10/10/2013,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115002/invasive-nsa-will-protect-us-cyberattacks)//duncan
Ever since stories about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) electronic intelligence-gathering
capabilities
began tumbling out last June, The New York Times has published more than a dozen editorials excoriating
the “national surveillance state.” It wants the NSA to end the “ mass warehousing of
everyone’s data” and the use of “ back doors ” to break encrypted communications. A major
element of the Times’ critique is that the NSA’s domestic sweeps are not justified by the terrorist threat they aim to prevent.¶ At the
end of August, in the midst of the Times’ assault on the NSA, the
newspaper suffered what it described as a
“malicious external attack” on its domain name registrar at the hands of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of
hackers who support Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. The paper’s website was down for several hours and,
for some people, much longer. “In terms of the sophistication of the attack, this is a big deal,”
said Marc Frons, the Times’ chief information officer. Ten months earlier, hackers stole the corporate
passwords for every employee at the Times, accessed the computers of 53 employees, and
breached the e-mail accounts of two reporters who cover China. “We brought in the FBI, and the FBI said
this had all the hallmarks of hacking by the Chinese military,” Frons said at the time. He also acknowledged that the hackers were in
the Times system on election night in 2012 and could have “wreaked havoc” on its coverage if they wanted.¶ Such cyber-
intrusions threaten corporate America and the U.S. government every day. “Relentless assaults on
America’s computer networks by China and other foreign governments, hackers and criminals have created an urgent need for
safeguards to protect these vital systems,” the Times editorial page noted last year while supporting legislation encouraging the
private sector to share cybersecurity information with the government. It cited General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA,
who had noted a 17-fold increase in cyber-intrusions on critical infrastructure from 2009 to 2011 and who described the losses in the
United States from cyber-theft as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” If a “catastrophic cyber-attack occurs,” the
Timesconcluded, “Americans will be justified in asking why their lawmakers ... failed to protect them.”¶ When catastrophe strikes,
the public will adjust its tolerance for intrusive government measures.¶ The Times editorial board is quite right about the seriousness
of the cyber- threat and the federal government’s responsibility to redress it.
What it does not appear to realize is
the connection between the domestic NSA surveillance it detests and the governmental
assistance with cybersecurity it cherishes. To keep our computer and telecommunication
networks secure, the government will eventually need to monitor and collect intelligence on
those networks using techniques similar to ones the Timesand many others find reprehensible
when done for counterterrorism ends.¶ The fate of domestic surveillance is today being fought around the topic of
whether it is needed to stop Al Qaeda from blowing things up. But the fight tomorrow, and the more important
fight, will be about whether it is necessary to protect our ways of life embedded in computer
networks.¶ Anyone anywhere with a connection to the Internet can engage in cyber-operations within the United States. Most
truly harmful cyber-operations, however, require group effort and significant skill. The attacking group or nation must have clever
hackers, significant computing power, and the sophisticated software—known as “malware”—that enables the monitoring,
exfiltration, or destruction of information inside a computer. The supply of all of these resources has been growing fast for many
years—in governmental labs devoted to developing these tools and on sprawling black markets on the Internet.¶
Telecommunication networks are the channels through which malware typically travels, often
anonymized or encrypted, and buried in the billions of communications that traverse the
globe each day. The targets are the communications networks themselves as well as the computers they connect—things like
the Times’ servers, the computer systems that monitor nuclear plants, classified documents on computers in the Pentagon, the
nasdaq exchange, your local bank, and your social-network providers.¶
To keep these computers and networks
secure, the government needs powerful intelligence capabilities abroad so that it can learn
about planned cyber-intrusions. It also needs to raise defenses at home. An important first step is to correct the market
failures that plague cybersecurity. Through law or regulation, the government must improve incentives for individuals to use security
software, for private firms to harden their defenses and share information with one another, and for Internet service providers to
crack down on the botnets—networks of compromised zombie computers—that underlie many cyber-attacks. More, too, must
be done to prevent insider threats like Edward Snowden’s, and to control the stealth introduction of
vulnerabilities during the manufacture of computer components—vulnerabilities that can later be used as windows for cyberattacks.¶ And yet that’s still not enough. The
U.S. government can fully monitor air, space, and sea for potential attacks from
abroad. But it has limited access to the channels of cyber-attack and cyber-theft, because they are owned
by private telecommunication firms, and because Congress strictly limits government access to private
communications. “I can’t defend the country until I’m into all the networks,” General Alexander reportedly told senior
government officials a few months ago.¶ For Alexander, being in the network means having government computers scan the content
and metadata of Internet communications in the United States and store some of these communications for extended periods. Such
access , he thinks, will give the government a fighting chance to find the needle of known
malware in the haystack of communications so that it can block or degrade the attack or
exploitation . It will also allow it to discern patterns of malicious activity in the swarm of
communications, even when it doesn’t possess the malware’s signature. And it will better
enable the government to trace back an attack’s trajectory so that it can discover the identity
and geographical origin of the threat.
No impact to backdoors
So 13 (Candice, writer for itbusiness.ca, Carleton University formerly at Edmonton Journal, the
Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and the Windsor Star, “Security experts debate use of
backdoors in coding,” itbusiness.ca, 11/7/2013, http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/securityexperts-debate-use-of-backdoors-in-coding/44646)//duncan
*Citing G. Mark Hardy, president of the National Security Corporation
Still,
backdoors may not be as serious a concern as people have supposed , says G. Mark Hardy,
president of the National Security Corporation. He has developed information security plans for four U.S. military commands, and he
wrote the requirements for communication security encryption for one of its satellite programs.¶ Backdoors have
been
around about as long as software has been around, with many of them just being there for
software developers to ensure their programs are running properly, Hardy says, adding he feels people
are just starting to take notice now, though they didn’t seem to care much about that in the past.¶ “Backdoors by
themselves aren’t necessarily bad or evil, but they do exist in many applications for either
testing purposes or to be able to do ongoing verification that things are working correctly. The
problem occurs when third parties access backdoors and the applications contain sensitive information, and now you, the consumer,
are not aware of the fact,” he says.¶ “In my opinion,
backdoors are not your biggest concern. The NSA doesn’t steal
credit card numbers. The NSA doesn’t do identity theft and ruin your credit. Organized crime does. And organized crime, as well as
other groups, actively seek exploits by which they can achieve financial gain.Ӧ Hardy adds that in many cases, hackers
gain
access through programming errors, and not necessarily through backdoors. He adds he feels
a lot of the news coming out of the NSA is really just rumours and speculation.¶ “I have not
seen tangible evidence of backdoors being inserted into code by government agencies, but that is
what the buzz is about,” he says.¶ While it’s almost impossible to write perfect code, completely free of
errors, users need to keep their systems up-to-date, patch regularly, and avoid using free services where they can. Free services
may not charge the user directly, but they may rely on a freemium model or push ads.¶ If security professionals do choose to use
backdoors, they should only use well-known, published encryption algorithms that have been tried and tested, instead of
proprietary algorithms, he says. For example, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) has been around for more than 30 years, with
banks now using triple DES to transfer data.¶ Ultimately,
Hardy says he feels citizens need to understand there
is a need to protect national security.
No cyber impact
Jason HEALEY, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, 13 [“No,
Cyberwarfare Isn't as Dangerous as Nuclear War,” March 20, 2013,
www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/03/20/cyber-attacks-not-yet-anexistential-threat-to-the-us]
America does not face an existential cyberthreat today, despite recent warnings . Our
cybervulnerabilities are undoubtedly grave and the
threats we face are severe but far from comparable to
nuclear war . The most recent alarms come in a Defense Science Board report on how to make military cybersystems more
resilient against advanced threats (in short, Russia or China). It warned that the "cyber threat is serious, with potential consequences
similar in some ways to the nuclear threat of the Cold War." Such fears were also expressed by Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2011. He called cyber "The single biggest existential threat that's out there" because "cyber actually more
than theoretically, can attack our infrastructure, our financial systems." While
it is true that cyber attacks might do
these things, it is also true they have not only never happened but are far more difficult to
accomplish than mainstream thinking believes . The consequences from cyber threats may be similar in some
ways to nuclear, as the Science Board concluded, but mostly, they are incredibly dissimilar. Eighty years ago, the generals of the U.S.
Army Air Corps were sure that their bombers would easily topple other countries and cause their populations to panic, claims which
did not stand up to reality. A
study of the 25-year history of cyber conflict, by the Atlantic Council and
Cyber Conflict Studies Association, has shown a similar dynamic where the impact of disruptive
cyberattacks has been consistently overestimated . Rather than theorizing about future cyberwars or
extrapolating from today's concerns, the history of cyberconflict that have actually been fought, shows that cyber incidents have so
far tended to have effects that are either widespread but fleeting or persistent but narrowly focused. No
attacks, so far,
have been both widespread and persistent. There have been no authenticated cases of
anyone dying from a cyber attack. Any widespread disruptions, even the 2007 disruption against Estonia,
have been short-lived causing no significant GDP loss. Moreover, as with conflict in other domains, cyberattacks can take
down many targets but keeping them down over time in the face of determined defenses has so far been out of the range of all but
the most dangerous adversaries such as Russia and China. Of course, if the United States is in a conflict with those nations, cyber will
be the least important of the existential threats policymakers should be worrying about. Plutonium
trumps bytes in a
shooting war. This is not all good news. Policymakers have recognized the problems since at least 1998 with little significant
progress. Worse, the threats and vulnerabilities are getting steadily more worrying. Still, experts have been warning
of a cyber Pearl Harbor for 20 of the 70 years since the actual Pearl Harbor . The transfer of U.S. trade
secrets through Chinese cyber espionage could someday accumulate into an existential threat. But it
doesn't seem so seem just yet, with only handwaving estimates of annual losses of 0.1 to 0.5 percent to the total U.S.
GDP of around $15 trillion. That's bad, but it doesn't add up to an existential crisis or "economic cyberwar."
Adv. 3
The intelligence agencies are separated from the rest of the government
Glennon ’14, Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University. (1/11/14, Michael J. Glennon, Harvard National Security Journal,
http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf, vol.5)
Neil Sheehan205 reflected on why nothing would happen. Sheehan’s Times colleague
Halberstam recalled that Sheehan came away with one impression: that “the government of the
United States was not what he had thought it was; it was as if there were an inner U.S.
government, what he called ‘a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else . . . . It
had survived and perpetuated itself . . . . [I]t does not function necessarily for the benefit of the
Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite
different from public codes.’”206
The Trumanite network has achieved, in a word, autonomy. 207 The maintenance of
Trumanite autonomy has depended upon two conditions. The first is that the Madisonian
institutions appear to be in charge of the nation’s security. The second is that the Madisonian
institutions not actually be in charge.
Solvency
Only businesses can solve—government solutions take too long
Spink Adrian Spink No date (“What are Java Zero-Day Attacks and How Can They Affect You?”,
NO DATE, http://www.findtheedge.com/general/what-are-java-zero-day-attacks-and-how-canthey-affect-you, accessed 7/16/15)
Secuity-Measures-NeededRecent months have seen a procession of Java zero-day attacks
impact a wide variety of organisations. Simply put, zero-day attacks occur when a problem with
a piece of software is discovered and exploited before the developer is even aware that there
is an issue. Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Microsoft have all recently disclosed compromised
computers, and many more firms have been hit but not gone public with the information. The
very nature of a zero-day attack means your systems could be vulnerable in the period between
the exploit being identified and the patch being deployed by Oracle, the owners of Java. It’s
unlikely we’ve seen the last of these exploits; Java’s rich programming language wasn’t designed
for a hostile Internet environment, so it’s likely more vulnerabilities will be uncovered. There are
also many other products running on our desktops that could be susceptible to this style of
attack, as has been shown by the recent Internet Explorer zero-day issues. Traditional anti-virus
and perimeter security techniques do not offer complete protection – for this reason,
organisations need to review their risk exposure, and plan their responses accordingly. So what
practical advice can we offer: 1. Remove Java? While many security experts recommend the
seemingly straightforward solution of disabling or removing Java from browsers, but this is not
always practical. Some firms will be dependent on Java to run both internal and third party
applications. For large organisations, the cost and logistics of ensuring Java is disabled for every
browser may be prohibitive. Many browsers now offer the ability to control how Java is
handled, however, and the latest version of Java has enhancements to the control panel settings
that may offer you a solution with a little tweaking. 2. Maximise your end-point security Antivirus solutions will protect you from the most common exploits once they have been identified,
but it’s even more important to ensure: You have full coverage across all your end-points
Security updates are installed on all endpoints quickly You have ‘zero-day’ and ‘Host Intrusion
Prevention’ features enabled 3. User Awareness Educating your users about the potential risks,
and how to avoid phishing attacks, is a great way to reduce your exposure. 4. Protect your
critical information assets In the longer term, ‘advanced persistent threats’ are likely to increase.
Firms need to ask themselves – while making the assumption that their network will be
breached at some point in the future – what additional measures could be taken to protect
critical information assets in advance, and limit damage. Summary Zero day attacks are
inevitable , so buisnessess need to take steps to protect their data and systems well ahead of
time. It’s tempting to put off thinking about these issues, but this is only likely to magnify the
amount of damage caused if your system is targeted in the future.
Backdoors are key to provide law enforcement critical information to prevent
crime
Hess 4/29 (Amy, Executive Assistant Director at FBI, “Encrytpion And Cybersecurity For Mobile
Electronic Communication Devices,” Department of Justice, 4/29/2015, pdf)//duncan
Encryption of stored data is not new, but it has become increasingly prevalent and sophisticated. The
challenge to law enforcement and national security officials has intensified with the advent of
default encryption settings and stronger encryption standards on both devices and networks.¶
In the past, a consumer had to decide whether to encrypt data stored on his or her device and take some action to implement that
encryption. With today’s new operating systems, however, a
device and all of a user’s information on that
device can be encrypted by default – without any affirmative action by the consumer. In the
past, companies had the ability to decrypt devices when the Government obtained a search
warrant and a court order. Today, companies have developed encryption technology which
makes it impossible for them to decrypt data on devices they manufacture and sell, even when lawfully ordered to
do so. Although there are strong and appropriate cybersecurity and other reasons to support these new uses of encryption, such
decisions regarding system design have a tremendous impact on law enforcement’s ability to fight crime and bring perpetrators to
justice.¶ Evidence of criminal activity used to be found in written ledgers, boxes, drawers, and file cabinets, all of which could be
searched pursuant to a warrant. But like the general population, criminal
actors are increasingly storing such
information on electronic devices. If these devices are automatically encrypted, the
information they contain may be unreadable to anyone other than the user of the device. Obtaining a search
warrant for photos, videos, email, text messages, and documents can be an exercise in futility. Terrorists and other
criminals know this and will increasingly count on these means of evading detection.¶ Additional
Considerations¶ Some assert that although more and more devices are encrypted, users back-up and store much of their data in
“the cloud,” and law enforcement agencies can access this data pursuant to court order. For several reasons, however, the data may
not be there. First,
aside from the technical requirements and settings needed to successfully back
up data to the cloud, many companies impose fees to store information there – fees which
consumers may be unwilling to pay. Second, criminals can easily avoid putting information
where it may be accessible to law enforcement. Third, data backed up to the cloud typically
includes only a portion of the data stored on a device, so key pieces of evidence may reside
only on a criminal’s or terrorist’s phone, for example. And if criminals do not back up their phones
routinely, or if they opt out of uploading to the cloud altogether, the data may only be found
on the devices themselves – devices which are increasingly encrypted.¶ Facing the Challenge¶ The
reality is that cyber adversaries will exploit any vulnerability they find. But security risks are better addressed by
developing solutions during the design phase of a specific product or service, rather than
resorting to a patchwork solution when law enforcement presents the company with a court
order after the product or service has been deployed.¶ To be clear, we in the FBI support and
encourage the use of secure networks and sophisticated encryption to prevent cyber threats
to our critical national infrastructure, our intellectual property, and our data. We have been on the
front lines of the fight against cybercrime and economic espionage and we recognize that absolute security does not exist in either
the physical or digital world. Any lawful intercept or access solution should be designed to minimize its impact upon the overall
security.
But without a solution that enables law enforcement to access critical evidence, many
investigations could be at a dead end. The same is true for cyber security investigations; if there is no way
to access encrypted systems and data, we may not be able to identify those who seek to steal
our technology, our state secrets, our intellectual property, and our trade secrets.¶ A common
misperception is that we can simply break into a device using a “brute force” attack – the idea that
with enough computing resources devoted to the task, we can defeat any encryption. But the reality is that even a
supercomputer would have difficulty with today’s high-level encryption standards. And some
devices have a setting that erases the encryption key if someone makes too many attempts to
break the password, effectively closing all access to that data.¶ Finally, a reasonable person might also ask,
“Can’t you just compel the owner of the device to produce the information in a readable form?” Even if we could compel an
individual to provide this information, a suspected criminal would more likely choose to defy the court’s order and accept a
punishment for contempt rather than risk a 30-year sentence for, say, production and distribution of child pornography.¶
Without access to the right evidence, we fear we may not be able to identify and stop child
predators hiding in the shadows of the Internet, violent criminals who are targeting our
neighborhoods, and terrorists who may be using social media to recruit, plan, and execute an
attack in our country. We may not be able to recover critical information from a device that
belongs to a victim who can’t provide us with the password, especially when time is of the
essence.