FYIs
What the plan does – It implements the parts of the SSRA that are relevant to online
surveillance
Lydia O'Connor March 24, 2015, “Bipartisan Bill Would Repeal Patriot Act To End Government
Spying On Americans,” Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/24/surveillance-staterepeal-act_n_6935632.html, KEL
The Surveillance State Repeal Act, introduced by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Thomas Massie (RKy.), would overturn the 2001 Patriot Act that allowed for mass government surveillance in the name of
anti-terrorism and the destruction of any information collected under it. The bill also would repeal the
2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows Internet spying, and would stop the government from forcing
tech manufacturers to compromise encryption or privacy features to allow spying on their devices.
Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, who exposed the National Security Agency's mass surveillance in
2013, would have additional protections.
What is Prism?
PRISM is a clandestine[1] surveillance program under which the United States National Security Agency
(NSA) collects internet communications from at least nine major US internet companies.[2][3][4] Since
2001 the United States government has increased its scope for such surveillance, and so this program was
launched in 2007.
PRISM is a government code name for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD US984XN.[5][6] The PRISM program collects stored internet communications based on demands made to
internet companies such as Google Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn
over any data that match court-approved search terms.[7] The NSA can use these PRISM requests to
target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on
stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier,[8][9] and to get data that is easier
to handle, among other things.[10]
PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush
Administration.[11][12] The program is operated under the supervision of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISA Court, or FISC) pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA).[13] Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned
that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew and included what he
characterized as "dangerous" and "criminal" activities.[14] The disclosures were published by The
Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a
financial arrangement between NSA's Special Source Operations division (SSO) and PRISM partners in
the millions of dollars.[15]
Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic
reports", and it accounts for 91% of the NSA's internet traffic acquired under FISA section 702
authority."[16][17] The leaked information came to light one day after the revelation that the FISA Court
had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over to
the NSA logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls.[18][19]
What is Bullrun?
Bullrun is a clandestine, highly classified decryption program run by the United States National Security
Agency (NSA). According to the BULLRUN classification guide published by The Guardian, the
program uses multiple sources including Computer Network Exploitation, interdiction, industry
relationships, collaboration with other IC entities, and advanced mathematical techniques to access
encryption programs and technology.
What is US-EU Safe Harbor Agreement?
Under Safe Harbor, U.S. organizations certify to the U.S. Department of Commerce that they provide
certain protections for personal data. Those protections are designed to ensure that organizations meet EU
data protection requirements. Safe Harbor certifications are enforced by the Federal Trade Commission or
the Department of Transportation as appropriate. Over four thousand organizations are currently listed on
the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor list. These organizations rely on Safe Harbor to authorize transfers of personal
data from the EU to the U.S. Recent events, however, have created uncertainty for Safe Harbor and the
organizations that depend on it.
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) –
1AC
Normal Version
Observation 1: Inherency
The 2008 FISA Amendment Act (FAA) removed the probable cause standard
requiring warrants for surveillance, allowing sweeping NSA electronic surveillance
of US citizens and communication within the US. There’s no effective oversight of
these programs now.
Margot Kaminski June 7, 2013, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School; She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the
Information Society Project. While at Yale Law School, she was a Knight Law and Media Scholar and
co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation from Yale
Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back,” The
Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/prisms-legal-basis-how-we-got-here-andwhat-we-can-do-to-get-back/276667/, KEL
First, there is the question of whom the surveillance targets.
PRISM spies on Americans. The Director of National Intelligence emphasized yesterday that PRISM targets
only " non-U.S. persons located outside the United States ." But the press release also acknowledges that "information about U.S. persons" may be "incidentally acquired" in such pursuits.
The current scope of this "incidental"
surveillance will shock most Americans. Before 2008, the law limited "incidental" surveillance by limiting primary surveillance. The
government had to show probable cause that its surveillance target was the agent of a foreign power,
and that the facility being watched was about to be used by that target. You could be incidentally observed if you communicated with a
targeted foreign agent, but otherwise foreign communications were likely to be unmonitored. But in 2008, the FISA Amendments Act (FISAAA)
changed this . The government now does not need to show probable cause that the target is a foreign agent. It need only have a "reasonable
belief" that the target is located outside of the United States. The new version of FISA does not require the
government to identify its targets; it does not require the government to identify the monitored facilities; and
the purpose of foreign intelligence gathering attaches to the whole surveillance program, not the individual investigation. That is to say: the FISA Amendments Act
permits the government to obtain a single court order through which it can monitor thousands, or even
millions, of people. The scope of "incidental" surveillance thus vastly expanded as Congress lowered the requirements for spying on the primary target. Such a system
will inevitably sweep in untold numbers of Americans who communicate with foreigners. And because the government
Targeting is not the same as collecting; the program may "target" foreign persons, but "acquire" information on Americans.
need have only a "reasonable belief" that the target is outside the United States--which it is interpreting according to the Washington Post as a 51% chance that the target is outside the U.S.--this
system will undoubtedly sweep in purely domestic communications as well.
This brings us to the issue of oversight: who is watching the watchers? The Director
of National Intelligence assures us that PRISM is "subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress." It is true that in December 2012
Congress renewed the law that allows PRISM to exist. But what kind of oversight did Congress actually provide? When Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall asked whether communications by
Americans had been gathered under the law, the Director of National Intelligence responded that it was not possible to identify the number of people in the United States whose communications
At the core of the
problem is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court), which meets in secret and does not publish its
opinions, itself does not provide adequate oversight. When Congress changed the standard for targeting
foreign individuals in 2008 , it abolished the ability of the FISA Court to evaluate whether the
government had any real cause to target an individual or group of individuals. The Supreme Court itself disputes whether the
were reviewed. How effective can Congressional oversight be if Congress does not understand the scope and nature of the programs it has authorized?
FISA Court enforces the Fourth Amendment. The "minimization procedures" touted by the Director of National Intelligence as adequate privacy safeguards are established by the government,
evaluated by the government, and are subject to review by a secret court--if review occurs at all. And as a general practice, FISA "minimization" hasnot been true minimization: it occurs after
information is already acquired. The existence of PRISM and the Verizon metadata program, both authorized by the FISA Court, confirms that a secret court broadly authorized by an uninformed
Congress will not adequately protect the Fourth and First Amendment rights of American citizens on American soil.
The 2015 USA Freedom Act does NOTHING to reform PRISM and sent a signal
that should trigger all negative disadvantages.
Fred Kaplan June 8, 2015, author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the
American Way of War, is writing a book on the history of cyberwar, “The NSA Debate We Should Be
Having,” Slate Magazine,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/the_national_security_agency_s_su
rveillance_and_the_usa_freedom_act_the.html, KEL
One week after Congress voted to stop the National Security Agency from collecting and storing millions of
Americans’ phone records, partisans on both sides are exaggerating the significance of this new reform.
NSA supporters lament the loss of a key tool for fighting terrorists , while the agency’s critics hail
the new law as (in Edward Snowden’s words) an “historic victory for the rights of every citizen, ” with some calling its
passage a vindication of Snowden himself as an authentic whistleblower who should be let back home as a hero, not a convict. Both sides are off the
mark. The NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata was the subject of the first news stories based on the trove of highly classified documents that Snowden
leaked, and it stirred the biggest commotion. But in fact the metadata program never comprised more than a tiny percentage of the agency’s vast and global
surveillance net. The new law’s reform measure—to keep the metadata stored with the telecom companies, allowing NSA access only to specified materials, and then
only through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—was first proposed not by some libertarian critic but by Gen. Keith Alexander, then-director of the NSA.
Under the system that has been in effect, as authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act (or, rather, by the FISA court’s now-discredited reading of that section), the
NSA routinely collected metadata from some of the biggest cellular companies—not the contents of conversations, but the phone numbers, dates, times, and duration
of the calls. If someone inside the United States called a number linked to one of three terrorist organizations (including al-Qaida), an NSA alert system would note
that fact. The NSA could then ask the FISA Court for permission to search the database for a list of all the other numbers that the American phone had called, as well
as all the numbers that those numbers had called, going back as far as five years. If this search revealed a suspicious pattern, the NSA would turn the materials over to
the FBI, which could seek a warrant to listen to conversations. Under the new reform law, called the USA Freedom Act, the NSA would no longer possess the
database, so it would seek a FISA court order to get it from the telecom companies—and the FISA court would now include a privacy advocate who could argue
against relinquishing the data. If the court sided with the NSA, what happened next would be exactly the same as before the new law passed. So, it’s not exactly a
giant step in the annals of either national-security risk or civil liberties reform—unless one of two things had been true. First, if the NSA had been abusing the
process—if analysts or senior officials had been searching metadata for personal, political, or vindictive purposes—the changes in custody and oversight would have a
huge impact. But neither Snowden’s documents nor any subsequent probes have uncovered any such evidence. Second, if authoritarians or worse—say, modern-day
versions of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover—were to come to power, they could suspend the internal controls at NSA and use the agency’s vast databases to track
domestic enemies or any target of their choosing. In that case, the Freedom Act would serve as a powerful brake to oppression: Because the government would no
longer possess the data, it couldn’t exploit the data. That is the real—and the intended—effect of the reform: not so much to change the way surveillance technology is
used today, but rather to limit the potential for abuse in the future. 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.
Plan Text
Thus, my partner and I stand resolved:
Domestic online surveillance authority under the USA PATRIOT Act, Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, and Executive Order
12333 should be repealed and any requirement for manufacturers of electronic
devices or software to provide bypasses for encryption will be prohibited.
Advantage One – Cloud Competitiveness
PRISM revelations and the weak response with US Freedom Act has caused other
nations to retaliate against our information tech sector and undermined our tech
sector competitiveness
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
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.
US competitiveness in the $241 billion global cloud market is key to US innovation,
economic growth, and job growth
Digital 4th, January 2015, Digital 4th is a bipartisan coalition dedicated to reforming and modernizing
our country’s 4th Amendment privacy rights, “U.S. Competitiveness in Cloud Computing: Updating the
Standard for Government Access to Stored Communications,” http://www.digital4th.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/01/Issue_Brief-2-ECPA-and-the-Cloud.pdf, KEL
Businesses all over the world are looking to cloud - based services for their information management
needs in order to save money on equipment and to achieve better computing reliability and data security.
Cloud based services allow companies to expand their computing capacity quickly – particularly valuable for start - up businesses and
entrepreneurs. Such services give employees the flexibility to share information and collaborate. The
global cloud market is
expected to expand to $241 billion by 2020. American companies have been the global leaders in cloud
computing, and cloud computing has been an engine for U.S. - based innovation, economic growth, and
job creation.
Maintaining US economic growth is key to global economic growth
Rich Miller, January 9, 2015, “U.S. Retakes the Helm of the Global Economy,” Bloomberg News,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-09/u-s-retakes-the-helm-of-the-global-economy, KEL
The U.S. is back in the driver’s seat of the global economy after 15 years of watching China and emerging
markets take the lead. The world’s biggest economy will expand by 3.2 percent or more this year, its best
performance since at least 2005, as an improving job market leads to stepped-up consumer spending, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase
& Co., Deutsche Bank AG and BNP Paribas SA. That outcome would be about what each foresees for the world economy as a whole and would
be the first time since 1999 that America hasn’t lagged behind global growth, based on data from the International Monetary Fund. “The
U.S.
is again the engine of global growth,” said Allen Sinai, chief executive officer of Decision Economics in New York. “The economy
is looking stellar and is in its best shape since the 1990s.”
Economic decline causes global wars – empirically proven
Royal, '10 (Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction Program -- DOD, Economics of War &
Peace: Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith & Brauer, p. 213-15)
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political
science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of
interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow.
First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms
in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the oftenbloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as
economic crises could usher in a redistribution or relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to
uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon. 1995). Alternatively, even a
relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to
challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins ( L 996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with
parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and
connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996. 2000)
theory of trade expectations suggests that future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security
behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states arc likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of
future trade relations. However, if
the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace
items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use
force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade
expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states .
Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess
(2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during
periods of economic downturn. They write, “The linkages between internal and external conflict and
prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict,
which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends lo amplify the extent to
which international and external conflict self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess 2002. p. 89) Economic
decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg. Hess. & Weerapana,
2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the
popularity of a sitting government. 'Diversionary theory’ suggests that when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline,
sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a rally around the flag effect. Wang (1996),
DeRouen ( 1995), and Blomberg. Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least
indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics arc
greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from
office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United
States and thus weak Presidential popularity arc statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship
positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency or economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links
economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels. This implied connection between integration, crises and armed
conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention.
Independently, US competitiveness solves great power war – it solves all imapcts
Colby 14 (Elbridge, the Robert M. Gates fellow at the Center for a New American Security; and Paul
Lettow, was senior director for strategic planning on the U.S. National Security Council staff from 2007
to 2009, 7/3/14, “Have We Hit Peak America?,”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/03/have_we_hit_peak_america)
Many foreign-policy
experts seem to believe that retaining American primacy is largely a matter of will -- of how
America chooses to exert its power abroad. Even President Obama, more often accused of being a prophet of decline than a booster of America's
future, recently asserted that the United States "has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world." The question, he continued, is "not whether America will
lead, but how we will lead." But
will is unavailing without strength. If the United States wants the international
system to continue to reflect its interests and values -- a system, for example, in which the global commons are
protected, trade is broad-based and extensive, and armed conflicts among great nations are curtailed -it needs to sustain not just resolve, but relative power. That, in turn, will require acknowledging the
uncomfortable truth that global power and wealth are shifting at an unprecedented pace, with profound implications.
Moreover, many of the challenges America faces are exacerbated by vulnerabilities that are largely self-created, chief among them fiscal policy.
Much more quickly and comprehensively than is understood, those vulnerabilities are reducing America's freedom of action and its ability to
influence others. Preserving
America's international position will require it to restore its economic vitality
and make policy choices now that pay dividends for decades to come. America has to prioritize and to act. Fortunately, the United States still
enjoys greater freedom to determine its future than any other major power, in part because many of its
problems are within its ability to address. But this process of renewal must begin with analyzing America's
competitive position and understanding the gravity of the situation Americans face.
Now is key – trust in Internet business is being eroded every day by government
surveillance –Internet surveillance restrictions are vital to solve
Gross 14 (Grant, Washington, D.C., correspondent for IDG News Service, covers legislation and
regulation related to the technology and telecommunications, contributor to PCWorld, “Snowden leaks
after one year: Wrangling over the meaning of 'bulk'”,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2361120/snowden-leaks-after-one-year-wrangling-over-the-meaning-ofbulk.html)
The Snowden leaks have forced a national conversation that’s necessary and important, but policymakers “haven’t
waved the flag and said, ‘what was happening before will not happen again,’” Castro said. While some policy
debates in Washington, D.C., take years to play out, speed is important in this case , as other nations look for alternatives to U.S.
tech products, Castro said. “There’s basically a clock on this,” he said. “If you don’t address this in a certain period
you lose out on long-term competitiveness. Every day you don’t address
this, you’re losing out.” Castro doesn’t expect the controversy over the surveillance to die down. “It’s
of time,
defining the brand of American tech companies as something that is both insecure and available to
government surveillance,” he said. “Once you’re branded a certain way, it’s really hard to shake.” This week, the CEOs of nine
major U.S. tech vendors—including Facebook, Google and Apple—wrote a letter to senators, calling
on them to strengthen the USA Freedom Act. “ Confidence in the Internet , both in the U.S. and internationally,
has been badly damaged over the last year, ” the letter said. “It is time for action. As the Senate takes up
this important legislation, we urge you to ensure that U.S. surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by
law, proportionate to the risks, transparent, and subject to independent oversight.”
Repealing the Patriot Act and 2008 FAA restores need for a uniform probablecause-based warrant standard for all surveillance and prevents government from
backdooring encryption software. This solves trust in our tech companies and cloud
services.
Christopher Zara, October 19 2013, “Hope For The Surveillance State Repeal Act? HR 2818 Gains
Support Among House Democrats,” International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/hopesurveillance-state-repeal-act-hr-2818-gains-support-among-house-democrats-1432772, KEL
Congressional support is growing for a bill that would roll back privacy regulations to what they were
before 9/11. H.R.2818, introduced this summer by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has gained five cosponsors this month, all Democrats. Also known as
the Surveillance State Repeal Act, the bill would repeal the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008. Both laws have received harsh criticism since classified information leaked by Edward Snowden revealed widespread
electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Instead of using these powers to zero in on the tiny number of real
terrorist threats we face, the executive branch turned these surveillance powers against the American people as a whole,” Holt said in a July statement. “My legislation
would put a stop to that right now.” Holt said the
bill would restore a “uniform probable-cause-based warrant standard for
surveillance requests,” while also prohibiting the U.S. government from forcing tech companies to create
“back doors” that make spying on the public easier. He added that people should be treated as “citizens first, not suspects.” Last month,
the New York Times editorial board endorsed the bill, citing specifically the provision that would bar the
government from requiring software makers to create ways for the government to bypass encryption.
Privacy and tech-industry advocates say such provisions weaken consumer trust in American tech
companies’ abilities to safeguard private data . One recent report showed that the U.S. cloudcomputing industry could lose up to $35 billion over the next few years as a result of NSA
surveillance and the negative press associated with it.
Advantage Two – US/EU
We have two scenarios – First is Trade
PRISM has placed the US-EU Safe Harbor Agreement on the brink
Devika Kornbacher May 5, 2015, attorney at Vinson & Elkins LLP, “The US-EU Safe Harbor
Program: Is It Safe?,” Law360, http://www.law360.com/articles/642603/the-us-eu-safe-harbor-programis-it-safe, KEL
Following the revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs,
European Union lawmakers and data privacy advocates have stepped up efforts to increase data protection
measures for EU citizens. One program that became an immediate target for attack was the U.S.-EU Safe
Harbor Program. EU law allows companies to transfer EU citizens’ personal data outside of the EU only
to countries deemed to have an “adequate” level of privacy protection. Because the EU does not feel that U.S. privacy
protection laws are “adequate,” the Safe Harbor permits companies to transfer EU citizen data to the United States only if those companies voluntarily certify that they
comply with certain data protection standards. With
more than 5,000 current registrants, the Safe Harbor is hugely
important to companies on both sides of the Atlantic. But the program is in jeopardy, and companies should consider measures to protect
themselves in the event the Safe Harbor is suspended.
Online surveillance is a major obstacle to TIPP passage – failure to reach a deal will
trigger global protectionism and undermine global trade
Sara Miller Llana July 8, 2013 “Will US-EU trade talks spur growth - or show globalization's limits?,”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0708/Will-US-EU-trade-talks-spur-growth-or-showglobalization-s-limits, KEL
A trade deal would deeply integrate US-European relations at a time of drift, and during a rocky patch,
amid friction over American spying allegations. If it succeeds , some say it would create a more level playing field
with the rise of China and other emerging markets, as well as reinvigorate other global trade initiatives. Yet even if it
fails – and there are plenty who think that the obstacles such as agriculture and, most recently, data privacy are
insurmountable – a failure would be pivotal, showing that tariffs can be dropped but non-tariff barriers, which are often more cultural
in nature, remain stubborn. A failure, says Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Center for International Political Economy (ECIPE) in
Brussels, “could
lead to a larger standstill in efforts to address 21st century trade barriers.”
Independent of TTIP, US internet surveillance has caused other countries to
demand data localization protectionism, which will fragment the internet, destroys
tech trade, and undermine all faith in US tech services, undermining overall US
growth
Seth Rosenblatt, Oct 8, 2014, “US spying scandal will 'break the Internet,' says Google's Schmidt,”
CNET.com, http://www.cnet.com/news/us-spying-scandal-will-break-the-internet-says-googles-schmidt/,
KEL
Some of the international pushback is in response to data collection by tech companies, not the US
government. Europe's new and controversial "right to be forgotten" law, which says European citizens have a right to ask search engines to remove any results
that might infringe on their privacy, is causing headaches for Google. Critics contend that Google policies placed data collection
over privacy. The tech execs on the panel were most upset and scared about international efforts to impose
"data localization," as Microsoft's Smith put it, referring to a burgeoning efforts by countries to force companies to
build data centers based within their borders. The cost of building data centers in each country that a tech
firm wants to do business in could wind up destroying US tech firms, Schmidt and Smith warned. Schmidt called data
localization a "national emergency." Tech titans have yet to go in-depth as to the actual financial impact data localization has had on them, but in addition to the costs
data localization could also subject the data to local
laws in a way that tech firms worry would erode user trust -- and their ability to trade on that trust -- even
further. Smith noted that 96 percent of the world does not live in the US, and that the American tech economy
depends on convincing them that American tech services are trustworthy. "Foreign data centers would
compromise American [economic] growth" and leadership, he said.
of having to build at least one separate data center for each country that demanded it,
AND, surveillance creates the perception of economic espionage – ensures other
nations retaliate against American businesses
John Villasenor, Contributor @ Forbes, “Why The NSA Leaks Will Lead To More Economic
Espionage Against American Companies”, 6/11/2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnvillasenor/2013/06/11/why-the-nsa-leaks-will-lead-to-more-economicespionage-against-american-companies/
What happens when an American economy built in significant part on intellectual property collides with overt second-class treatment of foreigners who entrust their data to American networks and systems? We’re about to find out.
, the world learned from the Guardian of an order from the F oreign I ntelligence S urveillance C ourt requiring Verizon to provide
NSA with “metadata” for all Verizon phone calls involving at least one party within the United States. Metadata can include the calling and receiving phone numbers, location of the parties, and call time and
duration, but not the actual audio content. A day later, the Washington Post described an NSA program called PRISM, which reportedly enables NSA to access data
On June 5
carried by “nine leading U.S. Internet companies” to extract “audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.” In a pair of statements on June 6 and June 8,
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper explained that the “collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” includes “extensive procedures . . . to ensure that only nonU.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted,” and that “Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States.” Foreign
leaders, unsurprisingly, don’t find all of this particularly reassuring. As a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel quoted in the Washington Post observed, “you can safely assume that this is an issue that the chancellor will
bring up” when she meets President Obama in Berlin next week. European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding said, “This case shows that a clear legal framework for the protection of personal data is not a luxury or
the NSA leaks will have another, less
widely recognized consequence: They will significantly increase the level of state-sponsored economic
espionage directed against American companies. Why? Because many people overseas will view the NSA’s data collection itself as the defining attribute of the story,
constraint, but a fundamental right.” In addition to spurring discussion on the tension between civil liberties and antiterrorism policies,
with less consideration of the larger American security context that frames it. Some of them will conclude that leveling the playing field requires ramping up their own countries’ efforts to eavesdrop on data from American companies.
NSA is almost certainly using the data it gathers under PRISM and from Verizon (and perhaps other carriers) solely for identifying potential terrorism or espionage threats to the United States. It is exceedingly unlikely that NSA
But perception can sometimes matter as
much as reality , and some overseas observers appear to believe that the NSA surveillance has an economic
component. As Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, reportedly said, “The German business community is on high alert . . . The suspicion in large parts of the
would use PRISM, for example, to help an American company gain a competitive advantage in a bidding war against a foreign rival.
business sector is that Americans would also be interested in our patent applications.” Surveillance in the name of national security is still surveillance, and last week’s developments remind us all in irrefutable terms that nations have
often felt much freer to spy on foreigners than on their own citizens. What varies among nations is the set of priorities that motivate the eavesdropping. In the United States, national security provides the motivation. For some other
nations, the goal of maximizing economic success in the global marketplace is viewed as justifying espionage against foreign companies. Of course, state-sponsored economic espionage is as old as the concept of states itself. But
the NSA leaks will put wind in the sails of non-U.S. intelligence services aiming to ramp up
espionage targeting American businesses. Budgets for spying on American businesses will grow, and people to do the work will be easier to hire. According to the most recent
EMC-sponsored IDC Digital Universe Study, an estimated total of 2.8 billion terabytes of data were created and replicated globally in 2012. Some fraction that tsunami of data passes through networks accessible to foreign
intelligence services. And a small fraction of that, in turn, contains highly confidential information about the products, services, and future plans of American companies. When you start with a few billion terabytes, a fraction of a
And more than ever before, that information is at risk of being compromised and
used to America’s economic disadvantage.
fraction is still a lot of information.
Collapse of global trade results in extinction
Garten, 09 – professor at the Yale School of Management (Jeffrey, “The Dangers of Turning Inward”, 3/5, Wall Street Journal,
http://www.business.illinois.edu/aguilera/Teaching/WSJ09_Dangers_of_Turning_Inward.pdf)
historians look back on today's severe downturn, with its crumbling markets, rising unemployment and massive government interventions, they could well be busy analyzing how
would likely point to the growth
of economic nationalism as the root cause. Ordinary protectionism such as tariffs and quotas would be one aspect of this problem, but it won't be the worst
of it because a web of treaties and the enforcement capabilities of the World Trade Organization will constrain the most egregious behavior. Economic nationalism is
more insidious because it is broader, more subtle and subject to fewer legal constraints. It is a frame of mind
that casts doubt on the very assumption that we live in a single international market, and that relatively open borders are a virtue. It is based on a calculation that
despite all the talk about economic interdependence, nations can go it alone, and could be better off
Yet if
globalization -- the spread of trade, finance, technology and the movement of people around the world -- went into reverse. They
in doing so. True economic nationalists want above all to protect capital and jobs in their own countries. They see global commerce not as a win-win proposition but as a contest in
which there is a victor and a loser. They are thus not focused on international agreements to open the world economy; to the contrary, they are usually figuring out how to avoid international
The last time we saw sustained economic nationalism was in the 1930s, when capital
flows and trade among countries collapsed, and every country went its own way. World growth
went into a ditch, political ties among nations deteriorated, nationalism and populism combined to
create fascist governments in Europe and Asia, and a world war took place. It took at least a
generation for globalization to get back on track. There have been some bouts of inwardlooking governmental action since then, such as the early
commercial obligations.
1970s when the U.S. cut the dollar from its gold base and imposed export embargoes on soybeans and steel scrap. However, the economic conditions were not sufficiently bad for the trend to
sustain itself. The kind of economic nationalism we are seeing today is not yet extreme. It is also understandable. The polit ical pressures could hardly be worse. Over the last decade, the global
economy grew on average about 4% to 5%, and this year it will come to a grinding halt: 0.5% according to the International Monetary Fund, where projections usually err on the optimistic side.
World trade, which has grown much faster than global gross domestic product for many years, is projected to decline this year for the first time since 1982. Foreign direct investment last year
slumped by 10% from 2007. Most dramatically, capital flows into emerging market nations are projected to drop this year by nearly 80% compared to 2007. The aggregate figures don't tell the
story of what is unraveling in individual countries. In the last quarter of 2008, U.S. GDP dropped by 6.2% at an annual rate, the U.K. by 5.9%, Germany by 8.2%, Japan by 12.7% and South
Korea by 20.8%. Mexico, Thailand and Singapore and most of Eastern Europe are also in deep trouble. In every case, employment has been plummeting. So far popular demonstrations against
government policies have taken place in theU.K., France, Greece, Russia and throughout Eastern Europe. And the governments of Iceland and Latvia have fallen over the crisis. Governments
could therefore be forgiven if they are preoccupied above all with the workers and companies within their own borders. Most officials don't know what to do because they haven't seen this level
of distress before. They are living from day to day, desperately improvising and trying to hold off political pressure to take severe measures they know could be satisfying right now but cause
bigger damage later. Thinking about how their policies might affect other countries is not their main focus, let alone taking the time to try to coordinate them internationally. Besides, whether it's
in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Beijing, Brazilia or Tokyo, it is hard to find many top officials who wouldn't say that whatever measures they are taking that may undermine global commerce are
strictly temporary. They all profess that when the crisis is over, they will resume their support for globalization. They underestimate, however, how hard it could be to reverse course. Political
figures take comfort, too, from the global institutions that were not present in the 1930s -- the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, all of which are assumed to be keeping
globalization alive. This is a false sense of security, since these institutions are guided by sovereign countries. Government officials often feel that because they are going to endless crisis summit
meetings -- the next big one is in London on April 2, when the world's top 20 nations will be assembling -- that some international coordination is actually taking place. This is mostly an illusion.
With a few exceptions, such as the so-called Plaza Agreements of 1984 when currencies were realigned, it is difficult to point to a meeting where anything major has been said and subsequently
Classic trade
protectionism is on the rise. In the first half of 2008, the number of investigations in the World Trade Organization relating to antidumping cases -- selling below cost -implemented. But as the pressure on politicians mounts, decisions are being made on an incremental and ad hoc basis that amounts to a disturbing trend.
was up 30% from the year before. Washington has recently expanded sanctions against European food products in retaliation for Europe's boycott against hormonetreated American beef -- an old
dispute, to be sure, but one that is escalating. In the last several months, the E.U. reintroduced export subsidies on butter and cheese. India raised tariffs on steel products, as did Russia on
imported cars. Indonesia ingenuously designated that just a few of its ports could be used to import toys, creating a trade-blocking bottleneck. Brazil and Argentina have been pressing for a
higher external tariff on imports into a South American bloc of countries called Mercosur. Just this week, the E.U. agreed to levy tariffs on American exports of biodiesel fuel, possibly a first shot
in what may become a gigantic trade war fought over different environmental policies -- some based on taxes, some on regulation, some on cap and trade -- being embraced by individual
countries. Much bigger problems have arisen in more non-traditional areas and derive from recent direct intervention of governments. The much-publicized "Buy America" provision of the U.S.
stimulus package restricts purchases of construction-related goods to many U.S. manufacturers, and although it is riddled with exceptions, it does reveal Washington's state of mind. The bailout
of GM and Chrysler is a purely national deal. Such exclusion against foreign firms is a violation of so-called "national treatment" clauses in trade agreements, and the E.U. has already put
Washington on notice that it will pursue legal trade remedies if the final bailout package is discriminatory. Uncle Sam is not the only economic nationalist. The Japanese government is offering
to help a broad array of its corporations -- but certainly not subsidiaries of foreign companies in Japan -- by purchasing the stock of these firms directly, thereby not just saving them but providing
an advantage over competition from non-Japanese sources. The French government has created a sovereign wealth fund to make sure that certain "national champions," such as carparts
manufacturer Valeo and aeronautics component maker Daher, aren't bought by foreign investors. Government involvement in financial institutions has taken on an anti-globalization tone. British
regulators are pushing their global banks to redirect foreign lending to the U.K. when credit is sorely needed and where it can be monitored. Just this past week, the Royal Bank of Scotland
announced it was closing shop in 60 foreign countries. Western European banks that were heavily invested in countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltics have pulled back
their credits, causing a devastating deflation throughout Eastern Europe. The Swiss are reportedly considering more lenient accounting policies for loans their banks make domestically as
opposed to abroad. This de-globalizing trend could well be amplified by Washington's effort to exercise tight oversight of several big financial institutions. Already AIG's prime Asian asset,
American International Assurance Company, is on the block. As the feds take an ever bigger stake in Citigroup, they may well force it to divest itself of many of its prized global holdings, such
as Banamex in Mexico and Citi Handlowy in Poland. It appears that new legislation under the Troubled Asset Relief Program will also restrict the employment of foreign nationals in hundreds of
American banks in which the government has a stake. Whether or not it goes into bankruptcy, General Motors will be pressed to sell many of its foreign subsidiaries, too. Even Chinese
multinationals such as Haier and Lenovo are beating a retreat to their own shores where the risks seem lower than operating in an uncertain global economy. The government in Beijing is never
far away from such fundamental strategic decisions. Then there is the currency issue. Economic nationalists are mercantilists. They are willing to keep their currency cheap in order to make their
exports more competitive. China is doing just that. A big question is whether other Asian exporters that have been badly hurt from the crisis -- Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand, for example -will follow suit. Competitive devaluations were a major feature of the 1930s. It's no accident that the European Union has called an emergency summit for this Sunday to consider what to do with
There are a number of reasons why economic nationalism could escalate
rising protectionism of all kinds.
. The recession
could last well beyond this year. It is also worrisome that the forces of economic nationalism were gathering even before the crisis hit, and have deeper roots than most people know. Congress
denied President Bush authority to negotiate trade agreements two years ago, fearing that America was not benefiting enough from open trade, and an effort to reform immigration was paralyzed
for years. Globally, international trade negotiations called the Doha Round collapsed well before Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers did. Concerns that trade was worsening income distribution
were growing in every major industrial nation since the late 1990s.
Whenever countries turned inward over the past half-century,
Washington was a powerful countervailing force, preaching the gospel of globalization and open
markets for goods, services and capital . As the Obama administration works feverishly to fire up America's growth engines, patch up its financial system and
keep its housing market from collapsing further, and as its major long-term objectives center on health, education and reducing energy dependence on foreign sources, the country's
preoccupations are more purely domestic than at any time since the 1930s. In the past, American business leaders from companies such as IBM, GE, Goldman Sachs and, yes, Citigroup and
Merrill Lynch beat the drum for open global markets. As their share prices collapse, some voices are muted, some silenced. It is not easy to find anyone in America who has the stature and
courage to press for a more open global economy in the midst of the current economic and political crosswinds. And given that the global rot started in the U.S. with egregiously irresponsible
lending, borrowing and regulation, America's brand of capitalism is in serious disrepute around the world. Even if President Obama had the mental bandwidth to become a cheerleader for
globalization, America's do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do leadership has been badly compromised. If economic nationalism puts a monkey wrench in the wheels of global commerce, the damage
could be severe. The U.S. is a good example. It is inconceivable that Uncle Sam could mount a serious recovery without a massive expansion of exports -- the very activity that was responsible
for so much of America's economic growth during the middle of this decade. But that won't be possible if other nations block imports. For generations, the deficits that we have run this past
decade and the trillions of dollars we are spending now mean we will be highly dependent on foreign loans from China, Japan and other parts of the world. But these will not be forthcoming at
prices we can afford without a global financial system built on deep collaboration between debtors and creditors -- including keeping our market open to foreign goods and services. The Obama
administration talks about a super-competitive economy, based on high-quality jobs -- which means knowledge-intensive jobs. This won't happen if we are not able to continue to bring in the
brightest people from all over the world to work and live here. Silicon Valley, to take one example, would be a pale shadow of itself without Indian, Chinese and Israeli brain power in its midst.
More generally, without an open global economy, worldwide industries such as autos, steel, banking and telecommunications cannot be rationalized and restructured efficiently, and we'll be
doomed to have excessive capacity and booms and busts forever. The big emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa will never be fully integrated into the world
economy, depriving them and us of future economic growth. The productivity of billions of men and women entering the global workforce will be stunted to everyone's detriment. Of course, no
one would say that globalization is without its problems. Trade surges and products made by low-priced labor can lead to job displacement and increasing income inequality. Proud national
cultures can be undermined. But these challenges can be met by reasonable regulation and by domestic policies that provide a strong social safety net and the kind of education that helps people
acquire new skills for a competitive world. With the right responses of governments, the benefits should far outweigh the disadvantages.
For thousands of years,
globalization has increased global wealth, individual choice and human freedom. The point is, economic
nationalism, with its implicit autarchic and save-yourself character, embodies exactly the wrong spirit and runs in precisely the
wrong direction from the global system that will be necessary to create the future we all want . As
happened in the 1930s, economic nationalism is also sure to poison geopolitics. Governments under
economic pressure have far fewer resources to take care of their citizens and to deal with rising
anger and social tensions. Whether or not they are democracies, their tenure can be threatened by
popular resentment. The temptation for governments to whip up enthusiasm for something that
distracts citizens from their economic woes -- a war or a jihad against unpopular minorities, for example -is great. That's not all. As an economically enfeebled South Korea withdraws foreign aid from North
Korea, could we see an even more irrational activity from Pyongyang? As the Pakistani economy
goes into the tank, will the government be more likely to compromise with terrorists to alleviate at least one source
of pressure? As Ukraine strains under the weight of an IMF bailout, is a civil war with Cold War
overtones between Europe and Russia be in the cards? And beyond all that, how will economically embattled
and inward-looking governments be able to deal with the critical issues that need global resolution
such as control of nuclear weapons , or a treaty to manage climate change, or help to the hundreds
of millions of people who are now falling back into poverty?
Second is Relations PRISM surveillance has tanked US-EU relations – ending the program is key to
restoring them
Zack Whittaker, Nov 27, 2013, “Realizing it's the underdog post-PRISM, EU lays out new BFF pact
with the U.S.,” ZDNET, http://www.zdnet.com/article/realizing-its-the-underdog-post-prism-eu-lays-outnew-bff-pact-with-the-u-s/, KEL
In efforts to get the "special relationship" back on track after months of painful political rhetoric and
frenemy-like relations, the European Commission wants to rekindle its trans-Atlantic love with its American
partners. But it comes with conditions. And if America doesn't play ball, the rift could get significantly
wider . The EU on Wednesday threw down its demands — albeit in a somewhat subdued typical softly-softly European way now that the 28 member state bloc
has taken time to breathe and think this one through — and hopes its U.S. counterparts bites at the chance to restore relations with its trans-Atlantic friend.
Tensions between the two continents have never been as strained as they are today. It all stems from the
revelations from the Edward Snowden house of leaks, which disclosed the massive surveillance operation by the U.S.
government by its National Security Agency (NSA).
US-EU relations key to solve global war
O'Sullivan, 4 -- National Interest editor (John, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom Distinguished
Fellow in International Relations, "Europe and the Establishment," The National Interest, 7-31-2004,
nationalinterest.org/article/europe-and-the-establishment-2608)
The report's starting point -- that U.S.-European relations
are extremely important -- is undeniable. A united Western
alliance would shape world institutions in line with values and practices rooted in liberty and democracy and coax rising
powers such as India and China into going along with this international status quo for the foreseeable future. Indeed, this is already
happening as China accepts liberal economic rules at home in order to enter institutions such as the G7 and the World Trade Organization. By
contrast, a
disunited West would tempt such powers to play off Europe and America against each other and
foster a global jockeying for power not unlike the maneuvering between a half-dozen great powers that led to 1914.
Plan solves global protectionism against US tech firms and increases US trade
negotiation credibility
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
RECOMMENDATIONS The
free and open Internet that powers the globally networked economy is dependent
on the ability of individuals and companies to engage in commerce without geographic restrictions. To
turn back the tide of technology protectionism, U.S. trade negotiators will need a stronger hand to
play . They cannot go to other nations and tell them to not discriminate against U.S. tech firms if the U.S.
intelligence system continues to follow policies that threaten their citizens and businesses. As a result, it is
incumbent on the Congress and the Obama administration to take the lead in showing the world
the best standards for transparency, cooperation, and accountability . First, the U.S. government
should be forthcoming and transparent about its surveillance practices and clearly inform the public about
the data it collects domestically and abroad. The U.S. government should set the gold standard for international transparency
requirements, so that it is clear what information both U.S. and non - U.S. companies are disclosing to governments at home and abroad. The U.S.
government should then work with its allies to create an international transparency requirement that illuminates when countries conduct
surveillance that accesses foreign companies’ information. Second,
the U.S. government should draw a clear line in the
sand and declare that the policy of the U.S. government is to strengthen not weaken information security.
The U.S. Congress should pass legislation, such as the Secure Data Act introduced by Sen. Wyden (D - OR) , banning any
government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption. 43 In the short term, President Obama,
or his successor, should sign an executive order formalizing this policy as well. In addition, when U.S. government agencies discover
vulnerabilities in software or hardware products, they should responsibly notify these companies in a timely manner so that the companies can fix
these flaws. The best way to protect U.S. citizens from digital threats is to promote strong cyber security practices in the private sector.
Iowa Plan-1st Version
Plan Text
Plan: Domestic online surveillance authority under the USA PATRIOT Act, Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, and Executive Order
12333 should be repealed and any requirement for manufacturers of electronic
devices or software to provide bypasses for encryption will be prohibited.
Observation 1: Inherency
The 2008 FISA Amendment Act (FAA) removed the probable cause standard
requiring warrants for surveillance, allowing sweeping NSA electronic surveillance
of US citizens and communication within the US. There’s no effective oversight of
these programs now.
Margot Kaminski June 7, 2013, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School; She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the
Information Society Project. While at Yale Law School, she was a Knight Law and Media Scholar and
co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation from Yale
Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back,” The
Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/prisms-legal-basis-how-we-got-here-andwhat-we-can-do-to-get-back/276667/, KEL
First, there is the question of whom the surveillance targets.
PRISM spies on Americans. The Director of National Intelligence emphasized yesterday that PRISM targets
only " non-U.S. persons located outside the United States ." But the press release also acknowledges that "information about U.S. persons" may be "incidentally acquired" in such pursuits.
The current scope of this "incidental"
surveillance will shock most Americans. Before 2008, the law limited "incidental" surveillance by limiting primary surveillance. The
government had to show probable cause that its surveillance target was the agent of a foreign power,
and that the facility being watched was about to be used by that target. You could be incidentally observed if you communicated with a
targeted foreign agent, but otherwise foreign communications were likely to be unmonitored. But in 2008, the FISA Amendments Act (FISAAA)
changed this . The government now does not need to show probable cause that the target is a foreign agent. It need only have a "reasonable
belief" that the target is located outside of the United States. The new version of FISA does not require the
government to identify its targets; it does not require the government to identify the monitored facilities; and
the purpose of foreign intelligence gathering attaches to the whole surveillance program, not the individual investigation. That is to say: the FISA Amendments Act
permits the government to obtain a single court order through which it can monitor thousands, or even
millions, of people. The scope of "incidental" surveillance thus vastly expanded as Congress lowered the requirements for spying on the primary target. Such a system
will inevitably sweep in untold numbers of Americans who communicate with foreigners. And because the government
Targeting is not the same as collecting; the program may "target" foreign persons, but "acquire" information on Americans.
need have only a "reasonable belief" that the target is outside the United States--which it is interpreting according to the Washington Post as a 51% chance that the target is outside the U.S.--this
system will undoubtedly sweep in purely domestic communications as well.
This brings us to the issue of oversight: who is watching the watchers? The Director
of National Intelligence assures us that PRISM is "subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress." It is true that in December 2012
Congress renewed the law that allows PRISM to exist. But what kind of oversight did Congress actually provide? When Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall asked whether communications by
Americans had been gathered under the law, the Director of National Intelligence responded that it was not possible to identify the number of people in the United States whose communications
At the core of the
problem is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court), which meets in secret and does not publish its
opinions, itself does not provide adequate oversight. When Congress changed the standard for targeting
foreign individuals in 2008 , it abolished the ability of the FISA Court to evaluate whether the
government had any real cause to target an individual or group of individuals. The Supreme Court itself disputes whether the
were reviewed. How effective can Congressional oversight be if Congress does not understand the scope and nature of the programs it has authorized?
FISA Court enforces the Fourth Amendment. The "minimization procedures" touted by the Director of National Intelligence as adequate privacy safeguards are established by the government,
evaluated by the government, and are subject to review by a secret court--if review occurs at all. And as a general practice, FISA "minimization" hasnot been true minimization: it occurs after
information is already acquired. The existence of PRISM and the Verizon metadata program, both authorized by the FISA Court, confirms that a secret court broadly authorized by an uninformed
Congress will not adequately protect the Fourth and First Amendment rights of American citizens on American soil.
The 2015 USA Freedom Act does NOTHING to reform PRISM and sent a signal
that should trigger all negative disadvantages.
Fred Kaplan June 8, 2015, author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the
American Way of War, is writing a book on the history of cyberwar, “The NSA Debate We Should Be
Having,” Slate Magazine,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/the_national_security_agency_s_su
rveillance_and_the_usa_freedom_act_the.html, KEL
One week after Congress voted to stop the National Security Agency from collecting and storing millions of
Americans’ phone records, partisans on both sides are exaggerating the significance of this new reform.
NSA supporters lament the loss of a key tool for fighting terrorists , while the agency’s critics hail
the new law as (in Edward Snowden’s words) an “historic victory for the rights of every citizen, ” with some calling its
passage a vindication of Snowden himself as an authentic whistleblower who should be let back home as a hero, not a convict. Both sides are off the
mark. The NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata was the subject of the first news stories based on the trove of highly classified documents that Snowden
leaked, and it stirred the biggest commotion. But in fact the metadata program never comprised more than a tiny percentage of the agency’s vast and global
surveillance net. The new law’s reform measure—to keep the metadata stored with the telecom companies, allowing NSA access only to specified materials, and then
only through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—was first proposed not by some libertarian critic but by Gen. Keith Alexander, then-director of the NSA.
Under the system that has been in effect, as authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act (or, rather, by the FISA court’s now-discredited reading of that section), the
NSA routinely collected metadata from some of the biggest cellular companies—not the contents of conversations, but the phone numbers, dates, times, and duration
of the calls. If someone inside the United States called a number linked to one of three terrorist organizations (including al-Qaida), an NSA alert system would note
that fact. The NSA could then ask the FISA Court for permission to search the database for a list of all the other numbers that the American phone had called, as well
as all the numbers that those numbers had called, going back as far as five years. If this search revealed a suspicious pattern, the NSA would turn the materials over to
the FBI, which could seek a warrant to listen to conversations. Under the new reform law, called the USA Freedom Act, the NSA would no longer possess the
database, so it would seek a FISA court order to get it from the telecom companies—and the FISA court would now include a privacy advocate who could argue
against relinquishing the data. If the court sided with the NSA, what happened next would be exactly the same as before the new law passed. So, it’s not exactly a
giant step in the annals of either national-security risk or civil liberties reform—unless one of two things had been true. First, if the NSA had been abusing the
process—if analysts or senior officials had been searching metadata for personal, political, or vindictive purposes—the changes in custody and oversight would have a
huge impact. But neither Snowden’s documents nor any subsequent probes have uncovered any such evidence. Second, if authoritarians or worse—say, modern-day
versions of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover—were to come to power, they could suspend the internal controls at NSA and use the agency’s vast databases to track
domestic enemies or any target of their choosing. In that case, the Freedom Act would serve as a powerful brake to oppression: Because the government would no
longer possess the data, it couldn’t exploit the data. That is the real—and the intended—effect of the reform: not so much to change the way surveillance technology is
used today, but rather to limit the potential for abuse in the future. 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.
Observation 2: Solvency
Repealing the Patriot Act and 2008 FAA restores need for a uniform probablecause-based warrant standard for all surveillance and prevents government from
backdooring encryption software. This solves trust in our tech companies and cloud
services.
Christopher Zara, October 19 2013, “Hope For The Surveillance State Repeal Act? HR 2818 Gains
Support Among House Democrats,” International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/hopesurveillance-state-repeal-act-hr-2818-gains-support-among-house-democrats-1432772, KEL
Congressional support is growing for a bill that would roll back privacy regulations to what they were
before 9/11. H.R.2818, introduced this summer by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has gained five cosponsors this month, all Democrats. Also known as
the Surveillance State Repeal Act, the bill would repeal the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008. Both laws have received harsh criticism since classified information leaked by Edward Snowden revealed widespread
electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Instead of using these powers to zero in on the tiny number of real
terrorist threats we face, the executive branch turned these surveillance powers against the American people as a whole,” Holt said in a July statement. “My legislation
would put a stop to that right now.” Holt said the
bill would restore a “uniform probable-cause-based warrant standard for
surveillance requests,” while also prohibiting the U.S. government from forcing tech companies to create
“back doors” that make spying on the public easier. He added that people should be treated as “citizens first, not suspects.” Last month,
the New York Times editorial board endorsed the bill, citing specifically the provision that would bar the
government from requiring software makers to create ways for the government to bypass encryption.
Privacy and tech-industry advocates say such provisions weaken consumer trust in American tech
companies’ abilities to safeguard private data . One recent report showed that the U.S. cloudcomputing industry could lose up to $35 billion over the next few years as a result of NSA
surveillance and the negative press associated with it.
Plan solves global protectionism against US tech firms and increases US trade
negotiation credibility
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
RECOMMENDATIONS The
free and open Internet that powers the globally networked economy is dependent
on the ability of individuals and companies to engage in commerce without geographic restrictions. To
turn back the tide of technology protectionism, U.S. trade negotiators will need a stronger hand to
play . They cannot go to other nations and tell them to not discriminate against U.S. tech firms if the U.S.
intelligence system continues to follow policies that threaten their citizens and businesses. As a result, it is
incumbent on the Congress and the Obama administration to take the lead in showing the world
the best standards for transparency, cooperation, and accountability . First, the U.S. government
should be forthcoming and transparent about its surveillance practices and clearly inform the public about
the data it collects domestically and abroad. The U.S. government should set the gold standard for international transparency
requirements, so that it is clear what information both U.S. and non - U.S. companies are disclosing to governments at home and abroad. The U.S.
government should then work with its allies to create an international transparency requirement that illuminates when countries conduct
surveillance that accesses foreign companies’ information. Second,
the U.S. government should draw a clear line in the
sand and declare that the policy of the U.S. government is to strengthen not weaken information security.
The U.S. Congress
should pass legislation, such as the Secure Data Act introduced by Sen. Wyden (D - OR) , banning any
government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption. 43 In the short term, President Obama,
or his successor, should sign an executive order formalizing this policy as well. In addition, when U.S. government agencies discover
vulnerabilities in software or hardware products, they should responsibly notify these companies in a timely manner so that the companies can fix
these flaws. The best way to protect U.S. citizens from digital threats is to promote strong cyber security practices in the private sector.
Advantage One – Cloud Competitiveness
PRISM revelations and the weak response with US Freedom Act has caused other
nations to retaliate against our information tech sector and undermined our tech
sector competitiveness
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
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.
US competitiveness in the $241 billion global cloud market is key to US innovation,
economic growth, and job growth
Digital 4th, January 2015, Digital 4th is a bipartisan coalition dedicated to reforming and modernizing
our country’s 4th Amendment privacy rights, “U.S. Competitiveness in Cloud Computing: Updating the
Standard for Government Access to Stored Communications,” http://www.digital4th.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/01/Issue_Brief-2-ECPA-and-the-Cloud.pdf, KEL
Businesses all over the world are looking to cloud - based services for their information management
needs in order to save money on equipment and to achieve better computing reliability and data security.
Cloud based services allow companies to expand their computing capacity quickly – particularly valuable for start - up businesses and
entrepreneurs. Such services give employees the flexibility to share information and collaborate. The
global cloud market is
expected to expand to $241 billion by 2020. American companies have been the global leaders in cloud
computing, and cloud computing has been an engine for U.S. - based innovation, economic growth, and
job creation.
Maintaining US economic growth is key to global economic growth
Rich Miller, January 9, 2015, “U.S. Retakes the Helm of the Global Economy,” Bloomberg News,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-09/u-s-retakes-the-helm-of-the-global-economy, KEL
The U.S. is back in the driver’s seat of the global economy after 15 years of watching China and emerging
markets take the lead. The world’s biggest economy will expand by 3.2 percent or more this year, its best
performance since at least 2005, as an improving job market leads to stepped-up consumer spending, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase
& Co., Deutsche Bank AG and BNP Paribas SA. That outcome would be about what each foresees for the world economy as a whole and would
be the first time since 1999 that America hasn’t lagged behind global growth, based on data from the International Monetary Fund. “The
U.S.
is again the engine of global growth,” said Allen Sinai, chief executive officer of Decision Economics in New York. “The economy
is looking stellar and is in its best shape since the 1990s.”
Economic decline causes global wars – empirically proven
Royal, '10 (Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction Program -- DOD, Economics of War &
Peace: Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith & Brauer, p. 213-15)
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political
science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of
interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow.
First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms
in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the oftenbloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as
economic crises could usher in a redistribution or relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to
uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon. 1995). Alternatively, even a
relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to
challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins ( L 996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with
parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and
connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996. 2000)
theory of trade expectations suggests that future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security
behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states arc likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of
future trade relations. However, if
the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace
items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use
force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade
expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states .
Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess
(2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during
periods of economic downturn. They write, “The linkages between internal and external conflict and
prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict,
which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends lo amplify the extent to
which international and external conflict self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess 2002. p. 89) Economic
decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg. Hess. & Weerapana,
2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the
popularity of a sitting government. 'Diversionary theory’ suggests that when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline,
sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a rally around the flag effect. Wang (1996),
DeRouen ( 1995), and Blomberg. Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least
indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics arc
greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from
office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United
States and thus weak Presidential popularity arc statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship
positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency or economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links
economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels. This implied connection between integration, crises and armed
conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention.
Independently, US competitiveness solves great power war – it solves all imapcts
Colby 14 (Elbridge, the Robert M. Gates fellow at the Center for a New American Security; and Paul
Lettow, was senior director for strategic planning on the U.S. National Security Council staff from 2007
to 2009, 7/3/14, “Have We Hit Peak America?,”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/03/have_we_hit_peak_america)
Many foreign-policy
experts seem to believe that retaining American primacy is largely a matter of will -- of how
America chooses to exert its power abroad. Even President Obama, more often accused of being a prophet of decline than a booster of America's
future, recently asserted that the United States "has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world." The question, he continued, is "not whether America will
lead, but how we will lead." But
will is unavailing without strength. If the United States wants the international
system to continue to reflect its interests and values -- a system, for example, in which the global commons are
protected, trade is broad-based and extensive, and armed conflicts among great nations are curtailed -it needs to sustain not just resolve, but relative power. That, in turn, will require acknowledging the
uncomfortable truth that global power and wealth are shifting at an unprecedented pace, with profound implications.
Moreover, many of the challenges America faces are exacerbated by vulnerabilities that are largely self-created, chief among them fiscal policy.
Much more quickly and comprehensively than is understood, those vulnerabilities are reducing America's freedom of action and its ability to
influence others. Preserving
America's international position will require it to restore its economic vitality
and make policy choices now that pay dividends for decades to come. America has to prioritize and to act. Fortunately, the United States still
enjoys greater freedom to determine its future than any other major power, in part because many of its
problems are within its ability to address. But this process of renewal must begin with analyzing America's
competitive position and understanding the gravity of the situation Americans face.
Now is key – trust in Internet business is being eroded every day by government
surveillance –Internet surveillance restrictions are vital to solve
Gross 14 (Grant, Washington, D.C., correspondent for IDG News Service, covers legislation and
regulation related to the technology and telecommunications, contributor to PCWorld, “Snowden leaks
after one year: Wrangling over the meaning of 'bulk'”,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2361120/snowden-leaks-after-one-year-wrangling-over-the-meaning-ofbulk.html)
The Snowden leaks have forced a national conversation that’s necessary and important, but policymakers “haven’t
waved the flag and said, ‘what was happening before will not happen again,’” Castro said. While some policy
debates in Washington, D.C., take years to play out, speed is important in this case , as other nations look for alternatives to U.S.
tech products, Castro said. “There’s basically a clock on this,” he said. “If you don’t address this in a certain period
you lose out on long-term competitiveness. Every day you don’t address
this, you’re losing out.” Castro doesn’t expect the controversy over the surveillance to die down. “It’s
of time,
defining the brand of American tech companies as something that is both insecure and available to
government surveillance,” he said. “Once you’re branded a certain way, it’s really hard to shake.” This week, the CEOs of nine
major U.S. tech vendors—including Facebook, Google and Apple—wrote a letter to senators, calling
on them to strengthen the USA Freedom Act. “ Confidence in the Internet , both in the U.S. and internationally,
has been badly damaged over the last year, ” the letter said. “It is time for action. As the Senate takes up
this important legislation, we urge you to ensure that U.S. surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by
law, proportionate to the risks, transparent, and subject to independent oversight.”
Advantage Two – US/EU
We have two scenarios – First is Trade
PRISM has placed the US-EU Safe Harbor Agreement on the brink
Devika Kornbacher May 5, 2015, attorney at Vinson & Elkins LLP, “The US-EU Safe Harbor
Program: Is It Safe?,” Law360, http://www.law360.com/articles/642603/the-us-eu-safe-harbor-programis-it-safe, KEL
Following the revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs,
European Union lawmakers and data privacy advocates have stepped up efforts to increase data protection
measures for EU citizens. One program that became an immediate target for attack was the U.S.-EU Safe
Harbor Program. EU law allows companies to transfer EU citizens’ personal data outside of the EU only
to countries deemed to have an “adequate” level of privacy protection. Because the EU does not feel that U.S. privacy
protection laws are “adequate,” the Safe Harbor permits companies to transfer EU citizen data to the United States only if those companies voluntarily certify that they
comply with certain data protection standards. With
more than 5,000 current registrants, the Safe Harbor is hugely
important to companies on both sides of the Atlantic. But the program is in jeopardy, and companies should consider measures to protect
themselves in the event the Safe Harbor is suspended.
Online surveillance is a major obstacle to TIPP passage – failure to reach a deal will
trigger global protectionism and undermine global trade
Sara Miller Llana July 8, 2013 “Will US-EU trade talks spur growth - or show globalization's limits?,”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0708/Will-US-EU-trade-talks-spur-growth-or-showglobalization-s-limits, KEL
A trade deal would deeply integrate US-European relations at a time of drift, and during a rocky patch,
amid friction over American spying allegations. If it succeeds , some say it would create a more level playing field
with the rise of China and other emerging markets, as well as reinvigorate other global trade initiatives. Yet even if it
fails – and there are plenty who think that the obstacles such as agriculture and, most recently, data privacy are
insurmountable – a failure would be pivotal, showing that tariffs can be dropped but non-tariff barriers, which are often more cultural
in nature, remain stubborn. A failure, says Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Center for International Political Economy (ECIPE) in
Brussels, “could
lead to a larger standstill in efforts to address 21st century trade barriers.”
Independent of TTIP, US internet surveillance has caused other countries to
demand data localization protectionism, which will fragment the internet, destroys
tech trade, and undermine all faith in US tech services, undermining overall US
growth
Seth Rosenblatt, Oct 8, 2014, “US spying scandal will 'break the Internet,' says Google's Schmidt,”
CNET.com, http://www.cnet.com/news/us-spying-scandal-will-break-the-internet-says-googles-schmidt/,
KEL
Some of the international pushback is in response to data collection by tech companies, not the US
government. Europe's new and controversial "right to be forgotten" law, which says European citizens have a right to ask search engines to remove any results
that might infringe on their privacy, is causing headaches for Google. Critics contend that Google policies placed data collection
over privacy. The tech execs on the panel were most upset and scared about international efforts to impose
"data localization," as Microsoft's Smith put it, referring to a burgeoning efforts by countries to force companies to
build data centers based within their borders. The cost of building data centers in each country that a tech
firm wants to do business in could wind up destroying US tech firms, Schmidt and Smith warned. Schmidt called data
localization a "national emergency." Tech titans have yet to go in-depth as to the actual financial impact data localization has had on them, but in addition to the costs
of having to build at least one separate data center for each country that demanded it, data
localization could also subject the data to local
laws in a way that tech firms worry would erode user trust -- and their ability to trade on that trust -- even
further. Smith noted that 96 percent of the world does not live in the US, and that the American tech economy
depends on convincing them that American tech services are trustworthy. "Foreign data centers would
compromise American [economic] growth" and leadership, he said.
AND, surveillance creates the perception of economic espionage – ensures other
nations retaliate against American businesses
John Villasenor, Contributor @ Forbes, “Why The NSA Leaks Will Lead To More Economic
Espionage Against American Companies”, 6/11/2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnvillasenor/2013/06/11/why-the-nsa-leaks-will-lead-to-more-economicespionage-against-american-companies/
What happens when an American economy built in significant part on intellectual property collides with overt second-class treatment of foreigners who entrust their data to American networks and systems? We’re about to find out.
, the world learned from the Guardian of an order from the F oreign I ntelligence S urveillance C ourt requiring Verizon to provide
NSA with “metadata” for all Verizon phone calls involving at least one party within the United States. Metadata can include the calling and receiving phone numbers, location of the parties, and call time and
duration, but not the actual audio content. A day later, the Washington Post described an NSA program called PRISM, which reportedly enables NSA to access data
On June 5
carried by “nine leading U.S. Internet companies” to extract “audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.” In a pair of statements on June 6 and June 8,
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper explained that the “collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” includes “extensive procedures . . . to ensure that only nonU.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted,” and that “Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States.” Foreign
leaders, unsurprisingly, don’t find all of this particularly reassuring. As a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel quoted in the Washington Post observed, “you can safely assume that this is an issue that the chancellor will
bring up” when she meets President Obama in Berlin next week. European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding said, “This case shows that a clear legal framework for the protection of personal data is not a luxury or
the NSA leaks will have another, less
widely recognized consequence: They will significantly increase the level of state-sponsored economic
espionage directed against American companies. Why? Because many people overseas will view the NSA’s data collection itself as the defining attribute of the story,
constraint, but a fundamental right.” In addition to spurring discussion on the tension between civil liberties and antiterrorism policies,
with less consideration of the larger American security context that frames it. Some of them will conclude that leveling the playing field requires ramping up their own countries’ efforts to eavesdrop on data from American companies.
NSA is almost certainly using the data it gathers under PRISM and from Verizon (and perhaps other carriers) solely for identifying potential terrorism or espionage threats to the United States. It is exceedingly unlikely that NSA
But perception can sometimes matter as
much as reality , and some overseas observers appear to believe that the NSA surveillance has an economic
component. As Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, reportedly said, “The German business community is on high alert . . . The suspicion in large parts of the
would use PRISM, for example, to help an American company gain a competitive advantage in a bidding war against a foreign rival.
business sector is that Americans would also be interested in our patent applications.” Surveillance in the name of national security is still surveillance, and last week’s developments remind us all in irrefutable terms that nations have
often felt much freer to spy on foreigners than on their own citizens. What varies among nations is the set of priorities that motivate the eavesdropping. In the United States, national security provides the motivation. For some other
nations, the goal of maximizing economic success in the global marketplace is viewed as justifying espionage against foreign companies. Of course, state-sponsored economic espionage is as old as the concept of states itself. But
the NSA leaks will put wind in the sails of non-U.S. intelligence services aiming to ramp up
espionage targeting American businesses. Budgets for spying on American businesses will grow, and people to do the work will be easier to hire. According to the most recent
EMC-sponsored IDC Digital Universe Study, an estimated total of 2.8 billion terabytes of data were created and replicated globally in 2012. Some fraction that tsunami of data passes through networks accessible to foreign
intelligence services. And a small fraction of that, in turn, contains highly confidential information about the products, services, and future plans of American companies. When you start with a few billion terabytes, a fraction of a
And more than ever before, that information is at risk of being compromised and
used to America’s economic disadvantage.
fraction is still a lot of information.
Collapse of global trade results in extinction
Garten, 09 – professor at the Yale School of Management (Jeffrey, “The Dangers of Turning Inward”, 3/5, Wall Street Journal,
http://www.business.illinois.edu/aguilera/Teaching/WSJ09_Dangers_of_Turning_Inward.pdf)
historians look back on today's severe downturn, with its crumbling markets, rising unemployment and massive government interventions, they could well be busy analyzing how
would likely point to the growth
of economic nationalism as the root cause. Ordinary protectionism such as tariffs and quotas would be one aspect of this problem, but it won't be the worst
of it because a web of treaties and the enforcement capabilities of the World Trade Organization will constrain the most egregious behavior. Economic nationalism is
more insidious because it is broader, more subtle and subject to fewer legal constraints. It is a frame of mind
that casts doubt on the very assumption that we live in a single international market, and that relatively open borders are a virtue. It is based on a calculation that
despite all the talk about economic interdependence, nations can go it alone, and could be better off
Yet if
globalization -- the spread of trade, finance, technology and the movement of people around the world -- went into reverse. They
in doing so. True economic nationalists want above all to protect capital and jobs in their own countries. They see global commerce not as a win-win proposition but as a contest in
which there is a victor and a loser. They are thus not focused on international agreements to open the world economy; to the contrary, they are usually figuring out how to avoid international
The last time we saw sustained economic nationalism was in the 1930s, when capital
flows and trade among countries collapsed, and every country went its own way. World growth
went into a ditch, political ties among nations deteriorated, nationalism and populism combined to
create fascist governments in Europe and Asia, and a world war took place. It took at least a
generation for globalization to get back on track. There have been some bouts of inwardlooking governmental action since then, such as the early
commercial obligations.
1970s when the U.S. cut the dollar from its gold base and imposed export embargoes on soybeans and steel scrap. However, the economic conditions were not sufficiently bad for the trend to
sustain itself. The kind of economic nationalism we are seeing today is not yet extreme. It is also understandable. The polit ical pressures could hardly be worse. Over the last decade, the global
economy grew on average about 4% to 5%, and this year it will come to a grinding halt: 0.5% according to the International Monetary Fund, where projections usually err on the optimistic side.
World trade, which has grown much faster than global gross domestic product for many years, is projected to decline this year for the first time since 1982. Foreign direct investment last year
slumped by 10% from 2007. Most dramatically, capital flows into emerging market nations are projected to drop this year by nearly 80% compared to 2007. The aggregate figures don't tell the
story of what is unraveling in individual countries. In the last quarter of 2008, U.S. GDP dropped by 6.2% at an annual rate, the U.K. by 5.9%, Germany by 8.2%, Japan by 12.7% and South
Korea by 20.8%. Mexico, Thailand and Singapore and most of Eastern Europe are also in deep trouble. In every case, employment has been plummeting. So far popular demonstrations against
government policies have taken place in theU.K., France, Greece, Russia and throughout Eastern Europe. And the governments of Iceland and Latvia have fallen over the crisis. Governments
could therefore be forgiven if they are preoccupied above all with the workers and companies within their own borders. Most officials don't know what to do because they haven't seen this level
of distress before. They are living from day to day, desperately improvising and trying to hold off political pressure to take severe measures they know could be satisfying right now but cause
bigger damage later. Thinking about how their policies might affect other countries is not their main focus, let alone taking the time to try to coordinate them internationally. Besides, whether it's
in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Beijing, Brazilia or Tokyo, it is hard to find many top officials who wouldn't say that whatever measures they are taking that may undermine global commerce are
strictly temporary. They all profess that when the crisis is over, they will resume their support for globalization. They underestimate, however, how hard it could be to reverse course. Political
figures take comfort, too, from the global institutions that were not present in the 1930s -- the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, all of which are assumed to be keeping
globalization alive. This is a false sense of security, since these institutions are guided by sovereign countries. Government officials often feel that because they are going to endless crisis summit
meetings -- the next big one is in London on April 2, when the world's top 20 nations will be assembling -- that some international coordination is actually taking place. This is mostly an illusion.
With a few exceptions, such as the so-called Plaza Agreements of 1984 when currencies were realigned, it is difficult to point to a meeting where anything major has been said and subsequently
Classic trade
protectionism is on the rise. In the first half of 2008, the number of investigations in the World Trade Organization relating to antidumping cases -- selling below cost -implemented. But as the pressure on politicians mounts, decisions are being made on an incremental and ad hoc basis that amounts to a disturbing trend.
was up 30% from the year before. Washington has recently expanded sanctions against European food products in retaliation for Europe's boycott against hormonetreated American beef -- an old
dispute, to be sure, but one that is escalating. In the last several months, the E.U. reintroduced export subsidies on butter and cheese. India raised tariffs on steel products, as did Russia on
imported cars. Indonesia ingenuously designated that just a few of its ports could be used to import toys, creating a trade-blocking bottleneck. Brazil and Argentina have been pressing for a
higher external tariff on imports into a South American bloc of countries called Mercosur. Just this week, the E.U. agreed to levy tariffs on American exports of biodiesel fuel, possibly a first shot
in what may become a gigantic trade war fought over different environmental policies -- some based on taxes, some on regulation, some on cap and trade -- being embraced by individual
countries. Much bigger problems have arisen in more non-traditional areas and derive from recent direct intervention of governments. The much-publicized "Buy America" provision of the U.S.
stimulus package restricts purchases of construction-related goods to many U.S. manufacturers, and although it is riddled with exceptions, it does reveal Washington's state of mind. The bailout
of GM and Chrysler is a purely national deal. Such exclusion against foreign firms is a violation of so-called "national treatment" clauses in trade agreements, and the E.U. has already put
Washington on notice that it will pursue legal trade remedies if the final bailout package is discriminatory. Uncle Sam is not the only economic nationalist. The Japanese government is offering
to help a broad array of its corporations -- but certainly not subsidiaries of foreign companies in Japan -- by purchasing the stock of these firms directly, thereby not just saving them but providing
an advantage over competition from non-Japanese sources. The French government has created a sovereign wealth fund to make sure that certain "national champions," such as carparts
manufacturer Valeo and aeronautics component maker Daher, aren't bought by foreign investors. Government involvement in financial institutions has taken on an anti-globalization tone. British
regulators are pushing their global banks to redirect foreign lending to the U.K. when credit is sorely needed and where it can be monitored. Just this past week, the Royal Bank of Scotland
announced it was closing shop in 60 foreign countries. Western European banks that were heavily invested in countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltics have pulled back
their credits, causing a devastating deflation throughout Eastern Europe. The Swiss are reportedly considering more lenient accounting policies for loans their banks make domestically as
opposed to abroad. This de-globalizing trend could well be amplified by Washington's effort to exercise tight oversight of several big financial institutions. Already AIG's prime Asian asset,
American International Assurance Company, is on the block. As the feds take an ever bigger stake in Citigroup, they may well force it to divest itself of many of its prized global holdings, such
as Banamex in Mexico and Citi Handlowy in Poland. It appears that new legislation under the Troubled Asset Relief Program will also restrict the employment of foreign nationals in hundreds of
American banks in which the government has a stake. Whether or not it goes into bankruptcy, General Motors will be pressed to sell many of its foreign subsidiaries, too. Even Chinese
multinationals such as Haier and Lenovo are beating a retreat to their own shores where the risks seem lower than operating in an uncertain global economy. The government in Beijing is never
far away from such fundamental strategic decisions. Then there is the currency issue. Economic nationalists are mercantilists. They are willing to keep their currency cheap in order to make their
exports more competitive. China is doing just that. A big question is whether other Asian exporters that have been badly hurt from the crisis -- Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand, for example -will follow suit. Competitive devaluations were a major feature of the 1930s. It's no accident that the European Union has called an emergency summit for this Sunday to consider what to do with
There are a number of reasons why economic nationalism could escalate
rising protectionism of all kinds.
. The recession
could last well beyond this year. It is also worrisome that the forces of economic nationalism were gathering even before the crisis hit, and have deeper roots than most people know. Congress
denied President Bush authority to negotiate trade agreements two years ago, fearing that America was not benefiting enough from open trade, and an effort to reform immigration was paralyzed
for years. Globally, international trade negotiations called the Doha Round collapsed well before Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers did. Concerns that trade was worsening income distribution
were growing in every major industrial nation since the late 1990s.
Whenever countries turned inward over the past half-century,
Washington was a powerful countervailing force, preaching the gospel of globalization and open
markets for goods, services and capital . As the Obama administration works feverishly to fire up America's growth engines, patch up its financial system and
keep its housing market from collapsing further, and as its major long-term objectives center on health, education and reducing energy dependence on foreign sources, the country's
preoccupations are more purely domestic than at any time since the 1930s. In the past, American business leaders from companies such as IBM, GE, Goldman Sachs and, yes, Citigroup and
Merrill Lynch beat the drum for open global markets. As their share prices collapse, some voices are muted, some silenced. It is not easy to find anyone in America who has the stature and
courage to press for a more open global economy in the midst of the current economic and political crosswinds. And given that the global rot started in the U.S. with egregiously irresponsible
lending, borrowing and regulation, America's brand of capitalism is in serious disrepute around the world. Even if President Obama had the mental bandwidth to become a cheerleader for
globalization, America's do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do leadership has been badly compromised. If economic nationalism puts a monkey wrench in the wheels of global commerce, the damage
could be severe. The U.S. is a good example. It is inconceivable that Uncle Sam could mount a serious recovery without a massive expansion of exports -- the very activity that was responsible
for so much of America's economic growth during the middle of this decade. But that won't be possible if other nations block imports. For generations, the deficits that we have run this past
decade and the trillions of dollars we are spending now mean we will be highly dependent on foreign loans from China, Japan and other parts of the world. But these will not be forthcoming at
prices we can afford without a global financial system built on deep collaboration between debtors and creditors -- including keeping our market open to foreign goods and services. The Obama
administration talks about a super-competitive economy, based on high-quality jobs -- which means knowledge-intensive jobs. This won't happen if we are not able to continue to bring in the
brightest people from all over the world to work and live here. Silicon Valley, to take one example, would be a pale shadow of itself without Indian, Chinese and Israeli brain power in its midst.
More generally, without an open global economy, worldwide industries such as autos, steel, banking and telecommunications cannot be rationalized and restructured efficiently, and we'll be
doomed to have excessive capacity and booms and busts forever. The big emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa will never be fully integrated into the world
economy, depriving them and us of future economic growth. The productivity of billions of men and women entering the global workforce will be stunted to everyone's detriment. Of course, no
one would say that globalization is without its problems. Trade surges and products made by low-priced labor can lead to job displacement and increasing income inequality. Proud national
cultures can be undermined. But these challenges can be met by reasonable regulation and by domestic policies that provide a strong social safety net and the kind of education that helps people
acquire new skills for a competitive world. With the right responses of governments, the benefits should far outweigh the disadvantages.
For thousands of years,
globalization has increased global wealth, individual choice and human freedom. The point is, economic
nationalism, with its implicit autarchic and save-yourself character, embodies exactly the wrong spirit and runs in precisely the
wrong direction from the global system that will be necessary to create the future we all want . As
happened in the 1930s, economic nationalism is also sure to poison geopolitics. Governments under
economic pressure have far fewer resources to take care of their citizens and to deal with rising
anger and social tensions. Whether or not they are democracies, their tenure can be threatened by
popular resentment. The temptation for governments to whip up enthusiasm for something that
distracts citizens from their economic woes -- a war or a jihad against unpopular minorities, for example -is great. That's not all. As an economically enfeebled South Korea withdraws foreign aid from North
Korea, could we see an even more irrational activity from Pyongyang? As the Pakistani economy
goes into the tank, will the government be more likely to compromise with terrorists to alleviate at least one source
of pressure? As Ukraine strains under the weight of an IMF bailout, is a civil war with Cold War
overtones between Europe and Russia be in the cards? And beyond all that, how will economically embattled
and inward-looking governments be able to deal with the critical issues that need global resolution
such as control of nuclear weapons , or a treaty to manage climate change, or help to the hundreds
of millions of people who are now falling back into poverty?
Second is Relations PRISM surveillance has tanked US-EU relations – ending the program is key to
restoring them
Zack Whittaker, Nov 27, 2013, “Realizing it's the underdog post-PRISM, EU lays out new BFF pact
with the U.S.,” ZDNET, http://www.zdnet.com/article/realizing-its-the-underdog-post-prism-eu-lays-outnew-bff-pact-with-the-u-s/, KEL
In efforts to get the "special relationship" back on track after months of painful political rhetoric and
frenemy-like relations, the European Commission wants to rekindle its trans-Atlantic love with its American
partners. But it comes with conditions. And if America doesn't play ball, the rift could get significantly
wider . The EU on Wednesday threw down its demands — albeit in a somewhat subdued typical softly-softly European way now that the 28 member state bloc
has taken time to breathe and think this one through — and hopes its U.S. counterparts bites at the chance to restore relations with its trans-Atlantic friend.
Tensions between the two continents have never been as strained as they are today. It all stems from the
revelations from the Edward Snowden house of leaks, which disclosed the massive surveillance operation by the U.S.
government by its National Security Agency (NSA).
US-EU relations key to solve global war
O'Sullivan, 4 -- National Interest editor (John, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom Distinguished
Fellow in International Relations, "Europe and the Establishment," The National Interest, 7-31-2004,
nationalinterest.org/article/europe-and-the-establishment-2608)
The report's starting point -- that U.S.-European relations
are extremely important -- is undeniable. A united Western
alliance would shape world institutions in line with values and practices rooted in liberty and democracy and coax rising
powers such as India and China into going along with this international status quo for the foreseeable future. Indeed, this is already
happening as China accepts liberal economic rules at home in order to enter institutions such as the G7 and the World Trade Organization. By
contrast, a
disunited West would tempt such powers to play off Europe and America against each other and
foster a global jockeying for power not unlike the maneuvering between a half-dozen great powers that led to 1914.
Slower version
Observation 1: Inherency
The 2008 FISA Amendment Act (FAA) removed the probable cause standard
requiring warrants for surveillance, allowing sweeping NSA electronic surveillance
of US citizens and communication within the US. There’s no effective oversight of
these programs now.
Margot Kaminski June 7, 2013, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School; She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the
Information Society Project. While at Yale Law School, she was a Knight Law and Media Scholar and
co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation from Yale
Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back,” The
Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/prisms-legal-basis-how-we-got-here-andwhat-we-can-do-to-get-back/276667/, KEL
First, there is the question of whom the surveillance targets.
PRISM spies on Americans. The Director of National Intelligence emphasized yesterday that PRISM targets
only " non-U.S. persons located outside the United States ." But the press release also acknowledges that "information about U.S. persons" may be "incidentally acquired" in such pursuits.
The current scope of this "incidental"
surveillance will shock most Americans. Before 2008, the law limited "incidental" surveillance by limiting primary surveillance. The
government had to show probable cause that its surveillance target was the agent of a foreign power,
and that the facility being watched was about to be used by that target. You could be incidentally observed if you communicated with a
targeted foreign agent, but otherwise foreign communications were likely to be unmonitored. But in 2008, the FISA Amendments Act (FISAAA)
changed this . The government now does not need to show probable cause that the target is a foreign agent. It need only have a "reasonable
belief" that the target is located outside of the United States. The new version of FISA does not require the
government to identify its targets; it does not require the government to identify the monitored facilities ; and
the purpose of foreign intelligence gathering attaches to the whole surveillance program, not the individual investigation. That is to say: the FISA Amendments Act
permits the government to obtain a single court order through which it can monitor thousands, or even
millions, of people. The scope of "incidental" surveillance thus vastly expanded as Congress lowered the requirements for spying on the primary target. Such a system
will inevitably sweep in untold numbers of Americans who communicate with foreigners. And because the government
Targeting is not the same as collecting; the program may "target" foreign persons, but "acquire" information on Americans.
need have only a "reasonable belief" that the target is outside the United States--which it is interpreting according to the Washington Post as a 51% chance that the target is outside the U.S.--this
system will undoubtedly sweep in purely domestic communications as well.
This brings us to the issue of oversight: who is watching the watchers? The Director
of National Intelligence assures us that PRISM is "subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress." It is true that in December 2012
Congress renewed the law that allows PRISM to exist. But what kind of oversight did Congress actually provide? When Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall asked whether communications by
Americans had been gathered under the law, the Director of National Intelligence responded that it was not possible to identify the number of people in the United States whose communications
At the core of the
problem is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court), which meets in secret and does not publish its
opinions, itself does not provide adequate oversight. When Congress changed the standard for targeting
foreign individuals in 2008 , it abolished the ability of the FISA Court to evaluate whether the
government had any real cause to target an individual or group of individuals. The Supreme Court itself disputes whether the
were reviewed. How effective can Congressional oversight be if Congress does not understand the scope and nature of the programs it has authorized?
FISA Court enforces the Fourth Amendment. The "minimization procedures" touted by the Director of National Intelligence as adequate privacy safeguards are established by the government,
evaluated by the government, and are subject to review by a secret court--if review occurs at all. And as a general practice, FISA "minimization" hasnot been true minimization: it occurs after
information is already acquired. The existence of PRISM and the Verizon metadata program, both authorized by the FISA Court, confirms that a secret court broadly authorized by an uninformed
Congress will not adequately protect the Fourth and First Amendment rights of American citizens on American soil.
The 2015 USA Freedom Act does NOTHING to reform PRISM and sent a signal
that should trigger all negative disadvantages.
Fred Kaplan June 8, 2015, author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the
American Way of War, is writing a book on the history of cyberwar, “The NSA Debate We Should Be
Having,” Slate Magazine,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/the_national_security_agency_s_su
rveillance_and_the_usa_freedom_act_the.html, KEL
One week after Congress voted to stop the National Security Agency from collecting and storing millions of
Americans’ phone records, partisans on both sides are exaggerating the significance of this new reform.
NSA supporters lament the loss of a key tool for fighting terrorists , while the agency’s critics hail
the new law as (in Edward Snowden’s words) an “historic victory for the rights of every citizen, ” with some calling its
passage a vindication of Snowden himself as an authentic whistleblower who should be let back home as a hero, not a convict. Both sides are off the
mark. The NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata was the subject of the first news stories based on the trove of highly classified documents that Snowden
leaked, and it stirred the biggest commotion. But in fact the metadata program never comprised more than a tiny percentage of the agency’s vast and global
surveillance net. The new law’s reform measure—to keep the metadata stored with the telecom companies, allowing NSA access only to specified materials, and then
only through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—was first proposed not by some libertarian critic but by Gen. Keith Alexander, then-director of the NSA.
Under the system that has been in effect, as authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act (or, rather, by the FISA court’s now-discredited reading of that section), the
NSA routinely collected metadata from some of the biggest cellular companies—not the contents of conversations, but the phone numbers, dates, times, and duration
of the calls. If someone inside the United States called a number linked to one of three terrorist organizations (including al-Qaida), an NSA alert system would note
that fact. The NSA could then ask the FISA Court for permission to search the database for a list of all the other numbers that the American phone had called, as well
as all the numbers that those numbers had called, going back as far as five years. If this search revealed a suspicious pattern, the NSA would turn the materials over to
the FBI, which could seek a warrant to listen to conversations. Under the new reform law, called the USA Freedom Act, the NSA would no longer possess the
database, so it would seek a FISA court order to get it from the telecom companies—and the FISA court would now include a privacy advocate who could argue
against relinquishing the data. If the court sided with the NSA, what happened next would be exactly the same as before the new law passed. So, it’s not exactly a
giant step in the annals of either national-security risk or civil liberties reform—unless one of two things had been true. First, if the NSA had been abusing the
process—if analysts or senior officials had been searching metadata for personal, political, or vindictive purposes—the changes in custody and oversight would have a
huge impact. But neither Snowden’s documents nor any subsequent probes have uncovered any such evidence. Second, if authoritarians or worse—say, modern-day
versions of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover—were to come to power, they could suspend the internal controls at NSA and use the agency’s vast databases to track
domestic enemies or any target of their choosing. In that case, the Freedom Act would serve as a powerful brake to oppression: Because the government would no
longer possess the data, it couldn’t exploit the data. That is the real—and the intended—effect of the reform: not so much to change the way surveillance technology is
used today, but rather to limit the potential for abuse in the future. 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.
Plan Text
Thus, my partner and I stand resolved:
Domestic online surveillance authority under the USA PATRIOT Act, Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, and Executive Order
12333 should be repealed and any requirement for manufacturers of electronic
devices or software to provide bypasses for encryption will be prohibited.
Advantage One – Cloud Competitiveness
PRISM revelations and the weak response with US Freedom Act has caused other
nations to retaliate against our information tech sector and undermined our tech
sector competitiveness
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
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.
US competitiveness in the $241 billion global cloud market is key to US innovation,
economic growth, and job growth
Digital 4th, January 2015, Digital 4th is a bipartisan coalition dedicated to reforming and modernizing
our country’s 4th Amendment privacy rights, “U.S. Competitiveness in Cloud Computing: Updating the
Standard for Government Access to Stored Communications,” http://www.digital4th.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/01/Issue_Brief-2-ECPA-and-the-Cloud.pdf, KEL
Businesses all over the world are looking to cloud - based services for their information management
needs in order to save money on equipment and to achieve better computing reliability and data security.
Cloud based services allow companies to expand their computing capacity quickly – particularly valuable for start - up businesses and
entrepreneurs. Such services give employees the flexibility to share information and collaborate. The
global cloud market is
expected to expand to $241 billion by 2020. American companies have been the global leaders in cloud
computing, and cloud computing has been an engine for U.S. - based innovation, economic growth, and
job creation.
Maintaining US economic growth is key to global economic growth
Rich Miller, January 9, 2015, “U.S. Retakes the Helm of the Global Economy,” Bloomberg News,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-09/u-s-retakes-the-helm-of-the-global-economy, KEL
The U.S. is back in the driver’s seat of the global economy after 15 years of watching China and emerging
markets take the lead. The world’s biggest economy will expand by 3.2 percent or more this year, its best
performance since at least 2005, as an improving job market leads to stepped-up consumer spending, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase
& Co., Deutsche Bank AG and BNP Paribas SA. That outcome would be about what each foresees for the world economy as a whole and would
be the first time since 1999 that America hasn’t lagged behind global growth, based on data from the International Monetary Fund. “The
U.S.
is again the engine of global growth,” said Allen Sinai, chief executive officer of Decision Economics in New York. “The economy
is looking stellar and is in its best shape since the 1990s.”
Economic decline causes global wars – empirically proven
Royal, '10 (Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction Program -- DOD, Economics of War &
Peace: Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith & Brauer, p. 213-15)
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political
science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of
interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow.
rhythms
in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the oftenbloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as
economic crises could usher in a redistribution or relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to
uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon. 1995). Alternatively, even a
relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to
challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins ( L 996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with
First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that
parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and
connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996. 2000)
theory of trade expectations suggests that future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security
behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states arc likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of
future trade relations. However, if
the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace
items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use
force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade
expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states .
Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess
(2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during
periods of economic downturn. They write, “The linkages between internal and external conflict and
prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict,
which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends lo amplify the extent to
which international and external conflict self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess 2002. p. 89) Economic
decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg. Hess. & Weerapana,
2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the
popularity of a sitting government. 'Diversionary theory’ suggests that when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline,
sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a rally around the flag effect. Wang (1996),
DeRouen ( 1995), and Blomberg. Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least
indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics arc
greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from
office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United
States and thus weak Presidential popularity arc statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship
positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency or economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links
economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels. This implied connection between integration, crises and armed
conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention.
Repealing the Patriot Act and 2008 FAA restores need for a uniform probablecause-based warrant standard for all surveillance and prevents government from
backdooring encryption software. This solves trust in our tech companies and cloud
services.
Christopher Zara, October 19 2013, “Hope For The Surveillance State Repeal Act? HR 2818 Gains
Support Among House Democrats,” International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/hopesurveillance-state-repeal-act-hr-2818-gains-support-among-house-democrats-1432772, KEL
Congressional support is growing for a bill that would roll back privacy regulations to what they were
before 9/11. H.R.2818, introduced this summer by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has gained five cosponsors this month, all Democrats. Also known as
the Surveillance State Repeal Act, the bill would repeal the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008. Both laws have received harsh criticism since classified information leaked by Edward Snowden revealed widespread
electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Instead of using these powers to zero in on the tiny number of real
terrorist threats we face, the executive branch turned these surveillance powers against the American people as a whole,” Holt said in a July statement. “My legislation
would put a stop to that right now.” Holt said the
bill would restore a “uniform probable-cause-based warrant standard for
surveillance requests,” while also prohibiting the U.S. government from forcing tech companies to create
“back doors” that make spying on the public easier. He added that people should be treated as “citizens first, not suspects.” Last month,
the New York Times editorial board endorsed the bill, citing specifically the provision that would bar the
government from requiring software makers to create ways for the government to bypass encryption.
Privacy and tech-industry advocates say such provisions weaken consumer trust in American tech
companies’ abilities to safeguard private data . One recent report showed that the U.S. cloudcomputing industry could lose up to $35 billion over the next few years as a result of NSA
surveillance and the negative press associated with it.
Advantage Two – US/EU
We have two scenarios – First is Trade
Online surveillance is a major obstacle to TIPP passage – failure to reach a deal will
trigger global protectionism and undermine global trade
Sara Miller Llana July 8, 2013 “Will US-EU trade talks spur growth - or show globalization's limits?,”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0708/Will-US-EU-trade-talks-spur-growth-or-showglobalization-s-limits, KEL
A trade deal would deeply integrate US-European relations at a time of drift, and during a rocky patch,
amid friction over American spying allegations. If it succeeds , some say it would create a more level playing field
with the rise of China and other emerging markets, as well as reinvigorate other global trade initiatives. Yet even if it
fails – and there are plenty who think that the obstacles such as agriculture and, most recently, data privacy are
insurmountable – a failure would be pivotal, showing that tariffs can be dropped but non-tariff barriers, which are often more cultural
in nature, remain stubborn. A failure, says Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Center for International Political Economy (ECIPE) in
Brussels, “could
lead to a larger standstill in efforts to address 21st century trade barriers.”
Collapse of global trade results in extinction
Garten, 09 – professor at the Yale School of Management (Jeffrey, “The Dangers of Turning Inward”, 3/5, Wall Street Journal,
http://www.business.illinois.edu/aguilera/Teaching/WSJ09_Dangers_of_Turning_Inward.pdf)
historians look back on today's severe downturn, with its crumbling markets, rising unemployment and massive government interventions, they could well be busy analyzing how
globalization -- the spread of trade, finance, technology and the movement of people around the world -- went into reverse. They would likely point to the growth
of economic nationalism as the root cause. Ordinary protectionism such as tariffs and quotas would be one aspect of this problem, but it won't be the worst
of it because a web of treaties and the enforcement capabilities of the World Trade Organization will constrain the most egregious behavior. Economic nationalism is
more insidious because it is broader, more subtle and subject to fewer legal constraints. It is a frame of mind
that casts doubt on the very assumption that we live in a single international market, and that relatively open borders are a virtue. It is based on a calculation that
despite all the talk about economic interdependence, nations can go it alone, and could be better off
in doing so. True economic nationalists want above all to protect capital and jobs in their own countries. They see global commerce not as a win-win proposition but as a contest in
Yet if
which there is a victor and a loser. They are thus not focused on international agreements to open the world economy; to the contrary, they are usually figuring out how to avoid international
The last time we saw sustained economic nationalism was in the 1930s, when capital
flows and trade among countries collapsed, and every country went its own way. World growth
went into a ditch, political ties among nations deteriorated, nationalism and populism combined to
create fascist governments in Europe and Asia, and a world war took place. It took at least a
generation for globalization to get back on track. There have been some bouts of inwardlooking governmental action since then, such as the early
commercial obligations.
1970s when the U.S. cut the dollar from its gold base and imposed export embargoes on soybeans and steel scrap. However, the economic conditions were not sufficiently bad for the trend to
sustain itself. The kind of economic nationalism we are seeing today is not yet extreme. It is also understandable. The polit ical pressures could hardly be worse. Over the last decade, the global
economy grew on average about 4% to 5%, and this year it will come to a grinding halt: 0.5% according to the International Monetary Fund, where projections usually err on the optimistic side.
World trade, which has grown much faster than global gross domestic product for many years, is projected to decline this year for the first time since 1982. Foreign direct investment last year
slumped by 10% from 2007. Most dramatically, capital flows into emerging market nations are projected to drop this year by nearly 80% compared to 2007. The aggregate figures don't tell the
story of what is unraveling in individual countries. In the last quarter of 2008, U.S. GDP dropped by 6.2% at an annual rate, the U.K. by 5.9%, Germany by 8.2%, Japan by 12.7% and South
Korea by 20.8%. Mexico, Thailand and Singapore and most of Eastern Europe are also in deep trouble. In every case, employment has been plummeting. So far popular demonstrations against
government policies have taken place in theU.K., France, Greece, Russia and throughout Eastern Europe. And the governments of Iceland and Latvia have fallen over the crisis. Governments
could therefore be forgiven if they are preoccupied above all with the workers and companies within their own borders. Most officials don't know what to do because they haven't seen this level
of distress before. They are living from day to day, desperately improvising and trying to hold off political pressure to take severe measures they know could be satisfying right now but cause
bigger damage later. Thinking about how their policies might affect other countries is not their main focus, let alone taking the time to try to coordinate them internationally. Besides, whether it's
in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Beijing, Brazilia or Tokyo, it is hard to find many top officials who wouldn't say that whatever measures they are taking that may undermine global co mmerce are
strictly temporary. They all profess that when the crisis is over, they will resume their support for globalization. They underestimate, however, how hard it could be to reverse course. Political
figures take comfort, too, from the global institutions that were not present in the 1930s -- the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, all of which are assumed to be keeping
globalization alive. This is a false sense of security, since these institutions are guided by sovereign countries. Government officials often feel that because they are going to endless crisis summit
meetings -- the next big one is in London on April 2, when the world's top 20 nations will be assembling -- that some international coordination is actually taking place. This is mostly an illusion.
With a few exceptions, such as the so-called Plaza Agreements of 1984 when currencies were realigned, it is difficult to point to a meeting where anything major has been said and subsequently
implemented. But as the pressure on politicians mounts, decisions are being made on an incremental and ad hoc basis that amounts to a disturbing trend.
Classic trade
protectionism is on the rise. In the first half of 2008, the number of investigations in the World Trade Organization relating to antidumping cases -- selling below cost -was up 30% from the year before. Washington has recently expanded sanctions against European food products in retaliation for Europe's boycott against hormonetreated American beef -- an old
dispute, to be sure, but one that is escalating. In the last several months, the E.U. reintroduced export subsidies on butter and cheese. India raised tariffs on steel products, as did Russia on
imported cars. Indonesia ingenuously designated that just a few of its ports could be used to import toys, creating a trade-blocking bottleneck. Brazil and Argentina have been pressing for a
higher external tariff on imports into a South American bloc of countries called Mercosur. Just this week, the E.U. agreed to levy tariffs on American exports of biodiesel fuel, possibly a first shot
in what may become a gigantic trade war fought over different environmental policies -- some based on taxes, some on regulation, some on cap and trade -- being embraced by individual
countries. Much bigger problems have arisen in more non-traditional areas and derive from recent direct intervention of governments. The much-publicized "Buy America" provision of the U.S.
stimulus package restricts purchases of construction-related goods to many U.S. manufacturers, and although it is riddled with exceptions, it does reveal Washington's state of mind. The bailout
of GM and Chrysler is a purely national deal. Such exclusion against foreign firms is a violation of so-called "national treatment" clauses in trade agreements, and the E.U. has already put
Washington on notice that it will pursue legal trade remedies if the final bailout package is discriminatory. Uncle Sam is not the only economic nationalist. The Japanese government is offering
to help a broad array of its corporations -- but certainly not subsidiaries of foreign companies in Japan -- by purchasing the stock of these firms directly, thereby not just saving them but providing
an advantage over competition from non-Japanese sources. The French government has created a sovereign wealth fund to make sure that certain "national champions," such as carparts
manufacturer Valeo and aeronautics component maker Daher, aren't bought by foreign investors. Government involvement in financial institutions has taken on an anti-globalization tone. British
regulators are pushing their global banks to redirect foreign lending to the U.K. when credit is sorely needed and where it can be monitored. Just this past week, the Royal Bank of Scotland
announced it was closing shop in 60 foreign countries. Western European banks that were heavily invested in countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltics have pulled back
their credits, causing a devastating deflation throughout Eastern Europe. The Swiss are reportedly considering more lenient accounting policies for loans their banks make domestically as
opposed to abroad. This de-globalizing trend could well be amplified by Washington's effort to exercise tight oversight of several big financial institutions. Already AIG's prime Asian asset,
American International Assurance Company, is on the block. As the feds take an ever bigger stake in Citigroup, they may well force it to divest itself of many of its prized global holdings, such
as Banamex in Mexico and Citi Handlowy in Poland. It appears that new legislation under the Troubled Asset Relief Program will also restrict the employment of foreign nationals in hundreds of
American banks in which the government has a stake. Whether or not it goes into bankruptcy, General Motors will be pressed to sell many of its foreign subsidiaries, too. Even Chinese
multinationals such as Haier and Lenovo are beating a retreat to their own shores where the risks seem lower than operating in an uncertain global economy. The government in Beijing is never
far away from such fundamental strategic decisions. Then there is the currency issue. Economic nationalists are mercantilists. They are willing to keep their currency cheap in order to make their
exports more competitive. China is doing just that. A big question is whether other Asian exporters that have been badly hurt from the crisis -- Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand, for example -will follow suit. Competitive devaluations were a major feature of the 1930s. It's no accident that the European Union has called an emergency summit for this Sunday to consider what to do with
There are a number of reasons why economic nationalism could escalate
rising protectionism of all kinds.
. The recession
could last well beyond this year. It is also worrisome that the forces of economic nationalism were gathering even before the crisis hit, and have deeper roots than most people know. Congress
denied President Bush authority to negotiate trade agreements two years ago, fearing that America was not benefiting enough from open trade, and an effort to reform immigration was paralyzed
for years. Globally, international trade negotiations called the Doha Round collapsed well before Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers did. Concerns that trade was worsening income distribution
were growing in every major industrial nation since the late 1990s.
Whenever countries turned inward over the past half-century,
Washington was a powerful countervailing force, preaching the gospel of globalization and open
markets for goods, services and capital . As the Obama administration works feverishly to fire up America's growth engines, patch up its financial system and
keep its housing market from collapsing further, and as its major long-term objectives center on health, education and reducing energy dependence on foreign sources, the country's
preoccupations are more purely domestic than at any time since the 1930s. In the past, American business leaders from companies such as IBM, GE, Goldman Sachs and, yes, Citigroup and
Merrill Lynch beat the drum for open global markets. As their share prices collapse, some voices are muted, some silenced. It is not easy to find anyone in America who has the stature and
courage to press for a more open global economy in the midst of the current economic and political crosswinds. And given that the global rot started in the U.S. with egregiously irresponsible
lending, borrowing and regulation, America's brand of capitalism is in serious disrepute around the world. Even if President Obama had the mental bandwidth to become a cheerleader for
globalization, America's do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do leadership has been badly compromised. If economic nationalism puts a monkey wrench in the wheels of global commerce, the damage
could be severe. The U.S. is a good example. It is inconceivable that Uncle Sam could mount a serious recovery without a massive expansion of exports -- the very activity that was responsible
for so much of America's economic growth during the middle of this decade. But that won't be possible if other nations block imports. For generations, the deficits that we have run this past
decade and the trillions of dollars we are spending now mean we will be highly dependent on foreign loans from China, Japan and other parts of the world. But these will not be forthcoming at
prices we can afford without a global financial system built on deep collaboration between debtors and creditors -- including keeping our market open to foreign goods and services. The Obama
administration talks about a super-competitive economy, based on high-quality jobs -- which means knowledge-intensive jobs. This won't happen if we are not able to continue to bring in the
brightest people from all over the world to work and live here. Silicon Valley, to take one example, would be a pale shadow of itself without Indian, Chinese and Israeli brain power in its midst.
More generally, without an open global economy, worldwide industries such as autos, steel, banking and telecommunications cannot be rationalized and restructured efficiently, and we'll be
doomed to have excessive capacity and booms and busts forever. The big emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa will never be fully integrated into the world
economy, depriving them and us of future economic growth. The productivity of billions of men and women entering the global workforce will be stunted to everyone's detriment. Of course, no
one would say that globalization is without its problems. Trade surges and products made by low-priced labor can lead to job displacement and increasing income inequality. Proud national
cultures can be undermined. But these challenges can be met by reasonable regulation and by domestic policies that provide a strong social safety net and the kind of education that helps people
For thousands of years,
globalization has increased global wealth, individual choice and human freedom. The point is, economic
nationalism, with its implicit autarchic and save-yourself character, embodies exactly the wrong spirit and runs in precisely the
wrong direction from the global system that will be necessary to create the future we all want . As
happened in the 1930s, economic nationalism is also sure to poison geopolitics. Governments under
economic pressure have far fewer resources to take care of their citizens and to deal with rising
anger and social tensions. Whether or not they are democracies, their tenure can be threatened by
popular resentment. The temptation for governments to whip up enthusiasm for something that
distracts citizens from their economic woes -- a war or a jihad against unpopular minorities, for example -is great. That's not all. As an economically enfeebled South Korea withdraws foreign aid from North
Korea, could we see an even more irrational activity from Pyongyang? As the Pakistani economy
goes into the tank, will the government be more likely to compromise with terrorists to alleviate at least one source
of pressure? As Ukraine strains under the weight of an IMF bailout, is a civil war with Cold War
overtones between Europe and Russia be in the cards? And beyond all that, how will economically embattled
and inward-looking governments be able to deal with the critical issues that need global resolution
such as control of nuclear weapons , or a treaty to manage climate change, or help to the hundreds
acquire new skills for a competitive world. With the right responses of governments, the benefits should far outweigh the disadvantages.
of millions of people who are now falling back into poverty?
Second is Relations PRISM surveillance has tanked US-EU relations – ending the program is key to
restoring them
Zack Whittaker, Nov 27, 2013, “Realizing it's the underdog post-PRISM, EU lays out new BFF pact
with the U.S.,” ZDNET, http://www.zdnet.com/article/realizing-its-the-underdog-post-prism-eu-lays-outnew-bff-pact-with-the-u-s/, KEL
In efforts to get the "special relationship" back on track after months of painful political rhetoric and
frenemy-like relations, the European Commission wants to rekindle its trans-Atlantic love with its American
partners. But it comes with conditions. And if America doesn't play ball, the rift could get significantly
wider . The EU on Wednesday threw down its demands — albeit in a somewhat subdued typical softly-softly European way now that the 28 member state bloc
has taken time to breathe and think this one through — and hopes its U.S. counterparts bites at the chance to restore relations with its trans-Atlantic friend.
Tensions between the two continents have never been as strained as they are today. It all stems from the
revelations from the Edward Snowden house of leaks, which disclosed the massive surveillance operation by the U.S.
government by its National Security Agency (NSA).
US-EU relations key to solve global war
O'Sullivan, 4 -- National Interest editor (John, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom Distinguished
Fellow in International Relations, "Europe and the Establishment," The National Interest, 7-31-2004,
nationalinterest.org/article/europe-and-the-establishment-2608)
The report's starting point -- that U.S.-European relations
are extremely important -- is undeniable. A united Western
alliance would shape world institutions in line with values and practices rooted in liberty and democracy and coax rising
powers such as India and China into going along with this international status quo for the foreseeable future. Indeed, this is already
happening as China accepts liberal economic rules at home in order to enter institutions such as the G7 and the World Trade Organization. By
contrast, a
disunited West would tempt such powers to play off Europe and America against each other and
foster a global jockeying for power not unlike the maneuvering between a half-dozen great powers that led to 1914.
Plan solves global protectionism against US tech firms and increases US trade
negotiation credibility
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
RECOMMENDATIONS The
free and open Internet that powers the globally networked economy is dependent
on the ability of individuals and companies to engage in commerce without geographic restrictions. To
turn back the tide of technology protectionism, U.S. trade negotiators will need a stronger hand to
play . They cannot go to other nations and tell them to not discriminate against U.S. tech firms if the U.S.
intelligence system continues to follow policies that threaten their citizens and businesses. As a result, it is
incumbent on the Congress and the Obama administration to take the lead in showing the world
the best standards for transparency, cooperation, and accountability . First, the U.S. government
should be forthcoming and transparent about its surveillance practices and clearly inform the public about
the data it collects domestically and abroad. The U.S. government should set the gold standard for international transparency
requirements, so that it is clear what information both U.S. and non - U.S. companies are disclosing to governments at home and abroad. The U.S.
government should then work with its allies to create an international transparency requirement that illuminates when countries conduct
surveillance that accesses foreign companies’ information. Second,
the U.S. government should draw a clear line in the
sand and declare that the policy of the U.S. government is to strengthen not weaken information security.
The U.S. Congress should pass legislation, such as the Secure Data Act introduced by Sen. Wyden (D - OR) , banning any
government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption. 43 In the short term, President Obama,
or his successor, should sign an executive order formalizing this policy as well. In addition, when U.S. government agencies discover
vulnerabilities in software or hardware products, they should responsibly notify these companies in a timely manner so that the companies can fix
these flaws. The best way to protect U.S. citizens from digital threats is to promote strong cyber security practices in the private sector.
Case Extensions
Inherency
Inherency - General
PRISM’s legal justification exponentially increases the amount of surveillance the
government can conduct legally without warrant
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
According to a leaked working draft of the NSA's Inspector General report, in
order to move the content collection involved in
the President's Surveillance Program to a more secure legal footing, from mid-2005 to January 2007, DOJ worked
with NSA to redefine facility. n41 Instead of understanding the word in the traditional sense, (as a specific
telephone number or email address), DOJ argued that it should be understood as a "general gateway" or
"cable head." n42 This change expanded the amount of information that could be obtained by the
government under FISA. The Internet consists of a number of interconnected networks that allow
computers to communicate. A "gateway" is the entrance point from one network to another, or a node, which
converts one protocol stack into another. It is thus an essential feature in most routers (although other devices may also function as gateways).
Routers may transfer, accept, and relay packets of information, but they are limited to networks using similar protocols. Gateways, however, can
accept packets that are formatted for one protocol and convert it into another protocol format. They house routing databases, which determine the
flow of information. A
"cable head," in turn, includes computer systems, databases required to provide Internet
access, and the cable modem termination system (CMTS), which is a system of devices that sends and
receives digital signals on a cable network. The mechanism resides at a phone company's central location, linking customer
connections to a single point. [*133] Redefining facility to include gateways held by the telecommunications company, as well
as the cable head and CMTS (instead of, more narrowly, specific telephone numbers or Internet protocol addresses associated with
particular computers), exponentially increased the amount of content that could be obtained by the government.
Instead of just obtaining the content carried by a single telephone line, or to and from a particular
computer address, the government could obtain the content of all telephone calls or Internet content run
through telecommunication companies' routers.
FISA Section 702 authorizes PRISM
James Jay Carafano, Aug 6, 2013, Ph.D., Vice President for the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis
Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at Heritage Foundation, and the E. W. Richardson
Fellow, “PRISM is Essential to U.S. Security in War Against Terrorism,” Heritage Foundation,
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2013/8/prism-is-essential-to-us-security-in-war-againstterrorism, KEL
The authority for PRISM is in FISA Section 702. Congress debated these authorities in 2007 and again
when the program was reauthorized in 2008. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., surely
remembers the controversy. He wrote President Bush: "There is no crisis that should lead you to cancel
your trip to Africa. But whether or not you cancel your trip, Democrats stand ready to negotiate a final
bill, and we remain willing to extend existing law for as short a time or as long a time as is needed to
complete work on such a bill." Evidently, Reid must have felt the authorities granted under Section 702
received a full and sufficient hearing.
Inherency – USA Freedom Act Did Nothing for PRISM
US Freedom Act did little – it’s signal won’t restore trust in our online systems and
keeps encryption backdoors in place. Allies are still upset.
San Jose Mercury News June 8, 2015, “Privacy fight is far from over in US,” Reprinted in
Bakerfield Californian, http://www.bakersfield.com/news/opinion/2015/06/08/privacy-fight-is-far-fromover-in-us.html, KEL
The Senate's passage of the USA Freedom Act last week marks the first time since the Nixon administration that Congress chose to
rein in a powerful intelligence agency such as the NSA. Ending the National Security Agency's ability to collect data wholesale was a significant step toward
not close to restoring a presumption of privacy — or to rebuilding
trust in digital communication, the foundation of the tech industry that drives the American
economy . The cost to the tech industry as a result of NSA spying is estimated to reach $200 billion by 2016, as Americans and our European and Asian allies
reclaiming Americans' privacy rights. But Congress is
lose confidence in our security software. The expiration of the Patriot Act signals the end of mass collection of Americans' phone records without a warrant. But
really, the reforms in the USA Freedom Act are modest. They leave intelligence agencies ample room to continue needless invasions of
privacy. For example, the NSA will still be able to obtain metadata from phone companies by seeking a court order, virtually a rubber-stamp process. Intelligence
The NSA will still demand that Silicon Valley
companies leave a backdoor entry point for them to peruse searches and social media exchanges . And
surveillance agencies will still be able to snoop on all international communications involving Americans
— anyone doing business or talking to loved ones overseas. This will further damage U.S.
relationships with allies . Some privacy advocates want Congress to reprise the Church Committee convened in the wake of Watergate to probe abuses
agencies will still be able to collect Americans' emails older than six months.
by the CIA, FBI and NSA. But there's no need: The work was done in 2013 by the President's Review Group on Intelligence, which included former members of the
CIA and NSA and experts on privacy law — not a wide-eyed idealist among them. They made 46 excellent, specific recommendations.
Failure to extend Section 215 of the Patriot Act was counterproductive. It focused
attention away from far greater surveillance threats-Executive Order 12333 and the
2008 FISA Amendments.
Vladeck, 6-1-15 [Stephen, Professor of Law @ American University, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here
Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign Policy, 6-1-15,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=]
The ongoing debate over U.S. surveillance programs seemingly came to a head last night, when the Senate
failed to extend controversial Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which expired at midnight. As we learned from
Edward Snowden two years ago, Section 215 was the provision that the government secretly claimed provided
authority for the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records — their telephone “metadata.” And although the government’s
less-than-obvious interpretation of that statute was accepted by judges sitting on the largely secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
Court, it has since been repudiated by two different federal courts, one on the grounds that Congress had not in fact approved such a program and
one on the grounds that, even if it had, such warrantless, suspicionless surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For
those reasons, and a host of others, the debate over what Congress should do with Section 215 as its sunset approached grew only more heated
ahead of the deadline, provoking bitter disputes over the legal wisdom and practical necessity of the phone records program. Some privacy and
civil liberties groups, joined by libertarian politicians such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), supported outright expiration of the provision, arguing that
the phone records program was both unnecessary and unconstitutional. At the other end of the spectrum, hardline conservatives, led by Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), backed a straight “reauthorization,” which would allow the program to continue for as much as two
additional years before further reconsideration. The Obama administration, along with a number of more moderate members of Congress, took
more of a middle road, calling for the fairly modest reforms provided by the USA Freedom Act, which would replace the phone records program
with a somewhat less open-ended (and somewhat better regulated) series of authorities for the government to obtain and review similar data —
and which the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed on May 13. But whatever
the merits of the competing sides in this
debate, the larger problem is that this conversation has missed the forest for a very small — and largely irrelevant
— tree. In fact, from the perspective of individual privacy rights, the phone records program is much less
problematic than the government’s other authorities to conduct mass surveillance under Executive Order
12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. And so, in focusing on how to “fix” Section 215, we’ve given
short shrift to the far more significant problems raised by these other authorities — and, just as importantly, the
broader lessons we should be taking away from the surveillance reform conversation that Snowden started.
Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments permit bulk data collection
without a warrant. The 4th Amendment is circumvented.
Vladeck, 6-1-15 [Stephen, Professor of Law @ American University, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here
Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign Policy, 6-1-15,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=]
Ordinarily, the government needs a warrant before collecting the content of domestic communications, one
based upon a judge’s determination that there’s good reason to believe a particular individual either is
engaged in the commission of a crime or is an agent of a foreign power. But Executive Order 12333 and the 2008
FISA statute, by focusing on individuals who fall outside the Fourth Amendment, capitalize on the lack of
constitutionally required individualized assessments and instead allow the government to engage in bulk
collection of such information — as if it were using an industrial vacuum cleaner to pick up individual particles
of dirt.
Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments can’t separate surveillance
of citizens from so-called legal surveillance of non-citizens. It’s technologically
impossible.
Vladeck, 6-1-15 [Stephen, Professor of Law @ American University, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here
Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign Policy, 6-1-15,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=]
It’s easy to see how these authorities could cause diplomatic headaches (as, for example, with the contretemps surrounding U.S. surveillance of
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone). But most commentators
have assumed that, at least legally, the validity of
these programs turns on their overseas focus. After all, if the government is only targeting the
communications of non-citizens outside the United States, what could possibly be the constitutional objection?
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.
So-called “minimization” requirements fail to protect privacy from Executive Order
12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments: too weak, ignored by the government and
sparse judicial and congressional oversight.
Vladeck, 6-1-15 [Stephen, Professor of Law @ American University, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here
Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign Policy, 6-1-15,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=]
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. More alarmingly, with regard to collection under Executive Order 12333, there
isn’t any similar judicial
review (or meaningful congressional oversight), which means that it has entirely been up to the government to
police itself. As State Department whistleblower John Napier Tye explained last summer, there is every reason to doubt that
such internal accountability has provided a sufficient check. In his words, “Executive Order 12333 contains nothing to
prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all … communications … provided that such collection occurs outside the United States in the
course of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation.”
Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA Amendments pose a much greater
privacy threat than Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
Vladeck, 6-1-15 [Stephen, Professor of Law @ American University, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here
Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign Policy, 6-1-15,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=]
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.
Shortsighted focus on Section 215 places the U.S. on a slippery slope to even greater
privacy violations with no accountability for Executive Order 12333 and the 2008
Amendments.
Vladeck, 6-1-15 [Stephen, Professor of Law @ American University, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here
Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign Policy, 6-1-15,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-courtmetadata/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=]
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 over-heated 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. Reaching some degree of closure with regard to the phone records program may leave many with the
impression that America has concluded a meaningful and productive national debate over surveillance reform.
We haven’t. And although the 2008 FISA Amendments Act is also set to expire — on December 31, 2017 —
the debate over Section 215 leaves little reason to believe that we’ll have it then, either.
Patriot Act expiration changed little – PRISM and other surveillance continue on
wide scale
Marcy Wheeler, June 1, 2015, “Reports of the Patriot Act’s death are greatly exaggerated,” Salon,
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/01/reports_of_the_patriot_acts_death_are_greatly_exaggerated/, KEL
The PATRIOT Act-authorized phone dragnet expired last night. For the first time since 2006, the NSA
won’t receive records of the phone calls you make within the United States. But that doesn’t mean spying
on Americans has stopped. The NSA still obtains records of calls — potentially all calls — you make
with people overseas. It still tracks Americans’ Internet communications using metadata obtained
overseas. The FBI can still access the content of any communications Americans have with foreigners
targeted under PRISM without a warrant or even any evidence of wrong doing. FBI can still, and indeed
does, obtain phone records of individuals in conjunction with national security investigations without any
court review. Not even the spying conducted under Section 215 — the authority that had been used to
collect all of Americans’ phone records, but which is also used to collect certain kinds of Internet data —
or the two other expiring provisions will stop. Because they’re tied to more focused investigations
(though the Internet collection is probably not targeted at one individual), they will probably continue
under a grandfather clause allowing ongoing investigations using those authorities to continue. So in spite
of all the alarmism you’re hearing, not much changed today. A phone dragnet that has never stopped a
terrorist was shut down, but will probably be restarted later this week or next, for at least 6 months.
US Freedom Act did nothing to deal with more significant mass online surveillance
Stephen Vladeck, June 1, 2015, professor of law at the American University Washington College of
Law, “Forget the Patriot Act – Here Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About,” Foreign
Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisacourt-metadata/?wp_login_redirect=0, KEL
The Obama administration, along with a number of more moderate members of Congress, took more of a
middle road, calling for the fairly modest reforms provided by the USA Freedom Act, which would
replace the phone records program with a somewhat less open-ended (and somewhat better regulated)
series of authorities for the government to obtain and review similar data — and which the House of
Representatives overwhelmingly passed on May 13.
But whatever the merits of the competing sides in this debate, the larger problem is that this conversation
has missed the forest for a very small — and largely irrelevant — tree. In fact, from the perspective of
individual privacy rights, the phone records program is much less problematic than the government’s
other authorities to conduct mass surveillance under Executive Order 12333 and the 2008 FISA
Amendments Act. And so, in focusing on how to “fix” Section 215, we’ve given short shrift to the far
more significant problems raised by these other authorities — and, just as importantly, the broader lessons
we should be taking away from the surveillance reform conversation that Snowden started.
Freedom Act doesn’t solve
Edgar 2015
(Tim Edgar, Former director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House National Security Staff,
“Without the USA Freedom Act, NSA Could Resume Bulk Collection Even if Patriot Act Provisions
Expire”, May 30th, 2015, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/05/without-the-usa-freedom-act-nsa-couldresume-bulk-collection-even-if-patriot-act-provisions-expire/)
With the Senate continuing its dangerous brinksmanship regarding the imminent expiration of three Patriot Act provisions,
opponents of NSA bulk data collection seem poised to celebrate whatever happens. McConnell’s efforts to
extend the Patriot Act unchanged lack enough support to pass either chamber. A last-minute deal to pass
the USA Freedom Act may be in the works, but would still face a number of procedural and political
hurdles . It is likely there will be at least some lapse of three sections of the Patriot Act, including section 215, the business records provision
that supports the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records. The assumption has been that the expiration of section 215
of the Patriot Act would mean the end of bulk data collection. That assumption is wrong . Only passing the
USA Freedom Act will do that. Even if section 215 expires, the NSA could resume bulk metadata collection with
a little legal work from Justice Department and Intelligence Community lawyers. It is true that the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court’s interpretation of section 215 has provided the authority for NSA’s current program of
bulk phone records collection as business records under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, as careful readers of
Lawfare know, the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata program under section 215 is not the only, nor was it the
first, bulk collection of metadata authorized by a creative interpretation of the Patriot Act’s amendments to FISA. The
section 215 phone records program was modeled on an earlier, Internet metadata bulk collection program
that began after September 11. The FISC approved the Internet metadata program under the pen register/trap and
trace (PR/TT) provisions of FISA – as amended by section 214 of the Patriot Act. The Internet metadata
program – known as the PR/TT program – had serious compliance problems because it was difficult for the NSA
reliably to segregate Internet metadata from Internet content. Still, the FISC continued to approve the
PR/TT program, with modifications, until the NSA itself chose to end the program in 2011. As a result, the
FISC’s orders approving bulk metadata collection remain a viable interpretation of the PR/TT
provisions of FISA and would have precedential value in any effort to resume bulk collection , whether
of Internet or telephony metadata. The PR/TT provisions of FISA are not limited to Internet metadata . If
anything, they apply more naturally to traditional telephony metadata, as they cover “dialing, routing, addressing, or
signaling” information. Section 214 , unlike section 215, is not going to expire tomorrow – it was made
permanent in 2005 . The Obama administration has understandably not talked much about this. It doesn’t want to take
pressure off Congress, and there is always risk in advancing a modified legal theory which would certainly
face opposition from telecommunications providers. The administration may feel differently on Monday, after section
215 has expired and it is facing an intelligence gap. Government lawyers would only need to persuade the court that
telephony metadata are “dialing, routing, address, or signaling” data – which they plainly are. The NSA
might well seek to switch its arguments before the FISC from section 215 to the PR/TT theory even if section
215 were reauthorized unchanged, as McConnell has proposed. The existing program is on shaky legal ground
because of the Second Circuit’s rejection of the FISC’s interpretation of section 215. The NSA’s bulk Internet
metadata program is far less well known than its phone records counterpart, probably because it was
terminated in 2011 — two years before Snowden leaked it and the government confirmed it. Still, the drafters of the USA Freedom Act
were careful to extend its reforms of bulk collection beyond section 215 of the Patriot Act. The USA Freedom Act prohibits bulk collection not
only under section 215, but also under either the PR/TT provisions of FISA (section 214 of the Patriot Act) or through the use of “national
there
is no guarantee that bulk collection will end simply because section 215 expires. In fact, they may well
end up preserving, not ending, the very bulk collection they oppose. Freedom Act codifies backdoor searches Gosztola
security letters.” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and his supporters should understand that, if they succeed in blocking the USA Freedom Act,
6/7 [KEVIN GOSZTOLA, JUNE 7, 2015, The US Surveillance State Now That USA Freedom Act is Law,
http://firedoglake.com/2015/06/07/podcast-the-us-surveillance-state-now-that-usa-freedom-act-is-law/] The
USA Freedom Act was
signed into law this past week. It was viewed
as both a victory for those concerned with privacy and restricting the National Security
law that did not go far enough in restricting spy agencies. In fact, the USA
Freedom Act further codified the post-9/11 legal framework for surveillance and resurrected
Patriot Act provisions , which expired for a couple days. The law did do away with the NSA’s control of all Americans’ domestic call
records. On the other hand, it left other programs, policies and practices, which NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to
the public, entirely untouched. For example, “backdoor searches” under Section 702 of the FISA
Amendments Act can continue, which means the NSA can collect emails, browsing and chat history of
US citizens without a warrant . On “Unauthorized Disclosure” this week, journalist Marcy Wheeler joins the show to discuss the
Agency’s mass surveillance and also as a
current state of play now that this law considered to be reform has passed.
Squo doesn’t solve
Business Cloud News 2015
(Business Cloud News, USA Freedom Act passes ending bulk data collection, May 14, 2015,
http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/05/14/usa-freedom-act-passes-ending-bulk-data-collection/)
“If
the Patriot Act authorities expire, and the FISC approves bulk collection under a different authority,
how would the public know? Without the USA Freedom Act, they won’t . Allowing the PATRIOT Act authorities to
expire sounds like a civil libertarian victory, but it will actually mean less privacy and more risk .” “Let’s not kill these
important reforms because we wish the bill did more. There is no perfect. Every bill we vote on could do more,” he added. Others, including Ted Lieu (D-CA), voted
against the proposed reforms because the bill didn’t go far enough. “ While
I appreciate a number of the reforms in the bill and
nation is better served by allowing Section
215 to expire completely and replacing it with a measure that finds a better balance between national
security interests and protecting the civil liberties of Americans,” Lieu said. “Beyond Section 215, I am troubled that the USA
Freedom Act would leave in place Sections 505 and 702, provisions that also allow sweeping data
collection and backdoor searches circumventing encryption that can result in the collection of information
of US citizens not identified in warrants . The loopholes left in place will continue to undermine the trust
understand the need for secure counter-espionage and terrorism investigations, I believe our
of the American people.”
Inherency: AT “SQ trend will solve surveillance”
Despite progress, there are still substantial risks of surveillance to overcome.
Snowden, 6-4-15 [Edward, former Central Intelligence Agency officer and National Security Agency
contractor and a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, “Edward Snowden: The World Says No
to Surveillance,” New York Times, 6-4-15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/opinion/edwardsnowden-the-world-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.
Inherency/DA Non-Unique – Freedom Act should have signaled
Status quo efforts to curtail surveillance render any disadvantage terminally non
unique or empirically false. Actions already taken will or should have caused the
impacts. Even Snowden admits curtailment has been substantial.
Snowden, 6-4-15 [Edward, former Central Intelligence Agency officer and National Security Agency
contractor and a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, “Edward Snowden: The World Says No
to Surveillance,” New York Times, 6-4-15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/opinion/edwardsnowden-the-world-says-no-to-surveillance.html]
Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program
was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight
board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president
who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated. This is the
power of an informed public. Ending the mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is
a historic victory for the rights of every citizen, but it is only the latest product of a change in global
awareness. Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and
imposed new restrictions on future activities. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an
unambiguous violation of human rights. In Latin America, the efforts of citizens in Brazil led to the
Marco Civil, an Internet Bill of Rights. Recognizing the critical role of informed citizens in correcting the
excesses of government, the Council of Europe called for new laws to protect whistle-blowers. Beyond
the frontiers of law, progress has come even more quickly. Technologists have worked tirelessly to reengineer the security of the devices that surround us, along with the language of the Internet itself. Secret
flaws in critical infrastructure that had been exploited by governments to facilitate mass surveillance have
been detected and corrected. Basic technical safeguards such as encryption — once considered esoteric
and unnecessary — are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple,
ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private. Such structural technological
changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the
arbitrary passage of anti-privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.
Momentum has shifted in favor of reduced surveillance. Each individual success
enhances solvency while making any disadvantages non unique or empirically
denied.
Snowden, 6-4-15 [Edward, former Central Intelligence Agency officer and National Security Agency
contractor and a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, “Edward Snowden: The World Says No
to Surveillance,” New York Times, 6-4-15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/opinion/edwardsnowden-the-world-says-no-to-surveillance.html]
Yet the
balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation,
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.
one that
Inherency - A2 Epstein & Loyola – 2008 FAA solves
SQ FAA procedures do not require destruction of info accidentally captured
Julian Sanchez June 28, 2013, Sr Fellow at CATO on tech, privacy, and civil liberties, “Epstein on
NSA (Again) Part I: PRISM & the FISA Amendments Act,” CATO Institute,
http://www.cato.org/blog/epstein-nsa-again-part-i-prism-fisa-amendments-act, KEL
Epstein and Loyola begin with a defense of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), and in particular the use of FAA authority to collect Internet
content via the PRISM program. That law scrapped the traditional requirement that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant be obtained to intercept
wire communications to which a U.S. person was a party, provided that the “target” of surveillance was a foreigner. Epstein and Loyola nevertheless characterize the
new standard as having “unduly restricted” surveillance on the grounds that some limitations on that interception remain. Yet the authors get several of those limits
wrong. They claim, for instance, that
FAA minimization procedures “require, among other things, the destruction of much
potentially valuable information on U.S. persons, and anyone inside the United States, even before
intelligence officials can determine its value.” Since those minimization procedures have now been
published by The Guardian, it is fairly easy to see that this is not accurate. Instead, destruction of U.S.
person information is required only after intelligence officials have determined that it is not of value, which
is to say that once a reviewer has identified a communication as “clearly not relevant to the authorized purpose of the acquisition (e.g., the communication does not
contain foreign intelligence information) or as not containing evidence of a crime which may be disseminated under these procedures.” When the communication
As the secret FISA court has explained in a
rare public ruling, FISA minimization procedures are “weighted heavily in favor of the government ,” with
destruction required only when a communication is unambiguously irrelevant. Even wholly domestic communications—which are not
supposed to be acquired under FAA authority at all—can be retained under a variety of exceptions. Among
“may be related” to an authorized purpose, it can be forwarded to an analyst for further scrutiny.
these: any communication that is encrypted or otherwise suspected to contain a “secret meaning” can be retained pending cryptanalysis.
Epstein & Loyola are wrong – FAA doesn’t require a special target now. The entire
point of the FAA was to allow surveillance of non-specified targets or groups
Julian Sanchez June 28, 2013, Sr Fellow at CATO on tech, privacy, and civil liberties, “Epstein on
NSA (Again) Part I: PRISM & the FISA Amendments Act,” CATO Institute,
http://www.cato.org/blog/epstein-nsa-again-part-i-prism-fisa-amendments-act, KEL
They also claim that “[l]ike a wiretap, the target [of FAA surveillance] is always a specific suspect,” and that
this “system allows the U.S. government to target specific persons wherever they go (outside the United States).” This is not merely incorrect; it is
precisely backwards. As Attorney General Eric Holder made explicit in a letter to Congress urging reauthorization of
the FAA, the attorney general and director of national intelligence annually approve “intelligence collection targeting categories of non-U.S. persons abroad, without
the whole point of the FAA is that the “target” of surveillance
at the authorization level is essentially never a specific suspect. The language of the law, which describes the “target” as a
the need for a court order for each individual target.” In other words,
“person,” may have misled Epstein and Loyola on this point. But as the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division explains in the definitive
manual National Security Investigations and Prosecutions, the
“person” who may be a “target” of FAA surveillance: includes
not only “any individual” human being, but also “any group, entity, association, corporation or foreign
power,” some of which are (in fact or by definition) located abroad, even if they have individual members
or affiliates inside the United States… [The FAA] authorizes acquisition “targeting” a “person” reasonably believed to be abroad, and explicitly
adopts traditional FISA’s broad definition of the term “person.”
Cloud Competitiveness Advantage
Brink
Tipping point in storage market; cloud services popularity and
storage hardware decline are indicators
Preimesberger 2014 [Chris J. Preimesberger; Tech editor/writer for: eWEEK Senior Writer, 2005 – 2011, Open Source
Technology Group, Editor/Writer, 2003 – 2005, Fawcette Technical Publications, Editor/Writer, 2000 – 2003, Miller Freeman Publishing,
Editor/Writer, 1999 – 2000, Press On Publications, President/Owner, 1992 – 2000, Tribune Company Editor/Writer 1982 – 1992, Stanford
University Media Relations, 1979 – 1982, Los Angeles Daily News Writer/editor, 1975 – 1979; Storage Industry May Have Reached a Notable
Tipping Point; eWeek; June 8, 2014; http://www.eweek.com/storage/storage-industry-may-have-reached-a-notable-tipping-point.html; July 8,
2015; MG]
NEWS ANALYSIS: The cloud has set in and a new, more distributed environment
is controlling the storage landscape. After more than a generation of double-digit
and high single-digit sales, the enterprise networked storage hardware market is
beginning to see the true effects of the sea change to cloud storage. Leading companies such as
EMC were breaking sales records so often a few years ago that it was hardly news anymore. EMC, the world's largest independent storage
hardware and software maker, reported about 25 straight quarters of double-digit sales percentage increases. The storage cash cow seemed to
But now the cloud has set in and a tipping point has been
reached, and a new, more distributed environment is controlling the storage
landscape. Storage Disk Numbers Fall 5.2 percent Researcher IDC reported earlier this week that worldwide external disk storage systems
factory revenues fell 5.2 percent year-over-year to $5.6 billion during the first quarter of 2014 , with
weak high-end demand causing a drop in rates not seen since the worldwide depression year of 2009. " The poor results of the
first quarter were driven by several factors, the most important of which was a 25
percent decline in high-end storage spending," deduced Eric Sheppard, research director of storage at IDC.
"Other important contributors to the market decline include the mainstream
adoption of storage optimization technologies, a general trend toward keeping systems longer, economic
have an unending supply of milk.
uncertainty and the ability of customers to address capacity needs on a micro- and short-term basis through public cloud offerings." One can
blame it mostly, but not all, on the cloud. The beginning of this inevitable trend started eight years ago with Amazon's subscription storage
model, and it isn't going to let up anytime soon. "Poor" and "weak" are terms that are never associated with the storage industry, whether
all data has to find a home in some sort of hardware, right? But
now the capacity of storage hardware--whether solid-state or spinning disk--is
hundreds of times higher than products of only a decade ago, so fewer and fewer
disks have to be bought. Cloud storage services are soaking up more and more
content, and that means businesses don't have to buy as much, or any storage, in
fact. Cloud Now More Trustworthy Enterprises are trusting cloud services such as
Amazon, Rackspace, HP, Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM and others for their
mission-critical storage and backup storage requirements. And why not? The IT
gets better and more trustworthy all the time and the subscription rates keep falling
due to competitive forces. Amazon has lowered its pricing 43 times since 2006, and
Google has been doing the same. Others are bound to follow. Again, this is a mere
tipping point, an event a lot of people have expected for a long while. Now that it's here, how
hardware or software. After all,
will the storage makers react? Will they branch out into new lines of business? EMC certainly has. How about NetApp, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Fujitsu
and all the others? The answer is that they, too, are doing the same. Most are already in the cloud-service business. It now depends upon which of
these companies is the quickest to react and answer the challenge of the market. In 2014 IT, the agile take all the marbles.
Surveillance hurts cloud industry
US online surveillance is undermining US cloud storage development and trust in ecommerce
Matthew Taylor, Nick Hopkins and Jemima Kiss November 1, 2013, “NSA surveillance may cause
breakup of internet, warn experts,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/nsasurveillance-cause-internet-breakup-edward-snowden, KEL
Large internet-based firms, such as Facebook and Yahoo, have already raised concerns about the impact
of the NSA revelations on their ability to operate around the world. "The government response was, 'Oh don't worry, we're not
spying on any Americans'," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "Oh, wonderful: that's really helpful to companies trying to serve people around the world, and
that's really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies." Castro
wrote a report for Itif in August predicting as much as
$35bn could be lost from the US cloud computing market by 2016 if foreign clients pull out their businesses.
And he said the full economic impact of the potential breakup of the internet was only just beginning to
be recognised by the global business community. "This is changing how companies are thinking about
data. It used to be that the US government was the leader in helping make the world more secure but the
trust in that leadership has certainly taken a hit … This is hugely problematic for the general trust in the
internet and e-commerce and digital transactions."
PRISM revelations have undermined US tech sales globally
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
revelations of PRISM and other digital surveillance programs by Edward Snowden in 2013, a steady stream of troubling
details has continued to emerge about online spying by the U.S. intelligence community. 7 These revelations have fundamentally shaken
international trust in U.S. tech companies and hurt U.S. business prospects all over the world. In 2014, one survey
Since the
of businesses in the United Kingdom and Canada found that 25 percent of respondents planned to pull company data out of the United States as a result of the NSA
revelations. 8 This survey also found that respondents were thinking differently about the location of their data in a post - PRISM world, with 82 percent citing
national laws as their top concern when deciding where to store their data. Several companies have come forward describing the damage that this loss of trust has had
on their ability to do business abroad. For example, the software - as - a - service company Birst has found that companies in Europe do not want their data hosted in
North America due to concerns about U.S. spying. 9 In order to address these concerns, Birst was forced to partner with a European - based company to access
European businesses. In another example, a major German insurance company turned its back on Salesforce — a U.S. cloud computing firm — that was slated to
manage its consumer database after the revelations emerged. 10 In fact, Salesforce faced major short - term sales losses and suffered a $124 million deficit in the fiscal
quarter after the NSA revelations. 11 Salesforce
was not the only company to face this challenge, as U.S. firms saw
their sales impacted all over the globe. For example, Cisco — a company that makes routers and switches
— saw its sales interrupted in Brazil, China , and Russia because of reports that the NSA had secretly
inserted backdoor surveillance tools into its routers, servers and networking equipment. 12 During a quarterly
earnings call, Cisco CEO John Chambers even cited the NSA as the factor behind steep sales decreases, saying “I do think (the NSA revelation) is a factor in China.”
13 These reports damaged the company’s international reputation and prompted it to take extra precautions to thwart surreptitious actions by the NSA. The additional
costs this involved were passed along to its customers. 14 Other
companies have seen declining sales. For example, the Virginia saw its international clientele shrink from 60 percent of its business to nearly 30
percent as a result of European outrage. 15 Similarly , while mobile device chipmaker Qualcomm expects to see its sales
continue to grow in China, its CEO has acknowledged that revelations about U.S. government surveillance are
hurting sales and impacting its business in the rapidly growing foreign market. 16 IBM, Microsoft, and
Hewlett - Packard also have reported diminished sales in China as a result of the NSA revelations. 17
based web hosting company Servint
US online surveillance is costing US cloud storage companies $180 billion in
revenue, risking US competitiveness in the market
Ben Young, May 2, 2014, “Data Protection Fears Vs. US Cloud Market,” Information Week,
http://www.informationweek.com/government/cloud-computing/data-protection-fears-vs-us-cloudmarket/d/d-id/1234862, KEL
Business attitudes toward the cloud have changed a lot in recent years, but one thing has not: cloud's growth within small businesses, and now larger enterprises, as a
standard component of IT operations. The
cloud's continued growth is inevitable, because it's one of the best
opportunities for organizations to achieve greater IT flexibility, cost efficiency, and value from their data.
This year alone, the global cloud market is set to grow more than 126%, according to GigaOm Research. Yet, despite the
prospects for growth, there's room for doubt that the US will dominate the global cloud market. The NSA
snooping revelations that broke during last year's "Summer of Snowden" stoked fears around security, compliance, and
privacy in the cloud, particularly for businesses in highly regulated industries, and in countries with strict data privacy laws. When Forrester analyst James
Staten notoriously projected last August that the US cloud market would miss out on $180 billion in revenue by 2016 as a
result of NSA concerns, people in all corners of the tech industry sat up and listened. Since then, unlikely dissidents, including Google,
Microsoft, and Facebook, have made their case to the US government that NSA surveillance needs to be
curtailed, or it could seriously hurt their business. Saber rattling aside, one has to wonder: Just how doomed is the US cloud market? And
should government agencies, including the NSA, be concerned? Unfortunately, the threat to the US cloud market, due to worries about government surveillance, looks
real. Non-US businesses are increasingly concerned about the privacy and security of their (and their customers') data. In fact, a recent survey from ResearchNow,
commissioned by Peer 1 Hosting, showed 25% of UK and Canadian businesses plan to pull company data out of the US in 2014 as a result of the NSA revelations.
The survey also found that most companies are thinking differently about the location of their data post-Snowden: 82% said privacy laws are a top concern for them
when choosing where to store data, and 81% want to know exactly where their data is being hosted.
Revelations about PRISM’s existence is causing the EU and Canada to develop their
own cloud markets, undermining US competitiveness
Ben Young, May 2, 2014, “Data Protection Fears Vs. US Cloud Market,” Information Week,
http://www.informationweek.com/government/cloud-computing/data-protection-fears-vs-us-cloudmarket/d/d-id/1234862, KEL
Such nuances of the global cloud market used to seem like "somebody else's problem" to US government
agencies. But now, with the Snowden leaks confirming data privacy concerns, hesitance to store data in
the US may actually boost the growth of the cloud industry in Europe and Canada, to the detriment of the
US economy, as customers seek ways to keep their information as far from the NSA as possible.
The data sovereignty issue is in fact so important that 70% of the businesses surveyed by ResearchNow
would give up some level of performance to ensure they have control over their data. It's not unreasonable
to assume European cloud upstarts can snatch some of their business.
NSA surveillance will crush US tech firms and US cyber-power
Pema Levy, Contributor @ IBT, “Did The NSA’s Internet Surveillance Damage American Cyber
Power?”, June 23rd 2013, http://www.ibtimes.com/did-nsas-internet-surveillance-damage-americancyber-power-1317257
The revelation that the U.S. government uses America’s top Internet companies to help them track terrorists has landed those companies in hot
water, particularly abroad. In Washington, D.C., the
symbol of the nation's cyberpower is the National Security
Agency, the government’s secretive electronic surveillance arm. But Jason Healey, who heads the Cyber Statecraft
Initiative at the Atlantic Council, says this viewpoint is actually backward: America’s real clout as a
cyberpower actually comes from the companies that are innovating and dominating the Internet -Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and many more. Now, according to Healey, the NSA’s Internet
spying program, which focuses on foreign surveillance, may have dealt a serious blow to those companies
that keep America on top. “By compelling American companies to participate, completely not in their
shareholders’ interests or their customers’ interests, to participate in American hard cyberpower, we really
are putting this larger American cyberpower at risk,” Healey said Thursday, speaking during a panel discussion at the
Brookings Institute in Washington. One possible result of the NSA’s surveillance programs is that foreign
governments and companies might try to stop using America's Internet companies for social media or
cloud computing, among other things. “It would be a very rational reaction for foreign companies, people
in governments, it would be rational for them to ... choose to avoid U.S. cyberspace wherever they can,
such as by finding alternate routes, if they can find routes that don’t go through the United States,” Healey said. “Or they can start
building their own infrastructure and companies rather than relying on U.S. companies.” He said, “This will be to the detriment of
U.S. companies and ultimately to U.S. cyberpower.” Investing in new infrastructure and companies would take time, but there
have also been predictions that tech companies will suffer in the short term. According to technology security expert Richard
Stiennon, foreign buyers already viewed U.S. tech companies suspiciously due to previous rumors about the NSA’s activities. “Since 2006, every
time I present outside the U.S., the same question has been asked: ‘Is the U.S. reading our email?’” Stiennon wrote in Forbes earlier this month.
“From this week forward, a universal suspicion has transformed into acknowledged fact.”
Cloud storage is fastest growing segment of internet market. Surveillance is
undermining US global competitiveness.
Richard Stiennon June 7, 2013, “NSA Surveillance Threatens US Competitiveness,” Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardstiennon/2013/06/07/nsa-surveillance-threatens-us-competitiveness/,
KEL
The vast foreign and domestic spying by the NSA revealed this week threatens the global competitiveness
of US tech companies.
We are told we live in a digital world and the future is bright for tech startups as costs of launching new
products and services plummet and global markets open up to the smallest vendor. Yet, there is a world
wide perception that any data that is stored or even routed through the United States is sucked into
cavernous NSA data centers for analysis and cataloging. That perception was solidified in 2006 when
former AT&T technician Mark Klein blew the whistle on the fiber tap that ATT had provided to the NSA
in some of its data centers. Those perceptions have had real consequences for US tech firms seeking to
offer global services. Email archiving services such as ProofPoint could not sell to even Canadian
customers without building local infrastructure. Even establishing separate data centers in Canada and
Europe is not enough to assure customers that their data would forever stay out of the grasp of US
intelligence services.
One of the fastest growing segments of the tech industry is cloud services, with Salesforce.com one of the
leading examples. Box.net, and other cloud storage solutions, are burgeoning. Cloud infrastructure
providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Rackspace are investing billions to serve markets that should be
global but will be barred from most countries thanks to the complete abandonment of trust caused by
NSA/FBI spying.
Surveillance hurts US tech exports/competitivness
NSA Surveillance will close foreign markets to US tech exports
Matthew Yglesias is Slate's business and economics correspondent, “Is PRISM Going To Harm U.S.
High-Tech Exports?”, June 7th 2013,
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/07/prism_tech_exports_will_nsa_revelations_block_ame
rican_companies_abroad.html
The legal and policy arguments around the PRISM program through which the NSA snoops into the data stream of major American high-tech
companies are primarily going to focus on the treatment of American residents and citizens. There
doesn't really appear to be much
in the way of a debate as to whether it's legal or appropriate to be spying on foreigners without warrants
or probable cause. Which is perhaps fine as a matter of constitutional law, but I wonder about it as a matter of business practice. We've had
some disputes in the United States about firms using Huwaei's networking equipment in the telecommunications space. The issue is that Huwaei
is a Chinese firm with ties to the Chinese state, so people raise the worry that there's a national security risk in using them for network
infrastructure. And, of course, whatever legitimate concerns there are about this are politically amplified by the fact that Huwaei's competitors
would like to block them from doing business. So now imagine
a foreign country deciding that it's maybe not such a
great idea for all its citizens' Web search and webmail traffic to be surveilled by the American
government via Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL along the same principles. Bad, right? Maybe the
most dramatic example here is Google's new Glass product. Right off the bat a number of people have
raised concerns about the privacy issues implied by the use of heads-up displays. But Google Glass +
NSA PRISM essentially amounts to a vision in which a foreign country is suddenly going to be flooded
with American spy cameras. It seems easy to imagine any number of foreign governments having a
problem with that idea. More broadly, Google is already facing a variety of anti-trust issues in Europe, where basic economic
nationalism is mixing with competition policy concerns. Basically, various European mapping and comparison and shopping firms don't want to
be crushed by Google, and European officials are naturally sympathetic to the idea of not letting local firms be crushed by California-based ones.
There is legitimate concern that U.S. tech companies are essentially a giant periscope for American
intelligence agencies and seem like they'd be a very powerful new weapon in the hands of European
companies that want to persuade EU authorities to shackle American firms. Imagine if it had come out in
the 1980s that Japanese intelligence agencies were tracking the location of ever Toyota and Honda
vehicle, and then the big response from the Japanese government was to reassure people that Japanese
citizens weren't being spied upon this way. There would have been—legitimately—massive political
pressure to get Japanese cars out of foreign markets. The intelligence community obviously views
America's dominance in the high-tech sector as a strategic asset that should be exploited in its own quest
for universal knowledge. But American dominance in the high-tech sector is first and foremost a
source of national economic advantage, one that could be undone by excessive security
involvement.
NSA surveillance will collapse US information technology exports
Glenn Derene, Contributor @ Popular Mechanic , June 2013, “Why the NSA Prism Program Could
Kill U.S. Tech Companies”, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/why-the-nsaprism-program-could-kill-us-tech-companies-15564220
Let's say we take Clapper at his word: How
much should we worry about a program that is aimed at monitoring the
digital communications of foreigners? We should worry quite a bit, because this issue goes far beyond just
respecting the civil liberties of non-Americans. Think for a second about just how the U.S. economy has
changed in the last 40 years. While a large percentage of our economy is still based in manufacturing, some of the most
ascendant U.S. companies since the 1970s have been in the information technology sector. Companies
such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google are major exporters of information services (if you can think of
such a thing as "exportable") through products such as Gmail, iCloud, Exchange, and Azure. Hundreds of
millions of people use these services worldwide, and it has just been revealed to everybody outside the
U.S. that our government reserves the right to look into their communications whenever it wants. If you
lived in Japan, India, Australia, Mexico, or Brazil, and you used Gmail, or synced your photos through
iCloud, or chatted via Skype, how would you feel about that? Let's say you ran a business in those
countries that relied upon information services from a U.S. company. Don't these revelations make using
such a service a business liability? In fact, doesn't this news make it a national security risk for pretty
much any other country to use information services from companies based in the U.S.? How should we
expect the rest of the world to react? Here's a pretty good guess: Other countries will start routing around the U.S.
information economy by developing, or even mandating, their own competing services. In 2000, the
European Union worked out a series of "Safe Harbor" regulations mandating privacy protection standards
for companies storing E.U. citizens' data on servers outside of the E.U. For U.S. companies, that means
applying stronger privacy protection for European data than for our own citizens' data. And now there is
considerable reason to believe that Prism violated our Safe Harbor agreements with the E.U.
The possibility of US spying will crush US competitiveness even if the program isn’t
used for economic purposes
Ed Moyle, Senior Security Strategist with Savvis, providing strategy, consulting, and solutions to clients
worldwide and a founding partner of SecurityCurve, “Economic effects of NSA PRISM compared to
PLA’s APT-1”, June 14th 2013, http://www.securitycurve.com/archives/6799
So unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’ve seen the news about NSA’s “PRISM” program. If what we’ve been led to believe
is as bad as we think (it might not be – see the “everything we know about PRISM” link from the Washington Post above), it’s pretty scary stuff.
Like most of us, I’ve been reading a lot of coverage about this over the past few days. We’re still in the “breaking story” portion of the news
cycle, so details are highly speculative at this point: we don’t know exactly what is involved, what is being requested from whom, and what the
details are about how they obtain it. So expect the story to change as more details surface. That being said, the
most astute points I’ve
been these observations from Forbes about the impact of this program on US competitiveness:
Trust is the very foundation of all commerce. Once lost it is almost impossible to regain. This week’s revelations that the
NSA has blanket data harvesting arrangements with Verizon, ATT, Sprint-Nextel, Google, Microsoft,
Apple, Skype, Yahoo, FaceBook and even credit card processors, will have immediate repercussions.
Non-US customers of any US business will immediately evaluate their exposure to these new risks and look
seen to date has
for alternatives. European, Canadian, and Australian tech companies will profit from this. Competitors in those regions will offer alternatives that
will also draw US customers away from the compromised US services. While
the FBI and NSA leverage the dramatic
intelligence opportunities of a digital world, their Orwellian actions are crushing opportunity for tech
giants and startups in the United States. TLDR version is that these actions could will have a stifling effect on the
ability of US firms to compete in the global marketplace. Meaning, given the choice between two products (one hosted in
the US and one hosted elsewhere) firms outside the US are less likely to purchase the US-based one when all other variables are equal. Now you
might say that maybe the PRISM stuff isn’t so bad and that the details (once they surface) might be more
benign than initially reported. That could be true. But the marketing impact is over. Meaning, it almost doesn’t
matter now what the actual details of the program are: the perception right now is so bad that the
competitiveness effects are already written . For example, remember the whole “horse meat” scandal from a while back? Does
it really matter if it turned out (upon closer scrutiny) that “beef” you bought is a mere 10% horse – as opposed to some larger percentage as you
initially speculated? Not really, right? Same with this. So, ”Alea Iacta Est”, as they say. The folks at Forbes didn’t explicitly draw this out in their
piece, but I’m interested in this as it relates to the actions of NSA (via PRISM) compared to the actions of China’s PLA in their activities (via
APT 1). Specifically, the PLA activities seem to be primarily focused on just one thing: increasing China’s competitiveness in the global
marketplace. They do this by bolstering China-based IP and incorporating the “competitive advantage” of the firms they target (allegedly). The
effects of this are more beneficial to the manufacturing sector – so in light of the specifics of the Chinese economy (~39% manufacturing), there’s
a bolstering effect. The impact of the PRISM economic impact is likely to be most strongly felt in services (which is 80% of the US economy).
So that’s not good. I guess time will tell what the full impact will be… but it does seem (to me anyway) like the
is the most salient point.
competitiveness impact
US internet surveillance undermines US tech firms like Google and destroys trust
necessary to sustain e-commerce
Seth Rosenblatt, Oct 8, 2014, “US spying scandal will 'break the Internet,' says Google's Schmidt,”
CNET.com, http://www.cnet.com/news/us-spying-scandal-will-break-the-internet-says-googles-schmidt/,
KEL
The impact of US government surveillance on tech firms and the economy is going to get worse before it
gets better, leaders at some of the biggest tech firms warned US Sen. Ron Wyden on Wednesday during a roundtable on the impact
of US government surveillance on the digital economy. The senior Democratic senator from Oregon took the floor at the Palo Alto High School gymnasium -- where
he played high school basketball well enough to earn a college scholarship for his court-side abilities more than 50 years ago -- to discuss the economic impact and
future risks of US government surveillance on technology firms. Google
Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who has been outspoken on the
topic, pulled no punches with his assessment of how the spying scandal has and will continue to impact
Google and other tech companies. The impact is "severe and is getting worse," Schmidt said. "We're going to wind up breaking
the Internet." Also on the panel with Schmidt was Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith, another critic who became more outspoken of government
surveillance after Edward Snowden leaked National Security Agency documents in 2013 that showed a much wider federal spying apparatus than previously believed.
"Just as people won't put their money in a bank they won't trust, people won't use an Internet they won't
trust," Smith said. Panelist Ramsey Homsany, general counsel for online storage company Dropbox, said the trust between customers and
businesses that is at the core of the Internet's economic engine has begun to "rot it from the inside out."
"The trust element is extremely insidious," Homsany said. "It's about personal emails, it's about photos, it's about plans, it's about medical
records."
Surveillance Programs Cause Decline of U.S Technological Competitiveness—well
beyond $35 billion
Whittaker 15 Zack Whittaker, writer-editor for ZDNet, and sister sites CNET and CBS News. He is
based in the New York newsroom, US tech giants to "far exceed" $35 billion loss in NSA fallout, ZDNet,
June 9, 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-tech-companies-to-far-exceed-35-billion-loss-in-nsafallout/
Silicon Valley is expected to take a harsher beating over claims it was working with US intelligence
agencies The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said in a new report Tuesday that the tech industry will
likely "far exceed" the group's initial estimate of losing up to $35 billion. The group's reason is in part
because little has been done to address global concerns two years after leaks revealed the PRISM
surveillance program.
NSA surveillance is already costing US tech industry its competitiveness
Whittaker 15 Zack Whittaker, writer-editor for ZDNet, and sister sites CNET and CBS News. He is
based in the New York newsroom, US tech giants to "far exceed" $35 billion loss in NSA fallout, ZDNet,
June 9, 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-tech-companies-to-far-exceed-35-billion-loss-in-nsafallout/
China is backing away from US tech brands for state purchases as NSA revelations continue to make
headlines in newspapers all around the world. ITIF, a non-profit group with a focus on tech issues, said that matters were
compounded by politicians failing to adopt new laws reining in government surveillance, which
"sacrifices robust competitiveness of the US tech sector for vague and unconvincing promises of
improved national security," said report authors Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn. But in reality, the figures could be incalculable.
The report follows a slew of paltry earnings reports and lower-than-expected sales figures reports from
major tech and cloud providers over the past year. It's partly because their customers, concerned about their own
users' data being slurped up by the National Security Agency, are turning to local companies in Europe
and elsewhere to store their data.
China is shunning US Tech companies
Whittaker 15 Zack Whittaker, writer-editor for ZDNet, and sister sites CNET and CBS News. He is
based in the New York newsroom, US tech giants to "far exceed" $35 billion loss in NSA fallout, ZDNet,
June 9, 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-tech-companies-to-far-exceed-35-billion-loss-in-nsafallout/
Foreign governments, who remain big spenders in IT and technology, are also shunning tech giants. Many technology
companies are reporting significant sales drop-offs in China, once a burgeoning economy for Silicon
Valley firms. While some consumer-focused companies like Apple are seeing considerable success in the country, others -- like Cisco, HP, and
Microsoft -- are taking a hit. It follows Beijing's decision to drop key brands from its list of authorized government suppliers in the wake of the NSA
leaks. Although a number of reasons were cited, domestic companies were said to offer "more product guarantees" than their overseas rivals.
Competitiveness Impacts - Economy
Loss of US competitiveness leads to economic decline due to growth, job, and trade
balance losses
Whittaker 15 Zack Whittaker, writer-editor for ZDNet, and sister sites CNET and CBS News. He is
based in the New York newsroom, US tech giants to "far exceed" $35 billion loss in NSA fallout, ZDNet,
June 9, 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-tech-companies-to-far-exceed-35-billion-loss-in-nsafallout/
"The cost of inaction is not only short-term economic losses for U.S. companies," write Castro and
McQuinn in their conclusion. "But a wave of protectionist policies that will systematically weaken U.S.
technology competitiveness in years to come, with impacts on economic growth, jobs, trade balance,
and national security through a weakened industrial base."
Weak competitiveness kills productivity, quality of life and the economy
Howes et. al. 2K Candace Howes, Professor of Economics at Connecticut College and Ajit Singh,
Professo of Econmics at the Queen’s College, University of Cambridge pg. 180 “Competitiveness
Matters: Industry and Economic Performance in the U.S.”
In the introduction to this book, Howes and Singh (1999) argued that there
are good analytical and empirical reasons for the view
that relative productivity growth and the relative competitiveness of a country’s export sector matter
profoundly to its overall economic performance. With so much trade based on nonprice competitiveness, the trade balance can rarely be
achieved solely through exchange rate manipulation or only at great cost in terms of employment and real income growth. Moreover, greater
productivity growth abroad, as a result of faster technical progress there, is likely to have negative
consequences for productivity growth in the home economy unless corrective measures are taken to enhance the country’s
technological capabilities. Thus even an advanced country cannot afford to ignore its international competitive
position if it wishes to improve its standard of living in the long run. Contrary to Krugman’s (1994)
argument, competitiveness matters. Otherwise, in a world of wage-price inflexibility, external balance is
achieved only through adjustments in a country’s rate of growth relative to that of its trading partners.
Furthermore, due to cumulative causation, a country that is investing and innovating at a slower rate than its competitors will fall even further behind, requiring slower
and slower relative growth. Real
incomes will fall, inequality will increase, and employment will stagnate.
Competitiveness is key to high level of productivity and high standard of living –
empirics prove
Hämäläinen ’03 Professor Timo J. Hämäläinen, Finnish National Fund for Research and
Development, Finland. Pg. 7 “National Competitiveness and Economic Growth: The Changing
Determinants of Economic Performance in the World Economy”
If a country has a significant real competitive advantage in sectors where the level of productivity is both
high and rapidly increasing, its standard of living will be higher and develop more favorably than it would
without such an advantage. Since the lack of real competitiveness in high productivity (growth) sectors can only be compensated with lower prices and
costs an uncompetitive economy must either select a low-price, low-cost strategy, if feasible in a particular sector; or specialize in other sectors where it is. Such priceand cost-driven sectors tend to be rather labor-intensive and involve mature technologies. National specialization on these kinds of sectors means lower productivity
growth and standards of living than specialization on sectors in which competitiveness is primarily based on non-price factors. Hence,
the nature and
sectoral composition of a nation’s competitive advantage is a crucial determinant of the level and growth
of its aggregate productivity, and consequently the nation’s living standards.
American Economic leadership key to prevent world economic collapse
Mandelbaum 2005 – Professor and Director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns
Hopkins – 2005 [Michael, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World’s Government in the
Twenty-First Century, p. 192-195]
Although the
spread of nuclear weapons, with the corresponding increase in the likelihood that a nuclear shot
would be fired in anger somewhere in the world, counted as the most serious potential consequence of the abandonment by the United
States of its role as the world's government, it was not the only one. In the previous period of American international reticence, the
1920s and 1930s, the global economy suffered serious damage that a more active American role might
have mitigated. A twenty-first-century American retreat could have similarly adverse international economic consequences. The economic
collapse of the 1930s caused extensive hardship throughout the world and led indirectly to World War II
by paving the way for the people who started it to gain power in Germany and Japan. In retrospect, the Great
Depression is widely believed to have been caused by a series of errors in public policy that made an economic downturn far worse than it would have been had
governments responded to it in appropriate fashion. Since
the 1930s, acting on the lessons drawn from that experience by
professional economists, governments have taken steps that have helped to prevent a recurrence of the
disasters of that decade.' In the face of reduced demand, for example, governments have increased rather than cut spending. Fiscal and monetary crises
have evoked rescue efforts rather than a studied indifference based on the assumption that market forces will readily reestablish a desirable economic equilibrium. In
contrast to the widespread practice of the 1930s, political authorities now understand that putting up barriers to imports in an attempt to revive domestic production
will in fact worsen economic conditions everywhere. Still,
a serious, prolonged failure of the international economy,
inflicting the kind of hardship the world experienced in the 1930s (which some Asian countries also suffered as a result of their
fiscal crises in the 1990s) does not lie beyond the realm of possibility. Market economies remain subject to cyclical downturns, which public policy can limit but has
not found a way to eliminate entirely. Markets also have an inherent tendency to form bubbles, excessive values for particular assets, whether seventeenth century
Dutch tulips or twentieth century Japanese real estate and Thai currency, that cause economic harm when the bubble bursts and prices plunge. In responding to these
events, governments can make errors. They can act too slowly, or fail to implement the proper policies, or implement improper ones. Moreover, the global economy
and the national economies that comprise it, like a living organism, change constantly and sometimes rapidly: Capital flows across sovereign borders, for instance, far
more rapidly and in much greater volume in the early twenty-first century than ever before. This means that measures that successfully address economic malfunctions
at one time may have less effect at another, just as medical science must cope with the appearance of new strains of influenza against which existing vaccines are not
effective. Most
importantly, since the Great Depression, an active American international economic role has
been crucial both in fortifying the conditions for global economic well-being and in coping with the
problems that have occurred, especially periodic recessions and currency crises, by applying the lessons of the past. The absence of such a
role could weaken those conditions and aggravate those problems. The overall American role in the world since World War II
therefore has something in common with the theme of the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, in which the angel Clarence, played by Henry Travers, shows James
Stewart, playing the bank clerk George Bailey, who believes his existence to have been worthless, how life in his small town of Bedford Falls would have unfolded
it is with the United States and
its role as the world's government. Without that role, the world very likely would have been in the past,
and would become in the future, a less secure and less prosperous place. The abdication by the United States of some or all of
had he never been born. George Bailey learns that people he knows and loves turn out to be far worse off without him. So
the responsibilities for international security that it had come to bear in the first decade of the twenty-first century would deprive the international system of one of its
In this sense, a world without
America would be the equivalent of a freeway full of cars without brakes. Similarly, should the American
government abandon some or all of the ways in which it had, at the dawn of the new century, come to
support global economic activity, the world economy would function less effectively and might even
suffer a severe and costly breakdown. A world without the United States would in this way resemble a fleet of cars without gasoline.
principal safety features, which keeps countries from smashing into each other, as they are historically prone to do.
Cloud Industry Non-Econ Impacts
Cloud has led to faster, better communication globally; this means
understanding of others’ needs and reporting issues instantly
Ferkoun 2013 [Maamar Ferkoun; Client Technical Architect for Cloud Services at IBM in the Asia-Pacific region; How cloud
computing is impacting everyday life; Thoughts On Cloud; April 4, 2013; http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com/2013/04/how-cloud-computing-isimpacting-everyday-life/; July 7, 2015; MG]
The likes of YouTube and Google are testimony to a shift in how people are now
interacting with others. From remote locations to the global center stage, an event can reach the four
corners of the planet by going viral. Global has reached its true significance, and we’ve
seen the emerging of the “citizen journalist” on this global stage. Anyone can turn into an instant
reporter, and live news feeds are constantly streaming the media, at times sparking social
upheavals. It has never been as easy to look out for long forgotten friends and classmates
with the explosion of social networks and websites proposing ways to connect and relate
through online communities. Facebook is of course a primary example. Public figures and politicians, too,
are now turning to engines such as Twitter to get a feel of the community and convey
their views while bearing the pressure and influence from the groups they are looking at
leading. Taking advantage of developments in cloud technology and the social media space has allowed these
different actors access to sophisticated analytical abilities. As an example of that, businesses are now increasingly using
data from social media platforms in combination with cloud-based information resources
to get better insights on potential services, innovations and customer requirements.
Cloud databases assist with access to education; cut expenses and
difficulties so more people can learn
Ferkoun 2013 [Maamar Ferkoun; Client Technical Architect for Cloud Services at IBM in the Asia-Pacific region; How cloud
computing is impacting everyday life; Thoughts On Cloud; April 4, 2013; http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com/2013/04/how-cloud-computing-isimpacting-everyday-life/; July 7, 2015; MG]
Educational institutions have been quick to realize the advantages of cloud technology
and have been eagerly adopting it for several reasons, including: Ability for the students
to access data anywhere, anytime, to enroll in online classes and to participate in group
activities The value of combining business automation processes to streamline
subscription, class enrollments and assignment tracking, thus reducing expenses
significantly Ability for the institutional body to leverage the storage cloud to store the
daily 2.5 quintillion bytes of data securely and without the need to cater to a complicated
infrastructure The benefit of process billing and charging for education and noneducation related activities While these are probably most obvious in a mature and developed market, cloud
computing technology also offers benefits to students from developing countries. Access
is now instantly available and in many instances free thanks to the proliferation of
websites dispensing educational material and cloud knowledge-sharing communities. A
simple internet connection can go a long way.
Developing countries weighed down by expensive infrastructure and
lack of education; cloud is k2 changing this
Ferkoun 2013 [Maamar Ferkoun; Client Technical Architect for Cloud Services at IBM in the Asia-Pacific region; How cloud
computing is impacting everyday life; Thoughts On Cloud; April 4, 2013; http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com/2013/04/how-cloud-computing-isimpacting-everyday-life/; July 7, 2015; MG]
Cloud technology also offers other benefits to developing countries since they no longer
have the burden of investing in costly infrastructures and can tap into data and
applications that are readily available in the cloud. I briefly mentioned the education sector above, but the same
applies to other areas, such as banking, agriculture, health and science. Take as an example the telecom industry,
whereby these developing countries have been fast embracing the smart mobile
technology that accelerated development by leaping over the traditional wire and copper
infrastructure.
Healthcare physicians and patients benefit from cloud; record
management and lowered operational costs result
Ferkoun 2013 [Maamar Ferkoun; Client Technical Architect for Cloud Services at IBM in the Asia-Pacific region; How cloud computing is
impacting everyday life; Thoughts On Cloud; April 4, 2013; http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com/2013/04/how-cloud-computing-is-impactingeveryday-life/; July 7, 2015; MG]
There are many reasons why using cloud technology in the healthcare industry is gaining pace.
Some examples include: managing non-siloed patient data and sharing it among different parties
such as medical professionals or patients checking their own status and treatment follow-ups;
reducing operational costs such as data storage; accessing this data through pervasive devices
such as mobile phones and going beyond the traditional intranet; implementing a quick solution in a secure
environment that is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
regulations. While there may be challenges in integrating old or current tools with new technologies and the corresponding level of
services, the benefits will outweigh the inhibition to move to the cloud. According to the industry, healthcare
will be a growing market in the coming years, running into the billions.
EU-US Advantage
AT “no impact – tons of trade now”
Even if the neg is correct that there’s a great deal of free trade between EU-US now,
TIPP still offers a huge boost for both US and European economies
Sara Miller Llana July 8, 2013 “Will US-EU trade talks spur growth - or show globalization's limits?,”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0708/Will-US-EU-trade-talks-spur-growth-or-showglobalization-s-limits, KEL Tariffs between the US and EU are already relatively low, but because of
the sheer size of trade between the two – representing half of global economic output – advocates
say it would be a major booster of growth and jobs, especially in debt-stricken Europe that has
seen record high unemployment at 12.2 percent. The two already invest nearly $4 trillion in each
other’s economies, according to US statistics, which translates into 7 million jobs.
Surv threatens TTIP negotations
PRISM surveillance risks a final TTIP agreement
European Parliament News, March 31, 2015, “TTIP: Trade agreements must not undermine
EU data protection laws, say Civil Liberties MEPs,” http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/newsroom/content/20150330IPR39308/html/TTIP-Trade-agreements-must-not-undermine-EU-dataprotection-laws-say-MEPs, KEL
The negotiators should keep in mind that that the consent of the European Parliament to the final TTIP
agreement "could be endangered as long as the blanket mass surveillance activities are not completely
abandoned and an adequate solution is found for the data privacy rights of EU citizens, including
administrative and judicial redress", MEPs say, in line with Parliament's resolution on the surveillance
programmes adopted on 12 March 2014 (press release).
PRISM surveillance risks TTIP passage by the EU
Jennifer Baker, April 9, 2015, “TTIP: Protect our privacy in EU-US trade deal or ELSE, snarl
MEPs,” The Register (UK),
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/09/ttip_eu_parliament_rattles_eu_commissions_cage_data_protecti
on/, KEL
Members of the
European Parliament’s civil liberties committee said last week that an “unambiguous, horizontal, selfstanding provision” in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) must be created to safeguard Europe’s
data protection laws. Although the ongoing negotiations on TTIP do not specifically deal with data protection, MEPs say that they “touch upon
international data flows, while excluding privacy and data protection entirely.” Ignoring data privacy has raised the ire of many in the
civil liberties committee and they warned EU Commission negotiators to “keep in mind that Parliament's
consent to the final TTIP agreement could be endangered as long as the blanket mass surveillance
activities are not completely abandoned and an adequate solution is found for the data privacy rights of EU citizens.” In other words,
the EU Parliament could hold the Commission to ransom.
MEPs have called on American and European negotiators to guarantee citizens’ right to privacy in an international trade deal.
NSA surveillance threatens TTIP negotiations – SQ talks on the issue wont resolve
long-term concerns – plan is key
Atlantic Community Press Commentary August 21, 2013, “NSA Scandal Heightens EU Data
Concerns with TTIP,” http://www.atlantic-community.org/-/nsa-scandal-heightens-eu-data-concernswith-ttip, KEL
NSA Scandal Heightens EU Data Concerns with TTIP The
recent NSA leaks have increased the debate around data
protection and how the US government and companies could use TTIP to further its data collection
operations. While large US corporations seek to reduce the level of data protection rules, European companies, with German companies out in front, have sought
to strengthen EU data protection regulations. The differing views of the EU and the US on data protection regulations are sure to affect the outcome of TTIP. The
disclosure of the collection of data by the National Security Agency (NSA) has had major reverberations throughout
the EU and the US. Although both sides have attempted to side step the issue of data protection to allow the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations to proceed, the issue of data protection and data
privacy is bound to play an important role in the finalisation of the agreement. While EU companies may have been
skeptical of US data operations prior to the leaking of NSA documents, this week's articles show how European sentiment toward data privacy has become more
entrenched, which could pose problems to future TTIP negotiations.
EU-US negotiations over Safe Harbor are ongoing, they can collapse at any time,
which would harm US tech firms
Devika Kornbacher May 5, 2015, attorney at Vinson & Elkins LLP, “The US-EU Safe Harbor
Program: Is It Safe?,” Law360, http://www.law360.com/articles/642603/the-us-eu-safe-harbor-programis-it-safe, KEL
Negotiations between the EU and the Department of Commerce regarding implementation of these
recommendations remain ongoing more than 16 months since first proposed. In November 2014, U.S. Federal Trade
Commissioner Julie Brill said that only 11 of the 13 recommendations could be addressed by either the Department of Commerce or the FTC, and that the two
recommendations on access to data by U.S. authorities are outside their jurisdiction. Recently, in mid-March, a delegation of EU members of Parliament visited
Washington, D.C., to continue these negotiations. But nothing has yet been finalized, and there is no timetable for an agreement. Schrems’ team cited these protracted
negotiations and missing timetable as proof that efforts to fix the admitted flaws in the Safe Harbor were failing. In defense of the Safe Harbor, Ireland and the EC
argued that the program is necessary both politically and economically, and that negotiations with the U.S. are ongoing. They asked the court to let the EC work
toward improving the Safe Harbor without inflicting the damage that would result from its suspension. The ECJ’s advocate general should publish a nonbinding
opinion by June 24 of this year, and the court should issue a final verdict by October. What Changes to the Safe Harbor Might Mean The EC appears to remain firmly
in support of the Safe Harbor, so the greatest threat to the program at the moment is likely from European courts or the national data protection agencies. Schrems’
ECJ case against Facebook involves limited questions from Ireland’s high court about the authority of the data protection agencies. The Irish high court did not ask the
ECJ to rule outright whether, in view of the NSA’s activities, the Safe Harbor complies with EU laws. Thus, the ECJ could limit its decision to the referred questions
and not directly address the validity of the Safe Harbor itself. Instead, it might give data protection agencies the authority to investigate the adequacy of the Safe
Harbor and make their own decisions regarding whether self-certifying U.S. companies are in compliance with the directive. A number of EU countries whose data
protection agencies have already made their positions clear could then find that the Safe Harbor does not provide “adequate” protection and potentially prosecute U.S.
companies that have relied on the program for years. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the ECJ could sua sponte rule that the Safe Harbor fails to satisfy
EU laws and order the program’s suspension, as Schrems attempted to argue. Relying on the ECJ’s April 2014 ruling invalidating the EU Data Retention Directive —
which required telecom companies to retain mass quantities of metadata for law enforcement — as being contrary to the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights,
In the face of uncertainty
surrounding the Safe Harbor, it is essential that companies formulate strategies to deal with a potential
suspension of the program. Twitter Inc., for example, stated in a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that
elimination of the Safe Harbor would disrupt its business by requiring duplicative operations in Europe or
by limiting its ability to use EU data. And Apple Inc. recently announced it will spend nearly $2 billion to
build two datacenters in Ireland and Denmark, which are expected to come online in 2017.
Schrems argued that this precedent required the invalidation of the Safe Harbor in light of U.S. surveillance.
NSA foreign surveillance will collapse the US-EU Safe Harbor compromise
Brian Proffitt, Adjunct @ the University of Notre Dame and technology expert specializing in
enterprise, cloud computing and big data with 23 years of journalism and publishing experience, “PRISM
Fallout: In Cloud We Don't Trust?”, June 07, 2013, http://readwrite.com/2013/06/07/prism-fallout-incloud-we-dont-trust#awesm=~oaaRV9iu6MkbgX
Successfully pulling off that impression would seem to be nearly impossible and the nine tech companies named in the PRISM documents are
in for a world of pain. Already, U.S.-based users, individual and corporate, are up in arms about the perceived breach, even as the U.S.
government insists that it is not spying on its own citizens, but is
targeting non-U.S. citizens in its quest to maintain
national security. US companies may end up becoming more active participants in cyber/national security related activities anyway,
depending on how Department of Defense cyberwar rules of engagement play out. Bit for public cloud users who reside outside
the U.S., the statements about non-U.S. targets are sure to have a chilling effect. Especially in the
European Union, which has been critically examining their data relationship with the U.S. for some time.
That relationship, once precarious, may have just gotten pushed off the cliff. Currently, data generated by
European companies is bound by the strictures of the E.U.'s 1998 European Commission Directive on
Data Protection (ECDDP), which, among other things, blocks data from being transferred to outside the
European Economic Area unless the E.U.'s strict protection guidelines were followed. The problem is that U.S. laws and
policies let data like names and addresses be handled in ways that were way outside the ECDDP comfort
zone. This would have effectively prevented any European data from being stored on U.S.-based clouds
and data centers, were it not for Safe Harbor. Established in the Fall of 2000, Safe Harbor is a compromise that
would allow data interchange to take place. Safe Harbor requires that companies follow a certain set of
privacy practices, such as informing individuals that their data is being collected and how it will be used. If Safe Harbor rules are
followed by U.S. companies, which self-certify themselves to be Safe Harbor compliant, then E.U. data can be stored in
the U.S., which is handy since many of the world's biggest public cloud services are located in the U.S. All of the E.U. nations, with the
exception of Germany, are participants in the E.U.-U.S. Safe Harbor agreement. This is why in Germany, corporate workers are prohibited from
using services like Google Docs to store and work with company information. (One has to wonder if the Germans didn't have an inkling that
something like PRISM was going on.) The Europeans have had some qualms about Safe Harbor already. Last July, an
independent European advisory body, the Article 29 Working Party, recommended the existing Safe Harbor agreement between the U.S. and
E.U. is not enough to provide true security for European organizations' data. Their
argument? That self-certification was
nowhere near enough to assure adequate protections. "…[I]n the view of the [Article 29] Working Party,
sole self-certification with Safe Harbor may not be deemed sufficient in the absence of robust
enforcement of data protection principles in the cloud environment," the recommendation stated. "The Working Party
considers that companies exporting data should not merely rely on the statement of the data importer claiming that he has a Safe Harbor
certification. On the contrary, the company exporting data should obtain evidence that the Safe Harbor self-certifications exists and request
evidence demonstrating that their principles are complied with." In other words, don't take U.S. tech companies at their word that they will
comply with Safe Harbor rules. Fast
forward to today, when suddenly the Article 29 Working Party's non-binding
recommendation has some teeth to it. European companies and lawmakers are very likely going to look at
the events surrounding PRISM and wonder how safe their data would be if stored in a U.S. system. Amazon
and Rackspace, two large U.S.-based public cloud providers, were not named in the PRISM slides, but Microsoft and Google were. While no one
knows if the U.S. intelligence services can and were accessing cloud-based data hosted by Microsoft and Google, the integrity of their cloud
hosting services will probably be called into question now, especially by companies outside the U.S., which - by the U.S. government's own
insistence - are valid targets for national security investigations. The
E.U.-U.S. Safe Harbor agreement may be the one of
first casualties of the leaking of PRISM - even if PRISM turns out to be fictitious. Just the hint that something like
PRISM could exist could evaporate a large amount of trust and business for U.S. cloud vendors - even ones
not named in the PRISM documents. Public cloud infrastructure is under serious threat, as users domestic and
international start seriously questioning public cloud security and integrity. This may bring a large shift
towards private cloud or virtual data centers deployments, as companies seek to protect their data from
government's prying eyes.
Discord over Safe Harbor could disrupt TTIP trade discussions
Privacy Tracker, Aug 2, 2013, Privacy Tracker provides allerts and legal analysis of legislative
trends, “US-EU Safe Harbor Under Pressure,” https://privacyassociation.org/news/a/us-eu-safe-harborunder-pressure/, KEL
Further signs of EU discontent over Safe Harbor came to light after the announcement of the Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. Those negotiations are aimed at establishing a free trade agreement between the U.S. and
the EU. Because of the substantial contribution that data transfers make to international trade, senior U.S.
officials wanted cross-border data transfers to be included in TTIP negotiations. The Coalition for Privacy and Free
Trade, launched by Hogan Lovells in March of this year, stated in comments to the United States Trade Representative that TTIP offers a unique
“opportunity to progress the interoperability of data privacy frameworks in a way that endures.” But not all stakeholders felt that TTIP was an
appropriate forum for addressing cross-border data transfers. Germany’s data protection commissioner, for example, blogged that the United
States data protection framework is lacking and that the Safe Harbor “cannot compensate for these deficits.”
Prism’s existence has placed Safe Harbor on the brink
Privacy Tracker, Aug 2, 2013, Privacy Tracker provides allerts and legal analysis of legislative
trends, “US-EU Safe Harbor Under Pressure,” https://privacyassociation.org/news/a/us-eu-safe-harborunder-pressure/, KEL
Recent attention to the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) surveillance operations have made things
even tougher for Safe Harbor. The European Parliament has called on the European Commission to
conduct a full review of Safe Harbor. Parliament’s resolution notes that some companies involved in
NSA’s PRISM surveillance program are certified under Safe Harbor. Parliament claims that PRISM
surveillance may have involved a “serious violation” of EU data protection laws, and that the
Commission may therefore be obliged to reverse or suspend Safe Harbor. Germany’s data protection
commissioners wrote a letter asking German Chancellor Merkel to recommend that the EU suspend Safe
Harbor. EU Vice President Viviane Reding announced the European Commission’s plan to conduct a full
review of Safe Harbor by the end of this year. Reding, who drafted the Commission’s proposed data
reform package, called PRISM a “wake-up call” and said that Safe Harbor “may not be so safe after all.”
These claims come a little more than one year after Reding, in a joint release with then U.S. Commerce
Secretary John Bryson, reaffirmed the EU’s commitment to Safe Harbor “as a tool to promote
transatlantic trade and economic growth.”
Criticisms of Safe Harbor and other mechanisms that allow data to be transferred from the EU to the
United States have, in many instances, been blind to the nature of government surveillance in EU
countries. As Hogan Lovells privacy lead Chris Wolf wrote in a recent Privacy Perspectives blog post,
“[I]t is naïve to think that intelligence agencies in European countries do not utilize information collected
from phone and Internet companies in their investigations.” And those countries often lack the judicial
and legislative oversight protections incorporated into U.S. surveillance laws. Regardless of the relative
strengths and weaknesses of the privacy protections in EU and U.S. surveillance laws, however, the
outcry over U.S. government surveillance has apparently reenergized EU data protection reform efforts.
That could spell trouble for Safe Harbor even though Safe Harbor facilitates substantial and valuable data
transfers that have been undisturbed by government access.
AT: “TTIP negotiations have derailed”
The recent TPA passage has TTIP back on track
Agence France Press June 26, 2015“US Congress passes trade bill paving way for TTIP,”
http://www.wort.lu/en/business/ttip-and-tpp-us-congress-passes-trade-bill-paving-way-for-ttip558d17db0c88b46a8ce5be4d, KEL
After weeks of legislative clashes Congress handed US President Barack Obama a major policy victory Wednesday,
giving him authority to rapidly conclude a Pacific trade accord and move forward with the transatlantic
EU trade deal. Bucking political tradition, the Democratic president relied on his Republican rivals to help realise the top economic priority of his second
term: creating a 12-nation trans-Pacific free-trade area aimed at opening new markets for US exports in countries like Japan, Chile, Australia and Vietnam. Obama's
own party has rebelled, worried about a repeat of the 1990s North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to large numbers of manufacturing jobs going to
Mexico, where labor costs were dramatically lower. But after a major trade package including so-called trade promotion authority (TPA) stalled in Congress this
month, the White House and Republican leaders secured the necessary votes to advance at least the TPA measure. The Senate voted 60 to 38, with 15 pro-trade
TPA expands Obama's powers to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership
and other trade deals, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the EU, and present
them to Congress for an up-or-down vote, without lawmakers able to pick apart the accord.
Democrats joining all but five Republicans to approve the measure.
European Parliament is no longer against TTIP – its approval of recommendations
for negotiations have clear objections from June
Neil Madden July 9, 2015, “MEPs give greenlight to further TTIP negotiations,” Shanghai Daily,
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/article_xinhua.aspx?id=291554, KEL
The European Parliament (EP) finally approved Wednesday its recommendations to European Commission (EC)
officials negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States. In June, the vote on the
recommendations was suspended after the EP's two major political groups, the centre-right European People's Party (EPP)
and centre-left Socialists & Democrats (S&D), failed to agree the final text. But a compromise was reached allowing the
recommendations to be put to Parliament which voted in favor by 436 votes to 241, with 32 abstentions. At a press conference
after the vote, the rapporteur, German Socialist MEP (member of EP) Bernd Lange, said he was delighted that the EP had achieved a positive result, adding that MEPs
had sent a clear signal to EC negotiators as to what can and cannot be negotiated in the trade pact. Lange said the TTIP negotiations could now proceed safe in the
knowledge that issues such as cultural diversity, data protection standards, workers' rights and environmental protection would not be watered down to suit the final
agreement, which could be ready by 2017-2018. A compromise wording on investor-state dispute resolution tools, hammered out by political groups in long and tense
negotiations and inserted in the text with 447 votes in favor, 229 against and 30 abstentions, calls for a new justice system to replace the controversial "investor state
dispute settlement" (ISDS), which relies on private arbitration and are common in trade deals. The new system should be "subject to democratic principles and
scrutiny," MEPs insisted, in which cases are handled "in a transparent manner", by publicly appointed, independent professional judges and in public hearings. It
should also include an appellate mechanism, respect the jurisdiction of EU and member state courts and ensure that private interests "cannot undermine public policy
objectives", the text states. Among the provisions MEPs want to see in the final TTIP agreement is the removal of U.S. restrictions on foreign ownership of transport
services and airlines, improved EU access to America's giant telecommunications markets and a "significant opening" of the U.S. public procurement market at all
levels of government. At the same time, high levels of protection for EU consumer data, and health and safety must be guaranteed, they added. MEPs also stressed
that public services must be excluded from the scope of the deal, and there should be special treatment for "sensitive agricultural and industrial products." Mutual
recognition of equivalent standards is another demand. However, the approved text stresses that there can be "no agreement" in areas where the U.S. standards are
"very different", e.g. authorization of chemicals, genetically modified food and crops, use of hormones in the cattle sector, cloning or endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
The tenth round of the TTIP negotiations is scheduled for 13-17 July 2015 in Brussels. But, it remains to be seen how U.S. negotiators will respond to the MEPs
demands. America
also has powerful lobbies -- for example, in agriculture -- that are just as keen to shield their markets
from foreign competition. And U.S. policy makers could point to the sometimes painfully slow progress in allowing cross-border freedom of trade even
between EU member states. In parts of the EU, some sectors, like financial services or rail transport, are still all but closed to companies from other EU countries.
But at least Wednesday's vote enables the TTIP negotiating process to clear a significant hurdle .
TTIP will be finalized – the sides are working out the issues
BBC, 10/3/14 (“US and EU 'make progress' in free trade area talks,” http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29482892, bgm)
Officials from the United States and the European Union say they have made progress as they seek to
sweep away trade barriers. Teams from the two sides have held a week of discussions in Chevy Chase,
Maryland. If successful an agreement would create the world's biggest free trade zone. The chief US
negotiator Dan Mullaney said the ultimate goal is to "create opportunities for job creating trade and
investment". 'Spadework' They are trying to do that by eliminating tariffs (taxes on imported goods) and
removing what Mr Mullaney called "non-tariff obstacles". This was the seventh formal round in an
exercise that began last year. Mr Mullaney said they have "progressed from discussing general
approaches to the spadework of reviewing the many proposals that each side has put on the table." The
planned agreement is known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP.
Wide government support for TTIP
New Scientist, 10/31/14 (“TTIP: How the world's largest trade deal affects you,”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429932.600-ttip-how-the-worlds-largest-trade-deal-affects-you.html, bgm)
This isn't the first time that the US and EU have tried to forge a broad trade agreement. The TTIP
negotiations might fail too. But TTIP has wide support from governments, and national parliaments will
only get a brief period to scrutinise the deal before being asked to ratify it. And if they do, it'll be hard to
call anyone to account. All the documentation will be locked away for 30 years.
There is bipartisan support for trade.
Stokes 15 [Bruce is director of global economic attitudes in the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes
Project, where he assesses public and expert views about economic conditions, values and policies.
“Americans agree on trade: Good for the country, but not great for jobs”,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/08/americans-agree-on-trade-good-for-the-country-butnot-great-for-jobs/, 7/7/15] BG
Despite conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans are free traders and Democrats are
protectionists, there is no partisan divide on trade outside the Washington Beltway. Both Republicans and
Democrats voice the view that trade is good for the United States. But that won’t necessarily make
passage of either trade initiative a slam dunk. Both the GOP and Democrats also agree that trade may not be good for them
personally. About two-thirds (68%) of Americans say that growing trade and business ties between the U.S.
and other nations are good for the country. This includes 71% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans.
However, only one-in-five Americans think trade with other countries creates jobs. This includes 24% of Republicans and just 19% of
Democrats. Similarly, only 17% of the general public says trade leads to higher wages, among these are 21% of the GOP and 14% of Democrats.
According to another Pew
Research poll, more than half the American public thinks both TPP and the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP), an Obama administration trade and investment initiative with the
European Union, would be good for the country.
Moreover, there is a discernible partisan split in support for specific trade agreements now under negotiation.
AT: “Ag issues will doom TTIP deal”
TTIP negotiations will solve GMO disputes
Andreas Geiger Oct 21, 2013, managing partner of Alber & Geiger, a leading EU lobbying law firm,
“American agriculture, GMOs and Europe,” The Hill, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-abudget/329375-american-agriculture-gmos-and-europe, KEL
But the TTIP
could be the ultimate way to solve the GMO dispute at the same time. There are major issues
which need to be resolved before a free-trade agreement can come into effect. The divergence is particularly visible with
regard to the mentioned sale of genetically modified food products. While the United States has embraced GMOs and regulated GM food products as if they were
equal to non-GM food, the EU has always imposed heavy restrictions on GM food through a series of labeling requirements and by limiting the approvals for the
cultivation of GMO crops. US farmers have been frustrated by these barriers for years and the US government is pushing towards concessions by the EU in this area.
In fact, the US Senate Finance committee has recently stressed that any agreement must also reduce EU restrictions, among others, on genetically modified crops.
Reaching consensus on this contentious issue is vital to successful negotiations of the TTIP. Despite
the considerable regulatory differences
in approach towards GMOs and the risk that they pose to the conclusion of the trade agreement, consensus may still be reached if
agriculture and patent based US industry stop relying on their government to lobby their interests in
Europe. But engage in direct, hard core lobbying activity themselves. US diplomacy alone will not do it. The EU-US
FTA talks are a unique opportunity for agriculture big business to make their voice heard in the EU and
implement their interests effectively, while at the same time paving the way for the successful conclusion of the trade talks. The TTIP
offers the perfect vehicle to overcome the overwhelming opposition to GMOs in the EU, if companies learnt from
past mistakes and engaged directly and in a meaningful manner with the EU institutions and regulatory bodies, treating their EU efforts equally to their efforts in
Washington D.C. Interested parties should do what they do in DC: Rely on professional lobbying services to mitigate concerns falsely attributed to GMOs associating
genetically modified crops with environmental risks or with safety hazards for food. There is a need to engage seriously through government relations work instead of
simply public affairs work to counter commonly held views across Europe. Past failures can also be attributed to an American lack of sensitivity about the Brussels
lobbying scene. No European tries to lobby Senate or Cngress without the help of a DC lobbying firm. For good reasons. So why do some American companies still
think they can handle themselves? While there is real money at stake. US companies should seek professional lobbying services on the TTIP issue, and especially
lobby firms that understand the agricultural EU politics, process and rules of engagement in Brussels. They should rely on firms that understand sensitivities in
Europe. Companies that will rely on specialized lobby firms, which will come up with the most convincing arguments by understanding the political and social
So while the differences in
transatlantic approach towards GM foods pose a concrete threat to the conclusion of the trade agreement,
the trade talks themselves provide the ultimate opportunity to enable the authorization and cultivation of
GM crops in Europe. The TTIP would be the biggest free-trade deal in the world. According to the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London a
realities on both sides of the Atlantic will have the best chance to change Brussels’ stance on GMOs now.
trade agreement which eliminates tariffs and reduces non-tariff barriers could boost US and EU economic growth by more than $100 billion a year.
TTIP Good – Russian Agression
TTIP key to check Russian aggression
Brown and Oudratt, 2/6/15 (Dr. Michael E. Brown is dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George
Washington University, received his Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, Dr. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, president of Women In
International Security and received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Paris II (Panthéon), “Trade, power and opportunity,”
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/06/trade-partnerships-are-an-opportunity-not-to-be-missed/, bgm)
First, Russian aggression is an unpleasant balance of power problem that is unlikely to go away any time
soon. TTIP isn’t a panacea, but it would strengthen the West’s balance of power position. It would help
European economies grow, provide more opportunities for European companies to turn from Russia to
the United States and enhance the prospects for further trans-Atlantic economic policy coordination. The
United States and its European allies need to prepare for more rounds of economic sanctions against
Russia in the near term, and they have to build a stronger, more united economic front for the long haul.
Extinction
Baum ‘14 (Seth Baum is Executive Director of the think tank Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He recently completed a Ph.D. in
Geography at Pennsylvania State University and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the Columbia University Center for Research on Environmental
Decisions. Based in New York City, Baum's research covers a variety of topics including ethics, economics, climate change, nuclear war, and life
in the universe, “Best And Worst Case Scenarios for Ukraine Crisis: World Peace And Nuclear War”, March 7,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-baum/best-and-worst-case-scena_b_4915315.html)
No one yet knows how the Ukraine crisis will play out. Indeed, the whole story is a lesson in the perils of prediction. Already we have a classic: "Putin's Bluff? U.S. Spies Say Russia Won't
Invade Ukraine," published February 27, just as Russian troops were entering Crimea. But considering the best and worst cases highlights some important opportunities to make the most of the
The best case scenario has the Ukraine crisis being resolved diplomatically through
The worst case scenario has the crisis escalating into
nuclear war between the United States and Russia, causing human extinction. Let's start with the worst case scenario,
nuclear war involving the American and Russian arsenals. How bad would that be? Put it this way: Recent analysis finds that a "limited" IndiaPakistan nuclear war could kill two billion people via agricultural declines from nuclear winter.
This "limited" war involves just 100 nuclear weapons. The U.S. and Russia combine to possess
about 16,700 nuclear weapons. Humanity may not survive the aftermath of a U.S.-Russia nuclear
war. It seems rather unlikely that the U.S. and Russia would end up in nuclear war over Ukraine. Sure, they have opposing positions, but neither side has anywhere near enough at stake to
situation. Here's the short version:
increased Russia-Europe cooperation, which would be a big step towards world peace.
justify such extraordinary measures. Instead, it seems a lot more likely that the whole crisis will get resolved with a minimum of deaths. However, the story has already taken some surprising plot
We cannot rule out the possibility of it ending in direct nuclear war. A nuclear war could also
occur inadvertently, i.e. when a false alarm is misinterpreted as real, and nuclear weapons are launched in what is believed to be a
counterattack. There have been several alarmingly close calls of inadvertent U.S.-Russia nuclear war over
the years. Perhaps the most relevant is the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident. A rocket carrying scientific equipment was
launched off northern Norway. Russia detected the rocket on its radar and interpreted it as a nuclear attack. Its own
twists.
nuclear forces were put on alert and Boris Yeltsin was presented the question of whether to launch Russia's nuclear weapons in response. Fortunately, Yeltsin and the Russian General Staff
apparently sensed it was a false alarm and declined to launch. Still, the disturbing lesson from this incident is that nuclear war could begin even during periods of calm. With the Ukraine crisis,
the situation today is not calm. It is even more tense than last year, when the United States was considering military intervention in Syria.
Unchecked Putin leads to nuclear war
Taylor, 14 (Jeffrey, Foreign Policy, Citing Andrei Piontkovsky, a former executive director of the Strategic Studies Center in Moscow
and a political commentator for the BBC World Service, “Putin's Nuclear Option”,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/04/putins_nuclear_option_russia_weapons, September 4, 2014, ak.)
Ever the one to administer bracing doses of Geopolitics 101 to his opponents, especially those inclined to underestimate his nerve, President
Vladimir Putin, at a youth forum north of Moscow last week, reminded
the world that "Russia is one of the most
powerful nuclear nations. This is a reality, not just words." (Indeed it is.) Fifteen days earlier, on Aug. 14, at a conference in
Yalta, the Russian president had told the assembled factions of the State Duma that he soon planned to "surprise the
West with our new developments in offensive nuclear weapons about which we do not talk yet." This
came as Russian
strategic nuclear bombers and fighter jets have been accused of violating the airspace of the
United States and Western European countries with mounting frequency, while under the surface of the world's seas
Russian and U.S. nuclear submarines have been involved in confrontations recalling the worst days of the Cold War. As NATO leaders convene
for their summit in Wales, Russia
just announced that its strategic nuclear forces will hold exercises of
unprecedented dimensions this month. And the Kremlin, for its part, just declared that it will amend its
military doctrine to reflect Russia's growing tensions with NATO. What this means exactly remains unclear, but in view
of the rising tensions with the Western alliance, it cannot be good. Russia has also been purportedly breaching the terms of
the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibits Russia (and the United States) from
possessing the sort of missiles that could be used against targets in Europe. If Barack Obama entered the
White House hoping to reduce atomic weapons stockpiles and make the world a safer place, it looks like
he will leave it with a Russia boasting a more lethal arsenal of nuclear weapons than at any time since the
Cold War. But Putin would never actually use nuclear weapons, would he? The scientist and longtime Putin critic
Andrei Piontkovsky, a former executive director of the Strategic Studies Center in Moscow and a political
commentator for the BBC World Service, believes he might. In August, Piontkovsky published a troubling
account of what he believes Putin might do to win the current standoff with the West -- and, in one blow,
destroy NATO as an organization and finish off what's left of America's credibility as the world's
guardian of peace. In view of the Russian leader's recent remarks and provocative actions, the scenario
Piontkovsky lays out becomes terrifyingly relevant. Worse, if the trigger events described come to pass, it
becomes logical, maybe even inevitable . Piontkovsky explains the positions of the two camps presenting Putin with
advice about how to resolve the Ukraine crisis. The first, the "Peace Party," as he calls it, composed of those occupying posts in
influential think tanks, including, in this case, Sergey Karaganov, the head of Moscow's Higher School of Economics, urges Putin to declare
victory in Ukraine now and thereby end the conflict. Having taken note of the lengths to which Moscow will go to prevent Ukraine from
slipping out of its orbit, NATO will almost certainly never invite the former Soviet republic to join its ranks, the Peace Party argues. And Russia
has already won tacit acceptance from the international community of its acquisition of Crimea. Piontkovsky
dismisses out of hand
the possibility of Putin pursuing this solution. If Putin chose to go this route, he would look defeated, and
looming before him would be the fate of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was deposed and forced into
retirement following his failed, and nearly catastrophic, 1962 attempt to secure communism in Cuba by stationing nuclear missiles there. The
other camp putting pressure on Putin, the "War Party," however, gives the president two options. The first, writes Piontkovsky,
is a "romantic and inspiring scenario: World War IV between the Orthodox Russian World, now risen
from its knees, against the rotting and decadent Anglo-Saxon World." (World War III, in his view, has already
happened: the Cold War.) This World War IV would be a conventional war with NATO -- and it would not go well. Given NATO's superior
armed forces and Russia's comparative economic, scientific, and technological weaknesses, a conventional campaign would, Piontkovsky
concludes, end with Russia's defeat. That
leaves Putin only one option: a nuclear attack. Not a massive launch of
intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States or Western Europe, which would bring about a suicidal atomic holocaust, but a
small,
tactical strike or two against a NATO member that few in the West would be willing to die to protect.
Piontkovsky surmises that, in such a conflict, the nuclear-armed country with the "superior political will" to alter
the geopolitical "status quo" and -- most importantly -- with the "greater indifference to values concerning
human lives" would prevail. Any guesses which country that would be? But what would trigger a Russian
attack? According to Piontkovsky's scenario, it could be something as simple as a plebiscite: the Estonian city of
Narva, overwhelmingly ethnically Russian and adjacent to Russia, deciding to hold a referendum on
joining the Motherland. To help them "freely express their will" at the polls, Russia could send in a
brigade of "little green men armed to the teeth," much like it did in Crimea in March. Estonia would
thereupon invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter -- "an armed attack against one or more [NATO members]
… shall be considered an attack against them all" -- and demand that the alliance defend it. Speaking in the Estonian capital of
Tallinn on the eve of NATO's summit in Wales, this is just what Obama promised. "The defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as
important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London," he said. Suddenly,
the most terrifying nightmare becomes reality:
NATO faces war with Russia. Suddenly, the most terrifying nightmare becomes reality: NATO faces war with Russia. How
would Putin then react? Piontkovsky believes that NATO would balk at attacking Moscow over a small country remote from NATO's heartland
and the hearts of its citizens. Piontkovsky imagines the course of action open to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama as he contemplates unleashing
a planetary holocaust over a "damned little city no one has even heard of" while the American public cries out, "We don't want to die for fucking
Narva, Mr. President!" Piontkovsky also cites a German public opinion poll asking what Berlin should do if Estonia enters an armed conflict with
Russia: 70 percent would want their country to remain neutral. Piontkovsky then tries to envision the situation in which Putin would find himself
if NATO intervened to drive his little green men from Narva. Would Putin commit suicide by letting his missiles fly against the United States?
No. Rather, he would respond with a limited nuclear strike against a couple of European capitals -- not London or
Paris, but smaller ones, presumably in Eastern European countries that have only recently joined NATO. Warsaw, against which Russia has
already conducted a drill simulating a Russian nuclear attack, first comes to mind. Or, say, Vilnius, Lithuania's capital. The point is, Putin would
bet on decision-makers in Washington, Berlin, London, and Paris not retaliating with nuclear weapons against Russia if it had "only" hit a city or
two most Westerners have barely heard of -- and certainly do not want to die for. The
outcome of Putin's putative gambit is that
NATO effectively capitulates. The alliance's credibility as guarantor of security for its member states
would be utterly destroyed, as would U.S. hegemony, which largely rests on the threat of using force.
Putin would then be free to do what he wanted in Ukraine and anywhere else he perceived Russia's
interests to be threatened. It might all sound a bit far-fetched. On the surface, there are obvious reasons that Putin would not want to be
the first to fire nuclear weapons at anyone, even his die-hard adversaries in NATO. It would be, to put it mildly, risky, and would irremediably
besmirch his place, and Russia's, in history. The world would unite against him and could do more damage to the Russian economy, which is
highly dependent on food imports and the export of hydrocarbons, than anyone now can imagine. And domestically, Russian anti-war sentiment
is formidable. The Russian
public has, throughout the crisis, adored Putin for standing up to the West and
retaking Crimea, and it even supports Russia's arming the separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. But Russians
have shown no appetite for direct military intervention, which is one reason the Kremlin repeatedly asserts that it has no troops or materiel on
Ukrainian soil. But it's worth remembering that since
2000 Russian nuclear doctrine has foreseen the deployment of
battlefield nuclear weapons to de-escalate a conflict with NATO, if Russian forces were about to suffer
defeat in a conventional conflict -- which shows that the Kremlin has already been betting that neither Obama
nor the leaders of other nuclear powers would push the button if they could avoid it. The Kremlin is probably
right.
TTIP solves Russian Expansion
TTIP boosts US-EU relations and stops Russian expansionism
James Stavridis 11/19/14, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University,
Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Naval Institute, PhD and Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy, retired
United States Navy admiral who served as the 15th Commander, U.S. European Command and NATO's
16th Supreme Allied Commander Europe, “Vladimir Putin Hates the TTIP,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Stavridis
Flying under the international radar is one of the most potentially important agreements ever
negotiated across the broad Atlantic: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also known as the
Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). It is a big basket of agreed-upon rules and regulations that would make the United States and
much of Europe a free trade zone, perhaps increasing overall trade by as much as 50 percent, according to the European Commission and the
Putin hates it. It’s not hard to figure out why: it would more tightly bind Europe to the
United States, thus hurting Russian leverage. The TTIP is a sensible agreement on economic grounds, broadly speaking. But it
also holds enormous real value in the geopolitical sphere. The increased linkages between the United
States and our European allies and partners will stand in direct opposition to Putin’s key strategy of
driving a wedge between the United States and the EU as the central members of the transatlantic community. But let’s back
White House. Guess what?
up: what are the key elements in the transatlantic relationship? First are values and demographics. The ideas we cherish — democracy, liberty,
freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to peaceful protest, gender and racial equality — came largely from
Europe. The Enlightenment provided much of the basic DNA of our nation’s intellectual heritage, not to mention many waves of immigrants. To
this day, numerous fundamental connections between the United States and Europe persist in our approaches to the civil rights, our judicial
bodies, and the structures of our basic political systems. And by the way, it is worth remembering that Russia stood largely outside the process of
the Enlightenment, with notable cultural distinctions resulting between Western European and Russian traditions. Second is geography. For the
United States, one of Europe’s key values is its strategic position on the edge of the Eurasian landmass. In my time as the NATO Supreme Allied
Commander for global operations, people in the United States would occasionally chide me for supporting bases in Europe that were, in their
view, "the outmoded bastions of the Cold War." But as we have seen over the past decade, these bases are anything but obsolete. Again and
again, we have used bases in Europe for operations in Africa, the Levant, and Central Asia. Europe’s geographic position between the United
States and many of our security interests and allies to the south and west of Europe remains critical. Thirdly, the NATO alliance remains central
to our military operations overseas. Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, piracy, and cyber security are all areas in which our NATO
allies have stood shoulder to shoulder with us. We will never find another pool of ready partners with the numbers, military capability, and
willingness to deploy that we have in Europe.We will never find another pool of ready partners with the numbers, military capability, and
willingness to deploy that we have in Europe. The Europeans spend $300 billion a year on defense, and have millions of men and women —
virtually all of them volunteers — in their standing armies and reserves. While Washington would prefer that European nations spent the full 2
percent of GDP on defense that they have pledged, the fact remains that they collectively constitute a highly capable force under the aegis of
NATO. That fundamental security plank in the transatlantic bridge is not going anywhere, and the recent resurgence of the Russian Federation,
with its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, have only amplified the NATO’s standing as the gold standard of security membership.
Fourth is the economy, which brings us to the TTIP. Some $4.2 trillion of trade flows across the Atlantic between the United States and Europe.
It is the largest trading relationship in the $60 trillion global economy, dwarfing any other trade relationship for the United States. Yet this
commerce continues to operate today without the benefit of a free trade zone which would break down regulatory barriers and — according to the
U.S. trade representative — add to the 13 million jobs already dependent on trade. The TTIP is a promising idea, and a draft agreement could be
finalized by the end of the year. Naturally, there are challenges. There is nervousness on both sides of the Atlantic about various elements of the
potential agreement — in particular, worries from Europe about the competitiveness of the continent’s agriculture sector; the impact on energy
production and the rise of fracking; protection of intellectual property; and the level of protection afforded to cultural assets. All of these
outstanding areas of concern have received considerable attention from the negotiators, and that there is guarded optimism they will be resolved
according to conversations with senior negotiators. There will also be obstacles to ratification. In Europe, the European Parliament will need to
approve it, and there are questions being raised about the need for national parliaments to be involved. In the United States, the Senate will have
to ratify the treaty. And we would still need to address the status of Canada and Mexico who currently enjoy a free trade zone via the North
American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and presumably would be interested in TTIP inclusion. Likewise, in Europe: four
nations outside of the EU would likewise be interested (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and tiny Liechtenstein). So
how does all this
affect the geopolitics of the region — especially Russia’s fraught relationship with the United States,
NATO, and the EU? In addition to the economic benefits that would flow to both sides, there is clear geopolitical value. An
economically energized Atlantic community with a shared free trade zone is far more likely to stand
firm against Russian pressures (with natural gas closures, for example) designed to break up transatlantic
solidarity. A European economy that enjoys a bounce from the benefits of free trade creates a stronger
military partner for the United States, and provides more resources for defense spending. The
agreement could help improve the Atlantic community’s ability to share energy resources like liquefied
natural gas through free trade. Indeed, a negotiated and eventually ratified TTIP would be a powerful
signal to Putin’s Russia that Europe and the United States stand together in all dimensions — values, politics,
security, and trade. And if Putin hates it, TTIP probably makes sense.
TTIP good – Obama international leadership
TTIP reinvigorates Obama international leadership
Brown and Oudratt, 2/6/15 (Dr. Michael E. Brown is dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George
Washington University, received his Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, Dr. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, president of Women In
International Security and received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Paris II (Panthéon), “Trade, power and opportunity,”
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/06/trade-partnerships-are-an-opportunity-not-to-be-missed/, bgm)
Third, TPP and TTIP pacts would strengthen Obama’s personal credibility and the United States’
international leadership position. Obama’s failure to enforce his “red line” on the use of chemical
weapons by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has done real damage to his credibility in the
Middle East, Asia and around the world. Effective presidential leadership in these trade negotiations
would help to restore Obama’s international credibility. A TPP agreement would also solidify the
economic pillar of Obama’s “pivot” to Asia – a geostrategic priority. More generally, effective U.S.
leadership on TPP and TTIP would enhance the United States’ standing in an era when many countries
need strategic reassurance and want U.S. engagement.
Solves nuke war
Coes, 9-30-11 (Ben, former speechwriter in the George H.W. Bush administration, managed Mitt
Romney’s successful campaign for Massachusetts Governor in 2002 & author, “The disease of a weak
president”, The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/30/the-disease-of-a-weak-president/)
The disease of a weak president usually begins with the Achilles’ heel all politicians are born with — the desire to be popular. It
leads to pandering to different audiences, people and countries and creates a sloppy, incoherent set of
policies. Ironically, it ultimately results in that very politician losing the trust and respect of friends and
foes alike. In the case of Israel, those of us who are strong supporters can at least take comfort in the knowledge that Tel Aviv will do
whatever is necessary to protect itself from potential threats from its unfriendly neighbors. While it would be preferable for the Israelis to be able
to count on the United States, in both word and deed, the fact is right now they stand alone. Obama and his foreign policy team have undercut the
Israelis in a multitude of ways. Despite this, I wouldn’t bet against the soldiers of Shin Bet, Shayetet 13 and the Israeli Defense Forces. But
Obama’s weakness could — in other places — have implications far, far worse than anything that might ultimately occur in
Israel. The triangular plot of land that connects Pakistan, India and China is held together with much more
fragility and is built upon a truly foreboding foundation of religious hatreds, radicalism, resource envy
and nuclear weapons. If you can only worry about preventing one foreign policy disaster, worry about this one. Here are a few unsettling
facts to think about: First, Pakistan and India have fought three wars since the British de-colonized and left the region in 1947. All
three wars occurred before the two countries had nuclear weapons. Both countries now possess hundreds of nuclear
weapons, enough to wipe each other off the map many times over. Second, Pakistan is 97% Muslim. It is a question of
when — not if — Pakistan elects a radical Islamist in the mold of Ayatollah Khomeini as its president. Make no mistake, it will happen, and
when it does the world will have a far greater concern than Ali Khamenei or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a single nuclear device. Third, China
China covets India’s
natural resources. Over the years, it has slowly inched its way into the northern tier of India-controlled
Kashmir Territory, appropriating land and resources and drawing little notice from the outside world. In my book, Coup D’Etat, I consider
sits at the northern border of both India and Pakistan. China is strategically aligned with Pakistan. Most concerning,
this tinderbox of colliding forces in Pakistan, India and China as a thriller writer. But thriller writers have the luxury of solving problems by
imagining solutions on the page. In my book, when Pakistan elects a radical Islamist who then starts a war with India and introduces nuclear
weapons to the theater, America steps in and removes the Pakistani leader through a coup d’état. I wish it was that simple. The more complicated
and difficult truth is that we, as Americans, must take sides. We must be willing to be unpopular in certain places. Most important, we must be
ready and willing to threaten our military might on behalf of our allies. And our allies are Israel and India. There
are many threats out
there — Islamic radicalism, Chinese technology espionage, global debt and half a dozen other things that
smarter people than me are no doubt worrying about. But the single greatest threat to America is none of these. The
single greatest threat facing America and our allies is a weak U.S. president. It doesn’t have to be this
way. President Obama could — if he chose — develop a backbone and lead. Alternatively, America could elect a new president.
It has to be one or the other. The status quo is simply not an option.
TTIP Good – EU Soft Power
TTIP key to EU soft power
Brattberg, 13 – Swedish Institute of International Affairs analyst
[Erik, currently Visiting Fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States and a Non-Resident Fellow at
the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, "The
Geopolitical Importance of TTIP," 11-8-13, www.euglobalstrategy.eu/nyheter/opinions/reinventing-thewest-the-geopolitical-importance-of-ttip, accessed 1-3-14]
Although the obstacles remain several, European and American leaders have very good reasons to keep pushing for a TTIP deal. Besides the
immediate positive economic effects for both sides, the agreement could also give spark to a
more strategic transatlantic
relationship – something that is desperately needed. As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has observed, TTIP could
potentially serve as a second anchor, in addition to NATO, binding together the US and the EU. Along similar lines, the
European Global Strategy report correctly notes that TTIP, if successful, could ‘spill over into more robust
political and security cooperation’ between the US and Europe. There is a great sense of urgency to this
task. 2015 will mark the ten-year anniversary of the New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA). Originally established by the Clinton White House, this
framework was designed to bring the US and EU together. While some progress has been made over the past decade, the US-EU
relationship remains far from strategic in nature. Washington still prefers to deal with European countries on a strictly bilateral
level, rather than with Brussels. Clearly, a New Transatlantic Compact requires a new set of leadership structures.
Moreover, the disappointments as of late with creating a robust EU security and defense policy has reinforced the notion that NATO is the only
Euro-Atlantic security organization that really matters. While the
US wants a strong EU as its core partner, it is uncertain about
Brussels’ level of ambition. In fact, Washington currently thinks the EU has no ambition whatsoever. If Europe and the US
can agree on TTIP it would send a signal to Washington that Brussels is indeed a serious strategic partner.
If so, this could be the start of a recreated and re-invented transatlantic relationship. The development of a
more strategic EU-US relationship could also help allay fears regarding the US ‘abandonment’ of Europe.
While US strategic thinking is changing – and fast (the so-called ‘Asian pivot’ is only the beginning) – a more strategic transatlantic relationship
would still serve a critical function for Washington, and not just on the security side of things. The
drawdown of the military
mission in Afghanistan means that the US will have less need for Europe in coming years. Focusing more
on global economic and trade issues could constitute a new strategic imperative for closer EU-US ties. At
the same time, for the EU, which still views itself predominantly as a global soft power, TTIP could help the
union utilize its role as the world’s single largest trading bloc in a more strategic way. The EGS report correctly
notes that the EU must seek to ‘maximize the opportunities that trade and development provide as a means of
pursuing its strategic objectives’. TTIP is accordingly an opportunity for Europe to reinforce its role as a
global trading superpower. In summary, Europe must strive for an ambitious and comprehensive TTIP. Such an agreement would not
only generate economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic, it would also pave the way for a more strategic transatlantic
partnership. As US strategic attention is quickly fading away from Europe toward the global East and
South, an agreement could send a message to Washington that Europe remains America’s core partner in the
world. In doing so, Europe could also draw on its unique strengths as a global trading superpower, but apply
these strengths more strategically.
Strong EU key to solve multiple scenarios for extinction
Burton ’01 (John,- Ambassador for the European Commission Delegation
http://www.irlgov.ie/committees-02/c-europeanaffairs/future/page1.htm)
2.5 As the Laeken Declaration put it, "Europe needs to shoulder its responsibilities in the governance of globalisation" adding that Europe must
exercise its power in order "to set globalisation within a moral framework, in other words to anchor it in solidarity and sustainable
development". 2.6 Only
a strong E uropean U nion is big enough to create a space, and a stable set of rules, within which
all Europeans can live securely, move freely, and provide for themselves, for their families and for their old age. Individual states are too small
to do that on their own. Only a strong European Union is big enough to
deal with the globalised human diseases, such as
AIDS and tuberculosis. Only a strong European Union is big enough to deal with globalised criminal conspiracies, like the
Mafia, that threaten the security of all Europeans. Only a strong European Union is big enough to deal with globalised environmental
threats, such as global warming, which threaten our continent and generations of its future inhabitants. Only a
strong European Union is big enough to deal with globalised economic forces, which could spread recession
from one country to another and destroy millions of jobs. Only a strong European Union is big enough to regulate, in the
interests of society as a whole, the activities of profit seeking private corporations, some of which now have more spending power than many
individual states. 2.7 These tasks are too large for individual states. 2.8 Only by coming together in the
E uropean U nion can we
ensure that humanity, and the values which make us, as individuals, truly human, prevail over blind global forces that will
otherwise overwhelm us.
TTIP Good – Solves G. Warming
TTIP is key to effective multilateral solutions to warming
Benson 13 - Intern at the Streit Council [Johann Benson (Master’s degree in public policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey
School of Public Affairs), “Toward a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement: What Impact on World Trade?,” Streit Talk, July 26, 2013 pg.
http://blog.streitcouncil.org/?tag=ttip
the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is taking its first steps toward becoming
reality. Questions remain , however; not only about what form the final agreement may take, but also what effect it could have on international trade. In its initial
assessment of the TTIP, the OECD notes that while multilateral arrangements are preferable, bilateral and plurilateral agreements like the proposed TTIP “can be
supportive of an effective multilateral trading system .” One of the primary ways in which these agreements can
promote trade at the global level is by addressing issues that currently lie outside the scope of WTO
regulations. Richard Baldwin, of the Graduate Institute in Geneva and the Centre for Economic Policy
Research, has laid out the shortcomings of current WTO regulations and how post-2000 trade agreements are fundamentally different from those of the 1990s. Baldwin argues
that the rise of global supply chains has elevated the importance of removing non-tariff barriers, while tariffs (with
some notable exceptions) have largely fallen by the wayside. Current WTO regulations (as well as agenda items of the stalled Doha Round) are not adequate
for addressing the most pressing issues of international commerce and investment, such as competition (or antitrust) policy, the movement of capital,
intellectual property rights (IPR), and investment assurances. These issues can and often have been addressed through
recent bilateral trade and investment agreements. Critically, Baldwin also notes that there is a feedback effect from increased trade
liberalization that makes future liberalization even more likely. It is for this reason, if no other, that an EU-U.S.
free trade agreement is a step in the right direction . Economic gains from the TTIP would mainly come from the harmonization of regulations and
With negotiations now officially underway,
the removal of other non-tariff barriers. While the agreement is expected to lead to trade diversion among EU members (in the case of an ambitious agreement, for example, total trade between
TTIP would benefit the struggling economies of southern Europe
It would also drive trade creation between the EU and the U.S., and between the
transatlantic area and third parties. For example, if car safety standards are harmonized in the European and American markets, it lowers costs not only for U.S. and
EU automakers, but also for any other company that exports to both markets. In fact, the third parties with the largest expected gains from the
TTIP are ASEAN countries, due to their very high trade to GDP ratios. Unfortunately, the fact that third parties often benefit from
the UK and Spain would decrease by about 45%), it is projected that the
even more than the EU as a whole.
the removal of non-tariff barriers can also act as an obstacle to bilateral agreements. For instance, Jagdish Bhagwati has noted that getting rid of production subsidies requires a multilateral
agreement because “you cannot – bilaterally – say that if the U.S. reduces or relaxes production subsidies, it will be only for New Zealand. Or only for Brazil.” This may, in some respects, limit
the breadth and depth of the TTIP. One of Bhagwati’s other worries about preferential trade agreements is that they create dispute settlement mechanisms that favor the stronger trading partner
and undermine the WTO’s own dispute settlement mechanism. If the TTIP is eventually opened to newcomers on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, any country wishing to join the agreement – for
which there would be strong incentives – would be strictly a rule-taker, with absolutely no say in the drafting of existing regulations. While numerous commentators argue that the primary
objective of the TTIP is to ensure that “the United States and Europe remain standard makers, rather than standard takers, in the global economy,” there is a risk that China and other emerging
the TTIP is concluded. The
is not likely to seriously threaten the multilateral trading system for the simple fact that bilateral
deals – no matter how large – are themselves unable to address a longer list of the world’s most pressing trade issues.
Resource and food security, exchange rate policy, and efforts to limit carbon emissions all demand
multilateral solutions. But the TTIP could provide a launching pad to address these and other issues.
economies will attempt to erect trading blocs amongst themselves and create their own rules. Completing the Doha Round may still be an uphill battle after
agreement
Warming is real, anthropogenic, and threatens extinction --- prefer new evidence
that represents consensus
Richard Schiffman 13, environmental writer @ The Atlantic citing the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, “What Leading Scientists Want You to Know About Today's Frightening Climate
Report,” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/leading-scientists-weighin-on-the-mother-of-all-climate-reports/280045/
The polar icecaps are melting faster than we thought they would; seas are rising faster than we thought
they would; extreme weather events are increasing. Have a nice day! That’s a less than scientifically rigorous summary of the
findings of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this morning in Stockholm. Appearing exhausted after a nearly two sleepless days
fine-tuning the language of the report, co-chair Thomas Stocker called climate change “the greatest challenge of our time,"
adding that “each of the last three decades has been successively warmer than the past,” and that this trend is
likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Pledging further action to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, "This isn’t a run of the mill
report to be dumped in a filing cabinet. This isn’t a political document produced by politicians... It’s science." And that science needs to be
communicated to the public, loudly and clearly. I canvassed leading climate researchers for their take on the findings of the vastly influential IPCC report. What headline would they put on the news? What do they hope people hear
Mann, the Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State (a former IPCC
author himself) suggested: "Jury In: Climate Change Real, Caused by Us, and a Threat We Must Deal
With." Ted Scambos, a glaciologist and head scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) based in Boulder would lead with: "IPCC 2013, Similar Forecasts, Better Certainty." While the report,
which is issued every six to seven years, offers no radically new or alarming news, Scambos told me, it puts an exclamation point on what we already know, and
refines our evolving understanding of global warming. The IPCC, the indisputable rock star of UN documents, serves as the basis for global climate
negotiations, like the ones that took place in Kyoto, Rio, and, more recently, Copenhagen. (The next big international climate meeting is scheduled for 2015 in Paris.) It is also arguably the most
elaborately vetted and exhaustively researched scientific paper in existence. Founded in 1988 by the United Nations and the World
Meteorological Organization, the IPCC represents the distilled wisdom of over 600 climate researchers in 32 countries on changes
about this report? When I asked him for his headline, Michael
in the Earth’s atmosphere, ice and seas. It endeavors to answer the late New York mayor Ed Koch’s famous question “How am I doing?” for all of us. The answer, which won’t surprise anyone who has been following the climate
It is now 95 percent likely that human spewed heat-trapping gases — rather than natural
variability — are the main cause of climate change, according to today’s report. In 2007 the IPCC’s confidence level was 90 percent, and in 2001 it was 66 percent, and
just over 50 percent in 1995. What’s more, things are getting worse more quickly than almost anyone thought would happen a
few years back. “If you look at the early IPCC predictions back from 1990 and what has taken place since, climate change is proceeding faster than we expected,” Mann told me by email. Mann helped develop the
famous hockey-stick graph, which Al Gore used in his film “An Inconvenient Truth” to dramatize the sharp rise in temperatures in recent times. Mann cites the decline of Arctic sea ice to explain : “Given the
current trajectory, we're on track for ice-free summer conditions in the Arctic in a matter of a decade or
two... There is a similar story with the continental ice sheets, which are losing ice — and contributing to sea level rise — at a faster rate than the [earlier IPCC] models had predicted.” But there is a lot that we still don’t
change story, is not very well at all.
understand. Reuters noted in a sneak preview of IPCC draft which was leaked in August that, while the broad global trends are clear, climate scientists were “finding it harder than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in
hotspots are not consistent, but move erratically around the globe. The same has been true of heat waves, mega-storms and
There is broad agreement that climate change is increasing the
severity of extreme weather events, but we’re not yet able to predict where and when these will show up. “It is like watching a pot boil,” Danish
astrophysicist and climate scientist Peter Thejll told me. “We understand why it boils but cannot predict where the next bubble will be.” There is also uncertainty about an
apparent slowdown over the last decade in the rate of air temperature increase. While some critics claim that global warming has “stalled,” others point out that,
when rising ocean temperatures are factored in, the Earth is actually gaining heat faster than previously
anticipated. “Temperatures measured over the short term are just one parameter,” said Dr Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in an interview.
“There are far more critical things going on; the acidification of the ocean is happening a lot faster than
anybody thought that it would, it’s sucking up more CO2, plankton, the basic food chain of the planet,
are dying, it’s such a hugely important signal. Why aren’t people using that as a measure of what is going on?” Barnett thinks that recent increases in
volcanic activity, which spews smog-forming aerosols into the air that deflect solar radiation and cool the atmosphere, might help account for the temporary slowing
of global temperature rise. But he says we shouldn’t let short term fluctuations cause us to lose sight of the big picture. The dispute over temperatures underscores just how formidable the IPCC’s task of
coming decades.” From year to year, the world’s
catastrophic floods, like the recent ones that ravaged the Colorado Front Range.
modeling the complexity of climate change is. Issued in three parts (the next two installments are due out in the spring), the full version of the IPCC will end up several times the length of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. Yet every
I do not know of any other area of any complexity and importance at all where there
is unanimous agreement ... and the statements so strong ,” Mike MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute in Washington, D.C.
told me in an email. “What IPCC has achieved is remarkable (and why it merited the Nobel Peace Prize granted in 2007).” Not surprisingly, the IPCC’s conclusions tend to be
“conservative by design,” Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology told me: “The IPCC is not supposed
to represent the controversial forefront of climate science. It is supposed to represents what nearly all
scientists agree on, and it does that quite effectively.” Nevertheless, even these understated findings are inevitably controversial. Roger Pielke Jr., the Director of the
last word of the U.N. document needs to be signed off on by all of the nations on earth. “
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder suggested a headline that focuses on the cat fight that today’s report is sure to revive: "Fresh Red Meat Offered Up in the Climate Debate,
Activists and Skeptics Continue Fighting Over It." Pielke should know. A critic of Al Gore, who has called his own detractors "climate McCarthyists," Pielke has been a lightning rod for the political controversy which continues to
swirl around the question of global warming, and what, if anything, we should do about it. The public’s skepticism of climate change took a dive after Hurricane Sandy. Fifty-four percent of Americans are now saying that the effects
of global warming have already begun. But 41 percent surveyed in the same Gallup poll believe news about global warming is generally exaggerated, and there is a smaller but highly passionate minority that continues to believe the
whole thing is a hoax.
For most climate experts, however, the battle is long over — at least when it comes to the science. What remains
in dispute is not whether climate change is happening, but how fast things are going to get worse. There are some possibilities that are deliberately left out of the IPCC projections, because we simply don’t have enough data yet to
The scary elephant in the closet is terrestrial and oceanic
model them. Jason Box, a visiting scholar at the Byrd Polar Research Center told me in an email interview that: “
methane release triggered by warming.” The IPCC projections don’t include the possibility — some scientists say likelihood — that huge quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas thirty times as potent as CO2)
will eventually be released from thawing permafrost and undersea methane hydrate reserves. Box said that the threshhold “when humans lose control of potential
management of the problem, may be sooner than expected.” Box, whose work has been instrumental in documenting the rapid deterioration of the Greenland ice
sheet, also believes that the latest IPCC predictions (of a maximum just under three foot ocean rise by the end of the century) may turn out to be wildly
optimistic, if the Greenland ice sheet breaks up. “We are heading into uncharted territory” he said. “We are creating a different
climate than the Earth has ever seen.” The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, speaks for the scientific consensus when he says that time is fast running
out to avoid the catastrophic collapse of the natural systems on which human life depends. What he recently told a
group of climate scientist could be the most chilling headline of all for the U.N. report: "We have five minutes before midnight."
TTIP Good – US/EU Relations
TTIP boosts relations – increases cooperation
Patrick Christy is a senior policy analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative., 4-5-2013
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/04/05/obama-should-prioritize-free-tradeagreements-with-europe-and-asia
The U.S.-E.U. agreement would reinvigorate relations between Europe and the United States at a time when
many European leaders worry that the Obama administration's "rebalance" to the Asia-Pacific will come at the expense of transatlantic ties. Despite
occasional differences on both sides of the Atlantic, the United States and Europe are bound by history, common interests, and shared values. In particular,
European nations who are aligned with NATO remain America's strategic partners of "first resort" – countries
that the United States works with in concert on key international matters. Indeed, NATO's 2011 mission in Libya and ongoing efforts in
Afghanistan reflect these common interests and shared values.
Security cooperation with Europe solves nuclear war and multiple transnational
threats
Yannis Stivachtis 10, Director of International Studies Program @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute &
State University A. Stivachtis (Professor of Poli Sci & Ph.D. in Politics & International Relations from
Lancaster University), THE IMPERATIVE FOR TRANSATLANTIC COOPERATION,” The Research
Institute for European and American Studies, 2010, pg. http://www.rieas.gr/research-areas/globalissues/transatlantic-studies/78.html
There is no doubt that
US-European relations are in a period of transition , and that the stresses and strains of globalization are increasing both the
number and the seriousness of the challenges that confront transatlantic relations. The events of 9/11 and the Iraq War have added significantly to these stresses and strains. At the same time,
terrorism, the nuclearization of North Korea and especially Iran, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the
Russia into a stable and cooperative member of the international community, the growing power of China, the political and economic transformation and
integration of the Caucasian and Central Asian states, the integration and stabilization of the Balkan countries, the promotion of peace
and stability in the Middle East, poverty, climate change, AIDS and other emergent problems and situations require
further cooperation among countries at the regional, global and institutional levels. Therefore, cooperation between the U.S. and Europe is more
imperative than ever to deal effectively with these problems. It is fair to say that the challenges of crafting a new
relationship between the U.S. and the EU as well as between the U.S. and NATO are more regional than global, but the
implications of success or failure will be global. The transatlantic relationship is still in crisis, despite efforts to improve it since the Iraq War. This is not
international
transformation of
to say that differences between the two sides of the Atlantic did not exist before the war. Actually, post-1945 relations between Europe and the U.S. were fraught with disagreements and never
free of crisis since the Suez crisis of 1956. Moreover, despite trans-Atlantic proclamations of solidarity in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. and Europe parted ways on issues from global warming
and biotechnology to peacekeeping and national missile defense. Questions such as, the future role of NATO and its relationship to the common European Security and Defense policy (ESDP),
or what constitutes terrorism and what the rights of captured suspected terrorists are, have been added to the list of US-European disagreements. There are two reasons for concern regarding the
if European leaders conclude that Europe must become counterweight to the U.S., rather than a
it will be difficult to engage in the kind of open search for a common ground than an elective partnership
requires. Second, there is a risk that public opinion in both the U.S. and Europe will make it difficult even for leaders who want to forge a new relationship to make the necessary
accommodations. If both sides would actively work to heal the breach, a new opportunity could be created. A vibrant transatlantic partnership remains a
real possibility, but only if both sides make the necessary political commitment. There are strong reasons to believe that the
transatlantic rift. First,
partner,
security challenges facing the U.S. and Europe are more shared than divergent. The most dramatic case is terrorism. Closely related is the common interest in halting the spread of weapons of
mass destruction and the nuclearization of Iran and North Korea. This commonality of threats is clearly perceived by publics on both sides of the Atlantic. Actually, Americans and Europeans see
eye to eye on more issues than one would expect from reading newspapers and magazines. But while elites on both sides of the Atlantic bemoan a largely illusory gap over the use of military
force, biotechnology, and global warming, surveys of American and European public opinion highlight sharp differences over global leadership, defense spending, and the Middle East that
There are other important, shared interests as well. The transformation of
Russia into a stable cooperative member of the international community is a priority both for the U.S. and Europe. They also have an
interest in promoting a stable regime in Ukraine. It is necessary for the U.S. and EU to form a united front to meet these
challenges because first, there is a risk that dangerous materials related to WMD will fall into the wrong hands; and second, the
threaten the future of the last century’s most successful alliance.
spread of conflict along those countries’ periphery could destabilize neighboring countries and provide safe havens for
terrorists and other international criminal organizations. Likewise, in the Caucasus and Central Asia both sides share a stake in
promoting political and economic transformation and integrating these states into larger communities such as the OSCE. This
would also minimize the risk of instability spreading and prevent those countries of becoming havens for international terrorists and criminals. Similarly, there is a common interest in integrating
Dealing with Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as other political issues in the Middle
East are also of a great concern for both sides although the U.S. plays a dominant role in the region. Finally, US-European cooperation will
be more effective in dealing with the rising power of China through engagement but also containment. The post Iraq War realities have shown
the Balkans politically and economically.
that it is no longer simply a question of adapting transatlantic institutions to new realities. The changing structure of relations between the U.S. and Europe implies that a new basis for the
The future course of relations will be determined above
all by U.S. policy towards Europe and the Atlantic Alliance. Wise policy can help forge a new, more enduring strategic partnership, through
which the two sides of the Atlantic cooperate in meeting the many major challenges and opportunities of the evolving world together. But a policy that takes Europe
for granted and routinely ignores or even belittles Europe an concerns, may force Europe to conclude that the costs
of continued alliance outweigh its benefits.
relationship must be found if transatlantic cooperation and partnership is to continue.
TTIP boosts US-EU relations and stops Russian expansionism
James Stavridis 14 11/19/14, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University,
Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Naval Institute, PhD and Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy, retired
United States Navy admiral who served as the 15th Commander, U.S. European Command and NATO's
16th Supreme Allied Commander Europe, “Vladimir Putin Hates the TTIP,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Stavridis
Flying under the international radar is one of the most potentially important agreements ever
negotiated across the broad Atlantic: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also known as the Transatlantic Free
Trade Agreement (TAFTA). It is a big basket of agreed-upon rules and regulations that would make the United States and much of Europe a free trade zone, perhaps
increasing overall trade by as much as 50 percent, according to the European Commission and the White House. Guess what?
Putin hates it. It’s not hard
to figure out why: it
would more tightly bind Europe to the United States, thus hurting Russian leverage. The TTIP is
a sensible agreement on economic grounds, broadly speaking. But it also holds enormous real value in the geopolitical
sphere. The increased linkages between the United States and our European allies and partners will stand
in direct opposition to Putin’s key strategy of driving a wedge between the United States and the EU as the
central members of the transatlantic community. But let’s back up: what are the key elements in the transatlantic relationship? First are values and demographics. The
ideas we cherish — democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to peaceful protest, gender and racial equality — came
largely from Europe. The Enlightenment provided much of the basic DNA of our nation’s intellectual heritage, not to mention many waves of immigrants. To this day,
numerous fundamental connections between the United States and Europe persist in our approaches to the civil rights, our judicial bodies, and the structures of our
basic political systems. And by the way, it is worth remembering that Russia stood largely outside the process of the Enlightenment, with notable cultural distinctions
resulting between Western European and Russian traditions. Second is geography. For the United States, one of Europe’s key values is its strategic position on the
edge of the Eurasian landmass. In my time as the NATO Supreme Allied Commander for global operations, people in the United States would occasionally chide me
for supporting bases in Europe that were, in their view, "the outmoded bastions of the Cold War." But as we have seen over the past decade, these bases are anything
but obsolete. Again and again, we have used bases in Europe for operations in Africa, the Levant, and Central Asia. Europe’s geographic position between the United
States and many of our security interests and allies to the south and west of Europe remains critical. Thirdly, the NATO alliance remains central to our military
operations overseas. Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, piracy, and cyber security are all areas in which our NATO allies have stood shoulder to shoulder
with us. We will never find another pool of ready partners with the numbers, military capability, and willingness to deploy that we have in Europe.We will never find
another pool of ready partners with the numbers, military capability, and willingness to deploy that we have in Europe. The Europeans spend $300 billion a year on
defense, and have millions of men and women — virtually all of them volunteers — in their standing armies and reserves. While Washington would prefer that
European nations spent the full 2 percent of GDP on defense that they have pledged, the fact remains that they collectively constitute a highly capable force under the
aegis of NATO. That fundamental security plank in the transatlantic bridge is not going anywhere, and the recent resurgence of the Russian Federation, with its
invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, have only amplified the NATO’s standing as the gold standard of security membership. Fourth is the economy, which
brings us to the TTIP. Some $4.2 trillion of trade flows across the Atlantic between the United States and Europe. It is the largest trading relationship in the $60
trillion global economy, dwarfing any other trade relationship for the United States. Yet this commerce continues to operate today without the benefit of a free trade
zone which would break down regulatory barriers and — according to the U.S. trade representative — add to the 13 million jobs already dependent on trade. The
TTIP is a promising idea, and a draft agreement could be finalized by the end of the year. Naturally, there are challenges. There is nervousness on both sides of the
Atlantic about various elements of the potential agreement — in particular, worries from Europe about the competitiveness of the continent’s agriculture sector; the
impact on energy production and the rise of fracking; protection of intellectual property; and the level of protection afforded to cultural assets. All of these outstanding
areas of concern have received considerable attention from the negotiators, and that there is guarded optimism they will be resolved according to conversations with
senior negotiators. There will also be obstacles to ratification. In Europe, the European Parliament will need to approve it, and there are questions being raised about
the need for national parliaments to be involved. In the United States, the Senate will have to ratify the treaty. And we would still need to address the status of Canada
and Mexico who currently enjoy a free trade zone via the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and presumably would be interested in TTIP
So how
does all this affect the geopolitics of the region — especially Russia’s fraught relationship with the United
inclusion. Likewise, in Europe: four nations outside of the EU would likewise be interested (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and tiny Liechtenstein).
States, NATO, and the EU? In addition to the economic benefits that would flow to both sides, there is clear geopolitical value.
An economically energized Atlantic community with a shared free trade zone is far more likely to
stand firm against Russian pressures (with natural gas closures, for example) designed to break up transatlantic
solidarity. A European economy that enjoys a bounce from the benefits of free trade creates a stronger
military partner for the United States, and provides more resources for defense spending.
The agreement could help improve the Atlantic community’s ability to share energy resources like
liquefied natural gas through free trade. Indeed, a negotiated and eventually ratified TTIP would be a
powerful signal to Putin’s Russia that Europe and the United States stand together in all dimensions —
values, politics, security, and trade. And if Putin hates it, TTIP probably makes sense.
Extinction—prefer consensus of academic, NATO, State and Defense all-stars
Daalder, et al 15 (Ivo Daalder, President, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and former U.S.
Permanent; Representative to NATO; Michele Flournoy, Chair, Center for a New American Security, and
former Under Secretary of Defense; John Herbst, Director, Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, the Atlantic
Council, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine; Jan Lodal, Distinguished Fellow and former President,
the Atlantic Council, and former Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense; Steven Pifer, Senior
Fellow, the Brookings Institution, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine; James Stavridis, Member of
the Board, the Atlantic Council, Dean, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and
former Supreme Allied Commander Europe; Strobe Talbott, President, the Brookings Institution, and
former Deputy Secretary of State; and Charles Wald, Member of the Board, the Atlantic Council, and
former Deputy Commander, U.S. European Command; “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting
Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do,” Atlantic Council, February 2015,
http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/sites/default/files/UkraineReport_February2015_FINAL.pdf)
The situation in eastern Ukraine is urgent and deteriorating. In recent weeks, the flow of heavy weapons has grown markedly, and
Moscow is no longer taking steps to hide this support from overhead imagery. Fighting along the line of contact increased
significantly during the week of January 19. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” indicated on January 23 that
the separatists would seek to take all of the Donetsk oblast. Large numbers of Russian forces remain deployed along the border,
ready to enter Ukraine on very short notice. Russian and separatist forces clearly have the capacity for
further offensive military action—whether to gain control of the entire Donbas region or, worse, to establish a land bridge between Russia and the
Crimea through effective control of southeastern Ukraine. Any such offensive move would set back the prospect for a peaceful
settlement and further destabilize Ukraine. The costs to the West of maintaining an independent Ukraine would then only grow, and
Moscow might be emboldened to take further actions. While these actions may not seem likely, they certainly are not
unthinkable. Few analysts at the end of 2013 would have considered a Russian military seizure of
Crimea or invasion of the Donbas “thinkable.” The post-World War II effort to create a safer Europe is
under serious threat. The 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Final Act, in which Russia agreed to respect the “inviolability of
borders” in Europe, has been blatantly violated. The United States, moreover, is a signatory to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine.
In that document, the United States, Britain and Russia committed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, and not to use or threaten to
use force against Ukraine. Russia has grossly violated those commitments, which were key to Kyiv’s decision to eliminate its nuclear weapons. The United States and
is not just a question of honoring U.S.
commitments under international agreements. It is important for preserving the credibility of
security assurances for the future, when they might play a role in resolving other nuclear
proliferation cases, such as Iran and North Korea. Above and beyond Ukraine—and more important
in strategic terms for the United States and NATO—is the need to respond to the challenge to European and
Eurasian security posed by the Kremlin’s aggressive policies. Russia has broken the cardinal rule of postwar European security, i.e.,
Britain should, in response, do more to robustly support Ukraine and penalize Russia. This
states must not use military force to change international borders. Putin and the Kremlin have proclaimed a unique and legally dubious right to “protect” ethnic
Russians and Russian speakers, wherever they are located and whatever their citizenship. This was the justification that Putin belatedly offered for Russia’s illegal
annexation of Crimea, despite the fact that there was no credible threat to ethnic Russians in Crimea. If
not constrained, such Russian policies
represent a clear danger to European security, the North Atlantic community, as well as to Russia’s
neighbors in Eurasia. Given the many other world challenges confronting the United States, especially problems in the broader Middle East and the
strategic challenge posed by the rise of China, Washington and other capitals have not devoted sufficient attention to the threat posed by Russia and its implications
for Western security. This must change. If the United States and NATO do not adequately support Ukraine, Moscow
may well conclude that the
kinds of tactics it has employed over the past year can be applied elsewhere. Of particular concern would
be Russian actions to destabilize Estonia or Latvia, each of which has a significant ethnic Russian
minority and both of which are NATO members to whom the United States and allies have an Article 5
commitment. The Kremlin has already demonstrated aggressive intent in the Baltics by kidnapping
an Estonian security official the day the NATO Wales summit ended. To be sure, there are issues on which the interests of the United States and the
West, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, coincide. These include preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, avoiding a return of the Taliban or chaos in
Afghanistan, the broader counterterrorism struggle, and controlling nuclear weapons and materials. But these interests should not outweigh the West’s interest in
The world has
faced this kind of challenge before. History makes clear that the only way to stop such aggression
from precipitating a regional or even worldwide conflagration is to deter and defend against it as
early as possible and not to be fooled by protestations of innocent motives or lack of further ambitions.
blocking Russian aggression that poses a threat not just to Ukraine, but also to the security of broader Europe and the transatlantic community.
TTIP Good – Solves Trade
TTIP causes spillover effects as big as the treaty
Stagnaro 14 [Carlo is senior fellow at Istituto Bruno Leoni. Since April 2014 he serves as an adviser
on energy and liberalization to Italy’s Minister for Economic Development. “In defence of TTIP: Good
for the economy – and for the climate”, http://www.energypost.eu/defence-ttip-good-economy-climate/,
7/7/15] BG
On top of that, given the size of the economies and the scope of the treaty, despite being formally only a
bilateral agreement, it is very likely that it would kick off a process whereby a global standard is set. It
would be very difficult for any other country to call for a change in the trade rules, if they are accepted
and enforced by such important countries/blocs as the US and the EU. In other words, TTIP may have
spillover effects that may end up being almost as important as the treaty itself.
TTIP boosts trade when econ crisis.
European Commission 15 [The European commission is the main site for European Union. “About
TTIP – basics, benefits, concerns”, http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/about-ttip/questions-andanswers/index_en.htm, 7/7/15]
TTIP would boost trade at a time of continuing economic crisis. That means more business opportunities,
more growth and more jobs. Lower prices, a wider variety of products to choose from and confidence
that products and services from across the Atlantic meet the highest safety standards would also
contribute to the prosperity of the over 800 million EU and US citizens.
Trade leads to a laundry list of benefits
European Commission 15 [The European commission is the main site for European Union. “About
TTIP – basics, benefits, concerns”, http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/about-ttip/questions-andanswers/index_en.htm, 7/7/15]
The EU is one of the world's most open economies. Open
trade: strengthens our economy creates jobs gives us more
choice and buying power as consumers helps our firms compete abroad. We are working hard to ensure
Europeans benefit even more from open trade and globalisation. As in any area of life, open trade may
affect each of us differently. We are working with EU governments, the European Parliament and civil
society to identify any potential negative effects early on in the process. This will help us manage them and take
possible measures to off-set them.
TTIP good – farming industry
TTIP benefits the farming industry
European Commission 15 [The European commission is the main site for European Union. “About
TTIP – basics, benefits, concerns”, http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/about-ttip/questions-andanswers/index_en.htm, 7/7/15]
EU exports to the US are mostly high-value products, like cheese, hams, wine, olive oil, spirits, and chocolate. High tariffs at
US customs - up to 30% - make some of these hard for Americans to afford - and difficult for European farmers
and firms to export. The US also faces customs tariffs in the EU on basic products like maize, soya beans,
and animal feed. This in turn raises costs for European farmers and food manufacturers. TTIP would
lower these customs duties - or get rid of them altogether US approval procedures and red tape can also
make it very difficult for EU exporters. At the moment, many apples and pears sold in Europe are effectively banned in the US.
TTIP Good – global trade & income
TTIP boosts trade and income around the world
European Commission 15 [The European commission is the main site for European Union. “About
TTIP – basics, benefits, concerns”, http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/about-ttip/questions-andanswers/index_en.htm, 7/7/15]
TTIP would not only boost trade and income in the EU and US but also in the rest of the world. An
independent study found TTIP could increase our trading partners' output by almost €100 billion. More
growth in the EU and the US would increase demand for exports of raw materials, components and
finished products from other countries. Aligning EU and US standards and regulations would mean
exporters in other countries would only have to comply with one set of rules instead of two. This would
make it easier for them to export and would help their economies. Aligning EU and US standards and
regulations could also provide the basis for high global standards, bringing benefits to consumers and
business alike.
Protectionism/retaliation now
PRISM and Encryption backdoor programs are costing US tech firms well over $35
billion through increasing protectionist backlash and shunning of US companies.
We must end NSA online surveillance to solve.
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn June 9, 2015, Castro is VP of ITIT; McQuinn is a research
assistant at ITFF, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S.
Competitiveness,” Information Tech and Innovation Foundation,
http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subvertsus-competitiveness, KEL
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 .4 The failure of U.S. policymakers to address surveillance concerns
over the last few years has buoyed foreign protectionism and hurt American businesses. 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 the ir 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
Surv harmed Relations
Surveillance has decked the relationship
Barker, Bertelsmann Foundation trans-Atlantic relations director, 2013
(Tyson, “BLOWN COVER: THE NSA AND THE UNRAVELING US-EU INTELLIGENCE
RELATIONSHIP”, 7-3, http://www.bfna.org/sites/default/files/BBrief%20Blown%20Cover%20%20The%20NSA%20and%20the%20Unraveling%20USEU%20Intelligence%20Relationship%20(3%20July%202013).pdf, ldg)
The EU has long pined for greater respect from Washington. Negotiations over data sharing were more than
discrete talks on limited framework agreements. They were a vehicle by which to develop a broader strategic relationship
based on equal partnership and mutual respect with a post-Lisbon Treaty EU. US officials often found the negotiations
tedious and exasperating. Since 2010, the administration and members of Congress have held extensive consultations with the European Commission
and waves of EP delegations to ensure them that the systems used for data collection and analysis are limited, carefully monitored, and operating under judiciously
crafted and transparent guidelines. Such assurances
went a long way toward repairing the US’s damaged image in
Europe. The recent disclosures have obliterated much of this effort . Even while negotiating an intricate framework for the
usage of narrowly defined classifications of personal data, the NSA was voraciously aggregating Europeans’ personal and institutional data across wide swaths of
The public debate on both sides of the Atlantic has
returned to the hubristic bravado characteristic of the George W. Bush era. Former NSA chief and CIA head Michael
territory. It will be difficult to justify this action as vital to US national security.
Hayden has stated that fourth-amendment privacy protections are not part of an “international treaty” and that Europeans should “look first and find out what their
own governments are doing”.20 For their part, Europeans brandish images from the 2007 German film “The Lives of Others”, which explored the deep human impact
of pervasive surveillance in authoritarian East Germany. In their eyes, USA stands for “United Stasi of America.”21 Secretary of State John Kerry’s comment that the
NSA’s alleged activities were “not unusual” reflects the indifference with which the US has treated the EU’s governing pathos.22 This
apathy could now
lead to a crisis of confidence . The Obama administration has touted the reparation of US’s global soft power as one of its greatest foreign-policy
achievements. How it handles relations with Europe in its wake could demonstrate whether that achievement is enduring.
Data privacy issues wreck cooperation
Global Post 2013
(“Are America's secretive ways destroying its relationship with Europe?”, 7-31,
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/130730/europe-data-wars-surveillance-nsasnowden, ldg)
It’s already casting a shadow over Europe’s most powerful leader — German Chancellor Angela Merkel — as well as jeopardizing transAtlantic agreements that Washington views as vital to the fight against terrorism, and threatening the
future of the world's biggest internet companies. Anger over the PRISM system — under which the US National Security
Agency claimed "direct access" to data stored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants — has boosted the positions of those seeking
tough new data-protection rules that would make it harder for the US authorities to get their hands on the
private details of European citizens. "I hope that PRISM has been a wake-up call," Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner,
said recently. "There is no area which lies outside the law in Europe, even when issues of security are involved." Outspoken in her criticism of the US cyber-snooping,
Reding has been leading efforts to update EU data privacy rules. " In Europe, data protection is a fundamental right. Citizens do not want
the secret service to listen to every phone call they make or read every email they write," she said in recent speech in Munich. "National security is important, but it
does not mean that anything goes and that fundamental rights no longer apply." Draft
EU data privacy rules drawn up by Reding's
office in 2011 were watered down by politicians who argued they would harm security and hamper
business. But the brouhaha over Snowden has prompted a turnaround, with powerful voices now demanding more protection.
Merkel has lent her highly influential voice to the demands for tougher rules. She’s publicly called for "very strict" European privacy laws that would force companies
such as Google and Facebook to keep European authorities informed of whom they share data with. "The protection of citizens' data must be ensured," she told ARD
television. With Germany's national elections looming in September, Merkel is under pressure to take a firm stance. Snowden's exposure of collusion between
Germany's BND spy agency and the NSA caused widespread outrage in a country where intrusion into private lives by secret services revives bad memories of the
Nazi Gestapo and Communist Stasi. Trailing Merkel in opinion polls, Germany's opposition has seized on the spy scandal. Social Democratic Party leader Peer
Steinbrueck has accused the chancellor of breaking her oath of office for failing to protect citizens from privacy violations by US intelligence. However, Merkel is far
A change of heart in the European
Parliament now seems certain to ensure that strict limits on how internet companies share European
citizens' data with foreign governments will be re-inserted into the proposed EU data-privacy legislation.
Lawmakers fearful of upsetting EU-US relations had opposed the so-called anti-FISA clause — named after the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the US government to monitor international phone and email conversations. Snowden has
changed their minds. "It's definitely a big step in the right direction," says Joe McNamee, director of the privacy campaign group European Digital
from the sole European politician pressed by public disquiet over PRISM to take a harder line.
Rights. "In the space of a few days, we went from being the only ones asking for this text to seeing the biggest groups in the European Parliament standing up and
saying it must be re-introduced. It was a pleasant trip into the mainstream for us.” The inclusion of the clause in the final EU law could have profound implications for
American tech firms. They could find themselves obliged by American legislation to share information about foreigners with government agencies at home, but facing
massive EU fines for passing on such data. The clause was removed from the bill originally drafted by Reding's office in 2011 after a bout of intense lobbying by the
Obama administration. The US authorities and American internet giants are continuing to mount a major lobbying campaign to dilute the legislation. "I've never seen
anything like it, such a powerful lobbying operation," Reding told Spain's El Pais newspaper last week. "The lobbies have 10 times more people than my team, there
are hundreds of lawyers' offices active on this and representatives paid by the big companies." The Snowden scandal has pushed American lobbyists onto the back
foot as European politicians call not just for tough new legislation, but also a rollback of existing rules that allow the sharing of information such as airline passenger
data or bank account details. Reding has also ordered a review of "safe-harbor" rules set up in the 1990s that — under the assumption that both sides of the Atlantic
shared broadly similar privacy standards — allow American companies to self-regulate their compliance with European laws under the supervision of the US Federal
Trade Commission. Germany's Conference of Data Protection Commissioners wrote to Merkel last week urging her to support a suspension of the safe-harbor
arrangements. "Supervisory authorities may suspend the transfer of data to such countries when there is a 'substantial likelihood' that the safe harbor principles ... are
being violated. This is now the case," the German authorities wrote. All
of this is casting a dark cloud over the recently launched
negotiations between the United States and European Union to create the world's largest free-trade zone.
Merkel intervened to persuade French President Francois Hollande not to block the first round of talks
over the PRISM scandal, but privacy issues seem certain to dog future progress.
US-EU Relations Impact Ext
Security cooperation with Europe solves nuclear war and multiple transnational
threats
Yannis Stivachtis 10, Director of International Studies Program @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State
University A. Stivachtis (Professor of Poli Sci & Ph.D. in Politics & International Relations from Lancaster
University), THE IMPERATIVE FOR TRANSATLANTIC COOPERATION,” The Research Institute for European
and American Studies, 2010, pg. http://www.rieas.gr/research-areas/global-issues/transatlanticstudies/78.html
There is no doubt that
US-European relations are in a period of transition , and that the stresses and strains of globalization are increasing both the
number and the seriousness of the challenges that confront transatlantic relations. The events of 9/11 and the Iraq War have added significantly to these stresses and strains. At the same
terrorism, the nuclearization of North Korea and especially Iran, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the
transformation of Russia into a stable and cooperative member of the international community, the growing power of China, the political and economic transformation
and integration of the Caucasian and Central Asian states, the integration and stabilization of the Balkan countries, the promotion of
peace and stability in the Middle East, poverty, climate change, AIDS and other emergent problems and situations
require further cooperation among countries at the regional, global and institutional levels. Therefore, cooperation between the U.S. and
Europe is more imperative than ever to deal effectively with these problems. It is fair to say that the challenges of
crafting a new relationship between the U.S. and the EU as well as between the U.S. and NATO are more regional than
global, but the implications of success or failure will be global. The transatlantic relationship is still in crisis, despite efforts to improve it
time, international
since the Iraq War. This is not to say that differences between the two sides of the Atlantic did not exist before the war. Actually, post-1945 relations between Europe and the U.S. were
fraught with disagreements and never free of crisis since the Suez crisis of 1956. Moreover, despite trans-Atlantic proclamations of solidarity in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. and Europe
parted ways on issues from global warming and biotechnology to peacekeeping and national missile defense. Questions such as, the future role of NATO and its relationship to the common
European Security and Defense policy (ESDP), or what constitutes terrorism and what the rights of captured suspected terrorists are, have been added to the list of US-European
if European leaders conclude that Europe must become
counterweight to the U.S., rather than a partner, it will be difficult to engage in the kind of open search for a
common ground than an elective partnership requires. Second, there is a risk that public opinion in both the U.S. and Europe will make it difficult even for
leaders who want to forge a new relationship to make the necessary accommodations. If both sides would actively work to heal the breach, a new opportunity could be created. A
vibrant transatlantic partnership remains a real possibility, but only if both sides make the necessary
political commitment. There are strong reasons to believe that the security challenges facing the U.S. and Europe are more shared than divergent. The most dramatic case is
disagreements. There are two reasons for concern regarding the transatlantic rift. First,
terrorism. Closely related is the common interest in halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the nuclearization of Iran and North Korea. This commonality of threats is clearly
perceived by publics on both sides of the Atlantic. Actually, Americans and Europeans see eye to eye on more issues than one would expect from reading newspapers and magazines. But while
elites on both sides of the Atlantic bemoan a largely illusory gap over the use of military force, biotechnology, and global warming, surveys of American and European public opinion highlight
sharp differences over global leadership, defense spending, and the Middle East that threaten the future of the last century’s most successful alliance.
There are other
important, shared interests as well. The transformation of Russia into a stable cooperative member of the
international community is a priority both for the U.S. and Europe. They also have an interest in promoting a stable regime in Ukraine. It is
necessary for the U.S. and EU to form a united front to meet these challenges because first, there is a risk that dangerous
materials related to WMD will fall into the wrong hands; and second, the spread of conflict along those countries’ periphery could
destabilize neighboring countries and provide safe havens for terrorists and other international criminal organizations. Likewise, in
the Caucasus and Central Asia both sides share a stake in promoting political and economic
transformation and integrating these states into larger communities such as the OSCE. This would also minimize the risk of instability spreading and
prevent those countries of becoming havens for international terrorists and criminals. Similarly, there is a common interest in integrating the Balkans politically and economically.
Dealing with Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as other political issues in the Middle East are also of a great
concern for both sides although the U.S. plays a dominant role in the region. Finally, US-European cooperation will be more effective in
dealing with the rising power of China through engagement but also containment. The post Iraq War realities have shown that it is no longer simply a question
of adapting transatlantic institutions to new realities. The changing structure of relations between the U.S. and Europe implies that a new basis for the relationship must be found if
transatlantic cooperation and partnership is to continue.
The future course of relations will be determined above all by U.S.
policy towards Europe and the Atlantic Alliance. Wise policy can help forge a new, more enduring strategic partnership, through which the two sides of the
a policy that takes Europe for granted and
routinely ignores or even belittles Europe an concerns, may force Europe to conclude that the costs of continued
alliance outweigh its benefits.
Atlantic cooperate in meeting the many major challenges and opportunities of the evolving world together. But
Cooperation with Europe solves nuclear terror and prolif
Stivachtis 10 – Director of International Studies Program @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State
University [Dr. Yannis. A. Stivachtis (Professor of Poli Sci & Ph.D. in Politics & International Relations
from Lancaster University), THE IMPERATIVE FOR TRANSATLANTIC COOPERATION,” The Research
Institute for European and American Studies, 2010, pg. http://www.rieas.gr/research-areas/globalissues/transatlantic-studies/78.html]
There is no doubt that US-European
relations are in a period of transition, and that the stresses and strains of globalization are
increasing both the number and the seriousness of the challenges that confront transatlantic relations. The events of 9/11 and the Iraq War have added significantly
to these stresses and strains. At the same time, international terrorism, the nuclearization
of North Korea and especially Iran, the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the transformation of Russia into a stable and cooperative member of the
international community, the growing power of China, the political and economic transformation and integration of the Caucasian and
Central Asian states, the integration and stabilization of the Balkan countries, the promotion of peace and stability in the Middle
East, poverty, climate change, AIDS and other emergent problems and situations require further cooperation among
countries at the regional, global and institutional levels. Therefore, cooperation between the U.S. and Europe is more imperative
than ever to deal effectively with these problems. It is fair to say that the challenges of crafting a new relationship
between the U.S. and the EU as well as between the U.S. and NATO are more regional than global, but the implications
of success or failure will be global. The transatlantic relationship is still in crisis, despite efforts to improve it since the Iraq War. This is not to say
that differences between the two sides of the Atlantic did not exist before the war. Actually, post-1945 relations between Europe and the U.S. were fraught with
disagreements and never free of crisis since the Suez crisis of 1956. Moreover, despite trans-Atlantic proclamations of solidarity in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S.
and Europe parted ways on issues from global warming and biotechnology to peacekeeping and national missile defense. Questions such as, the future role of NATO
and its relationship to the common European Security and Defense policy (ESDP), or what constitutes terrorism and what the rights of captured suspected terrorists
are, have been added to the list of US-European disagreements. There are two reasons for concern regarding the transatlantic rift. First, if European leaders
conclude that Europe must become counterweight to the U.S., rather than a partner, it will be difficult to engage in the kind of open search for a common ground
than an elective partnership requires. Second, there is a risk that public opinion in both the U.S. and Europe will make it difficult even for leaders who want to forge
a new relationship to make the necessary accommodations. If both sides would actively work to heal the breach, a new opportunity could be created. A
vibrant
transatlantic partnership remains a real possibility, but only if both sides make the necessary political
commitment. There are strong reasons to believe that the security challenges facing the U.S. and Europe are more shared than divergent. The most
dramatic case is terrorism. Closely related is the common interest in halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the nuclearization of Iran and North
Korea. This commonality of threats is clearly perceived by publics on both sides of the Atlantic. Actually, Americans and Europeans see eye to eye on more issues
than one would expect from reading newspapers and magazines. But while elites on both sides of the Atlantic bemoan a largely illusory gap over the use of military
force, biotechnology, and global warming, surveys of American and European public opinion highlight sharp differences over global leadership, defense spending,
and the Middle East that threaten the future of the last century’s most successful alliance. There
are other important, shared interests as well.
The transformation of Russia into a stable cooperative member of the international community is a priority both for the
U.S. and Europe. They also have an interest in promoting a stable regime in Ukraine. It is necessary for the U.S. and EU to form
a united front to meet these challenges because first, there is a risk that dangerous materials related to WMD will fall
into the wrong hands; and second, the spread of conflict along those countries’ periphery could destabilize
neighboring countries and provide safe havens for terrorists and other international criminal organizations. Likewise, in the
Caucasus and Central Asia both sides share a stake in promoting political and economic transformation
and integrating these states into larger communities such as the OSCE. This would also minimize the risk of instability spreading and prevent those
countries of becoming havens for international terrorists and criminals. Similarly, there is a common interest in integrating the Balkans politically and economically.
Dealing with Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as other political issues in the Middle East are also of a great concern for both sides
although the U.S. plays a dominant role in the region. Finally, US-European cooperation will be more effective in dealing with the rising power of China through
engagement but also containment. The post Iraq War realities have shown that it is no longer simply a question of adapting transatlantic institutions to new
realities. The changing structure of relations between the U.S. and Europe implies that a new basis for the relationship must be found if transatlantic cooperation
and partnership is to continue. The future course of relations will be determined above all by U.S. policy towards Europe and the Atlantic Alliance. Wise policy can
help forge a new, more enduring strategic partnership, through which the two sides of the Atlantic cooperate in meeting the many major challenges and
opportunities of the evolving world together. But a
policy that takes Europe for granted and routinely ignores or even
belittles European concerns, may force Europe to conclude that the costs of continued alliance
outweigh its benefits.
Nuclear terrorism is highly likely
Plame ’14 (Nuclear terrorism: Most immediate and extreme threat to global security 143686 2 By
Valerie Plame - 09/26/14 07:00 AM EDT A former career covert CIA operations officer, Plame worked to
protect U.S. national security and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. She is now
a New York Times best-selling author and a leader of the international Global Zero movement for the
elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Yet this mounting violence and instability pales in comparison to what could be wrought by nucleararmed terrorists. We know that the Islamic State group has the means and motive to attain weapons
of mass destruction. They have an appetite for shocking demonstrations and indiscriminate killing,
and have already seized low-grade nuclear material from a facility in Mosul. They are acquiring the ability to
build radioactive dirty bombs that could cause major health and economic damage. With reports of
escalating funding and recruitment of citizens from every continent, and ties to radicals in nuclear
weapons-states such as Pakistan, it is increasingly conceivable that weapons-grade materials – or
even a ready-made nuclear device – could fall into their hands. If that happens, they would not hesitate
to use them – possibly at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. There are more than 16,000 nuclear weapons in the
world and enough highly-enriched uranium and plutonium to make hundreds of thousands more. We can do our best to prevent isolated
incidents in which terrorists buy, build or steal them – but those efforts are stop-gap at best, and we won’t know if we missed something until
it’s too late.
Nuclear terrorism is all but inevitable unless we work quickly and urgently to secure all
nuclear materials and eradicate all nuclear weapons. To eliminate the risk we have to drain the swamp.
Terrorism causes full scale nuclear wars
Hellman ‘8 (Martin E. Hellman* * Martin E. Hellman is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. His current project applies risk analysis to
nuclear deterrence
Nuclear proliferation and the specter of nuclear terrorism are creating additional possibilities for
triggering a nuclear war. If an American (or Russian) city were devastated by an act of nuclear terrorism, the
public outcry for immediate, decisive action would be even stronger than Kennedy had to deal with
when the Cuban missiles first became known to the American public. While the action would likely not
be directed against Russia, it might be threatening to Russia (e.g., on its borders) or one of its allies and
precipitate a crisis that resulted in a full-scale nuclear war. Terrorists with an apocalyptic mindset might
even attempt to catalyze a full-scale nuclear war by disguising their act to look like an attack by the U.S. or
Russia.
Prolif causes extinction- it will be fast and dangerous
Kroenig ’12 (Matthew Kroenig: The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future? NPEC
asked Council on Foreign Relations Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow and Georgetown University assistant
professor of government Matthew Kroenig to review the bidding. His take and bottom line is that such
nuclear optimism always was strained, that it remains far less popular out of academe than in and with
cause. May 26, 2012 AUTHOR: Matthew Kroenig: Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown
University and Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations The History of Proliferation
Optimism (PDF) 173.80 KB The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future? Prepared for
the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center)
The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in
possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there is a
catastrophic nuclear war. A nuclear exchange between the two superpowers during the Cold War could have arguably resulted in human
extinction and a nuclear exchange between states with smaller nuclear arsenals, such as India and Pakistan, could still result in millions of deaths and casualties,
billions of dollars of economic devastation, environmental degradation, and a parade of other horrors. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare
once. In 1945, the United States used one nuclear weapon each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many
analysts point to
sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it
would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again. After all, analysts in the 1990s
argued that worldwide economic downturns like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to
be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting in the later 1990s and the Great Recession of the late
Naughts.[53] This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used in my lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new
nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure-second strike capability. In this
context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if
Iran acquires nuclear weapons neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large
arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating
counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but ,
when it first crosses the nuclear
threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are
at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might
believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a
preemptive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities and eliminate the threat of nuclear war against Israel. Indeed, this incentive
might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action.
Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose
‘em pressures. That is, if Tehran believes that Israel might launch a preemptive strike, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire
nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise
attack.[54] If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first
than to go second. In a future Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a
devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, there is a risk of nuclear war. Rational
deterrence theory assumes
nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders that would not intentionally launch a suicidal
nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the
future. For example, Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains
leaders who genuinely hold millenarian religious worldviews who could one day ascend to power and have their finger on the nuclear trigger. We
cannot
rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, one leader will choose to launch
a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality,
however, to imagine a nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of
international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. This
leads to the credibility problem that is at the heart of modern deterrence theory: how can you threaten to launch a suicidal nuclear war? Deterrence theorists have
devised at least two answers to this question. First, as stated above, leaders can choose to launch a limited nuclear war.[55] This strategy might be especially
attractive to states in a position of conventional military inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States
was willing to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority in continental Europe. As Russia’s
conventional military power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear use in its strategic doctrine. Indeed,
Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to deescalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals
openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above leaders can make
a “threat that leaves something to chance.”[56] They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk
of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents could have led to war.[57] When we think about
future nuclear crisis dyads, such as India and Pakistan and Iran and Israel, there are fewer sources of stability that existed during the Cold War, meaning that
there is a very real risk that a future Middle East crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange.
Nuclear terrorism. The spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism.[58] It used to be said that “terrorists want a lot of people watching,
not a lot of people dead,” but the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed expert perceptions of the terrorist threat.[59] September 11th demonstrated
that Al Qaeda and other modern terrorist groups are interested in imposing massive casualties and there are few better ways of killing large numbers of civilians
than detonating a nuclear weapon in a major metropolitan area. And, while September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have
been much worse had Osama Bin Laden been able to acquire nuclear weapons. Osama Bin Laden declared it a “religious duty” for Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear
weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.[60] Unlike states, which can be deterred,
there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them. Indeed, in recent years, many U.S. politicians and security analysts have
agreed that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security.[61] Wanting nuclear weapons and actually possessing them, however, are two
different things and many analysts have pointed out the tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.[62]
Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear
weapons, or the fissile material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to
terrorists, but, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group with nuclear weapons increases. Some fear,
for example, that Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no
state would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might be vulnerable to theft,
allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists. There is evidence, for example, that
representatives from Pakistan’s atomic energy establishment met with Al Qaeda members to discuss a possible nuclear deal.[63] Finally, a nuclear-armed state
could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nuclear weapons problem. U.S. officials are currently very concerned about what would
happen with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a
history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power. The regime change that Washing has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a
nightmare if Iran had nuclear weapons and a break down in authority forced us to worry about the fate of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Regional instability: The spread of
nuclear weapons also emboldens nuclear powers contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct military attack from other
states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more aggressive in the
conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons provide a shield under which states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed,
international relations theories about the “stability-instability paradox” maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.[64]
Historically, we have seen that the spread of nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses
have demonstrated that, after controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon states and
that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have less experience with nuclear diplomacy.[65] Similarly, research on internal decisionmaking in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to
initiate militarized disputes against India.[66] Currently, Iran restrains its foreign policy because it fears a major military retaliation from the United States or Israel,
but with nuclear weapons it could feel free to push harder. A nuclear-armed Iran would likely step up support to terrorist and proxy groups and engage in more
aggressive coercive diplomacy. With a nuclear-armed Iran increasingly throwing its weight around in the region, we could witness an even more crisis prone Middle
East. And in a poly-nuclear Middle East with Israel, Iran, and, in the future, possibly other states, armed with nuclear weapons, any one of those crises could result in
a catastrophic nuclear exchange. Nuclear
proliferation can also lead to regional instability due to preventive strikes
against nuclear programs. States often conduct preventive military strikes to prevent adversaries from
acquiring nuclear weapons . Historically, the United States attacked German nuclear facilities during World War II, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor
in Iraq in 1981, Iraq bombed Iran’s Bushehr reactors in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and Iran returned the favor against an Iraqi nuclear plant, a U.S.-led
international coalition destroyed Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure in the first Gulf War in 1991, and Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. These strikes have
not led to extensive conflagrations in the past, but we might not be so lucky in the future. At the time of writing in 2012, the United States and Israel were polishing
military plans to attack Iran’s nuclear program and some experts maintain that such a strike could very well lead to a wider war in the Middle East. Constrained
freedom of action. The spread of nuclear weapons also disadvantages American’s national security by constraining U.S. freedom of action. As the most powerful
country on the planet, with the ability to project power to every corner of the globe, the United States has the ability to threaten or protect every other state in the
international system. This is a significant source of strategic leverage and maintaining freedom of action is an important objective of U.S. national security
policy.[67] As nuclear weapons spread, however, America’s military freedom of action is constrained. The United States can use or credibly threaten to use force
against nonnuclear states. The threat of military action against nuclear-armed states is much less credible, however, because nuclear-armed states can deter U.S.
military action with the threat of nuclear retaliation. In January of 2012, for example, Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow Persian Gulf waterway
through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows, and the United States issued a counter-threat, declaring that Washington would use force to reopen the Strait. If
Iran had had nuclear weapons, however, Washington’s threats would have been much less credible. Would a U.S. President really be willing to risk nuclear war with
Iran in order to reopen the Strait? Maybe. But, maybe not. While the United States might not be deterred in every contingency against a nuclear-armed state, it is
clear that, at a minimum, the spread of nuclear weapons greatly complicates U.S. decisions to use force. Undermines alliances: The spread of nuclear weapons also
complicates U.S. alliance relationships. Washington uses the promise of military protection as a way to cement its alliance structures. U.S. allies depend on
America’s protection, giving Washington influence over allied states’ foreign policies. Historically, the United States has offered, and threatened to retract, the
security guarantee carrot to prevent allied states from acting contrary to its interests. As nuclear weapons spread, however, alliances held together by promises of
military protection are undermined in two ways. First, U.S. allies may doubt the credibility of Washington’s commitments to provide a military defense against
nuclear-armed states, leading them to weaken ties with their patron. As Charles de Gaulle famously asked about the U.S. commitment to defend France from the
Soviet Union during the Cold War, would Washington be willing to trade New York for Paris? Similarly, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, U.S. partners in the Middle
East, such as Israel and Gulf States, will question Washington’s resolve to defend them from Iran. After all, if the United States proves unwilling to use force to
prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, would it really be willing to fight a war against a nuclear-armed Iran? Qatar, for example, already appears to be
hedging its bets, loosening ties to Washington and warming to Tehran. Second, nuclear proliferation could encourage client states to acquire nuclear weapons
themselves, giving them greater security independence and making them less dependable allies. According to many scholars, the acquisition of the force de frappe
was instrumental in permitting the French Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gualle to pursue a foreign policy path independent from Washington at
NATO.[68] Similarly, it is possible that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other regional states will acquire independent nuclear capabilities to counter Iran’s nuclear arsenal,
greatly destabilizing an already unstable region and threatening Washington’s ability to influence regional dynamics. Further proliferation. Nuclear
proliferation poses an additional threat to international peace and security because it causes further
proliferation. As former Secretary of State George Schultz once said, “ proliferation begets proliferation .”[69] When one
country acquires nuclear weapons, its regional adversaries, feeling threatened by its neighbor’s new
nuclear capabilities, are more likely to attempt to acquire nuclear weapons in response. Indeed, the history of
nuclear proliferation can be read as a chain reaction of proliferation. The United States acquired nuclear weapons in response to Nazi Germany’s crash nuclear
program. The Soviet Union and China acquired nuclear weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The United Kingdom and France went nuclear to protect
themselves from the Soviet Union. India’s bomb was meant to counter China and it, in turn, spurred Pakistan to join the nuclear club. Today, we worry that, if Iran
acquires nuclear weapons, other Middle Eastern countries, such as Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, might desire nuclear capabilities, triggering an arms race in
a strategically important and volatile region.
US-EU relations key to solve warming
Larivé 12 (Maxime Henri André Larivé, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the EU Center of Excellence at
the University of Miami, “Obama 2: Future Implications for EU,” Miami - Florida European Union Center
of Excellence - US Relations, November, Vol. 12, No. 8, http://aei.pitt.edu/43440/1/Larive_EUUSunderObama.pdf, CMR)
As demonstrated during the 15 th session of the Confer ence of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change in 2009, or COP15, followed by the COP16 in 2010, and COP17 in 2011, the EU and US were not in sync. The lack
of unity has had a considerable role on the failure of all three UN meetings on Climate Change. The most
obvious was the COP15 taking place in Copenhagen, where for the first time the ‘Rest’ – BRICS countries led by China – did balance the
influence and power of a divided West, which affected the outcomes of the convent ion. Since
then, the Europeans have been
increasing their diplomatic reach in order to develop strategic partnerships and push for a global set of
rules on carbon emissions. 40 Quite interestingly, in the mind of Americans, climate change is still closely li nked to energy
independence. The latest energy revolution taking place in the US, shale gas, has completely changed the dynamics. The US is on its way to
become the largest producer of gas by 2020 well beyond Russia. 41 The narrative in the US has been that shale gas not only will permit to lower
carbon emissions, but is also environmental friendly. Such assumption has been a strong point of debate within the specialized literature. 42
For instance, Europeans, at the exception of Poland, have stopped the produc tion of shale gas due to the environmental risks associated with
the extraction process, so - called fracking, which is a mix of sand, water and undisclosed chemicals underground in order to release the
unconventional gas stacked in the rocks. In order to ad dress the problem of gas emissions, which have been identified as the major cause of
global warming, two solutions are currently on the table: carbon tax or Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). 43 The carbon tax has been advanced as
the best option to regulate gas emissions. Even Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, was calling governments to introduce a carbon tax, or a
minimum price for CO2, because “the ETS was failing to deliver sufficient incentives to kickstart expensive technologies such as carbon capture
a nd storage.” 44 Furthermore, the current financial crisis has hurt the credibility of a solid and reliable trading system considering the flaws of
market - based mechanisms. Thus, a tax on carbon would be a more accurate way to calculate the actual emissions. In the case of the EU, it has
been argued that a carbon tax would have the greatest impact on the “green growth” of the EU, rather than the ETS, which has been the
flagship of the EU climate policy instrument. 45 Despite a lack of unity in the US, the politi cs tend to favor a trading scheme rather than a tax.
Even though both actors may disagree on the future of shale gas and on the creation of carbon tax, it
second mandate of President Obama, the
is undeniable that under the
EU and the US must work closely together in order to push for new sets
of global regulations in order to address climate change. The discussion over carbon tax or ETS will be
crucial in the coming four years. Europeans are keen on pushing new norms, but only with the support of
the US can they be transferred and adopted by other countries and global institutions.
Warming is the largest risk of extinction
Deibel 07 – professor of IR at National War College (Terry L. Deibel, Foreign Affairs Strategy, “Conclusion: American Foreign
Affairs Strategy Today Anthropogenic – caused by CO2”)
there is one major existential threat to American security (as well as prosperity) of a nonviolent nature, which, though far in the future, demands urgent
action. It is the threat of global warming to the stability of the climate upon which all earthly life
depends. Scientists worldwide have been observing the gathering of this threat for three decades now, and what was once a mere
possibility has passed through probability to near certainty. Indeed not one of more than 900 articles on
climate change published in refereed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003 doubted that anthropogenic
warming is occurring. “In legitimate scientific circles,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert, “it is virtually impossible to find
evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.” Evidence from a vast international scientific monitoring effort accumulates
Finally,
almost weekly, as this sample of newspaper reports shows: an international panel predicts “brutal droughts, floods and violent storms across the planet over the next century”; climate change could “literally alter ocean currents,
wipe away huge portions of Alpine Snowcaps and aid the spread of cholera and malaria”; “glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting much faster than expected, and…worldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier
than a decade ago”; “rising sea temperatures have been accompanied by a significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes”; “NASA scientists have concluded from direct temperature measurements that 2005 was the
Earth’s warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths
and 5 million illnesses each year” as disease spreads; “widespread bleaching from Texas to Trinidad…killed broad swaths of corals” due to a 2-degree rise in sea
temperatures. “The world is slowly disintegrating ,” concluded Inuit hunter Noah Metuq, who lives 30 miles from the Arctic Circle. “They call it climate change…but we just call it breaking
hottest year on record, with 1998 a close second”; “
up.” From the founding of the first cities some 6,000 years ago until the beginning of the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained relatively constant at about 280 parts per million (ppm). At present
Unfortunately, atmospheric CO2 lasts about a
century, so there is no way immediately to reduce levels, only to slow their increase, we are thus in for
significant global warming; the only debate is how much and how serous the effects will be. As the newspaper stories
quoted above show, we are already experiencing the effects of 1-2 degree warming in more violent storms, spread of disease, mass die offs
of plants and animals, species extinction, and threatened inundation of low-lying countries like the Pacific nation of Kiribati and the
Netherlands at a warming of 5 degrees or less the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could disintegrate, leading to a sea
level of rise of 20 feet that would cover North Carolina’s outer banks, swamp the southern third of Florida, and inundate Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village. Another
catastrophic effect would be the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps the winter
weather in Europe far warmer than its latitude would otherwise allow. Economist William Cline once estimated the damage to the United States
alone from moderate levels of warming at 1-6 percent of GDP annually; severe warming could cost 13-26 percent of GDP. But the most frightening scenario is runaway
they are accelerating toward 400 ppm, and by 2050 they will reach 500 ppm, about double pre-industrial levels.
greenhouse warming, based on positive feedback from the buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere
that is both caused by and causes hotter surface temperatures. Past ice age transitions, associated with only 5-10 degree changes in average global
temperatures, took place in just decades, even though no one was then pouring ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Faced with this specter, the best one can conclude is that “humankind’s
continuing enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect is akin to playing Russian roulette with the
earth’s climate and humanity’s life support system. At worst, says physics professor Marty Hoffert of New York University, “we’re just going to
burn everything up; we’re going to heat the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous
when there were crocodiles at the poles, and then everything will collapse.” During the Cold War, astronomer Carl Sagan popularized a
theory of nuclear winter to describe how a thermonuclear war between the Untied States and the Soviet Union would not only destroy both countries but possibly end life on this planet. Global warming is
the post-Cold War era’s equivalent of nuclear winter at least as serious and considerably better supported scientifically. Over the
long run it puts dangers form terrorism and traditional military challenges to shame. It is a threat not only to the security and prosperity to the United
States, but potentially to the continued existence of life on this planet.
Internet Fragmentation Add-on
2AC Fragmentation Add-on
US online surveillance risks fragmenting the internet, harming the US economy and
internet innovation
Matthew Taylor, Nick Hopkins and Jemima Kiss November 1, 2013, “NSA surveillance may cause
breakup of internet, warn experts,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/nsasurveillance-cause-internet-breakup-edward-snowden, KEL
The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is leading to the breakup of the internet
as countries scramble to protect private or commercially sensitive emails and phone records from UK and
US security services, according to experts and academics. They say moves by countries, such as Brazil and Germany,
to encourage regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US are likely to be the
first steps in a fundamental shift in the way the internet works. The change could potentially hinder
economic growth. "States may have few other options than to follow in Brazil's path," said Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute.
"This would be expensive, and likely to reduce the rapid rate of innovation that has driven the
development of the internet to date … But if states cannot trust that their citizens' personal data – as well as
sensitive commercial and government information – will not otherwise be swept up in giant surveillance
operations, this may be a price they are willing to pay." Since the Guardian's revelations about the scale of state surveillance,
Brazil's government has published ambitious plans to promote Brazilian networking technology, encourage regional internet traffic to be routed
locally, and is moving to set up a secure national email service. In India, it has been reported that government employees are being advised not to
use Gmail and last month, Indian diplomatic staff in London were told to use typewriters rather than computers when writing up sensitive
documents. In Germany, privacy commissioners have called for a review of whether Europe's internet traffic can be kept within the EU – and by
implication out of the reach of British and US spies.
Fragmentation destroys innovation – that’s key to solve all collective problems
Genachowski 13 (Chair-FCC, 4/16, "The Plot to Block Internet Freedom",
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/16/plot_block_internet_freedom?page=full)
The Internet has created an extraordinary new democratic forum for people around the world to express
their opinions. It is revolutionizing global access to information: Today, more than 1 billion people
worldwide have access to the Internet, and at current growth rates, 5 billion people -- about 70 percent of
the world's population -- will be connected in five years. But this growth trajectory is not inevitable, and
threats are mounting to the global spread of an open and truly "worldwide" web. The expansion of
the open Internet must be allowed to continue: The mobile and social media revolutions are critical
not only for democratic institutions' ability to solve the collective problems of a shrinking world ,
but also to a dynamic and innovative global economy that depends on financial transparency and
the free flow of information. The threats to the open Internet were on stark display at last December's
World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, where the United States fought
attempts by a number of countries -- including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia -- to give a U.N.
organization, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), new regulatory authority over the
Internet. Ultimately, over the objection of the United States and many others, 89 countries voted to
approve a treaty that could strengthen the power of governments to control online content and deter
broadband deployment. In Dubai, two deeply worrisome trends came to a head. First, we see that the
Arab Spring and similar events have awakened nondemocratic governments to the danger that the
Internet poses to their regimes. In Dubai, they pushed for a treaty that would give the ITU's
imprimatur to governments' blocking or favoring of online content under the guise of preventing
spam and increasing network security. Authoritarian countries' real goal is to legitimize content
regulation, opening the door for governments to block any content they do not like, such as political
speech. Second, the basic commercial model underlying the open Internet is also under threat. In
particular, some proposals, like the one made last year by major European network operators, would
change the ground rules for payments for transferring Internet content. One species of these proposals is
called "sender pays" or "sending party pays." Since the beginning of the Internet, content creators -individuals, news outlets, search engines, social media sites -- have been able to make their content
available to Internet users without paying a fee to Internet service providers. A sender-pays rule would
change that, empowering governments to require Internet content creators to pay a fee to connect with an
end user in that country. Sender pays may look merely like a commercial issue, a different way to divide
the pie. And proponents of sender pays and similar changes claim they would benefit Internet deployment
and Internet users. But the opposite is true: If a country imposed a payment requirement, content creators
would be less likely to serve that country. The loss of content would make the Internet less attractive and
would lessen demand for the deployment of Internet infrastructure in that country. Repeat the process in a
few more countries, and the growth of global connectivity -- as well as its attendant benefits for
democracy -- would slow dramatically. So too would the benefits accruing to the global economy .
Without continuing improvements in transparency and information sharing, the innovation that springs
from new commercial ideas and creative breakthroughs is sure to be severely inhibited . To their
credit, American Internet service providers have joined with the broader U.S. technology industry,
civil society, and others in opposing these changes. Together, we were able to win the battle in
Dubai over sender pays, but we have not yet won the war. Issues affecting global Internet openness,
broadband deployment, and free speech will return in upcoming international forums, including an
important meeting in Geneva in May, the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum. The massive
investment in wired and wireless broadband infrastructure in the United States demonstrates that
preserving an open Internet is completely compatible with broadband deployment. According to a recent
UBS report, annual wireless capital investment in the United States increased 40 percent from 2009 to
2012, while investment in the rest of the world has barely inched upward. And according to the
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, more fiber-optic cable was laid in the United States
in 2011 and 2012 than in any year since 2000, and 15 percent more than in Europe. All Internet users lose
something when some countries are cut off from the World Wide Web. Each person who is unable to
connect to the Internet diminishes our own access to information. We become less able to understand the
world and formulate policies to respond to our shrinking planet. Conversely, we gain a richer
understanding of global events as more people connect around the world, and those societies nurturing
nascent democracy movements become more familiar with America's traditions of free speech and
pluralism. That's why we believe that the Internet should remain free of gatekeepers and that no entity -public or private -- should be able to pick and choose the information web users can receive. That is a
principle the United States adopted in the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 Open Internet
Order. And it's why we are deeply concerned about arguments by some in the United States that
broadband providers should be able to block, edit, or favor Internet traffic that travels over their networks,
or adopt economic models similar to international sender pays. We must preserve the Internet as the most
open and robust platform for the free exchange of information ever devised. Keeping the Internet open is
perhaps the most important free speech issue of our time.
That makes extinction inevitable
Eagleman 10 [David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the
Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law and author of Sum
(Canongate). Nov. 9, 2010, “ Six ways the internet will save civilization,”
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/12/start/apocalypse-no]
Many great civilisations have fallen, leaving nothing but cracked ruins and scattered genetics. Usually
this results from: natural disasters, resource depletion, economic meltdown, disease, poor
information flow and corruption . But we’re luckier than our predecessors because we command a
technology that no one else possessed: a rapid communication network that finds its highest
expression in the internet. I propose that there are six ways in which the net has vastly reduced the
threat of societal collapse. Epidemics can be deflected by telepresence One of our more dire prospects
for collapse is an infectious-disease epidemic. Viral and bacterial epidemics precipitated the fall of the
Golden Age of Athens, the Roman Empire and most of the empires of the Native Americans. The
internet can be our key to survival because the ability to work telepresently can inhibit microbial
transmission by reducing human-to-human contact. In the face of an otherwise devastating epidemic,
businesses can keep supply chains running with the maximum number of employees working from home.
This can reduce host density below the tipping point required for an epidemic. If we are well prepared
when an epidemic arrives, we can fluidly shift into a self-quarantined society in which microbes fail
due to host scarcity. Whatever the social ills of isolation, they are worse for the microbes than for us. The
internet will predict natural disasters We are witnessing the downfall of slow central control in the
media: news stories are increasingly becoming user-generated nets of up-to-the-minute information.
During the recent California wildfires, locals went to the TV stations to learn whether their
neighbourhoods were in danger. But the news stations appeared most concerned with the fate of celebrity
mansions, so Californians changed their tack: they uploaded geotagged mobile-phone pictures, updated
Facebook statuses and tweeted. The balance tipped: the internet carried news about the fire more
quickly and accurately than any news station could. In this grass-roots, decentralised scheme, there
were embedded reporters on every block, and the news shockwave kept ahead of the fire. This head start
could provide the extra hours that save us. If the Pompeiians had had the internet in 79AD, they could
have easily marched 10km to safety, well ahead of the pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius. If the
Indian Ocean had the Pacific’s networked tsunami-warning system, South-East Asia would look
quite different today. Discoveries are retained and shared Historically, critical information has
required constant rediscovery. Collections of learning -- from the library at Alexandria to the entire
Minoan civilisation -- have fallen to the bonfires of invaders or the wrecking ball of natural disaster.
Knowledge is hard won but easily lost. And information that survives often does not spread. Consider
smallpox inoculation: this was under way in India, China and Africa centuries before it made its way to
Europe. By the time the idea reached North America, native civilisations who needed it had already
collapsed. The net solved the problem. New discoveries catch on immediately; information spreads
widely. In this way, societies can optimally ratchet up, using the latest bricks of knowledge in their
fortification against risk. Tyranny is mitigated Censorship of ideas was a familiar spectre in the last
century, with state-approved news outlets ruling the press, airwaves and copying machines in the USSR,
Romania, Cuba, China, Iraq and elsewhere. In many cases, such as Lysenko’s agricultural despotism in
the USSR, it directly contributed to the collapse of the nation. Historically, a more successful
strategy has been to confront free speech with free speech -- and the internet allows this in a natural
way. It democratises the flow of information by offering access to the newspapers of the world, the
photographers of every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Some posts are full of doctoring and
dishonesty whereas others strive for independence and impartiality -- but all are available to us to sift
through. Given the attempts by some governments to build firewalls, it’s clear that this benefit of the net
requires constant vigilance. Human capital is vastly increased Crowdsourcing brings people together
to solve problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the world’s population is involved. We need
expand human capital. Most of the world not have access to the education afforded a small minority. For
every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who has educational opportunities, uncountable
others do not. This squandering of talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of
problem solvers. The net opens the gates education to anyone with a computer. A motivated teen
anywhere on the planet can walk through the world’s knowledge -- from the webs of Wikipedia to the
curriculum of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The new human capital will serve us well when we confront
existential threats we’ve never imagined before. Energy expenditure is reduced Societal collapse
can often be understood in terms of an energy budget: when energy spend outweighs energy return,
collapse ensues. This has taken the form of deforestation or soil erosion; currently, the worry involves
fossil-fuel depletion. The internet addresses the energy problem with a natural ease. Consider the
massive energy savings inherent in the shift from paper to electrons -- as seen in the transition from the
post to email. Ecommerce reduces the need to drive long distances to purchase products. Delivery
trucks are more eco-friendly than individuals driving around, not least because of tight packaging and
optimisation algorithms for driving routes. Of course, there are energy costs to the banks of computers
that underpin the internet -- but these costs are less than the wood, coal and oil that would be expended
for the same quantity of information flow. The tangle of events that triggers societal collapse can be
complex, and there are several threats the net does not address. But vast, networked communication
can be an antidote to several of the most deadly diseases threatening civilisation. The next time your
coworker laments internet addiction, the banality of tweeting or the decline of face-to-face conversation,
you may want to suggest that the net may just be the technology that saves us.
Surveillance causes internet fragmentation
NSA surveillance has placed us at the brink of online fragmentation, which risks
collapsing the whole internet system
Matthew Taylor, Nick Hopkins and Jemima Kiss November 1, 2013, “NSA surveillance may cause
breakup of internet, warn experts,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/nsasurveillance-cause-internet-breakup-edward-snowden, KEL
Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington,
said the Snowden revelations were pushing the internet towards a tipping point with huge ramifications
for the way online communications worked. "We are certainly getting pushed towards this cliff and it is a
cliff we do not want to go over because if we go over it, I don't see how we stop. It is like a run on the
bank – the system we have now works unless everyone decides it doesn't work then the whole thing
collapses." Castro said that as the scale of the UK and US surveillance operations became apparent,
countries around the globe were considering laws that would attempt to keep data in-country, threatening
the cloud system – where data stored by US internet firms is accessible from anywhere in the world.
US internet surveillance causes other countries to demand data localization, which
will fragment the internet, destroy US tech firms, and undermine all faith in US tech
services, undermining overall US growth
Seth Rosenblatt, Oct 8, 2014, “US spying scandal will 'break the Internet,' says Google's Schmidt,”
CNET.com, http://www.cnet.com/news/us-spying-scandal-will-break-the-internet-says-googles-schmidt/,
KEL
Some of the international pushback is in response to data collection by tech companies, not the US
government. Europe's new and controversial "right to be forgotten" law, which says European citizens have a right to ask search engines to remove any results
that might infringe on their privacy, is causing headaches for Google. Critics contend that Google policies placed data collection
over privacy. The tech execs on the panel were most upset and scared about international efforts to impose
"data localization," as Microsoft's Smith put it, referring to a burgeoning efforts by countries to force companies to
build data centers based within their borders. The cost of building data centers in each country that a tech
firm wants to do business in could wind up destroying US tech firms, Schmidt and Smith warned. Schmidt called data
localization a "national emergency." Tech titans have yet to go in-depth as to the actual financial impact data localization has had on them, but in addition to the costs
data localization could also subject the data to local
laws in a way that tech firms worry would erode user trust -- and their ability to trade on that trust -- even
further. Smith noted that 96 percent of the world does not live in the US, and that the American tech economy
depends on convincing them that American tech services are trustworthy. "Foreign data centers would
compromise American [economic] growth" and leadership, he said.
of having to build at least one separate data center for each country that demanded it,
Cyber Security Add-on
2AC Add-on Module
U.S. government attacks on encryption destroy cybersecurity.
Open Letter 15 — An Open Letter to President Obama co-signed by 36 civil society organizations
(including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, and the Free Software Foundation), 48 technology companies and trade associations
(including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo), and 58 security and policy experts
(including Jacob Applebaum, Eric Burger, Joan Feigenbaum, and Bruce Schneier), the full list of
signatories is available upon request under the “FYI: Open Letter To Obama” header, 2015 (Open Letter
to Obama, May 19th, Available Online at https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/3138-113/Encryption_Letter_to_Obama_final_051915.pdf, Accessed 06-29-2015, p. 1)
Strong encryption is the cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security. Encryption protects
billions of people every day against countless threats—be they street criminals trying to steal our phones and laptops,
computer criminals trying to defraud us, corporate spies trying to obtain our companies’ most valuable trade secrets, repressive
governments trying to stifle dissent, or foreign intelligence agencies trying to compromise our and our allies’ most sensitive national security
secrets. Encryption thereby protects us from innumerable criminal and national security threats. This
protection would be undermined by the mandatory insertion of any new vulnerabilities into encrypted
devices and services. Whether you call them “front doors” or “back doors”, introducing intentional vulnerabilities into secure
products for the government’s use will make those products less secure against other attackers. Every
computer security expert that has spoken publicly on this issue agrees on this point, including the
government’s own experts .
Cyber attacks are frequent and devastating. Every attack increases the risk of
existential catastrophe.
Nolan 15 — Andrew Nolan, Legislative Attorney at the Congressional Research Service, former Trial
Attorney at the United States Department of Justice, holds a J.D. from George Washington University,
2015 (“Cybersecurity and Information Sharing: Legal Challenges and Solutions,” CRS Report to
Congress, March 16th, Available Online at http://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R43941.pdf, Accessed 07-05-2015,
p. 1-3)
Introduction
Over the course of the last year, a host of cyberattacks1 have been perpetrated on a number of high profile
American companies. In January 2014, Target announced that hackers, using malware,2 had digitally
impersonated one of the retail giant’s contractors,3 stealing vast amounts of data—including the names, mailing
addresses, phone numbers or email addresses for up to 70 million individuals and the credit card information of 40 million shoppers.4 Cyberattacks in
February and March of 2014 potentially exposed contact and log-in information of eBay’s customers,
prompting the online retailer to ask its more than 200 million users to change their passwords. 5 In September, it was revealed that over the
course of five months cyber-criminals tried to steal the credit card information of more than fifty million
shoppers of the world’s largest home improvement retailer, Home Depot.6 One month later, J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest
U.S. bank by assets, disclosed that contact information for about 76 million households was captured in a
cyberattack earlier in the year.7 In perhaps the most infamous cyberattack of 2014, in late November, Sony Pictures
Entertainment suffered a “significant system disruption” as a result of a “brazen cyber attack”8 that resulted in
the leaking of the personal details of thousands of Sony employees.9 And in February of 2015, the health
care provider Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield [end page 1] disclosed that a “very sophisticated attack”
obtained personal information relating to the company’s customers and employees.10 The high profile
cyberattacks of 2014 and early 2015 appear to be indicative of a broader trend: the frequency and
ferocity of cyberattacks are increasing,11 posing grave threats to the national interests of the U nited
S tates. Indeed, the attacks on Target, eBay, Home Depot, J.P. Morgan-Chase, Sony Pictures, and Anthem
were only a few of the many publicly disclosed cyberattacks perpetrated in 2014 and 2105.12 Experts suggest that
hundreds of thousands of other entities may have suffered similar incidents during the same period,13 with
one survey indicating that 43% of firms in the United States had experienced a data breach in the past year.14
Moreover, just as the cyberattacks of 2013—which included incidents involving companies like the New
York Times, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft15—were eclipsed by those that occurred in 2014,16
the consensus view is that 2015 and beyond will witness more frequent and more sophisticated cyber
incidents.17 To the extent that its expected rise outpaces any corresponding rise in the ability to defend
against such attacks, the result could be troubling news for countless businesses that rely more and more
on computers in all aspects of their operations, as the economic losses resulting from a single cyberattack
can be extremely costly .18 And the resulting effects of a cyberattack can have effects beyond a single
company’s bottom line. As “nations are becoming ever more dependent on information and information
technology,”19 the threat posed by any one cyberattack [end page 2] can have “devastating collateral and
cascading effects across a wide range of physical, economic and social systems.”20 With reports that
foreign nations—such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—may be using cyberspace as a new front
to wage war,21 fears abound that a cyberattack could be used to shut down the nation’s electrical grid,22
hijack a commercial airliner,23 or even launch a nuclear weapon with a single keystroke .24 In short,
the potential exists that the United States could suffer a “cyber Pearl Harbor,” an attack that would “cause
physical destruction and loss of life”25 and expose—in the words of one prominent cybersecurity expert—“vulnerabilities
of staggering proportions.”26
Cyber Security Extensions
Cybersecurity outweighs terrorism.
CSM 14 — Christian Science Monitor, 2014 (“Feds hacked: Is cybersecurity a bigger threat than
terrorism?,” Byline Harry Bruinius, November 10th, Available Online at
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/1110/Feds-hacked-Is-cybersecurity-a-bigger-threat-than-terrorismvideo, Accessed 07-06-2015)
While the terrestrial fears of terrorism and Ebola have dominated headlines, American leaders are fretting about
what may be even more serious virtual threats to the nation’s security. This year, hundreds of millions of
private records have been exposed in an unprecedented number of cyberattacks on both US businesses
and the federal government. On Monday, just as President Obama arrived in Beijing to being a week-long summit with regional leaders, Chinese
hackers are suspected to have breached the computer networks of the US Postal Service, leaving the personal data of more than 800,00 employees and customers
compromised, The Washington Post reports. The data breach, which began as far back as January and lasted through mid-August, potentially exposed 500,000 postal
employees’ most sensitive personal information, including names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, the Postal Service said in a statement Monday. The
data of customers who used the Postal Service’s call center from January to August may have also been exposed. "The FBI is working with the United States Postal
Service to determine the nature and scope of this incident," the federal law enforcement agency said in a statement Monday. Neither the FBI nor the Postal Service,
however, confirmed it was the work of Chinese hackers. The breach did not expose customer payment or credit card information, the Postal Service said, but hackers
did gain access to its computer networks at least as far back as January. The FBI informed the Postal Service of the hack in mid-September. “It is an unfortunate fact
of life these days that every organization connected to the Internet is a constant target for cyber intrusion activity,”
said Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in a statement. “The United States Postal Service is no different. Fortunately, we have seen no evidence of malicious use of
both
intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts say computer hackers now pose a greater threat to
national security than terrorists . Since 2006, cyber-intruders have gained access to the private data of nearly 90 million people in federal
the compromised data and we are taking steps to help our employees protect against any potential misuse of their data.” But the reported breach comes as
networks, the Associated Press reported in a major investigation published Monday. Hackers have also accessed 255 million customer records in retail networks
during this time, 212 million customer records in financial and insurance industry servers, as well as 13 million records of those in educational institutions, the AP
reported. “The
increasing number of cyber-attacks in both the public and private sectors is unprecedented and
poses a clear and present danger to our nation’s security,” wrote Rep. Elijah Cummings (D) of Maryland, ranking member of the
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in a letter to Postmaster General Donahoe on Monday.
Only strong encryption can preserve cybersecurity.
Kehl et al. 15 — Danielle Kehl, Senior Policy Analyst at the Open Technology Institute at the New
America Foundation, holds a B.A. in History from Yale University, with Andi Wilson, Policy Program
Associate at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, holds a Master of Global
Affairs degree from the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and Kevin Bankston, Policy Director
at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, former Senior Counsel and Director of
the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, former Senior Staff Attorney at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, former Justice William Brennan First Amendment Fellow at the
American Civil Liberties Union, holds a J.D. from the University of Southern California Law School,
2015 (“Doomed To Repeat History? Lessons From The Crypto Wars of the 1990s,” Report by the Open
Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, June, Available Online at
https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/3407-125/Lessons%20From%20the%20Crypto%20Wars%20of%20the%201990s.882d6156dc194187a5fa51b1
4d55234f.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2015, p. 19)
Strong Encryption Has Become A Bedrock Technology That Protects The Security Of The Internet The
evolution of the ecosystem for encrypted communications has also enhanced the protection of individual
communications and improved cybersecurity. Today, strong encryption is an essential ingredient in the
overall security of the modern network, and adopting technologies like HTTPS is increasingly considered an industry best-practice among major
the report of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications
Technologies, the panel of experts appointed by President Barack Obama to review the NSA’s surveillance
activities after the 2013 Snowden leaks, was unequivocal in its emphasis on the importance of strong encryption to
protect data in transit and at rest. The Review Group wrote that: Encryption is an essential basis for trust
on the Internet; without such trust, valuable communications would not be possible. For the entire
system to work, encryption software itself must be trustworthy. Users of encryption must be confident, and
justifiably confident, that only those people they designate can decrypt their data…. Indeed, in light of the
massive increase in cyber-crime and intellectual property theft on-line, the use of encryption should be
greatly expanded to protect not only data in transit, but also data at rest on networks, in storage, and in the
cloud.178 The report further recommended that the U.S. government should: Promote security[] by (1) fully
supporting and not undermining efforts to create encryption standards; (2) making clear that it will not
in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption;
and (3) supporting efforts to encourage the greater use of encryption technology for data in transit, at rest,
in the cloud, and in storage.179
technology companies.177 Even
Surveillance State Critical Advantage
1AC Advantage
Programs like PRISM are the epitome of the modern security state. The worse effect
of this state is to normalize society to accept neoliberal surveillance and capitalist
commodification of all aspects of life.
Henry A. Giroux, June 30, 2015, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in
the English and Cultural Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The
McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning. He also is a Distinguished
Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Orwell, Huxley and the Scourge of the Surveillance State,”
Truth-out, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31639-orwell-huxley-and-the-scourge-of-the-surveillancestate2, KEL
In this instance,
the surveillance state is one that not only listens, watches and gathers massive amounts of
information through data mining, allegedly for the purpose of identifying "security threats." It also
acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of commercial surveillance technologies - and, perhaps
more vitally, the acceptance of privatized, commodified values - into all aspects of their lives. In other words,
the most dangerous repercussions of a near total loss of privacy involve more than the unwarranted
collecting of information by the government: We must also be attentive to the ways in which being spied
on has become not only normalized, but even enticing, as corporations up the pleasure quotient for
consumers who use new digital technologies and social networks - not least of all by and for simulating experiences of
community. Many individuals, especially young people, now run from privacy and increasingly demand services in which they can share every personal facet of their
lives. While Orwell's vision touches upon this type of control, there is a notable difference that he did not foresee. According to Pete Cashmore, while Orwell's
"Thought Police tracked you without permission, some consumers are now comfortable with sharing their every move online." (17 )
The state and
corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone - especially young people - into a regime
of security and commodification in which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a
culture of commodified addictions, self-help, therapy and social indifference. Intelligence networks now inhabit the
world of major corporations such as Disney and Bank of America as well as the secret domains of the NSA, FBI and 15 other intelligence agencies. As Edward
Snowden's revelations about the PRISM program revealed, the NSA has also collected personal data
from many of the world's largest internet companies, including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. According to a senior lawyer for
the NSA, the internet companies "were fully aware of the surveillance agency's widespread collection of data." (18) The fact is that Orwell's and
Huxley's ironic representations of the modern totalitarian state - along with their implied defense of a democratic ideal
rooted in the right to privacy and the right to be educated in the capacity to be autonomous and critical thinkers - have been transformed and
mutilated almost beyond recognition by the material and ideological registers of a worldwide
neoliberal order . Just as we can envision Orwell's and Huxley's dystopian fables morphing over time from "realistic novels" into a "real life documentary,"
and now into a form of "reality TV," privacy and freedom have been radically altered in an age of permanent, nonstop global exchange and circulation. That is, in
the current moment, the right to privacy and freedom has been usurped by the seductions of a narcissistic
culture and casino capitalism's unending desire to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to
make all aspects of daily life subject to market forces under watchful eyes of both government and
corporate regimes of surveillance.
The Status Quo Surveillance State crushes domestic dissent and militarizes
everyday life in the name of increased security versus terrorism. The problem is not
so much the loss of privacy but the lack of concern about federal authority to claim
the power to intrude into our lives. This destroys any value to justice and freedom.
Our politics must resist the authority of such surveillance to revive any meaningful
sense of progressive democracy.
Henry A. Giroux, June 30, 2015, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in
the English and Cultural Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The
McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning. He also is a Distinguished
Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Orwell, Huxley and the Scourge of the Surveillance State,”
Truth-out, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31639-orwell-huxley-and-the-scourge-of-the-surveillancestate2, KEL
By integrating insights drawn from both Huxley and Orwell, it becomes necessary for any viable critical analysis to take a long view, contextualizing the
contemporary moment as a new historical conjuncture in which political rule has been replaced by corporate sovereignty, consumerism becomes the only obligation of
citizenship, and the only value that matters is exchange value. Precarity has replaced social protections provided by the state, just as the state cares more about
The United
States is not just dancing into oblivion as Huxley suggested; it is also being pushed into the dark recesses of an
authoritarian state. Orwell wrote dystopian novels but he believed that the sheer goodness of human nature would in the end be enough for individuals
building prisons and infantilizing the US public than it does about providing all of its citizens with quality educational institutions and health care.
to develop modes of collective resistance that he could only imagine in the midst of the haunting specter of totalitarianism. Huxley was more indebted to Kafka's
notion of destabilization, despair and hopelessness. For Huxley, the subject had lost his or her sense of agency and had become the product of a scientifically
manufactured form of idiocy and conformity. Progress had been transformed into its opposite, and science needed to be liberated from itself. As Theodor Adorno has
pointed out, where Huxley fails is that he has no sense of resistance. According to Adorno, "The weakness of Huxley's entire conception is that it makes all its
concepts relentlessly dynamic but nevertheless arms them against the tendency to turn into their own opposites." (27) Hence, the forces of resistance are not simply
underestimated but rendered impotent. The
authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and
security system with its "urge to surveil, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every
communication of any sort on the planet" (28) can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are
connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in
supermax prisons, the hypermilitarization of local police forces, the justification of secret prisons and state-sanctioned torture abroad, and the increasing
labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States. (29) This is part of Orwell's narrative, but it does not go far enough. The
new authoritarian, corporate-driven state deploys more subtle tactics to depoliticize public memory and
promote the militarization of everyday life. Alongside efforts to defund public and higher education and to attack the welfare state, a wideranging assault is being waged across the culture on all spheres that encourage the public to hold power accountable. If these public institutions are destroyed, there
will be few sites left in which to nurture the critical formative cultures capable of educating people to challenge the range of injustices plaguing the United States and
the forces that reproduce them. One
particular challenge comes from the success of neoliberal tyranny to dissolve
those social bonds that entail a sense of responsibility toward others and form the basis for political
consciousness. Under the new authoritarian state, perhaps the gravest threat one faces is not simply being
subject to the dictates of what Quentin Skinner calls "arbitrary power," but failing to respond with outrage when "my
liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by
the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose." (30) The situation is dire when
people no longer seem interested in contesting such power. It is precisely the poisonous spread of a
broad culture of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and
freedom, which lie at the heart of a robust democracy . The democratic imagination has been transformed into a data machine that
marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dream world of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and
initiate individuals into the brave new surveillance-punishing state that merges Orwell's Big Brother with Huxley's mind-altering soma. Nothing
will
change unless people begin to take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United States
and what it might require to make such issues meaningful in order to make them critical and
transformative. As Charles Derber has explained, knowing "how to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially
important" (31) if any viable notion of resistance is to take place. The current regime of authoritarianism is reinforced through a
new and pervasive sensibility in which people surrender themselves to both the capitalist system and a
general belief in its call for security. It does not simply repress independent thought, but constitutes new modes of thinking through a diverse set
of cultural apparatuses ranging from the schools and media to the internet. The fundamental question in resisting the transformation
of the United States into a 21st century authoritarian society must concern the educative nature of politics that is, what people believe and how their individual and collective dispositions and capacities to be either
willing or resistant agents are shaped.
The belief that NSA online surveillance is necessary to protect us establishes this
kind of intrusive surveillance as the governing norm that controls our freedom and
lives. We self-regulate and self-sacrifice our all our freedom and the value of a
liberal democratic society through this disciplinary logic of power.
Zack Beauchamp June 7, 2013, “Why The NSA’s Secret Online Surveillance Should Scare You,”
Think Progress, http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/07/2120141/why-the-nsas-secret-onlinesurveillance-should-scare-you/
The reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA)’s secret online spying program, PRISM, has been polarized between seething
outrage and some variant on “what did you expect?” Some have gone so far as to say this program helps open the door to fascism, while others have downplayed it as in line with
the way that we already let corporations get ahold of our personal data. That second reaction illustrates precisely why this program is so troubling.
The more we accept perpetual government and corporate surveillance as the norm, the more we change
our actions and behavior to fit that expectation — subtly but inexorably corrupting the liberal ideal that
each person should be free to live life as they choose without fear of anyone else interfering with it .
Put differently, George Orwell isn’t who you should be reading to understand the dangers inherent to the NSA’s
dragnet. You’d be better off turning to famous French social theorist Michel Foucault. The basic concern with the PRISM program is that it is undoubtedly collecting
information on significant numbers of Americans, in secret, who may not have any real connection to the case the Agency is pursuing. PRISM sifts through tech giants’ databases to cull information about suspected national security
threats. However, since it uses a 51 percent confidence threshold for determining whether a target is foreign, and likely extends to individuals that are “two degrees of separation” from the original target, the chances are
A citizenry that’s constantly on guard for secret,
unaccountable surveillance is one that’s constantly being remade along the lines the state would
prefer . Foucault illustrated this point by reference to a hypothetical prison called the Panopticon. Designed by
utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon is a prison where all cells can be seen from a central tower shielded
such that the guards can see out but the prisoners can’t see in. The prisoners in the Panopticon could thus
never know whether they were being surveilled, meaning that they have to, if they want to avoid running
the risk of severe punishment, assume that they were being watched at all times. Thus, the Panopticon
functioned as an effective tool of social control even when it wasn’t being staffed by a single guard. In his famous Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that we live in a
world where the state exercises power in the same fashion as the Panopticon’s guards. Foucault called it “disciplinary power;” the basic idea is that the
omnipresent fear of being watched by the state or judged according to prevailing social norms caused
people to adjust the way they acted and even thought without ever actually punished. People had become
“self-regulating” agents, people who “voluntarily” changed who they were to fit social and political
expectations without any need for actual coercion. Online privacy advocates have long worried that government surveillance programs could end up disciplining internet
extraordinarily high that this program is spying on a significant number of Americans.
users in precisely this fashion. In 1997, the FBI began using something called Project Carnivore, an online surveillance data tool designed to mimic traditional wiretaps, but for email. However, because online information is not like a
phone number in several basic senses, Carnivore ended up capturing far more information than it was intended to. It also had virtually no oversight outside of the FBI. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Congress in 2000,
“Systems like Carnivore have the potential to turn into mass surveillance systems that will harm our free and open society…Once individuals realize that they have a lowered expectation of privacy on the Net, they may not visit
particular web sites that they may otherwise have visited.” Writing in 2004, a group of scholars drew a straight line from this analysis to Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power. “Resembling the ever-present powers of the central
watchtower in a prison modeled after the Panopticon,” they wrote “the very fact that the FBI has the potential to monitor communications on a website may lead Internet users to believe that they are constantly being watched.” We
The more people come to see mass online surveillance as
a norm, rather than something used only on specific subjects of investigation, the more they’ll tailor their
online habits to it. Since people understandably don’t want the government looking at their private
information, that’ll mean the internet will over time slowly become less of a place for vibrant selfexpression. That should trouble anyone who believes that the best society is one in which people are
most free to be themselves in whatever way they find most meaningful . In essence, that should trouble anyone committed to the basic
know now that this hypothetical fear about Carnivore has become a reality, courtesy of the NSA.
liberal project. Foucault’s point wasn’t that disciplinary power was intrinsically bad; the idea that, for example, pedophiles might be deterred from accessing child pornography for fear of state surveillance of child porn sites shouldn’t
Foucault warned, disciplinary power was dangerous — used in certain fashions, it could
be subtly corrosive of exactly the sorts of freedoms of expression and self-identity that liberal
democracies purportedly protected absolutely . The NSA program, especially as its breadth
becomes clear, is exactly the sort of overreach his work should warn us against.
bother anyone. Rather,
Surveillance’s panoptic discipline leads to passivity and no resistance to increased
oppression and a total loss of freedom. SQ social movements and resistance cannot
succeed without our advocacy. You should be skeptical of all the negative arguments
because the security power/knowledge system asserts “truth” about national
security threats to rationalize its all-pervading surveillance techniques.
Ray Pensador Sept 11, 2013, “The Surveillance State As Foucault's Panopticon,” Daily Kos,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/11/1238013/-The-Surveillance-State-As-Foucault-s-Panopticon,
KEL
Another relevant/related observation I've been intrigued with is what I consider to be an eerie passivity with which the population reacts in the face of increasing
corporate-government corruption, criminality, and oppression. Also, the utter inability for any type of social justice movement to take hold so it can grow and become
powerful (organized, strategic, and cohesive) enough to be able to effect change, has been something I've been observing and thinking about for many years now. I've
always felt that there
must be a logical explanation for this seemingly illogical docility exhibited by the
population in the face of increasingly outrageous abuses and rampant government corruption. I think that
Foucault's Panopticon metaphor offers that explanation... The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the
relationship between 1.) systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation and, 2.) the power-knowledge concept. In his view, power and
knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every
movement supervised and all events recorded. The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations
and docility - a normalization of sorts, stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is
achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to
conform by the internalization of this reality . The actions of the observer are based upon this monitoring and the behaviours he sees
exhibited; the more one observes, the more powerful one becomes. The power comes from the knowledge the observer has
accumulated from his observations of actions in a circular fashion, with knowledge and power reinforcing
each other. Foucault says that "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power
regularly reinforce one another in a circular process" (Foucault 1977). The emphasis is mine I think this metaphor, this concept, applies perfectly to
the current situation regarding the illegal and unconstitutional spying by the corporate-controlled NSA. Here's how
Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, and author of "Spying on Democracy" sees it: This book ["Spying on Democracy"] documents the
way relentless
surveillance makes people in the United States less free. As government agencies shift from
investigating criminal activity to preempting it, they have forged close relationships with corporations
honing surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques for use against Americans. By claiming that
anyone who questions authority or engages in undesired political speech is a potential terrorist threat, this
government-corporate partnership makes a mockery of civil liberties. The examples in these pages show how a free
press, our legal system, activists, and other pillars of a democratic society—and even children—suffer as a
consequence. As the assault by an alignment of consumer marketing and militarized policing grows, each single act of individual
expression or resistance assumes greater importance . As individuals and communities, we need to
dismantle this system if we are to restore and protect our civil liberties. Now, I argue that what makes this
corporate-controlled total information awareness surveillance apparatus so pernicious, so dangerous,
so Orwellian, is the fact that once combined with the effects of a propagandist media ("Research Study
Explains How U.S. Media Brainwashes The Public"), and a security apparatus that actively engages in disrupting the
formation of viable social justice movements, what we end up with is a totally paralyzed population, incapable
of reacting to the increased oppression from the ruling elite, as it has done throughout the entire history of this country ("A People's
History of The United States").
We outline two impacts to Surveillance State:
First, the biopolitical desire to protect us all from both internal and external threats
produces continuous violence and eventual extinction in the name of the greater
good
Foucault 1978 Michel, esteemed French philosopher, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p. 136-137
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form
of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating
forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in
the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on
the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars
were never
as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit
such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the
cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to
administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars
are no longer waged in the name of
a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres
have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes
have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology
of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them
and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one
has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no
longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because
power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
Second, the monitoring and destruction of the Other to ensure to smooth operation
of neoliberalism makes the entire world disposable in the name of utilitarianism this justifies endless destruction, culminating in extinction – all their impacts are
non-unique in a world of biopower and neoliberalism.
Santos 3 - Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra; Distinguished Legal Scholar at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison; LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University (Boaventura, Collective
Suicide?, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63, April 2003)
the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by
destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the
possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of
indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in
two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the
Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and
even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial
illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the
Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion manifested
According to Franz Hinkelammert,
in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to ult imate
consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having been fully applied. If
terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically
eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the
radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to
there is
it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history:
Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of
the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be
able to privatize the state and international institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this
combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers.
a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective
suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other . Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the
efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market
radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of
"discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer
At all these moments,
to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental
Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war
will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically,
sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor
force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of
the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation,
legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period
of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war . The machine of
democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction. In opposition to this, there is the ongoing movement of globalization from below, the
global struggle for social justice, led by social movements and NGOs, of which the World Social Forum (WSF) has been an eloquent manifestation. The WSF has been a remarkable affirmation
of life, in its widest and most inclusive sense, embracing human beings and nature. What challenges does it face before the increasingly intimate interpenetration of the globalization of the
economy and that of war? I am convinced that this new situation forces the globalization from below to re-think itself, and to reshape its priorities. It is well-known that the WSF, at its second
meeting, in 2002, identified the relationship between economic neoliberalism and imperial warmongering, which is why it organized the World Peace Forum, the second edition of which took
place in 2003. But this is not enough. A strategic shift is required. Social movements, no matter what their spheres of struggle, must give priority to the fight for peace, as a necessary condition
for the success of all the other struggles. This means that they must be in the frontline of the fight for peace, and not simply leave this space to be occupied solely by peace movements. All the
movements against neoliberal globalization are, from now on, peace movements.
War)
We are now in the midst of the fourth world war (the third being the Cold
and the spiral of war will go on and on. The principle of non-violence that is contained in the WSF Charter of Principles must no longer be a demand made on the
,
movements; now it must be a global demand made by the movements. This emphasis is necessary so that, in current circumstances the celebration of life can be set against this vertiginous
collective suicide. The peace to be fought for is not a mere absence of war or of terrorism. It is rather a peace based upon the elimination of the conditions that foster war and terrorism: global
injustice, social exclusion, cultural and political discrimination and oppression and imperialist greed. A new, cosmopolitan humanism can be built above and beyond Western illuminist
abstractions, a humanism of real people based on the concrete resistance to the actual human suffering imposed by the real axis of evil: neoliberalism plus war.
We solve - The current surveillance-based knowledge/power system makes us
believe that we have limited options other than passively accepting our own
subjugation in the face of purported terrorist threats. Even if our plan doesn’t do
anything, we can use our 1AC knowledge as a form of power and resistance to form
solidarity against the surveillance police state.
Ray Pensador Sept 11, 2013, “The Surveillance State As Foucault's Panopticon,” Daily Kos,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/11/1238013/-The-Surveillance-State-As-Foucault-s-Panopticon,
KEL
The conclusions that I draw from this situation is that, one, the constant propaganda bombardment we are
being exposed to 24/7 helps in conditioning us to accept a worldview where we only have a limited
number of (artificially-formulated) options; two, the fact that the corporate-government total
information surveillance apparatus is so vast and overreaching, it has the capacity to manipulate us
into remaining "docile" and malleable in the face of increasing oppression; three, we need to
understand the importance of being fully aware about exactly how the corporate-government system
is monitoring us, and the reason for that is, once again, because "knowledge is power." Here's how Ms. Mason saw
it: Can we mobilize counter-power to form a resistance against the pervasiveness of an increasingly
intrusive electronic society that is trying to manage the information it is tracking and collecting? Can we
wage our own battles and develop some strategies to help us retain a semblance of individual anonymity and privacy? Can we develop our own
system of power/knowledge as a form of resistance? Or should we just surrender to it? Surrender to the unseen power
that endeavours to control us from afar? Or should we continue to adapt and submissively, quietly accept the prevailing philosophy of an increasingly monitored
society? Or should we try to overcome? The emphasis is mine I argue that the
reason we can't seem to form a strong and united
peaceful resistance and social justice movements is because of the effects of Panopticism in combination
with an ongoing active campaign by the police state to prevent it, as we saw with the brutal suppression
(surveillance, infiltration, psychological warfare) of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Knowledge is power . We need to
understand the true nature of the system, so we can then start formulating the right solutions ; if we are
being manipulated, then we need to fully understand exactly how that's happening; we need to know exactly how the corporate-government apparatus is illegally and
we need to unite in solidarity (unions, social justice
and formulate strategies to dismantled the Oligarchy, and the surveillance
unconstitutionally monitoring us with the total information awareness surveillance state;
activists, progressive groups, etc.)
police state .
Surveillance key to Neoliberalism
Norm spreads throughout society – controlling and normalizing individuals. Social
control of individuals for the purpose of smooth operation of neoliberal order.
Holly Ventura, J. Mitchell Miller & Mathieu Deflem 2005, Ventura is Assist Prof of criminal
justice at U Texas-San Antonio, Miller is Deflem is professor of sociology at South Carolina,
“Governmentality and the War on Terror: FBI Project Carnivore and the Diffusion of Disciplinary
Power,” Critical Criminology 13(1): 55-70, http://deflem.blogspot.com/2009/08/governmentality-andwar-on-terror-fbi.html, KEL
From a more analytically informed perspective, we argue, the Carnivore program presents an instance of the evolving rationality of social control that Michel Foucault
(1977, 1981, 1991) has described as governmentality. In Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault
developed the theory that the
disciplinary effects of power, which had originally been developed in prison, gradually spread
throughout society in all kinds of manifestations aimed at correcting and normalizing individuals .
Aimed at producing docile bodies in a society’s population, disciplinary power moves beyond the walls of the prison “right down into the depths of society,.... down
to the finest grain of the social body” (Foucault 1977:27, 80). Thus, discipline
steadily grows and expands to become a “whole
complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase in wealth, a higher juridical
and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter portioning of the
population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information” (p. 77). The perspective of
governmentality explains the diffusion of disciplinary power as the result of a transformation of power from a negatively oriented
concept (to forbid) towards a positive notion of power that centers on the members of a population in all aspects of
their behavior (Foucault, 1980, 1981, 1991; see also Deflem, 1997; Gordon, 1991). Dating back to political thought of the 16th century,
governmental power extends to the current phase of neo-liberal mechanisms of social control by
centering on each and every thought and action of any and all people as the building blocks of law and
order. Social control is not merely crime control (literally: the control of criminals), but extends to an entire
population and its potential relevance to positively or negatively affect the security of the nation .
Thus, a whole series of knowledge systems is developed (e.g., traditional criminology as criminal justice administration) and a sophisticated apparatus of strategies
and tools is devised and implemented to foster the development of this power-knowledge.
Surveillance = disciplinary power
Disciplinary power is a perfect model in order to under the effect of online
surveillance. This type of social control extends beyond its law-enforcement or
intelligence purposes throughout society to constitute all of us as criminals or
terrorists.
Holly Ventura, J. Mitchell Miller & Mathieu Deflem 2005, Ventura is Assist Prof of criminal
justice at U Texas-San Antonio, Miller is Deflem is professor of sociology at South Carolina,
“Governmentality and the War on Terror: FBI Project Carnivore and the Diffusion of Disciplinary
Power,” Critical Criminology 13(1): 55-70, http://deflem.blogspot.com/2009/08/governmentality-andwar-on-terror-fbi.html, KEL
Although Foucault’s
research of power was centered on discipline in correctional contexts, his discussion also provides an adequate
framework in which to consider Project Carnivore. For, indeed, as other scholars discussing practices of social control in advanced
capitalist societies have observed (Baddeley, 1997; Garland, 1997; Walters, 2003), the governmental diffusion of disciplinary power
continues to characterize modern systems of social control. At the most general level, as a system of deeply penetrating
surveillance, Carnivore represents a means of correct training which Foucault (1977:170-194) describes as an ‘examination,’ i.e., a method of
disciplinary power that is able to see and record every move and thought of each and all, but that
itself cannot be seen . Resembling the ever-present powers of the central watchtower in a prison modeled after the Panopticon, the very fact
that the FBI has the potential to monitor communications on a website may lead Internet users to
believe that they are constantly being watched . The proven fact that there have been crimes that were perpetuated by reliance on the
internet (e.g., the September 11 highjackers planned their attacks via email) justifies the federal law enforcement response to target the internet. Besides the fact that
the enacted system of surveillance may go well beyond its initial justification, the very development and utilization of the Carnivore software has effectively enabled
law enforcement to further increase its arsenal of disciplinary tools. It is important in this respect to note that Project Carnivore was initiated by the FBI more than a
year prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Although it may be relatively easy to accept the need for the software since the events of 9-11, especially given the
fact that the hijackers orchestrated the attacks via the internet, it is more difficult to reconcile that federal law enforcement planned on utilizing this technology prior to
to Foucault (1980), disciplinary power creates “a machine in which everyone
is caught” in order to accomplish a system of “total and circulating mistrust” (pp. 156, 158). In this context, it
is difficult to accept at face-value that social control is a mere functional response to crime . In the case of
the current state of emergency. According
Project Carnivore, high-level Bureau officials have linked the system intimately to the investigation of criminals. For example, John E. Collingwood, the Assistant
Director of the Office of Public and Congressional Affairs of the FBI, defended Carnivore by simply stating that the software would be used to “to obtain a criminal’s
e-mail…” (Collingwood, 2000b). In a theoretical vacuum, the use of the word ‘criminal’ is powerful, but misleading and somewhat at odds with the notion of an
adversarial and due-process orientation to law and justice. A central tenet of the criminal justice system in our society is the presumption of innocence. Labeling the
the constitutive effect of
the labeling might imply that all those who are monitored will be considered criminals, because the
logic of an official investigation is based on the premise that only criminals will be monitored.
targets of criminal investigations prematurely as ‘criminals’ compromises the spirit of the justice process. Ironically, also,
Be skeptical of all neg claims
Surveillance knowledge produces social knowledge through power – all of the
negative’s truth claims are suspect because this kind of knowledge produces its own
authority and legitimizes its own claims.
Ray Pensador Sept 11, 2013, “The Surveillance State As Foucault's Panopticon,” Daily Kos,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/11/1238013/-The-Surveillance-State-As-Foucault-s-Panopticon,
KEL
I've always found the "knowledge is power" concept very intriguing because of its simplicity and applicability. No matter the setting, this concept, which I consider a
truism, can be viewed as a universal principle which applies to all human interactions. And as I've thought about it, I've come to view these two components
(knowledge and power) as inextricably linked in that one cannot exist without the other. When
it comes to the issue of the corporategovernment total information awareness surveillance system, the "knowledge is power" concept could not
have more relevance. And if so, then there is no better metaphor than Michel Foucault's take on late 18th century English
philosopher Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon." Here's how the late (she passed away in 2012) Moya K. Mason saw it: Along with other social theorists,
Foucault believed that knowledge is always a form of power, but he took it a step further and told us that knowledge can be gained from power;
producing it, not preventing it. Through observation, new knowledge is produced. In his view, knowledge is
forever connected to power, and often wrote them in this way: power/knowledge. Foucault's theory states that knowledge is power: Knowledge
linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make itself true. All
knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, 'becomes true.' Knowledge, once used to regulate the
conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, 'there is no power relation
without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same
time, power relations (Foucault 1977,27). The emphasis is mine
Disciplinary Surveillance is Racist
Disciplinary and biopolitical power seeks to eliminate internal dangers to the
population along racial lines. This is especially true in a post-9/11 environment.
Falguni A. Sheth, 2011, Hampshire College, “The War on Terror and Ontopolitics: Concerns with
Foucault’s Account of Race, Power Sovereignty,” Foucault Studies, No. 12, pp. 51-76, October 2011,
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDQQFjAC&url=http%
3A%2F%2Frauli.cbs.dk%2Findex.php%2Ffoucaultstudies%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F3337%2F3634&ei=97mbVbHwJMn7tQXRZCgAQ&usg=AFQjCNHeiorCKk0jlhvENU_uo5g1eV0EYA, KEL
Biopolitics8 is clearly an urgent lens by which to assess the political management that has taken place in
the 20th century. As a regulatory technology ,9 biopower’s scope pertains to human beings as a species,
and is deployed to divide populations along the lines of life and death . Biopower replaces the old
sovereign right to‚ take life and let live‛ with a new capacity, ‚the right to make live and to let die.‛10
Biopolitics engages policies and processes pertaining to reproduction, fertility, health, and medical care,11 as well as geography and climate,12 using the mechanisms
of statistics, forecasts, estimates, to organize—rather than discipline—men as species.13 Biopower functions as a: technology which brings together the mass effects
characteristic of a population, which tries to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass, a technology which tries to predict the probability of
This is a technology which aims to establish a sort of homeostasis , not by training individuals, but by
achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers .14
Whereas disciplinary power is a non-sovereign power,15 biopower goes beyond sovereign right.16 Together, disciplinary and regulatory
power establish a link between the body and population, and correspondingly between knowledge
and power. 17 Even though biopower goes beyond sovereign right, it retains its effectiveness through the exercise of the
capacity to kill. Death, once meted out by the sovereign, is now regulated through the mechanism of
racism. As Foucault states, ‚ racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in
modern States .‛18 For Foucault, racism is the tendency or the drive to fragment or divide the ‚biological
continuum of the human race.‛19 As he says, racism ‚is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is power’s control: the
those events<
break between what must live and what must die.‛ But as Foucault describes it, racism operates within the framework of biopolitics: The appearances within the
biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of race, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in
contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating the groups that exist within a
population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain.20 The
racism of the
state lies in the ability to produce races of subjects by dividing that continuum, using any number and
quality of characteristics, in order to create divisions between the living and the dying. Foucault frames this racism
through the framework of biopolitics, which involves managing men-as-species through the control and regulation of the health and life of the population. However,
Foucault insists that racism functions through ‚not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship‛21 in order to pro-duce a purer
species. Thus, the criteria along which racism operates could include the physical, biological, sexual, health, or medical, as we see in his analyses of madness,
incarceration, and psychiatric power. Foucault gives the examples of sexuality as a site where body and population meet, and of medicine as a technique that
establishes a link ‚between scientific know-ledge of both biological and organic processes. Medicine thus, can be an effective ‘political intervention technique’ which
will have ‘both disciplinary and regulatory’ effects.‛22 Race it-self is neither biological nor phenotypical in Foucault’s reading, although it can be inscribed through
biological vehicles and measures, as manifested through health policies, pension plans, etc. These practices operate at the level of life, and yet they can collude to
create ‚good‛ and bad races.23 It is possible to see how Muslims
could eventually be construed as a threat to the general
population at the level of biopolitics, especially as seen through the various policies implemented in detention and immigrant centers, access to
public schools and health care. These reflect the antipathy or ambivalence of the ‚Western‛ world toward this
population. And yet, the biopolitical fails to fully capture the impetus and the path of the racism that has surfaced in the decade since September 11, 2001.
Security State exaggerates threats; = continual violence
The Security State uses exaggerated threats of a constructed Other to justify
continual war and violence
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir)
Cold War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies
Association Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
The Cold
War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the American
national security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual complex, which “were observers of, and
active participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and
fueled predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were
instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture” (Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was “a complex space where various representations
and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the boundaries and dominate the murkier margins of international relations” (Der Derian, 1992: 41).
The same Cold War security culture has been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist
analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once again reproduces
the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage
point, the identification process of the state and the nation is always a negative process for it is achieved by
exclusion, violence, and marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that constitute and consolidate state identity is necessary: the
writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that constitute it. The state and the discourses that (re)constitute it thus
frame its very identity and impose a fictitious “national unity” on society; it is from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous
discourses of inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in
which the state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence – a power socially constructed, following
Max Weber’s work on the ethic of responsibility – to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the “unified” Self,
the national society (the nation).16 It is through this very practice of normative statecraft,17 which produces threatening Others, that the international
sphere comes into being. David Campbell adds that it is by constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the state’s very conditions of existence are
generated18.
K of Nuclear Impacts
Threats of nuclear war are used to justify militarization
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir)
Cold War David Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies
Association Convention, March 17-20, 2004, Montreal)
Much of the Cold War state apparatus and military infrastructure remained in place to meet the challenges
and threats of the post-Cold War era. If the attack on Pearl Harbor was the driving force of the postwar national security state
apparatus (Stuart, 2003: 303), the 9/11 events have been used as a motive for resurrecting the national security
discourse as a justification against a new ‘infamy’, global terrorism.19 Although in this study I am calling into question
the political practices that legitimized the very idea of a national security state during the Cold War era, I find even more problematic
the reproduction of a similar logic in the post-9/11 era – a rather different historical and socio-political
context. As Simon Dalby highlights, Coupling fears of Soviet ambitions, of a repeat of Pearl Harbor, and of nuclear
war, these institutions formed the heart of a semipermanent military mobilization to support the policies
of containment militarism. If this context is no longer applicable, the case that the national security state is not an appropriate mode for
social organization in the future is in many ways compelling. If security is premised on violence, as security-dilemma and
national-security literatures suggest (albeit often reluctantly), perhaps the necessity of rethinking global
politics requires abandoning the term and the conceptual strictures that go with it (Dalby, 1997: 2
K of Terrorism Impacts
Terrorist threats constructs inside/outside and friend/enemy distinctions that justify
continual violence and preemptive attacks once identified through intelligence
systems like PRISM
Mark Duffield 2004 Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the
University of Lancaster, “Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror,” Danish
Institute for International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
For Georgio Agamben (1998),3 rather than emerging from a social contract, sovereignty
is argued to reside in the power to
decide the exception. That is , to fix in language the boundary between who or what is included or
excluded as valid life : sovereign power is that which constitutes the ‘other’. In populating the space of the exception, sovereignty calls
forth a particular form of subjectivity to bear the consequences of exclusion. Agamben has given this subjectivity a generic name calling it ‘bare’
or ‘natural’ life. That is, an abandoned life that effectively exists beyond the rights, conventions and moral restraints of secular and religious law.
Deciding the exception constitutes a juridico-political space where anything becomes possible; it is even
“…permitted to kill without committing homicide…” (Ibid: 83 as orig.).4 Such life, however, is more than an
abandoned subjectivity destined to bear sovereignty’s ordering; it is constitutive of political order itself.
Bare life is an exclusion that is also an inclusion (Ibid: 18). While sovereignty decides the exception, it simultaneously elects to
protect society from the threat that it has itself identified. The war on terrorism is an example of this recurrent
sovereign design . During the 1990s, the leading ‘homeland’ states, as it were, remapped the zone of exception in
terms of a global ‘borderland’ of failed states, shadow networks, rogue states, and so on. Today, this new
cartography of risk encapsulates the terrorist threat (National Security Strategy 2002). At the same time, through
emergency powers , the derogation of international law and pre-emptive attack , homeland states seek to protect
society and its values from the menace their intelligence systems have identified . The global
borderlands have once again become zones where anything becomes possible; an open-range where you can kill
without committing murder.
4th Amendment stuff
Failure to require probable cause for PRISM surveillance undermines any meaning
to the 4th Amendment
Margot Kaminski June 7, 2013, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School; She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the
Information Society Project. While at Yale Law School, she was a Knight Law and Media Scholar and
co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation from Yale
Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back,” The
Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/prisms-legal-basis-how-we-got-here-andwhat-we-can-do-to-get-back/276667/, KEL
The Fourth Amendment prevents dragnet surveillance by requiring law enforcement to go to courts and
show probable cause . These dual requirements of court oversight and a legitimate, targeted investigation ensure that people will not be subject to
general searches by an abusive government. But intelligence-gathering that involves "the activities of foreign powers" is
treated differently, whether it occurs inside or outside of the United States. Foreign intelligence is the exception that has
swallowed the Fourth Amendment whole. As my colleague Anjali Dalal points out, people probably believe that foreign intelligence law is "
supposed to be going after foreign intelligence ," but its impact on Americans is surprisingly broad. In 1978, Congress set up a system governing foreign intelligence
surveillance. The surveillance programs leaked in the past two days are the results of the post-9/11 version of this system. The Verizon call records, which include
the PRISM
program --which allows the NSA to access content such as emails, search histories, and audio chats-- is authorized as part of "foreign
intelligence" gathering under the 2008 Amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ( FISA ). It is crucial to
phone numbers, location data, and timestamps, were authorized as the collection of "business records" under the PATRIOT Act. And
understand that the foreign intelligence system as it currently exists fails to require both adequate targeting and adequate oversight. The system allows intelligence
agencies to gather an enormous amount of information "incidental" to any investigations. And it does so with minimal court and Congressional oversight. If the
revision of our foreign intelligence surveillance system is a
constitutional necessity. If the Fourth Amendment is to have any meaning, Congress must untangle
the current web of broad authorizations and broad secrecy that allows the government to escape
judicial accountability for its acts .
revelations of the past two days have taught us anything, it is that
PRISM raises important 4th Amendment concerns
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
Within days of the releases, the intelligence community acknowledged the existence of the programs. n12
In August 2013 the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, offered further confirmation, noting
that PRISM had been in operation since Congress had passed the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. n13 He
declassified eight documents, n14 and by the end of the month, he had announced that the intelligence
community would release the total [*122] number of Section 702 orders issued, and targets thereby
affected, on an annual basis. n15 Although much of the information about PRISM and upstream
collection remains classified, what has been made public suggests that these programs push statutory
language to its limit, even as they raise critical Fourth Amendment concerns. n16 Accordingly, this
Article proceeds in three Parts: the evolution of Section 702, a statutory analysis of PRISM and upstream
collection, and the attendant constitutional concerns.
PRISM violates the 4th Amendment in several ways
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
In its constitutional analysis, the Article finds certain practices instituted under Section 702 to fall outside
acceptable Fourth Amendment bounds. Although lower courts had begun to recognize a domestic foreign intelligence exception to
the warrant clause, in 1978 Congress introduced FISA to be the sole means via which domestic foreign intelligence electronic intercepts could be
undertaken. Consistent with separation of powers doctrine, this shift carried constitutional meaning. Internationally, practice and precedent prior
to the FAA turned on a foreign intelligence exception. But in 2008 Congress altered the status quo, introducing individualized judicial review into
the process. Like FISA, the FAA carried constitutional import. [*124] If that were the end of the story, one could argue that the incidental
collection of U.S. persons' information, as well as the interception of domestic conversations ought to be regarded in Justice Jackson's third
category under Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. n18 Renewal in 2012, however, points in the opposite direction. The NSA's actions,
for purposes of the warrant clause, appear to be constitutionally sufficient insofar as foreign intelligence gathering to or from non-U.S. persons is
concerned. The tipping point comes with regard to criminal prosecution. Absent a foreign intelligence purpose, there is no exception to the
warrant requirement for the query of U.S. persons' international or domestic communications. Although a warrant is not required for foreign
intelligence collection overseas, the interception of communications under Section 702 must still comport with the reasonableness requirements
of the Fourth Amendment. A totality of the circumstances test, in which the significant governmental interest in national security is weighed
against the potential intrusion into U.S. persons' privacy, applies. The
incidental collection of large quantities of U.S.
persons' international communications, the scanning of content for information "about" non-U.S. person
targets, and the interception of non-relevant and entirely domestic communications in multicommunication transactions, as well as the query of data using U.S. person identifiers, fall outside the
reasonableness component of the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment is not adapted to current administrative purposes
Budiansky, 2003 [Privacilla, Stephen Budiansky, Privacy and Government, found online 7/7/15,
http://www.privacilla.org/government/fourthamendment.html LB]
the growth of both the U.S. and state governments during the 20th century vastly increased the
amount of information that governments collect. When information is collected for "administrative"
purposes, like issuing licenses and benefits or collecting taxes, the government does not have to satisfy the Fourth
Amendment. Unfortunately, sometimes this information is used by investigators, released or sold by
government agencies, or just misused by rogue government employees. This invades citizens'
expectations of privacy and violates their Fourth Amendment rights.
In addition,
4th amendment is vital
Swindle, 2013[ Swindle law group, Jason Swindle, May 31 2013, the history behind the 4
th
amendment, found online 7/7/15,
http://www.swindlelaw.com/2013/03/the-history-behind-the-4th-amendment/ LB]
In modern society, it is easy to forget where many of our freedoms come from. It is also dangerous to turn a blind
eye to history. Civilizations, military commanders, and leaders of nations have ignored history with
devastating results. Because the 4th Amendment is so vitally important to America, it deserves a look into the
history behind its inception into the Constitution. The 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution was added as part of the Bill of Rights on
December 15, 1791. It deals with protecting people from the searching of their homes and private property without properly executed search
warrants. The 4th Amendment specifically provides:
4th amendment is relevant and important
Barbara, 2006 [Courier Post, 4 amendment protections are among the most relevant today, Reach Barbara, March 1 2006, found
th
online 7/7/15 , http://archive.courierpostonline.com/article/20060228/SPECIAL08/603010301/4th-Amendment-protections-among-mostrelevant-today
LB]
Civil rights and constitutional lawyers agree that the Fourth Amendment is perhaps the most fundamental
and relevant in today's society. In the post-9/11 age, the context in which the amendment is utilized has
certainly changed in some respects from what the Founding Fathers intended, but the principles remain
the same. "Protection against unreasonable search and seizure is what people deal with as a part of their
daily life," said James Katz, a Cherry Hill lawyer who specializes in labor and employment issues, civil rights and constitutional litigation.
"You see it in the news today regarding electronic eavesdropping. I see it in the context of a wide variety of drug-testing issues, including in a
civil context with random drug-testing in the work place, in schools, and among student athletes," Katz said. "It
is as vitally important
today as when it was enacted. It provides protection against an overzealous government, and seeks to
balance the interests of the government with that of the people to be free of unreasonable conduct," he said.
4th Amendment equally important as 2nd
Lee, 2014 [Breitbart, Tony Lee, march 7 2014, 4 amendment vital, found online 7/7/15, http://www.breitbart.com/bigth
government/2014/03/07/rand-what-you-do-on-your-cell-phone-none-of-nsa-s-damn-business/ LB]
Yet as Americans protest the National Security Agency’s spying programs, Paul said that the federal government still monitors everyone’s cell
phone activity. I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business,” Paul said. “I believe this is a profound Constitutional
question: can a single warrant be applied to millions of Americans’ phone records, emails, credit cards?” Paul said that though the government
the Fourth Amendment is
“very clear” that a single warrant for “millions of Americans’ phone records hardly sounds
specific to an individual.” Paul said that issuing “generalized warrants that don’t name an individual and
seek the records of millions of individuals goes against the very fabric of the Fourth Amendment.” He
maintains that Americans do not own their records and credit card statements, he disagreed because
recalled that John Adams said that James Otis’s revolt against generalized warrants was the “spark” that started the American Revolution. He said
in the “great battle for the heart and soul of America,” the
Amendment, and conservatives cannot forget this.”
Fourth Amendment is “equally as important as the Second
Solvency
Congress should act – solves fear of Cloud
Congressional repeal of the 2008 FAA best solves PRISM and fear of spying on
cloud computing. The Courts cannot solve.
Margot Kaminski June 7, 2013, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School; She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the
Information Society Project. While at Yale Law School, she was a Knight Law and Media Scholar and
co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation from Yale
Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back,” The
Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/prisms-legal-basis-how-we-got-here-andwhat-we-can-do-to-get-back/276667/, KEL
The first instinct might be to look to federal courts to protect our constitutional rights. But in February of this year, the
Supreme Court effectively closed that avenue of recourse at least with respect to PRISM in Clapper
v. Amnesty International. The majority of the Court found that the group of lawyers, journalists, and
human rights advocates who challenged the constitutionality of the law that authorizes PRISM could not
show that they had been injured by it. The Court explained that the alleged surveillance was too speculative; the group could not get into court
unless it showed that surveillance of its members was "certainly impending." One might think that a new
lawsuit could show that surveillance is "certainly impending," because we now know that the PRISM
program exists. But this is not clear. Any plaintiffs would probably still face the significant hurdle of
showing that the government has spied on them in particular, or their foreign correspondents. And while the existence of a similarly pervasive spying program
led the Ninth Circuit to find that a similar lawsuit could proceed, that case came down before the recent Supreme Court opinion. The best solution, then, is Congress.
Congress must repeal the FISA Amendments Act, which it regrettably reauthorized in 2012.
Otherwise the revelation that the government can and does spy on Americans through Internet companies
will chill expression, chill free association, and threaten our society's growing reliance on cloud
computing for everything from intimate communications to business transactions. And Congress should reevaluate the secrecy surrounding our entire foreign intelligence-gathering system, because if the past two days
have shown anything, it is that lack of oversight leads to extraordinary abuses.
NSA requirements for encryption backdoors to surveil online systems weaken
confidence in e-commerce and cloud systems. Congress should ban the practice to
solve.
NY Times Editorial Board, Sept 21, 2013, “Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors,” NY Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/close-the-nsas-back-doors.html?_r=1, KEL
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make clear that the agency has never met an
encryption system that it has not tried to penetrate. And it frequently tries to take the easy way out. Because modern
cryptography can be so hard to break, even using the brute force of the agency’s powerful supercomputers, the agency prefers to
collaborate with big software companies and cipher authors, getting hidden access built right into their
systems. The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the agency now has access to the codes that
protect commerce and banking systems, trade secrets and medical records, and everyone’s e-mail and
Internet chat messages, including virtual private networks. In some cases, the agency pressured companies to give it access; as The Guardian reported
earlier this year, Microsoft provided access to Hotmail, Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. According to some of the Snowden documents given to Der Spiegel, the
These back doors and special access
routes are a terrible idea , another example of the intelligence community’s overreach. Companies and individuals are
increasingly putting their most confidential data on cloud storage services, and need to rely on
N.S.A. also has access to the encryption protecting data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry phones.
assurances their data will be secure . Knowing that encryption has been deliberately weakened will
undermine confidence in these systems and interfere with commerce. The back doors also strip away the expectations
of privacy that individuals, businesses and governments have in ordinary communications. If back doors are built into systems by the N.S.A., who is to say that other
The government can get a warrant and
break into the communications or data of any individual or company suspected of breaking the
law. But crippling everyone’s ability to use encryption is going too far, just as the N.S.A. has exceeded its boundaries
in collecting everyone’s phone records rather than limiting its focus to actual suspects. Representative Rush Holt , Democrat of New Jersey, has
introduced a bill that would, among other provisions, bar the government from requiring software
makers to insert built-in ways to bypass encryption . It deserves full Congressional support . In the
countries’ spy agencies — or hackers, pirates and terrorists — won’t discover and exploit them?
meantime, several Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, are building encryption systems that will be much more difficult for the N.S.A. to penetrate,
forced to assure their customers that they are not a secret partner with the dark side of their own government.
Need to restore faith in Cloud Market – Act now
PRISM surveillance will cost cloud businesses $22-35 billion if we don’t restore faith
in US cloud systems
Kashmir Hill, Sept 10, 2013, “How The NSA Revelations Are Hurting Businesses,” Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/10/how-the-nsa-revelations-are-hurting-businesses/,
KEL
Earlier this summer, technology analyst Daniel Castro authored a report suggesting that revelations about
corporate cooperation with the government through programs like PRISM would take a toll on cloud
computing businesses to the tune of $22 to $35 billion over the next three years “if foreign customers
decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits.”
Solves US Tech Competitivness
Repealing the FAA and Patriot Act solves US tech competitiveness
Julie Borowski, April 15, 2015, “Top 5 Reasons to Support the Surveillance State Repeal Act,”
Freedom Works, http://www.freedomworks.org/content/top-5-reasons-support-surveillance-state-repealact, KEL
Domestic spying doesn’t just violate our privacy. It also hurts the economy. Many U.S. technology companies are
finding it harder to compete on a global scale after the NSA revelations. Under law, companies are forbidden from
informing their customers if the government is spying on them. Former Federal Trade Commission employee Ed Felten writes: “This is
going to put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage, because people will believe that U.S.
companies lack the ability to protect their customers—and people will suspect that U.S. companies may feel compelled to lie
to their customers about security.” The Surveillance State Repeal Act would help to boost global trust in U.S.
companies.
Should prohibit NSA collection
Need to prohibit all NSA collection to solve
Tech Freedom 2014 Tech Freedom, TF, CDT, and 40 others tell Congress what real NSA reform
should look like, April 1, 2014, http://techfreedom.org/post/81391689035/tf-cdt-and-40-others-tellcongress-what-real-nsa)
The White House has expressed support for reining in the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, but
with multiple bills in Congress it’s uncertain which specific reforms will be included in the debate moving forward. To ensure whichever
NSA reform bill advances is as strong as possible, TechFreedom and 41 other nonprofits and businesses have sent
a joint letter to key policymakers outlining what any bill aiming to reform bulk surveillance should
include. Read the text below, and see the full letter for the list of signatories and recipients: We the undersigned are writing to express support
for ending the government’s bulk collection of data about individuals. We strongly urge swift markup and passage of the USA FREEDOM Act
(H.R.3361), which would enact appropriate surveillance reforms without sacrificing national security. This
letter focuses on bulk
collection, but overbroad NSA surveillance raises many more privacy and security issues that Congress
and the Administration should address. We appreciate that Congress and the Administration are converging on consensus that the
National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of telephone records must end. Among other things, legislation on bulk
collection should: Prohibit bulk collection for all types of data, not just phone records. Section 215 of the
PATRIOT Act applies broadly to business records, and the Department of Justice has claimed authority for bulk collection of any records that
reveal relationships between individuals. Legislation that focuses only on phone records may still allow for the bulk collection of, for example,
Internet metadata, location information, financial records, library records, and numerous other records that may help “identify unknown
relationships among individuals.” Prohibit
bulk collection under Section 214 as well as Section 215 of the
PATRIOT Act, or under any other authority . While the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records under the purported
authority of Section 215 has received considerable attention, the NSA engaged in the bulk collection of Internet metadata
using the Pen/Trap authority under Section 214 until 2011. Legislation that focuses solely on Section 215
would still fail to prohibit the bulk collection of phone and Internet metadata using Section 214, the National Security Letter
(NSL) statutes, or another authority. Require prior court approval for each record request. Under current law, the
government must obtain approval from the FISA court before it can force private entities to turn over
records (in bulk or otherwise) under Sections 215 and 214 of the PATRIOT Act. In addition, President Obama, in his January 17th policy
announcement, established that a judicial finding is required before the government can query the phone records that the NSA collected in
bulk. Congress
should leave this key safeguard in place. If there is concern that the FISA Court would
move too slowly to authorize domestic surveillance beforehand, then the solution should be to provide
the FISA Court with sufficient resources .
AT Circumvention
Only the plan solves — anything less gets circumvented.
Marthews 15 —Alex Marthews, National Chair at Restore The Fourth—a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that
seeks to strengthen the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and end programs that
violate it, holds a Masters in Public Policy from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. in
English from the University of Cambridge, 2015 (“Go Big or Go Home: Pass the New Surveillance State
Repeal Act,” Restore The Fourth, March, Available Online at http://restorethe4th.com/blog/go-big-or-gohome-pass-the-new-surveillance-state-repeal-act/, Accessed 06-19-2015)
Congress has done nothing to fix the US government's massively abusive surveillance
practices. They think Americans will be OK with an unconstitutional, sprawling, mass-surveillance empire intruding into every part of our lives. We’re not. It’s time to take a stand. We’ve seen what
happens when reformers try to nibble around the edges, when we try to pre-compromise with the
intelligence community. We saw a good reform bill last session, the “USA FREEDOM Act”, get stripped of nearly
everything worth doing as it passed through the process, and then it failed anyway. So this time, we’re setting out for
what we’d really like to see happen–a bill that embodies our vision for a new way of dealing with security
and surveillance. Restore The Fourth has been working quietly with a new coalition of surveillance reform
groups and with representatives interested in real reform, and today we’re helping to launch HR 1466, the
Surveillance State Repeal Act. Co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), this bill strikes at the heart of the
surveillance state. The SSRA: repeals the PATRIOT Act; repeals the FISA Amendments Act; requires the
destruction of information gathered under that Act; reforms the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court;
bans law enforcement “back doors” into our hardware and software; requires annual audits of intelligence
community practices; protects intelligence community whistleblowers; and requires a probable cause
warrant for information on US persons gathered under Executive Order 12333. It is the only
comprehensive surveillance reform bill in this Congress, and it deserves maximum publicity and support.
Nearly two years after Snowden began revealing them,
Details The SSRA... 1. Repeals the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act. The PATRIOT Act was passed by a panicked Congress in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. At the time, it was a wet dream for law enforcement.
Since then, it’s become clear that it doesn’t meaningfully help with thwarting terrorist attacks. What it is very good at is legitimating activities more appropriate for the East German secret police than for a free republic. Secret national
security letters that recipients can’t talk about or challenge. Phone metadata dragnets sweeping up calls from Pawtucket to Peoria. So-called “roving wiretaps” that deeply violate the Fourth Amendment requirement for particularized
probable cause. This was all meant to be “emergency” legislation. The emergency is long past, and it’s time to bury the PATRIOT Act in the unhallowed ground it deserves. The FISA Amendments Act was passed after the Bush
administration’s illegal mass surveillance became public. Its purpose was to give a vague color of law to their intentional violations, prevent their prosecution, and also give immunity to the criminals running our telecommunications
companies who went along with administration requests rather than protecting their users. It also turned the Fourth Amendment on its head, by approving warrants connected to a “program” rather than a person. Not only would SSRA
repeal the FISA Amendments Act, but it would require the destruction of any information gathered under it. 2. Reforms the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court set up after the surveillance scandals of the 1970s. It increases the
independence of judges by extending their terms from seven to ten years and allowing them to have multiple terms on the Court. It allows technical experts to be appointed to assist the judges in forming a more critical and
independent view of administration demands. 3. Bans the farcical practice of mandating “back doors” for government access to hardware and software. Computer security can’t be designed to provide a “magic golden key” to the US
government (while also making systems vulnerable to foreign governments and black-hat hackers). You’re either vulnerable or you’re not. The US government should be promoting secure cyber-infrastructure, not holding conferences
on how to weaken it. 4. Improves transparency by requiring the GAO to audit domestic surveillance annually. Famously, there’s a GAO room at the NSA that is empty, because too many members of Congress don’t want to appear
unpatriotic by calling on GAO to investigate a surveillance agency. Required annual audits would overcome that problem. 5. Sets out whistleblower procedures for employees of or contractors to intelligence agencies, requires the
Comptroller General to investigate and report on their complaints, and prohibits retaliation against them. 6. For the first time, meaningfully limits collection under Executive Order 12333, requiring (for US persons) a valid warrant
based on probable cause. In short, this is a blockbuster bill. If passed, it would undo much of the enormous damage done to the Bill of Rights after the September 11 attacks. It would return us to a path we should never have left,
where we investigate Americans only when we have reason to. At the same time, we believe it will increase our actual security. We have been trying too much to control our own citizens and the world by surveilling them into sullen
and resentful silence; we make a desolation, and call it peace. If instead we practice justice, promote peace, and let people pursue their ideas and aspirations freely, we will be far more secure in the long run.
The plan is a “hard reset” of surveillance authority — it can’t be circumvented.
Meinrath 15 — Sascha Meinrath, Founder of X-Lab—a future-focused technology policy and
innovation project, Fellow and Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Communications Research at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Founder and former Director of the Open Technology
Institute, former Vice President and Research Director of the Wireless Futures Program at the New
America Foundation, holds an M.A. in Social-Ecological Psychology from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, 2015 (“Opinion: Meaningful surveillance reform must prioritize civil liberties,”
Passcode—the Christian Science Monitor security and privacy publication, March 24th, Available Online
at http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0324/Opinion-Meaningfulsurveillance-reform-must-prioritize-civil-liberties, Accessed 06-20-2015)
Now is the time for meaningful surveillance reform. Across the political spectrum, from the progressive left to libertarian right, there is
widespread agreement that mass surveillance has exceeded the bounds of legality, morality, and efficacy. Today, the key ingredients for a
successful surveillance reform agenda can be found in the boldly titled Surveillance State Repeal Act. Among its bold provisions,
it repeals the Patriot Act and the excesses of the 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It would also
restore our civil liberties by clearing out legislation that even the Patriot Act’s main author, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R) of Wisconsin, has stated is extremely
troubling. The Surveillance State Repeal Act begins with the right questions: What parts of these laws, which have proven to be the catalysts for widespread civil
liberties violations, should we even keep? What kinds of surveillance actually work? While many have made light of Benjamin Franklin’s quote, “Those who would
give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” few have trivialized the conditions undergirding his missive –
namely, that interpretations of law were often “‘of an extraordinary nature,’ without informing us wherein that extraordinary nature consisted,” and rejected
participatory democracy for “disagreeing with new discovered meanings, and forced constructions of a clause in the proprietary [secret] commission.” The parallels to
Previous reform efforts have floundered
because they compromised – attempting to lessen the diminution of our freedoms, rather than
prioritizing our inherent and inalienable right to “the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.” Surveillance reform needs grassroots support – same as the millions of people who killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012 by overloading
congressional phone lines – in order to pass, and Americans of all stripes are only mobilized by unambiguous and forceful legislation to protect their rights. The
Surveillance repeal act is clear, concise, and accessible (the latest version is less than 10 pages long), and rolls back some
of the worst constitutional abuses with a hard reset of the US government’s surveillance powers.
the current surveillance state that the proposed repeal act aims to address couldn’t be clearer.
Noncompliance isn’t a reason reject the plan — the real problems are the laws that
authorize the surveillance.
Jaffer 13 — Jameel Jaffer, ACLU Deputy Legal Director and Director of ACLU Center for
Democracy, 2013 (“"There Have Been Some Compliance Incidents": NSA Violates Surveillance Rules
Multiple Times a Day,” ACLU Blog, August 16th, Available Online at https://www.aclu.org/blog/therehave-been-some-compliance-incidents-nsa-violates-surveillance-rules-multiple-timesday?redirect=blog/national-security/nsa-privacy-violations-even-more-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.
We get permanent fiat – any other interpretation turns debate from a “should”
question to a “will question”. Neg would always win and we’d also learn a lot less.
Doesn’t take out solvency – our cloud and EU advantages are both based on
perception of privacy in the US – the aff is a substantial improvement in privacy in
the eyes of world – that’s our Advantage 1 Zara 13 ev and Advantage 2 Castro &
McQuinn 15 cards.
The NSA and FBI will now have to abide by Congressional mandate — heightened
Congressional attention and whistleblowers will check
Buttar 15 — Shahid Buttar, constitutional lawyer and executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense
Committee, 2015 (“Senate Moves to Check Executive Spying Power,” The Progressive, May 27th,
Available Online at http://progressive.org/news/2015/05/188151/senate-moves-check-executive-spyingpower, Accessed 06-07-2015)
The political shift indicates a direction for future reform. Who Wins and Who Loses? The
most obvious losers are the NSA and FBI.
After 15 years of breaking already permissive laws, yet not congressional blank checks, the agencies must finally
start complying with constitutional limits . Within the agencies, senior leaders of the intelligence
establishment also emerge looking like clowns. Section 215 survived this long only because agency
officials—including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former NSA Director Michael Hayden—lied under oath to evade
oversight. The Senate's decision to end a program that senators learned about from whistleblowers, instead of
those officials, further discredits their legacies. Even if they remain above the law by evading the prosecution for perjury sought by multiple members of
Congress, their careers will be defined by congressional and judicial rejection of illegal programs they built in secret. To the extent intelligence officials are clowns,
the many congressional leaders from both parties who supported them are stooges. Establishment Democrats and Republicans alike uncritically accepted lies, deferred
to them and went along with the Beltway consensus - in sharp contrast to their populist colleagues who proved willing to uphold their oath of office to "defend the
Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Several winners also emerged from this drama. Congressional
rejection of mass spying
vindicates several principles at once, including transparency, oversight, checks and balances, the
separation of powers and constitutional rights enshrined in the First and Fourth Amendments. Each of those
values is cherished across the political continuum, making them especially powerful during a presidential election year. Senator Paul is another clear winner. He
demonstrated leadership, surged among the crowded GOP field of 2016 presidential hopefuls and effectively seized control of the Senate from the majority leader.
With its senators leading both the surveillance/secrecy/corruption caucus, as well as the competing constitutional/privacy/accountability caucus, Kentucky could also
claim victory. The US Constitution may be the most important winner. By proxy, "We the People of the United States" actually scored two victories at once.
Narrowly, the expiration of Patriot Act Section 215 advances Fourth Amendment privacy interests. Even though mass surveillance will continue for now under other
legal authorities, one program through which our government monitors phone calls and tracks everyone's behavior, regardless of wrongdoing, will end. More broadly,
this vote begins a long-overdue process of limiting executive powers , expanded during a period of seeming emergency,
which grew entrenched despite proving ineffective as well as constitutionally offensive. In this sense, congressional assertiveness supports
democracy in a long-running battle to avoid the erosion from within foreseen by both Alexis de Tocqueville and President and
Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower. What Comes Next? With reformers having triumphed in Congress, the debate over surveillance reform must
expand. Further reforms are necessary to enable an adversarial process and greater transparency at the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and also to limit
other legal authorities - like Executive Order 12333 and FISA Section 702 - used to justify unconstitutional domestic surveillance. It's a good thing that a bipartisan
measure, the Surveillance State Repeal Act (HR 1466), is poised to do exactly that. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky)
introduced the SSRA to force the agencies to justify the expansion of any powers from a constitutional baseline, rather than one contrived by a decade of executive
lies. Congress
has long abandoned its role of checking and balancing runaway executive power, but the
Senate's recent vote suggests an overdue awakening . Members should heed the political wind, and embrace bipartisan calls for
aggressive limits as the starting point for comprehensive surveillance reform.
Obama will comply
David J Barron 8, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Martin S. Lederman, Visiting
Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest
Ebb -- A Constitutional History”, Harvard Law Review, February, 121 Harv. L. Rev. 941, Lexis
In addition to offering important guidance concerning the congressional role, our historical review also illuminates the practices of the President in creating the
it is
tempting to think that Commanders in Chief would always have claimed a unilateral and unregulable authority to
determine the conduct of military operations. And yet, as we show, for most of our history, the presidential practice was
otherwise. Several of our most esteemed Presidents - Washington, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts, among others - never invoked the sort of
preclusive claims of authority that some modern Presidents appear to embrace without pause. In fact, no Chief Executive did so in any clear way until
the onset of the Korean War, even when they confronted problematic restrictions, some of which could not be fully interpreted away and
constitutional law of war powers at the "lowest ebb." Given the apparent advantages to the Executive of possessing preclusive powers in this area,
some of which even purported to regulate troop deployments and the actions of troops already deployed. ¶ Even since claims of preclusive power emerged in full, the
practice within the executive branch has waxed and waned. No consensus among modern Presidents has crystallized. Indeed, rather
than denying the
authority of Congress to act in this area, some modern Presidents, like their predecessors, have acknowledged the
constitutionality of legislative regulation. They have therefore concentrated their efforts on making effective use of other presidential
authorities and institutional [*949] advantages to shape military matters to their preferred design. n11 In sum, there has been much less executive
assertion of an inviolate power over the conduct of military campaigns than one might think. And, perhaps most importantly, until recently
there has been almost no actual defiance of statutory limitations predicated on such a constitutional theory.¶ This repeated,
though not unbroken, deferential executive branch stance is not, we think, best understood as evidence of the timidity of prior Commanders in
Chief. Nor do we think it is the accidental result of political conditions that just happened to make it expedient for all of these Executives to refrain from lodging such
a constitutional objection. This consistent pattern of executive behavior is
more accurately viewed as reflecting deeply rooted
norms and understandings of how the Constitution structures conflict between the branches over war. In
particular, this well-developed executive branch practice appears to be premised on the assumption that the
constitutional plan requires the nation's chief commander to guard his supervisory powers over the military chain of command jealously, to be willing to act in times
of exigency if Congress is not available for consultation, and to use the very powerful weapon of the veto to forestall unacceptable limits proposed in the midst of
military conflict - but that otherwise, the
Constitution compels the Commander in Chief to comply with legislative
restrictions .¶ In this way, the founding legal charter itself exhorts the President to justify controversial military
judgments to a sympathetic but sometimes skeptical or demanding legislature and nation, not only for the sake of liberty, but also for effective and
prudent conduct of military operations. Justice Jackson's famous instruction that "with all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique
for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations" n12 continues to have a
strong pull on the constitutional imagination. n13 What
emerges from our analysis is how much pull it seemed to [*950] have
on the executive branch itself for most of our history of war powers development.
AT Off-Case Arguments
AT Topicality – “Domestic”
2AC Frontline
1) We meet – we are domestic surveillance. The plan curtails domestic surveillance
— it’s the biggest aff on the topic. Here’s contextual evidence.
RT 15 — RT USA—a Russian English-language news publication, 2015 (“Bipartisan bill would repeal
Patriot Act, cut down American surveillance,” March 25th, Available Online at http://rt.com/usa/243745bill-repeal-patriot-act-surveillance/, Accessed 06-20-2015)
The bipartisan Surveillance State Repeal Act, if passed, would repeal dragnet surveillance of Americans’ personal
communications, overhaul the federal domestic surveillance program, and provide protections for
whistleblowers. House lawmakers Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are co-sponsoring bill H.R.1466, which was introduced on Tuesday and
would repeal the 2001 Patriot Act, limit powers of the FISA Amendments Act, and prohibit retaliation against federal national security whistleblowers, according to
The Hill. “The
Patriot Act contains many provisions that violate the Fourth Amendment and have led to a
dramatic expansion of our domestic surveillance state ,” said Rep. Massie in a statement. "Our Founding Fathers fought and
died to stop the kind of warrantless spying and searches that the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act authorize. It is long past time to repeal the Patriot Act and
the bill would revoke all the powers of the Patriot Act, and
instruct the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to destroy any information
collected under the FISA Amendments Act concerning any US person not under investigation. It would repeal
reassert the constitutional rights of all Americans.” Specifically,
provisions of the FISA Amendments Act to ensure surveillance of email data only occurs with a valid warrant based on probable cause. The bill would also prohibit
the government from mandating that manufacturers build mechanisms allowing the government to bypass encryption in order to conduct surveillance. Additionally,
the bill would protect a federal whistleblower’s efforts to expose mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse, or criminal behavior. It would also make retaliation against
anyone interfering with those efforts – such as threatening them with punishment or termination – illegal. “Really, what we need are new whistleblower protections so
that the next Edward Snowden doesn’t have to go to Russia or Hong Kong or whatever the case may be just for disclosing this,” Massie said. There have been
previous attempts to limit dragnet surveillance under the Patriot Act since former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaked information regarding
the programs in 2013, but the Senate bill introduced in 2013 never reached the floor for a vote. “ The
warrantless collection of millions of
personal communications from innocent Americans is a direct violation of our constitutional right to
privacy,” said Rep. Pocan in a statement. “Revelations about the NSA’s programs reveal the extraordinary extent
to which the program has invaded Americans’ privacy . I reject the notion that we must sacrifice liberty for security – we can live in
a secure nation which also upholds a strong commitment to civil liberties. This legislation ends the NSA’s dragnet surveillance
practices, while putting provisions in place to protect the privacy of American citizens through real and
lasting change.”
2) Counter-definition:
A) Domestic means “occurring within the United States”
Congressional Bills 105th Congress, S.2617, 1998, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS105s2617is/html/BILLS-105s2617is.htm
(2) Domestic.--The term `domestic' means
within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.
B) “Domestic surveillance” must collect information from within the United States
Sladick 12 – Kelli Sladick, Blogger at the Tenth Amendment Center, “Battlefield USA: The Drones are
Coming”, Tenth Amendment Center, 12-10, http://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/12/battlefieldusa-the-drones-are-coming/
In a US leaked document, “Airforce Instruction 14-104”, on domestic surveillance is permitted on US
citizens. It defines domestic surveillance as, “any imagery collected by satellite (national or commercial)
and airborne platforms that cover the land areas of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and the
territories and possessions of the US, to a 12 nautical mile seaward limit of these land areas.” In the
leaked document, legal uses include: natural disasters, force protection, counter-terrorism, security
vulnerabilities, environmental studies, navigation, and exercises.
C) The Foreign-to-foreign surveillance of NSA surveillance occurs within the US
RICHARD HENRY SEAMON, Professor, University of Idaho College of Law, “Domestic
Surveillance for International Terrorists: Presidential Power and Fourth Amendment Limits”, Hastings
Law Quarterly, Vol. 35:3 Spring 2008,
http://www.hastingsconlawquarterly.org/archives/V35/I3/seamon.pdf
As discussed above, the
Protect America Act of 2007 "clarifies" that FISA's definition of "electronic surveillance"
excludes "surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United
States.216 The primary purpose is to free the government from having to get a traditional FISA warrant to intercept
communications between people overseas.217 Under the analysis proposed here, this provision supports both the President's
power to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications through warrantless surveillance inside the United
States , and the reasonableness of such interception for Fourth Amendment purposes. The Protect America Act does not grant surveillance
power to the President; instead, it implicitly recognizes that the President has such power independently of any statutory grant. It does so by
lifting FISA's restrictions on the President's exercise of surveillance authority when directing electronic surveillance at people outside the U.S. In
light of the
3)
Your violation is wrong - FISA domestic vs. foreign espionage distinction is
flawed. And NSA analysts target US citizens both in initial data collection and
reverse targeting.
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
The Article next turns to statutory issues related to targeting, post-targeting analysis, and the retention and dissemination of information. It argues that
the NSA
has sidestepped FAA restrictions by adopting procedures that allow analysts to acquire information not just to or from, but also "about" targets. In its foreignness
assumes, absent evidence to the contrary, that the target is a non-U.S. person
located outside domestic bounds . And weak standards mark the foreign intelligence purpose
determination . Together, these elements allow for the broad collection of U.S. persons' international
communications, even as they open the door to the interception of domestic communications. In regard
to post-targeting analysis, the Article draws attention to the intelligence community's use of U.S. person
information to query data obtained under Section 702, effectively bypassing protections Congress
introduced to prevent reverse targeting. The Article further notes in relation to retention and dissemination that increasing consumer and
determination the agency
industrial reliance on cryptography means that the NSA's retention of encrypted data may soon become the exception that swallows the rule.
4) Our Interpretation is superior:
A) Their FISA definition is a flawed framework – it does not envision SQ bulk data
collection
William C. Banks 2009, “Responses to the Ten Questions,” 35 WM. MITCHELL L. REV. 5007, 5012,
pp. LN, KEL
For a long time, the process worked well as a mechanism to regulate surveillance of known intelligence targets. The FISA process and its
eventual orders have always been limited, however. FISA was concerned with "acquisition," not with the uses the Government might have for
what is collected. FISA also assumed that officials know where the target is and what "facilities" he will use for his communications. Knowing
this much enabled the Government to demonstrate the required "probable cause" to believe that the target was an agent of a foreign power, or
more recently, a lone wolf. FISA
did not authorize intelligence collection for the purpose of identifying the
targets of surveillance, by collecting aggregate communications traffic and then identifying the
surveillance target. In other words, FISA envisioned case-specific surveillance, not a generic surveillance
operation, and its approval architecture was accordingly geared to specific, narrowly targeted
applications. FISA was also based on the recognition that persons lawfully in the United States have constitutional privacy and free
expression rights that stand in the way of unfettered [*5009] government surveillance.
B) Ground – they exclude the only predictable NSA aff on the topic, making affs run
to the margins of the topic to find small affs that are unpredictable and worse for
neg ground – we are best for neg ground
5) No ground loss for the negative – even if we are extra-topical this is an example of
it benefiting the negative – we supercharge their links by requiring a warrant for
ANY surveillance
6) But we aren’t extra topical
Jon Henke, Director of DigitalSociety.org, a tech policy think tank, and Arts+Labs, a technology policy
coalition defending the future of the digital economy, “CENSURE LIES, CENSURE MYTHS”, March
2006, http://qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=3611
Tom clearly is operating from his own unique set of definitions. For example, he seems to think that
"domestic surveillance" means "calls wherein both participants are within the United States" — which is
simply incorrect and at direct variance with the language of FISA.
7) Prefer reasonability – competing interpretations justifies “everything except the
aff” which we can’t generate offense against
We Meet – domestic Surveillance Ext
The plan dramatically curtails domestic surveillance under all relevant legal
authorities.
Williams 15 — Lauren C. Williams, Technology Reporter for ThinkProgress who covers consumer
privacy, cybersecurity, tech culture, and the intersection of civil liberties and tech policy, holds a master’s
in journalism from the University of Maryland, 2015 (“House Members Move To Repeal The Patriot Act
With Strongest Anti-Surveillance Bill To Date,” ThinkProgress, March 24th, Available Online at
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/03/24/3638234/house-members-move-repeal-patriot-act-strongestanti-surveillance-bill-date/, Accessed 06-29-2015)
Overshadowed by congressional budget talks, Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) quietly introduced
the strongest
anti-surveillance bill to date that would strip the government of much of its spying power. “This isn’t just
tinkering around the edges, it’s a meaningful overhaul that makes sure the meaningless surveillance of
emails and cell phones are done away with ,” Pocan said in a briefing for congressional staffers Tuesday. The Surveillance State
Repeal Act, or HR 1466, aims to repeal the Patriot Act, including the controversial telephony metadata collection program, and
strip many of the surveillance permissions granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
amendments passed under President George W. Bush in 2008. Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL), James McGovern (D-MA), and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) are
original co-sponsors on the bill, which was ushered in March 19. Surveillance has been a prominent in public debate since former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden’s massive document leak exposed several government intelligence programs, namely the NSA’s dragnet telephone metadata collection. But despite
public outrage over civil liberties violations and calls for immediate reform, little has been done since Snowden’s 2013 revelations. The controversial phone metadata
surveillance program was reauthorized for the fifth time under Section 215 of the Patriot Act extended until June. Other sections of the Patriot Act are also expected to
sunset this summer. In 2014, President Barack Obama announced a scaled-back surveillance program that would permit intelligence agencies to collect phone records
without storing them, and agencies could only query the data stored by a third party after getting a warrant except in true emergencies. Those queries were limited to
people who have called or been called by suspected terrorists. Revised versions of the USA Freedom Act, a counter bill to the Patriot Act introduced after the
Snowden leaks, have stalled, and only offered smaller changes. But with continued bipartisan support, HR
1466 could rekindle hope for
sweeping changes in surveillance laws. “All mass surveillance does is violate the rights and put a chilling effect on the American people,”
causing people to change their behavior because they’re afraid of government spying, said Patrick Eddington, national security and civil liberties policy analyst for the
libertarian think tank CATO Institute, at Tuesday’s meeting. The
Patriot Act, as written, is heavily contingent on Executive Order
12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan more than 30 years ago. The order has been since used as the legal justification for
some of the NSA’s surveillance programs including backdoor access to internet companies’ data centers . If
passed, the Surveillance State Repeal Act would ban the use of order 12333 and close those data access loopholes
built in to software and devices’ encryption. It would also extend greater protections to whistleblowers,
such as making it illegal to fire or retaliate against them. “This is not about Edward Snowden. If you want to talk about Edward
Snowden, we need better whistleblower protections so it doesn’t happen again,” Massie said, indicating the contractor turned whistleblower couldn’t legally have
disclosed problems with the agency to him or other Congress members.” Pocan
and Massie’s bill would upend that justification by repealing
the programs under FISA and the Patriot Act that allow indiscriminate collection and access to
Americans’ communications . For example, HR 1466 would repeal the amendment that permits email
harvesting, with few exceptions, and make it illegal to survey individuals without a warrant and
probable cause. The bill also mandates domestic surveillance programs be monitored for compliance by
the Government Accountability Office.
Data repackaging and rerouting means domestic communication travels over
foreign servers, making it domestic surveillance
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
Second,
wholly domestic conversations may become swept up in the surveillance simply by nature of how
the Internet is constructed. Everything one does online involves packets of information. Every Web site, every e-mail, every transfer of documents
takes the information involved and divides it up into small bundles. Limited in size, these packets contain information about the sender's IP address, the intended
receiver's IP address, something that indicates how many packets the communication has been divvied up into, and what number in the chain is represented by the
packet in question. n182 Packet
switched networks ship this information to a common destination via the most
expedient route--one that may, or may not, include the other packets of information contained in the message. If a roadblock or problem
arises in the network, the packets can then be re-routed, to reach their final destination. Domestic messages may thus be
routed through international servers, if that is the most efficient route to the final destination. What this
means is that even if the NSA applies an IP filter to eliminate communications that appear to be within
the United States, it may nevertheless monitor domestic conversations by nature of them being routed
through foreign servers. In this manner, a student in Chicago may send an e-mail to a student in Boston
[*164] that gets routed through a server in Canada. Through no intent or design of the individual in
Chicago, the message becomes international and thus subject to NSA surveillance.
FISA Definitions are Flawed Ext.
FISA is a bad framework for understanding electronic surveillance
William C. Banks 2009, “Responses to the Ten Questions,” 35 WM. MITCHELL L. REV. 5007, 5012,
pp. LN, KEL
It is widely understood that the
political dynamics that led to the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in
1978 were unique, and that the inter-branch compromises reached then authorized the means for
electronic collection of foreign intelligence that served the Nation well for many years. The basic idea was simple:
the Government can conduct intrusive electronic surveillance of Americans or others lawfully in the United States without traditional probable cause to believe that
they had committed a crime, if it could demonstrate to a special Article III court that it had a different kind of probable cause: reason to believe that they are acting on
behalf of foreign powers. Since
then, critics argue that the basic patchwork-like architecture of FISA became too
rigid, too complicated, and too unforgiving to enable effective intelligence responses to crises . Would-be targets
of surveillance are communicating in ways that stress or evade the FISA system (when, for example, the location of the target is difficult or impossible to determine).
Because of switching technology, collection inside the United States is now often the best or only way to acquire even foreign-to-foreign communications.
Furthermore, powerful
computers and data mining techniques now permit computers to select potential
surveillance targets from electronic databases of previously unimaginable size. The wholesale quality of
such computer collection and data mining is incompatible with the retail scope of the original FISA
process. At the same time, more Americans than ever are engaged in international communications and there is
far [*5008] greater intelligence interest in communications to and from Americans. Both circumstances
increase the likelihood that the Government will be intercepting communications of innocent Americans,
raising as many questions about the adequacy of the FISA safeguards, as about the adaptability of FISA
architecture. This tension forms the context for a series of post-1978 amendments to FISA, culminating in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), which
this essay examines.
Their interpretation is wrong – FISA says persons targeted in the US for
surveillance is done for the purpose of foreign intelligence
William C. Banks 2009, “Responses to the Ten Questions,” 35 WM. MITCHELL L. REV. 5007, 5012,
pp. LN, KEL
Until the 2008 amendments, FISA
governed the electronic surveillance of persons in the United States for the
purpose of collecting foreign intelligence . (FISA did not apply to surveillance conducted outside the
United States, or to foreign-to-foreign telephone communications intercepted within the United States.)
FISA "probable cause" required that targets of the surveillance had to be a "foreign power," an "agent of a foreign power," or, since 2004, a "lone
wolf" terrorism suspect. Applications had to specify "facilities" where the surveillance would be directed and provide "minimization" procedures
to assure that the "acquisition" of collected information would not be disseminated or retained outside authorized bounds. A special court that
meets in secret was created to hear requests for orders to conduct the surveillance.
NSA interpretation of FISA is the problem, not the letter of the law – your
interpretation doesn’t account for this.
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
Section 702 places four limitations on acquisition, each of which is meant to restrict the amount of
information that can be obtained by the government. n166 The NSA has sidestepped these statutory
restrictions in three important ways : first, it has adopted procedures that allow analysts to acquire
information "about" selectors (that is, communications modes used by targets) or targets, and not merely communications to or from
targets (or selectors employed by targets), or information held by targets themselves. Second, it has created a presumption of non-U.S. person
status: That is, if an individual is not known to be a U.S. person (and thus exempted from Section 702 and treated either under Sections 703
As aforementioned,
then the NSA assumes that the individual is a non-U.S. person. Third,
the NSA has failed to adopt standards that would require it to ascertain whether a target is located within
domestic bounds. Instead, the agency, having looked at the available evidence, absent evidence to the contrary, assumes that
the target is located outside the United States. These interpretations work together to undermine
Congress's addition of Sections 703 and 704, even as they open the door to more extensive collection of
domestic communications. In 2008 Congress anticipated that U.S. person information would inadvertently be collected under Section 702. This is in part why it included
and 704 or under traditional FISA, depending on the location),
minimization procedures, as well as limits on what could be collected. Most Members, however, do not appear to have contemplated broad, programmatic collection that would undermine
protections introduced in Sections 702 and 703. n167 Those who did articulate this possibility voted against the bill. [*159] Even if Congress did not initially appreciate the potential for
programmatic collection, however, certainly by 2012 the intelligence community had made enough information available to Congress for Members to make an informed decision. This does not
mean that all Members were fully informed. But to the extent that Members selected not to access the material or to take a public stand on the matter, particularly in light of the legislature's
FISC realized the
implications of the NSA's interpretation of to, from or about (TFA) collection. However, in light of the seriousness
of the NSA's aim (protecting national security), and the limitations imposed by the types of technologies being used,
the Court read the statute in a manner that found the targeting procedures to be consistent with the statute.
reading of its authorities with regard to classification, fault lies with Congress. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court failed to step into the gap. In 2011,
Domestic v Foreign Distinction Flawed Ext
Their domestic vs. foreign intelligence distinction is flawed – Status quo data
collection makes the distinction meaningless
William C. Banks 2009, “Responses to the Ten Questions,” 35 WM. MITCHELL L. REV. 5007, 5012,
pp. LN, KEL
Second, the Attorney General submits classified procedures to the FISC by which the Government will determine that acquisitions conducted
under the program meet the program targeting objectives and satisfy traditional FISA minimization procedures. After a judge approves the
program features, executive branch officials authorize the surveillance and issue directives compelling communications carriers to assist.
Although details of the implementation of the program authorized by the FAA are not known, a best
guess is the Government uses a broad vacuum cleaner-like first stage of collection, focusing on
transactional data, where wholesale interception occurs following the development and implementation of filtering criteria. Then the
NSA engages in [*5015] a more particularized collection of content after analyzing mined data. Although
traditional FISA orders are still required for "intentional acquisition" of domestic communications,
accidental or incidental acquisition of U.S. persons inside the United States surely occurs, especially in
light of the difficulty of ascertaining a target's location. Nor do the minimization rules require the
Government to discard communications of U.S. persons incidentally collected when the Government is
targeting someone abroad. NSA may decide to retain any communications that constitute foreign
intelligence, and there is no review of the NSA decisions.
Modern technologies make determining domestic vs. foreign impossible
William C. Banks 2009, “Responses to the Ten Questions,” 35 WM. MITCHELL L. REV. 5007, 5012,
pp. LN, KEL
A third problematic feature of the FAA is, ironically, that the legislation follows the thirty-year FISA
model of focusing on targets and their location for the purposes of authorizing and conditioning
surveillance and data collection. With modern communications capabilities, it is not possible to tell
reliably in many cases where an individual is when a communication is made. From the Government's
perspective, the downside of relying on a target's location as a basis for conducting lawful surveillance
was softened when the PAA and FAA provided that the Government had only to reasonably believe that
the target is abroad. However, one inevitable problem with the relaxed standard is that more warrantless
surveillance of persons inside the United States will occur.
Their interpretation is wrong – modern email makes consideration of physical
location and the domestic/foreign distinction impossible to determine. Despite not
being considered legally “domestic” surveillance under FISA currently, it *should
be*
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
The same types of communications exempted from FISA, however, in the modern age of e-mail, had
begun to fall within traditional FISA. For instance, U.S. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) store e-mail
on servers in the United States. The same British subject, if she accesses her email from London (pulling
it from a server within the United States), suddenly falls within FISA--even when the e-mail she is
retrieving is sent by the same French citizen in Paris. In other words, merely by using an American ISP,
[*148] non-citizens could obtain the protections of the more rights-protective FISA framework--even
where such persons had no other ties to the United States and presented a classic foreign intelligence
threat (and would otherwise be covered by the less rigorous contours of Executive Order 12,333).
Exacerbating the problem was the difficulty of determining where the user was located--inside the
U.S. or on foreign soil--a consideration crucial to determining whether the intelligence community
must first approach FISC for an order.
FISA doesn’t define “domestic” – it allows blurring between foreign and domestic
Laura Donohue 2015, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, “SECTION 702 AND
THE COLLECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE AND INTERNET CONTENT,” Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy, pp. LN, KEL
The FAA is largely silent about what burden must be borne by the government to establish
whether the target is a U.S. person. Instead, Section 702 directs the Attorney General to adopt targeting procedures reasonably
designed (a) to ensure acquisition is limited to persons reasonably believed to be outside U.S.; and (b) to prevent the acquisition of domestic communications. n185 In
only requires that the NSA not know (a) that the target is in the U.S.; or (b) that it is
intercepting entirely domestic communications. There is nothing in the targeting requirements
requiring intelligence agencies to take certain steps to ascertain whether the target is a U.S. person
or what must be done to ascertain the target's location
other words, the statute
The negative’s definition of “domestic surveillance” is outdated
Jonathan Masters, Deputy Editor, CFR, “U.S. Domestic Surveillance”, June 13th 2013,
http://www.cfr.org/intelligence/us-domestic-surveillance/p9763
The Bush administration maintained that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was an outdated lawenforcement mechanism that was too time-consuming given the highly fluid, modern threat environment. Administration officials
portrayed the NSA program as an "early warning system" (PDF) with "a military nature that requires speed and agility." Moreover, the White
House stressed that the program was one not of domestic surveillance but of monitoring terrorists abroad, and publicly
referred to the operation as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." Opponents of the program referred to it as "domestic spying." Under
congressional pressure, Gonzales announced in January 2007 plans to disband the warrantless surveillance
program and cede oversight to FISC, but questions about the legality of the program lingered in Congress and Gonzales resigned months later.
But Washington's vow to seek FISA approval for domestic surveillance was short-lived. In July 2007--weeks before Gonzales stepped down-intelligence officials pressed lawmakers for emergency legislation to broaden their wiretapping authority following a ruling by the court
overseeing FISA that impacted the government's ability to intercept foreign communications passing through telecommunications "switches" on
U.S. soil. In August, President Bush
signed the Protect America Act of 2007, which gave the attorney general and
the director of national intelligence temporary power to approve international surveillance, rather than the
special intelligence court. It also said warrants are unnecessary for surveillance of a person "reasonably believed"
to be located overseas. This six-month stopgap measure expired in early 2008, but the FISA Amendment
Act passed just months later contained similar provisions. President Obama reauthorized this legislation for five more years
in December 2012.
AT Politics DA
2AC Answers
Non-Unique: Anti-surveillance coalition is already pushing for more antisurveillance measures that go beyond USA Freedom Act, which should trigger the
link
Sara Sorcher June 8, 2015, “NSA surveillance debate gives rise to bipartisan Civil Liberties
Coalition,” Christian Science Monitor, pp. LN, KEL
Most of the privacy advocates agreed the USA Freedom Act - the bill President Obama eventually signed to end bulk collection and force the agency to collect
the data from the private sector - would be better than the straight extension of the spying authorities McConnell was proposing, but many thought it did not go far enough. So a critical
mass within the coalition formed what David Segal, executive director of progressive political activist group Demand Progress, called a "vanguard, grassroots
flank" pushing for a total sunset of the Patriot Act provisions. "We think USA Freedom is woefully insufficient at best," Mr. Segal said. Yet Segal and other
advocates acknowledged that, if the coalition could convince a swath of members in both parties to hold out for sunset, lawmakers against surveillance reform would be forced take it seriously. After all, if no compromise was reached
and the authorities were about to expire, the coalition believed - correctly - that Congress would be more likely to have USA Freedom form the compromise than a weaker surveillance reform bill. The group generated at least 600,000
e-mails to lawmakers' offices and tens of thousands of phone calls in the weeks leading up to the vote. What's more, during the intense days of the Patriot Act fight, the various segments of the groups targeted the members of Congress
naturally more receptive to their core issues. "We could lead with the Quakers, or [progressive digital rights advocacy group] Fight for the Future, or FreedomWorks - in a way that traditional coalitions of this sort just don't do,
because they are coalitions of either the left or right," Meinrath says. Each member of the coalition found allies on Capitol Hill who advocated for reforming Section 215, making for strange bedfellows in Congress. Republican
With the passage of the
USA Freedom Act behind them, the alliance is already working on a multiyear, coordinated
strategy to push Congress to continue surveillance reforms . Just last week, the House of
Representatives approved several antispying measures within a major appropriations bill - including banning the government
from forcing tech companies to place "back doors" into encrypted devices, and prohibiting the Drug Enforcement Agency from revamping a once-secret bulk call records collection program. The coalition
supported and consulted with more than 50 House lawmakers on these efforts, and is looking ahead to the
Defense Appropriations bill expected later this month as another vehicle for anti-spying amendments. "You'll
libertarians such as Senator Paul or Rep. Justin Amash found themselves in the same camp as liberal Democrats such as Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Mark Pocan.
see an immediate push for amendments to appropriations bills to prevent the NSA from making use of what's called the 'back door loophole' for warrantless wiretapping of Americans," Segal said. The coalition is eyeing several
amendments, including one that would prevent the NSA from purposefully degrading the security of devices to get access to the data.
N/U: Congress is divided – strong Democrat opposition
Kakumi Kobayashi, 6-27-15, “TPP’s fate rests with Japan, U.S.,” Japan Times,
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/06/27/business/top-problem-new-tpp-talks-will-disputes-japan-us/#.VaB-n_kpsTd, KEL
Obama said the United States needs the TPP, which would cover 40 percent of the global economy, to boost its economy and prevent China from setting the rules of
trade in the Asia-Pacific region. However, Obama
had to deal with rebellions in his Democratic Party to pass the related
bills, including the one last week that gave him trade promotion authority — which enables him to sign trade deals with only
a yes or no vote by Congress. Democrats who are critical of free trade deals because of the risk they pose to
domestic jobs blocked one of the bills, forcing the legislation to be batted back and forth between the
Senate and the House of Representatives. “It has been a roller-coaster ride,” said Mack McLarty, a former White House
chief of staff, describing the twists and turns in the congressional debates on trade, including the TPP, since a
bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the TPA bill in April. The split in Congress apparently stoked a sense of crisis among
leading lawmakers and prompted them to call for unity in supporting Obama’s trade agenda and the TPP
itself.
TURN - Trade partners will balk to TPP because we will use it to expand NSA
surveillance of them – plan is necessary to solve those fears
Justin Ling, July 16, 2014, “The World's Next Major Trade Agreement Will Make NSA Spying Even
Easier,” Motherboard, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-trans-pacific-partnership-will-make-nsaspying-easier, KEL
With paranoia over NSA surveillance reaching a fever pitch , foreign governments are making a
reasonable plea: bring our data home. But the Americans are doing their best to ensure that the
world’s Internet data stays on U.S. soil, well within the reach of their spies. To do so, American
negotiators are leveraging trade deals with much of the developed world, inserting language to ensure
“cross-border data flows”—a euphemism that actually means they want to inhibit foreign governments
from keeping data hosted domestically. The trade deals they’re influencing—the Trans-Atlantic Partnership (TPP), the Trade in Services
Agreement (TiSA), and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—are all so secretive that nobody but the governments themselves are privy to the
we have a pretty good idea of what’s going
on in the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade agreement that will act as a sort of NAFTA for Asia-Pacific region nations. America
is, essentially, the world’s data server. Since the dawn of the internet itself, every database of import has
been hosted in the grand US of A. But now, foreign governments are starting to see the benefit of
patriating their citizens’ private information. Canada was an early adopter of the idea. Federal procurement regulations often require
details. But thanks to the Australians and Wikileaks, both of whom have leaked details on TPP,
government departments to insert local data requirements, stating that businesses who wish to administer or host Canadians’ information must keep the information
within Canadian borders. Most recently, the Canadian Government put out a tender for a company to merge and host the email servers for all their departments. In
doing so, they stuck in a national security exemption, forbidding foreign contractors from applying. Nova Scotia and British Columbia went a step further, flatly
requiring any government-hosted personal data to be physically located in Canada. Australia has taken similar steps, including setting up firm requirements for how
companies store offshore data. But
the American government is not having any of it and is using TPP negotiations to
strong-arm new provisions that favour American hosted data.
Turn – Obama is all about his legacy, he won’t fight the plan, he’ll embrace it as his
own progressive reform
Spencer Ackerman June 3, 2015, national security editor for Guardian US. A former senior writer
for Wired, he won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Digital Reporting, “Barack Obama and
surveillance reform: a story of vacillation, caution and fear,” The Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/barack-obama-surveillance-reform-vacillation-cautionfear, KEL
Almost exactly two years before Barack Obama signed a bill to end the National Security Agency’s bulk
collection of US phone records, the US president defended a domestic surveillance dragnet he would later claim
credit for stopping. “You can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we’re going to
have to make some choices as a society,” Obama said on 7 June 2013, two days after the Guardian, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden,
The Snowden revelations began a process of classic Obama
vacillation , bringing him from public defender of domestic mass surveillance to its reluctant and
partial critic . It was a path crafted by politics, accelerated by law and fueled by fear. On 1 June 2015,
after the Senate conceded it would pass a bill ending the phone records dragnet, Obama’s spokesman
claimed full ownership of the end of a program the US president had two years before said posed mere
“modest encroachments on privacy”. “To the extent that we’re talking about the president’s legacy, I
would suspect that that would be a logical conclusion from some historians that the president ended some
of these programs,” said the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest.
began revealing the reach of US surveillance.
Reform’s popular and builds political support – lobbies, lawmakers – their evidence
doesn’t assume new changes in the political environment
Barfield, 14 (Claude Barfield, resident scholar at AEI who researches international trade policy, the
WTO, IP, and science and tech policy, and is former consultant to the Office of the US Trade
Representative, 8-6-2014, "NSA surveillance reform: A tilt toward privacy over security?-CICTP", Tech
Policy Daily, http://www.techpolicydaily.com/technology/nsa-surveillance-reform-tilt-toward-privacysecurity/, DA: 5-23-2015)
Several months ago, I predicted that in the debate over proposed NSA surveillance reform, NSA’s security defenders would ultimately hold the
line against significant changes in the current mode of operation. Traditionally,
security trumps privacy. But at this point in
time, the tide seems to be going the other way . Last week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick
Leahy (D-VT), introduced a version of the USA Freedom Act that is far more restrictive on intelligence
agencies’ operations than any other competing bill. Surprisingly, given the deep political divisions, Leahy’s bill
seems to have swept the field. As Jodie Liu and Benjamin Wittes write in Lawfare, “It’s the bill. It represents a compromise between
the intelligence community, the administration more generally, civil liberties groups, industry, and a fairly wide range of senators. And it will be
the legislation that moves forward with the sometimes nose-holding support of most of the major parties.” What follows is a brief review of how
we got here – and the future prospects for NSA surveillance reform. One can start with President Obama’s much heralded but ultimately
noncommittal speech on NSA and FISA court reforms in January. In
his “leading from behind” mode, the president laid
down general principles but left it to Congress and various interest groups to fill in the specifics. Reactions to the
president’s speech were decidedly mixed and reflected the strong, opposing viewpoints across the security-privacy spectrum.
Then NSA Director General Keith Alexander had already publicly stated his opposition to ending the government’s control of the metadata
program. His skepticism regarding this and other elements of the administration’s proposed FISA reforms was echoed publicly by the chairmen
and ranking members of both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. On
the other side, numerous privacy and civil
liberties organizations – the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology, et. al. –
immediately clamored for legally binding, tighter restrictions on NSA/CIA/FBI surveillance activities. They
were joined by a Who’s Who of high-tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Apple, Verizon, Facebook, Twitter, and
LinkedIn. Jockeying among congressional committees provides one central focus for the narrative over the past six months. Jurisdiction over
NSA/FISA reform is split between the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in both houses, with primary power traditionally residing in the
Intelligence Committees. Pursuant to the president’s proposals, the House Intelligence Committee began working on a bill to partially revamp
intelligence community and FISA Court procedures. But in a surprising turn of events, a competing bill from the House Judiciary Committee
developed strong bipartisan support and 163 sponsors. At that point, House Intelligence Committee leadership capitulated and entered into
negotiations with the administration and with Rep. Sensenbrenner and others on the Judiciary Committee. This in turn led to a Judiciary
Committee version of the USA Freedom Act that was revised in late negotiations to assuage concerns among both the administration and
Intelligence committee members. This bill passed the House on May 21, 303-121. Giving
evidence of how far the pendulum has
swung in recent months, however, both civil libertarian groups and high-tech companies came down hard against the
House bill as passed, and demanded further restrictions and changes in current policy and practice. This set
the stage for Senate Judiciary Chairman Leahy to seize the lead and rally a broad political coalition behind his own revised bill.
Non-Unique Ext – Dems oppose
Pelosi and Dem Leadership oppose TPP
Adam Behsudi, 6/24/15, “Trade talks approach endgame with fast track passage,” Politico,
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/trade-talks-approach-endgame-with-fast-track-in-reach119392.html, KEL
Ironically, Democrats in the House voted against the program’s renewal last month in an effort to stop the trade legislation, with which it was linked. But Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi, who remained mum on the previous measure until announcing her opposition just before that vote, threw her support behind the current bill on
Wednesday, giving it a better chance of passing once the Senate sends it over. That could happen as soon as Wednesday evening if Democrats cede back post-cloture
debate time. Pelosi
shifted her focus from the fast-track debate to the actual contents of the Asia-Pacific trade
agreement in a “dear colleague” letter Wednesday morning, adding that she expected a final passage vote on the workers’ assistance reauthorization, which is
combined with trade preferences for developing countries, on Thursday. “ I’m disappointed that the TAA bill isn’t nearly as robust as
it should be in light of a trade agreement that encompasses 40 percent of the global economy,” Pelosi said,
referring to the sprawling the trans-Pacific trade deal. “While we may not all vote in the same manner on TAA, I will support its passage because it can open the door
to a full debate on TPP.” The
California Democrat and other party leaders are highly critical of the pact, expressing
concern that it doesn’t do enough to address currency manipulation, isn’t transparent and fails to protect
U.S. workers adequately from competition from cheap foreign labor, among numerous other concerns .
Non-Unique Ext -- Congress & lobbies will push for more reforms
Non-Unique - Congress will continue to push for more surveillance reforms
Yahoo News 15 — Yahoo News, Byline Scott Bomboy, 2015 (“USA Freedom Act signed, so what’s
next for NSA spying?,” Yahoo News, June 3rd, Available Online at http://news.yahoo.com/usa-freedomact-signed-next-nsa-spying-111450759.html, Accessed 06-08-2015)
Surveillance will certainly continue under other parts of the act and under other government programs designed to combat terrorism. But
the
fight in Congress may just be getting started. The New York Times says that Senator Mike Lee and Senator Pat Leahy
are moving on to targeting the government program that allows e-mails older than six months to be read by
investigators. Congressional reformers may also seek to limit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And there
is debate in the House and Senate about other spying provisions. “Some of us don’t think USA Freedom
sufficiently ends bulk metadata collection. In fact, [the government] will still contend after the act passes that they can bulk
collect all of the websites and emails and all that content,” said Representative Thomas Massie. “Read it closely, it’s only about your
phone calls.”
Non-Unique & Turn – Symbolic victory over the Freedom Act will cause the
libertarian and liberal coalition to push for more surveillance curtailment. This
coalition is powerful and will overcome any resistance from the white house,
security agencies, and congressional leadership.
Sara Sorcher June 8, 2015, “NSA surveillance debate gives rise to bipartisan Civil Liberties
Coalition,” Christian Science Monitor, pp. LN, KEL
When the clock struck midnight on June 1, the National Security Agency's sweeping call records surveillance program ended. The expiration was a major loss for
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. He wanted the Patriot Act's Section 215 that authorized the spying extended without any change. But it was a
coup for Senator McConnell's fellow Republican senator from Kentucky. Sen. Rand Paul successfully stood in the way of renewing the bulk collection that vacuumed
up Americans' call data, clearing the way for Congress to pass a landmark surveillance reform bill instead. While the fight over Section 215 aired deep divisions in
Congress over surveillance practices, behind
the scenes, an unusual alliance that brought together far-left Democrats
and conservative Republicans had been fighting hard against a clean reauthorization of the Patriot Act and
in favor of surveillance reforms. Now, that coalition is celebrating the Patriot Act's brief expiration as its
first major victory - in what the group pledges will be a much longer fight to protect civil liberties in
the face of what it considers to be excessive government surveillance. "It's a real game changer," says Becky Bond, political
director of progressive activist organization Credo Action. "We found ourselves aligned fighting for the full repeal of the Patriot Act. Since we don't align
on many other issues, the mission was very focused." The loose-knit network, dubbed the Civil Liberties Coalition, spanned all corners
of the political spectrum and united groups such as Credo and conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks that are usually at odds on other hot political issues. Its
diversity is a rarity in Washington as it was focused on a single issue - ending mass surveillance - while at
the same time not seeking the limelight media attention. Some members are even reluctant to be
publicly affiliated with each other because they have such polar opposite views on issue such as
health care and economic policy . "Alone, libertarians nor progressives have not been able to make much headway," says Ms. Bond. Now, she
adds, " there's a recognition that progressive and libertarians coming together can form a very
powerful counterweight to the White House, security agencies, and even leadership in Congress
when we line up . We have some power, where people felt really powerless before."
Tech Lobby Link Turn Extensions
Tech lobbying over surveillance is a powerful influence – deep campaign finance
pockets, overcomes the fight because they can get the public behind them.
San Jose Mercury News June 8, 2015, “Privacy fight is far from over in US,” Reprinted in
Bakerfield Californian, http://www.bakersfield.com/news/opinion/2015/06/08/privacy-fight-is-far-fromover-in-us.html, KEL
Curtailing the metadata collection and increasing the transparency of surveillance programs are among a handful that have gotten traction. The
tech industry
can push for implementation of the rest. Increasingly engaged in lobbying, companies can authoritatively
argue that effective intelligence gathering does not have to trample Americans' privacy rights . The public
has yet to see evidence that the NSA's "collect it all" approach to phone records ever thwarted a terrorist.
Politicians increasingly understand that the path to the presidency runs through Silicon Valley's
pockets. A record $64 million from this region went to the 2012 presidential campaigns . Valley executives
and organizations should insist that candidates commit to preserving the fundamental right to privacy essential to Americans' personal liberty — and, by the way, an
essential factor in the industry's ability to thrive.
The tech sector loves and will push for the plan – they’re a key lobby group
Romm, 15 (Tony Romm, senior technology reporter for Politico, 1-21-2015, "Tech giants get deeper
into D.C. influence game", POLITICO, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/tech-lobby-apple-amazonfacebook-google-114468.html, DA: 6-2-2015)
Apple, Amazon and Facebook shelled out record amounts to influence Washington; Google posted one of
its biggest lobbying years ever; and a slew of new tech companies dipped their toes into politics for the first
time in 2014 — a sign of the industry’s deepening effort to shape policymaking in D.C. The sharp uptick
in spending reflects the tech sector’s evolution from an industry that once shunned Washington into a powerful interest
that’s willing to lobby extensively to advance the debates that matter most to companies’ bottom lines —
from clamping down on patent lawsuits to restricting NSA surveillance to obtaining more high-skilled immigration visas and green
cards. Story Continued Below “There is increasingly a sense from companies that they need to engage earlier and smarter,” said Ryan Triplette, a
Republican lobbyist for Franklin Square Group, which represents companies like Apple and Google. “They began opening up their view as their
businesses have grown … and not just looking at traditional technology issues.” Apple, which mostly avoided D.C. under the watch of late
CEO Steve Jobs, grew its lobbying balance sheet to just over $4.1 million last year from $3.3 million in 2013, according to an
analysis of lobbying reports, the latest of which were filed midnight Tuesday. The iPhone giant recently has shown a greater willingness to
engage Washington under CEO Tim Cook: It even dispatched executives to Capitol Hill in September to talk about its new smart watch and
health tracking tools hoping to assuage lawmakers’ fears about the new technology’s data-tracking abilities. Amazon’s
lobbying
expenses — more than $4.7 million, up from around $3.5 million in 2013 — correspond with the company’s own
Washington makeover. The e-commerce giant last year jumped into new lines of business, expanding its pursuit of government contracts
while eyeing a new drone delivery service, prompting it to hire a slew of new lobbyists and move to a bigger downtown D.C. office. Amazon is
also fighting the Federal Trade Commission over how it handled app purchases made by kids. Apple, Amazon and Google declined to comment
on the record. Facebook did not reply to a request for comment. For all their efforts, these tech giants failed to advance their political priorities in
the last Congress — but the fights are sure to return in 2015 under the Republican-majority Congress. GOP leaders in
both chambers have already promised to revive the debate over patent litigation reform — a critical issue for tech companies like Google that
want to curb lawsuits from so-called patent trolls. There’s also talk of boosting the number of foreign high-skilled workers, something industry
titans have coveted as part of broader immigration reform. The looming expiration of key Patriot Act surveillance authorities means Congress
must also wade back into the fight over what data the NSA can collect — a major issue for tech
companies stung by Edward Snowden’s leaks about the agency’s spying via popular Internet services. And lawmakers are plugging
into new issues like drones and wearable technology that are important to Silicon Valley. “No doubt, Internet and tech companies are
a bigger and more important part of the economy — period. It’s natural they’re going to be more involved in the
political process,” said Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members
include Amazon, Facebook and Google. “There’s been a growing realization that not only do tech companies have to be in there [in D.C.], to
make a fair pitch, they have to be more actively involved because they have to fight off hostile efforts.“ Google is the leader of the tech pack
when it comes to lobbying: The company, which until October owned Motorola Mobility, spent more than $17 million in 2014 — its secondmost expensive year after 2012, when it battled back a federal antitrust investigation. The search giant’s D.C. operation, led by former GOP Rep.
Susan Molinari, relocated last year to a new, sprawling 54,000-square-foot office steps from the Capitol. Facebook, for its part, spent more than
$9.3 million in 2014, up from $6.4 million in 2013. The company’s most recent lobbying report points to its work on privacy and security issues
along with Internet access and trade, as Facebook aims to expand its service worldwide and avoid foreign rules that might restrict where it stores
user data. Companies like Belkin, a major player in the emerging sector of connected home devices, and Snapchat, an app for disappearing photo
messages, each registered their first-ever lobbyists last year. Snapchat hired its new consultants from the firm Heather Podesta + Partners after a
major data breach registered on Washington’s radar. Other prominent tech companies retained new help, as well. Netflix grew its lobbying roster
amid the fight at the FCC over net neutrality. And Uber added D.C. lobbyists to win new allies for its ride-hailing app, which has triggered fights
with state and local regulators and cab operators nationwide. And a
coalition of tech titans like Apple, Google and
Microsoft banded together to invest in an anti-NSA snooping coalition, Reform Government Surveillance, which spent
$230,000 in 2014. Many of those companies’ executives regularly traveled to Washington to press President Barack
Obama on surveillance reforms, and the group ran frequent advertisements highlighting the need for more NSA transparency.
Online industry has tremendous lobbying clout – has proven success
Business Pundit April 26, 2011, “10 of the Biggest Lobbies in Washington,”
http://www.businesspundit.com/10-of-the-biggest-lobbies-in-washington/, KEL
Over the past 15 years, the tech industry has become one of the big spenders in lobbying, doling out over
$120 million in 2010. With the power of tech giants Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft behind it, the
computer and Internet lobby has a lot of weight to throw around. By weight, we mean money: In 2010, Microsoft alone
spent over $6.9 million in federal lobbying efforts. The tech lobby’s priorities include trying to lower corporate tax rates and pass cybersecurity legislation. In the last few
years, tech industry heavy-hitters and activists have found themselves at odds with communication companies and governing bodies like the FCC over the issue of Net Neutrality. In the summer of 2010,
Google brokered a deal with Verizon that seemed an abrupt about-face from its former stance. Meanwhile, the
House has gridlocked a bill by the FCC that would regulate ISPs and give them authority to step into
disputes; more evidence of the tech lobby, hard at work.
Google is a powerhouse lobbying group with proven success and influence who
supports our plan
Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold April 12, 2014, “Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a
master of Washington influence,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/howgoogle-is-transforming-power-and-politicsgoogle-once-disdainful-of-lobbying-now-a-master-ofwashington-influence/2014/04/12/51648b92-b4d3-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html, KEL
The behind-the-scenes machinations demonstrate how Google — once a lobbying weakling — has come
to master a new method of operating in modern-day Washington, where spending on traditional
lobbying is rivaled by other, less visible forms of influence. That system includes financing sympathetic
research at universities and think tanks, investing in nonprofit advocacy groups across the political
spectrum and funding pro-business coalitions cast as public-interest projects. The rise of Google as a top-tier
Washington player fully captures the arc of change in the influence business. Nine years ago, the company opened
a one-man lobbying shop, disdainful of the capital’s pay-to-play culture. Since then, Google has soared to near the top of the city’s
lobbying ranks, placing second only to General Electric in corporate lobbying expenditures in 2012 and fifth place in 2013. The
company gives money to nearly 140 business trade groups, advocacy organizations and think tanks ,
according to a Post analysis of voluntary disclosures by the company, which, like many corporations, does not reveal the size of its donations. That’s double the
number of groups Google funded four years ago. This summer, Google will move to a new Capitol Hill office, doubling its Washington space to 55,000 square feet —
Google’s increasingly muscular Washington presence matches its expanded
needs and ambitions as it has fended off a series of executive- and legislative-branch threats to
regulate its activities and well-funded challenges by its corporate rivals. Today, Google is working to preserve its rights
to collect consumer data — and shield it from the government — amid a backlash over revelations that the National Security
roughly the size of the White House.
Agency tapped Internet companies as part of its surveillance programs. And it markets cloud storage and other services to federal departments, including intelligence
agencies and the Pentagon.
Google can appeal in a bipartisan manner
Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold April 12, 2014, “Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a
master of Washington influence,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/howgoogle-is-transforming-power-and-politicsgoogle-once-disdainful-of-lobbying-now-a-master-ofwashington-influence/2014/04/12/51648b92-b4d3-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html, KEL
As Google’s lobbying efforts have matured, the company has worked to broaden its appeal on both
sides of the aisle . Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is a well-known backer of President Obama and advises the White House. Google’s
lobbying corps — now numbering more than 100 — is split equally, like its campaign donations, among
Democrats and Republicans. Google executives have fostered a new dialogue between Republicans and
Silicon Valley, giving money to conservative groups such as Heritage Action for America and the Federalist Society. While also supporting
groups on the left, Google has flown conservative activists to California for visits to its Mountain View campus and a stay at the Four Seasons Hotel. The
company has also pioneered new and unexpected ways to influence decision-makers, harnessing its vast
reach. It has befriended key lawmakers in both parties by offering free training sessions to Capitol Hill
staffers and campaign operatives on how to use Google products that can help target voters.
AT Elections DA
Anti-surveillance coalition will impact the election – will force GOP compliance with
new measures – their push for more reform is inevitable
Sara Sorcher June 8, 2015, “NSA surveillance debate gives rise to bipartisan Civil Liberties
Coalition,” Christian Science Monitor, pp. LN, KEL
The coalition is also looking ahead to 2017. That's the expiration data the Patriot Act's Section 702, a provision that allows the collection of
foreign data but Mr. Snowden's revelations showed also sucked up Americans' e-mails and chats without a warrant. The coalition is working with lawmakers on
amendments to effectively defund the spying practices by stipulating no money be allocated toward them. "We don't have to wait until 2017 to wait for Section 702 to
expire to demand attention for greater reforms," Withrow said. "All we have to do is keep on encouraging them, and letting them know there's a grassroots
constituency outside the beltway that has their back." Some
in the coalition are working with lawmakers on various strategies
to create an oversight and investigation panel, analogous to the Church and Pike Committees of the 1970s, to vet the totality of
surveillance activities in the post-9/11 era. Others want to see Congress debate whether Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
should keep his job - who, depending on who you ask, either lied or misspoke when he testified the NSA does not wittingly collect data on millions of Americans.
All this, too, could have an impact in election season . FreedomWorks, for instance, generated 10,000 phone
calls from conservatives in the weeks leading up to the Patriot Act vote to ensure McConnell heard from the right wing of his
party that a clean reauthorization was "absolutely unacceptable" and "toxic to him, his party, and allies," says Withrow. Now that the group knows
its base is energized on the issue of privacy, it won't stop there . FreedomWorks also has a political
action committee that raises money for and endorses Republican candidates - and plans to call out
conservatives who are, in its view, failing on surveillance and civil liberties issues. "We need to make sure conservatives are
aware of which Republicans are good on this issue," Withrow says, "and which are bad."
Income inequality, not surveillance, will the shape the entire political debate for the
2016 Presidential elections and far beyond.
Walsh, 7-6-15 [Tom, business columnist for the Detroit Free Press, former member of Board of
Governors, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, former Jefferson Fellow on Pacific Rim
Studies at the East-West Center, “America is prosperous: Now can we make people feel it?,” Detroit Free
Press, 7-6-2015, http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/columnists/tomwalsh/2015/07/06/economy-strength-inequality-obama-income-hopefuls/29555241/]
The U.S. stands tall atop an otherwise skittery world economy — with Detroit and Michigan generating some of the
strongest data points on rising car and truck sales and consumer sentiment. Yet alongside the momentum lurks nagging
anxiety that the economic lives of most U.S. citizens is not improving. Income inequality is increasingly
pronounced as the nation's wealthiest reap gains while wages of the trailing 90% are stagnant. These dueling trends are
already shaping the political narrative heading into the 2016 U.S. elections. Some Republican presidential
hopefuls, realizing they can't argue credibly that America's economy is weak — or that President Barack Obama
is to blame — are talking more like Democrats, asking why the middle class is being left behind while elites
are prospering. The risk in ignoring that issue, even as the U.S. outperforms around the globe, is frustration rooted
in the prosperity gap that can spark recurring unrest — Occupy Wall Street; Baltimore; Ferguson, Mo. —
here at home. Nancy Kaffer: How many more must die before we act? "I think this is not just a 2016 political debate, I
think this is the political debate for the next 10, 20 years because it’s hard to have a democracy when
people's income is going down," said Lou Glazer, president of the Michigan Future think tank.
AT Terrorism DA
2AC Frontline
No link - PRISM is not critical to stopping terrorism – The cases are overblown and
there’s no reason why warrantless surveillance is key. Traditional police procedures
solved these threats.
Julian Sanchez June 28, 2013, Sr Fellow at CATO on tech, privacy, and civil liberties, “Epstein on
NSA (Again) Part I: PRISM & the FISA Amendments Act,” CATO Institute,
http://www.cato.org/blog/epstein-nsa-again-part-i-prism-fisa-amendments-act, KEL
Finally, Epstein
and Loyola rather uncritically repeat the claim that the PRISM program surveillance
pursuant to FAA authorities “is responsible for foiling about 40 of the 50 terrorist plots which the administration
recently disclosed to Congress in classified briefings.” If we scrutinize the government’s claims a bit more closely, we see that in fact NSA Director Keith Alexander
claimed that PRISM intercepts had “contributed” to the disruption of 40 of 50 terrorist “events,” mostly overseas, and judged this contribution to have been “critical”
we examine some of the specific “events” government officials have discussed,
however, it becomes clear that not all of these are “plots” at all—many seem to have involved funding or
other forms of “material support” for radical groups, though in at least one such case the government
appears to have claimed a “plot” to bomb the New York Stock Exchange where none really existed. (FBI
in 50 percent of these cases. When
Deputy Sean Joyce further told Congress that the “plot” must have been serious given that a jury convicted the plotters. But federal prosecutors themselves
emphasized that the men “had not been involved in an active plot” and there was no jury trial: they were charged with “material support” and pled guilty.)
Presumably at least some of these “events” did involve actual planned attacks, but knowing that PRISM
surveillance was “critical” to disrupting half of them doesn’t in itself tell us much. The question is
whether the same surveillance could have been conducted in these cases using authorities that
existed before the FISA Amendments Act , or under narrower amendments to FISA. Since the bulk of these “events”
appear to have been overseas, the traditional authority to intercept purely foreign communications without
a warrant would seem to have sufficed, or at most required a legal tweak to accommodate stored data on
U.S. servers used by foreigners to communicate with other foreigners. There is no evidence to suggest
that the actually controversial part of the FAA—the revocation of the warrant requirement for
interception of U.S.-to-foreign wire communications—made a necessary contribution in these cases .
Indeed, as national security expert Peter Bergen has documented, the public record in the overwhelming majority of terror plots we
know about shows that they were “uncovered by traditional law enforcement methods, such as the use of informants, reliance on
community tips about suspicious activity and other standard policing practices.”
Turn: US-EU relations are key to solve terrorism – NSA surveillance undermines
that
Kristin Archick, Dec 1, 2014, Specialist in European Affairs, “US-EU Cooperation against Terrorism,”
Congressional Research Service, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS22030.pdf, KEL
As part of the EU’s efforts to combat terrorism since September 11, 2001, the EU made improving law
enforcement and intelligence cooperation with the United States a top priority. The previous George W. Bush
Administration and many Members of Congress largely welcomed this EU initiative in the hopes that it would help root out
terrorist cells in Europe and beyond that could be planning other attacks against the United States or its
interests. Such growing U.S.-EU cooperation was in line with the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations
that the United States should develop a “comprehensive coalition strategy” against Islamist terrorism,
“exchange terrorist information with trusted allies,” and improve border security through better international cooperation. Some measures in the resulting Intelligence
Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-458) and in the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-53) mirrored
these sentiments and were consistent with U.S.-EU counterterrorism efforts, especially those aimed at improving border controls and transport security. U.S.-EU
cooperation against terrorism has led to a new dynamic in U.S.-EU relations by fostering dialogue on law
enforcement and homeland security issues previously reserved for bilateral discussions with individual
EU member states. Despite some frictions, most U.S. policy makers and analysts view the developing partnership with the EU in these areas as positive.
Like its predecessor, the Obama Administration has supported U.S. cooperation with the EU in the fields of counterterrorism, border controls, and transport security.
At the November 2009 U.S.-EU Summit in Washington, DC, the two sides reaffirmed their commitment to work together to combat terrorism and enhance
cooperation in the broader JHA field. In June 2010, the United States and the EU adopted a “Declaration on Counterterrorism” aimed at deepening the already close
U.S.-EU relationship and highlighting the commitment of both sides to combat terrorism within the rule of law. In June 2011, President Obama’s National Strategy for
Counterterrorism asserted that in addition to working with European allies bilaterally, “the United States will continue to partner with the European Parliament and
European Union to maintain and advance CT efforts that provide mutual security and protection to citizens of all nations while also upholding individual rights.” The
EU has also been a key U.S. partner in the 30-member Global Counterterrorism Forum, founded in September 2011 as a multilateral body aimed at mobilizing
resources and expertise to counter violent extremism, strengthen criminal justice and rule of law capacities, and enhance international counterterrorism cooperation. 12
Recently, U.S. and EU officials have been discussing ways to combat the foreign fighter phenomenon given increasing concerns that both European and American
Muslims are being recruited to fight with Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq. U.S. policy makers, including some Members of Congress, have expressed worries in
particular about such foreign fighters in light of short-term visa-free travel arrangements between the United States and most EU countries. In early July 2014, U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder asserted, “We have a mutual and compelling interest in developing shared strategies for confronting the influx of U.S. and Europeanborn violent extremists in Syria. And because our citizens can freely travel, visa-free ... the problem of fighters in Syria returning to any of our countries is a problem
for all of our countries.” 13 In September 2014, the White House noted that U.S. officials from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security
are “working closely” with EU counterparts to “address a wide range of measures focused on enhancing counter-radicalization, border security, aviation security, and
some challenges remain in the evolving
U.S.-EU counterterrorism relationship. Among the most prominent are long-standing data privacy
and data protection concerns, which have long complicated a range of U.S.-EU informationsharing agreements and have received renewed attention in the wake of the unauthorized
disclosures since June 2013 of U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance activities . Other issues that have led to periodic
information sharing” to address potential threats posed by foreign fighters. 14 Nevertheless,
tensions include detainee policies, differences in the U.S. and EU terrorist designation lists, and balancing measures to improve border controls and border se curity
with the need to facilitate legitimate transatlantic travel and commerce.
The plan solves without jeopardizing counter-terrorism. Targeted investigations of
specific people are still authorized.
Buttar 15 — Shahid Buttar, Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Director of
Civil Rights Enforcement in the Green Shadow Cabinet—a civic organization whose membership
includes prominent scientists, community and labor leaders, physicians, cultural workers, and veterans
and which provides progressive analysis of government policies and alternative policy recommendations,
incoming Director of Grassroots Advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, former Associate
Director of the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy, serves on the advisory bodies of the
Rights Working Group, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, the National Campaign to
Restore Civil Rights, and South Asian Americans Leading Together, 2015 (“Back to Square One on
Spying,” Green Shadow Cabinet, March 26th, Available Online at
http://greenshadowcabinet.us/statements/back-square-one-spying, Accessed 06-20-2015)
By repealing the twin pillars of the surveillance dragnet, the SSRA would essentially shift the burden of
proof , forcing intelligence agencies like the NSA and FBI to justify the expansion of their powers from a
constitutional baseline, rather then the illegitimate status quo. Most policymakers forget the 9/11
commission’s most crucial finding: the intelligence community's failures that enabled the 9/11 attacks
were not failures of limited data collection, but rather failures of data sharing & analysis. Over the last 15
years, Congress has allowed the agencies to expand their collection capacities, solving an imaginary
problem while creating a host of real threats to US national security far worse than any act of rogue
violence: the specter of state omniscience, immune from oversight and accountability, and thus
vulnerable to politicization . This was among the fears of which President Eisenhower warned us in his last speech as President. Meanwhile, the
SSRA would preserve what the PATRIOT Act’s authors have said they meant to authorize: targeted
investigations of particular people suspected by authorities to present potential threats. HR 1466 would
also advance transparency, both by protecting conscientious whistleblowers from the corrupt retaliation of
agencies and careerists, and by giving judges on the secret FISA court access to technical expertise they have
been denied. Finally, the bill would directly address disturbing government duplicity, prohibiting agencies
from hacking encryption hardware and software, and from using an executive order authorizing
foreign surveillance as a basis to monitor Americans.
PRISM isn’t key to stop terrorism – traditional police methods solved all the
instances cited by the NSA
Peter Bergen and David Sterman June 17, 2013, “Did NSA snooping stop 'dozens' of terrorist
attacks?,” CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/17/opinion/bergen-nsa-spying/, KEL
Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Gen. Keith Alexander,
director of the N ational S ecurity A gency, asserted that his
agency's massive acquisition of U.S. phone data and the contents of overseas Internet traffic that is provided by
American tech companies has helped prevent "dozens of terrorist events." On Thursday, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall,
Democrats who both serve on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and have access to the nation's
most sensitive secrets, released a statement contradicting this assertion. "Gen. Alexander's testimony yesterday suggested that
the NSA's bulk phone records collection program helped thwart 'dozens' of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to
have been identified using other collection methods," the two senators said. Indeed, a survey of court
documents and media accounts of all the jihadist terrorist plots in the United States since 9/11 by the New America
Foundation shows that traditional law enforcement methods have overwhelmingly played the most significant
role in foiling terrorist attacks. This suggests that the NSA surveillance programs are wide-ranging fishing
expeditions with little to show for them.
The plan maintains sufficient law enforcement tools to prevent terrorism.
Kibbe 15 — Matt Kibbe, President of FreedomWorks— a conservative and libertarian advocacy group,
former Chief of Staff to U.S. Representative Dan Miller (R-FL), former Senior Economist at the
Republican National Committee, former Director of Federal Budget Policy at the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, and former Managing Editor of Market Process—an academic economics journal published
by the Center for the Study of Market Processes at George Mason University, 2015 (“Letter in Support of
the Surveillance State Repeal Act,” FreedomWorks, March 24th, Available Online at
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/letter-support-surveillance-state-repeal-act, Accessed 06-19-2015)
It’s important to note that the
Surveillance State Repeal Act saves anti-terrorism tools that are useful to law
enforcement. It retains the ability for government surveillance capabilities against targeted individuals,
regardless of the type of communications methods or devices being used. It would also protect
intelligence collection practices involving foreign targets for the purpose of investigating weapons of
mass destruction. We urge you to voice your support for the Surveillance State Repeal Act to stop
unconstitutional spying on U.S. citizens . It is our hope that you will ask your representatives to co-sponsor and otherwise support the bill if
they have not already done so.
PRISM not key to effective operations
Ingersol 13 (Geoffrey Ingersol, staff writer, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nsa-prism-is-aimedat-terrorisms-idiots-2013-6#ixzz3duIX7WfL, “The NSA's PRISM Surveillance Program Only Gathers
Info On Stupid Terrorists” ekr)
It doesn't really matter if the NSA gathers all the information from the big tech giants, because real terrorists, smart
terrorists, the guys in management, they don't use those platforms. Only terrorism's idiots do . Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg
writes: The infrastructure set up by the National Security Agency, however, may only be good for gathering information on the
stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists. The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America’s
largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that
truly dangerous elements typically use . A few weeks ago, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked documents
diagramming the existence of a program called PRISM. Supposedly this program enabled the NSA to tap into the content of communications from the major tech
giants — but only specific information and only if they had a court order, NSA officials later claimed. Later, when Congress pressed for information and justification
for such a program, NSA director Keith Alexander claimed they had stopped 50 terrorist acts, 10 of which were aimed at the U.S. Former vice president Dick Cheney
raised the stakes, asserting PRISM could have stopped 9/11. Dubious claims at best. There are multiple platforms and methods to avoid the higher, more visible side
of the Internet. Even Bin Laden was smart enough to use a courier and hand written notes to give orders. The
real terrorist planners prefer to
"remain in the undernet," writes Bershidsky. From Bloomberg: In 2012, a French court found nuclear physicist Adlene Hicheur
guilty of, among other things, conspiring to commit an act of terror for distributing and using software called Asrar alMujahideen, or Mujahideen Secrets. The program employed various cutting-edge encryption methods, including
variable stealth ciphers and RSA 2,048-bit keys. A mathmetician found out when he hacked into Google last year that they were only
using 512 bit keys for their email communications. Likely they've upgraded, but the anecdote goes to show just how sophisticated terrorist planners can get. Earlier
this year we covered an element of the undernet called "Tor." Certainly the paranoid upper echelons of Al Qaeda would use this side-road rather than the general
Internet super highway. Those aren't the only options either when it comes to avoding PRISM. "At best," writes Bershidsky, " the
recent revelations
concerning Prism and telephone surveillance might deter potential recruits to terrorist causes from
using the most visible parts of the Internet ."
Turn - Strong data encryption decreases crime.
Kehl et al. 15 — Danielle Kehl, Senior Policy Analyst at the Open Technology Institute at the New
America Foundation, holds a B.A. in History from Yale University, with Andi Wilson, Policy Program
Associate at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, holds a Master of Global
Affairs degree from the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and Kevin Bankston, Policy Director
at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, former Senior Counsel and Director of
the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, former Senior Staff Attorney at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, former Justice William Brennan First Amendment Fellow at the
American Civil Liberties Union, holds a J.D. from the University of Southern California Law School,
2015 (“Doomed To Repeat History? Lessons From The Crypto Wars of the 1990s,” Report by the Open
Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, June, Available Online at
https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/3407-125/Lessons%20From%20the%20Crypto%20Wars%20of%20the%201990s.882d6156dc194187a5fa51b1
4d55234f.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2015, p. 19)
Moreover, there is now a significant body of evidence that, as Bob Goodlatte argued back in 1997,
“Strong encryption prevents crime.”180 This has become particularly true as smartphones and other
personal devices that store vast amount of user data have risen in popularity over the past decade.
Encryption can stop or mitigate the damage from crimes like identity theft and fraud targeted at
smartphone users.181
Even with increasing numbers, terrorism is far from an existential worldwide
threat. Recent State Department data proves.
Zenko, 6-19-15 [Micah, the Douglas Dillon fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at
the
Council on Foreign Relations, “Terrorism Is Booming Almost Everywhere But in the United States,”
Foreign Policy, 6-19-15, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/19/terrorism -is-booming-almosteverywhere-but-in-the-united-states-state-department -report/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_ ]
Third, even with these worsening trends, terrorism still represents only a small fraction of overall violent
deaths. The annual number of violent deaths worldwide is 508,000, according to the Global Burden of
Armed Violence 2015: Every Body Counts report. In other words, less than 7 percent of violent deaths
are a result of acts of terrorism. Compare the 32,727 terrorist fatalities to the estimated 377,000 people
who were killed in interpersonal violence, gang violence, or economically motived crimes. Citizens of
several Central American and Caribbean countries are still more likely to be the victim of homicide than
Iraqis or Syrians are from terrorism.
No impact- terrorism not an existential risk – threats declining
Burke, The Guardian, ’13 [Jason Burke, The Guardian, 1/28/13, “Al-Qaida: how great is the terrorism threat to the west now?,”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/29/al-qaida-terrorism-threat-west, accessed 7/11/13, JTF]
Of course a threat remains. But the big attacks – those that could potentially pose something a little
closer to "an existential threat" – are unlikely. These would need to be in a major European or US city or
involve at least one passenger jet. If British intelligence, despite having a team devoted for months to
checking and rechecking every possible potential lead, could not come up with a single credible threat to
the London Olympics last year and their US counterparts were confident enough to declare a similar lack
of immediate danger during the recent presidential campaign, it appears fair to assume that bombs in
London or New York are a fairly distant prospect for the moment. The biggest threat to airplanes comes
from a single highly proficient bombmaker in the Yemen.
No link – PRISM not key Exts
Of the 42 plots to attack within the US, PRISM data was only important to
preventing one
Peter Bergen and David Sterman June 17, 2013, “Did NSA snooping stop 'dozens' of terrorist
attacks?,” CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/17/opinion/bergen-nsa-spying/, KEL
Homegrown jihadist extremists have mounted 42 plots to conduct attacks within the United States since 2001.
Of those plots, nine involved an actual terrorist act that was not prevented by any type of government action, such as the failed attempt by Faisal Shahzad to blow up a
car bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010. Of
the remaining 33 plots, the public record shows that at least 29 were
uncovered by traditional law enforcement methods, such as the use of informants, reliance on community
tips about suspicious activity and other standard policing practices. Informants have played a critical role in preventing more
than half of the plots by homegrown jihadist extremists since the 9/11 attacks, according to New America Foundation data. For instance, a group of Muslims from the
Balkans living in southern New Jersey who were virulently opposed to the Iraq War told a government informant in 2007 they were plotting to kill soldiers stationed
at the nearby Fort Dix army base. Other investigations have relied on tips to law enforcement. Saudi student Khalid Aldawsari's plot to attack a variety of targets in
Texas in 2011, including President George W. Bush's home in Dallas, was foiled when a company reported his attempt to buy chemicals suitable for making
explosives. Standard police work has also stopped plots. Kevin Lamar James, a convert to Islam, formed a group dedicated to holy war while he was jailed in
California's Folsom Prison during the late 1990s. James' crew planned to attack a U.S. military recruiting station in Los Angeles on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 as
well as a synagogue a month later. Members of James' group financed their activities by sticking up gas stations, and their plans only came to light during the course
of a routine investigation of a gas station robbery by local police in Torrance, California, who found documents that laid out the group's plans for mayhem. In
defending the role of NSA surveillance in his congressional testimony, Alexander pointed to two plots
averted by his agency's programs; the plan by Denver resident Najibullah Zazi to bomb the New York subway
system in 2009 and a plot the same year by Chicago resident David Coleman Headley to attack the offices of a Danish
newspaper that had printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that many Muslims deemed offensive. In the Zazi case, testimony in a Brooklyn court shows
that around the eighth anniversary of 9/11, U.S. officials found an e-mail address in Pakistan, believed to be connected to al Qaeda, that was in communication with
njbzaz@yahoo.com, an e-mail address in the Denver area. Officials found that Zazi was e-mailing from njbzaz@yahoo.com to get clarification from his handlers in
Pakistan about how to mix ingredients for the bombs he was building in his Denver apartment. Zazi was arrested before he could carry out his plan to attack the New
York subways. This plot could well have been detected by the NSA's PRISM program, which collects the e-mails and other
records of computer users outside the United States from nine U.S. technology companies, including Yahoo. But the detection of the plot does not appear to have
anything to do with the government's collection of the phone records of tens of millions of Americans. In the case of Headley, the government hasn't clarified its claim
that NSA surveillance led to his detection, but Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica, who has done the most authoritative reporting on the Headley case, says that Headley
came to the attention of U.S. officials because he was in contact with al Qaeda operatives in the United Kingdom who were under surveillance by the British. In other
words, Headley
was not detected by NSA surveillance but because of a tip from a close ally. Moreover,
conventional law enforcement methods were available to detect Headley's ties to terrorism, but they were
ignored. Headley's wife warned the FBI of his involvement with the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba years before his plot to attack the Danish
newspaper.
PRISM and NSA surveillance not key to stopping terrorism
Cohn and Kayyali 2014 (Cindy Cohn and Nadia Kayyali, Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Top
5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible, June 2nd, 2014,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/top-5-claims-defenders-nsa-have-stop-making-remain-credible)
you hear any one of these in the future, you can tell yourself straight up: “this person isn’t
credible ,” and look elsewhere for current information about the NSA spying. And if these are still in your talking points (you
know who you are) it’s time to retire them if you want to remain credible. And next time, the talking points should stand the
test of time. 1. The NSA has Stopped 54 Terrorist Attacks with Mass Spying The discredited claim NSA
defenders have thrown out many claims about how NSA surveillance has protected us from terrorists,
including repeatedly declaring that it has thwarted 54 plots. Rep. Mike Rogerssays it often. Only weeks after the first
So if
Snowden leak, US President Barack Obama claimed: “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted” because of the NSA’s spy powers.
Former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander also repeatedly claimed that those programs thwarted 54 different attacks. Others, including former
Vice President Dick Cheney have claimed that had the bulk spying programs in place, the government could have stopped the 9/11 bombings,
specifically noting that the government needed the program to locate Khalid al Mihdhar, a hijacker who was living in San Diego. Why
it’s
not credible: These claims have been thoroughly debunked. First, the claim that the information stopped
54 terrorist plots fell completely apart. In dramatic Congressional testimony, Sen. Leahy forced a formal retraction from NSA
Director Alexander in October, 2013: "Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not
all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?" Leahy said at the hearing. "Would you agree with that, yes or
no?" "Yes," Alexander replied, without elaborating. But that didn’t stop the apologists. We keep hearing the “54 plots” line to this day. As for
9/11, sadly, the same is true. The government did not need additional mass collection capabilities, like the
mass phone records programs, to find al Mihdhar in San Diego. AsProPublica noted, quoting Bob Graham, the former chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee: U.S.
intelligence agencies knew the identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid
before 9/11 and had the ability find him, but they failed to do so. "There were plenty of opportunities
without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar," says former Senator
al Mihdhar, long
Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated 9/11 as chairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee. Moreover, Peter
Bergen and a team at the New America Foundation dug into the government’s claims about plots in America, including studying over 225
individuals recruited by al Qaeda and similar groups in the United States and charged with terrorism, and concluded: Our
review of the
government’s claims about the role that NSA "bulk" surveillance of phone and email communications
records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown
and even misleading... When backed into a corner, the government’s apologists cite the capture of Zazi, the so-called
New York subway bomber. However, in that case, the Associated Press reported that the government could have
easily stopped the plot without the NSA program, under authorities that comply with the Constitution. Sens. Ron Wyden and
Mark Udall have been saying this for a long time. Both of the President’s hand-picked advisors on mass
surveillance concur about the telephone records collection. The President’s Review Board issued a report in which
it stated “the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony metadata was not essential to preventing attacks,” The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) also issued a report in
which it stated, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk
collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
And in an amicus brief in EFF’s case First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. the NSA case, Sens. Ron Wyden, Mark Udall, and Martin
Heinrich stated that, while the administration has claimed that bulk collection is necessary to prevent terrorism, they “have reviewed the bulk-
top NSA official John Inglis
admitted that the phone records program has not stopped any terrorist attacks aimed at the US and at
most, helped catch one guy who shipped about $8,000 to a Somalian group that the US has designated as a
collection program extensively, and none of the claims appears to hold up to scrutiny.” Even former
terrorist group but that has never even remotely been involved in any attacks aimed at the US. 2. Just collecting call detail records isn’t a big deal.
The discredited claim The
argument goes like this: Metadata can’t be privacy invasive, isn’t very useful and
therefore its collection isn’t dangerous—so the Constitution shouldn’t protect it. Even the President said, “what the
intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not
looking at content”—as if that means there is no privacy protection for this information. Why
it’s not credible: As former director
of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden recently admitted: “We kill people based on metadata .” And former
NSA General Counsel Stu Baker said: “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have
enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” In fact, a Stanford study this year demonstrated exactly
what you can reconstruct using metadata: “We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership,
and more, using solely phone metadata.” Metadata can show what your religion is, if you went to get an abortion, and other
incredibly private details of your life. 3. There Have Been No Abuses of Power The discredited claim President Obama stated in an interview that
“there are no allegations, and I am very confident —knowing the NSA and how they operate — that purposefully somebody is out there trying to
abuse this program…” And General Alexander stated in a speech that “We get all these allegations of [abuses of power] but when people check...
they find zero times that that's happened. And that's no bullshit. Those are facts.” Why it’s not credible: We already have evidence of abuses of
power. We know that NSA analysts were using their surveillance powers to track their ex-wives and husbands, and other love interests. They
even had a name for it, LOVEINT. The FISA court has also cited the NSA for violating or ignoring court orders for years at a time. And those are
just self-reported abuses – the only oversight that occurs is that the NSA investigates itself and reports on the honor system to Congress or the
FISC about what it finds. A real independent investigation might reveal even more. Unfortunately, until we get something like a new Church
Committee, we are unlikely to see such details. 4. Invading Privacy is Okay Because It’s Done to Prevent Terrorist Attacks The discredited claim
We keep hearing the same thing: Surveillance is a “critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.” When we reform the NSA, it must be
done in a way that “protect[s] the operational capability of a critical counterterrorism tool.” The implication is that the stopping terrorist attacks is
the government’s only goal. Why it’s not credible: We know that NSA surveillance is not used just for stopping terrorists and it’s not even just
used for national security. The Intercept recently revealed leaks detailing the NSA’s role in the “war on drugs,”—in particular, a 2004 memo
detailing how the NSA has redefined narcotics trafficking as a national security issue. We also know that the NSA feeds data to the DEA, where
it ends up playing a part in ordinary law enforcement investigations. And internationally, the NSA engages in economic espionage and diplomatic
spying, something detailed in Glenn Greenwald’s recent book No Place to Hide. 5. There’s Plenty of Oversight From Congress, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, and Agency Watchdogs The discredited claim We’ve repeatedly heard from the President and from NSA
defenders like Sen. Dianne Feinsteinand Rep. Mike Rogers that Congress knows all about NSA spying. Right after the first Snowden leak,
President Obama said: “your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing.” We’ve also heard that a
court has approved these programs, so we shouldn’t be concerned. Why it’s not credible: EFF and others have long documented that Congress
has an incredibly hard time getting information about NSA spying. And it’s not just Congress. We learned a few months ago that the Department
of Defense's deputy Inspector General, in charge of Intelligence and Special Program Assessments, was not aware of the call detail collection
program. What’s more, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is completely incomparable to an ordinary adversarial court.
It makes decisions in a vacuum, and it doesn’t always have complete information, much less a second adversarial voice or technical help. Its chief
judge has said that it’s not equipped to conduct oversight. EFF recently had to tell the court that its Jewel v. NSA case even existed – the
government had apparently decided that it didn’t have to. We also know that the FISC isn’t much of a block, since in 11 years “the court has
denied just 10 applications, and modified several dozen, while approving more than 15,000.” So why are we giving up our rights? It's time for
NSA and its supporters to admit what we all know is true: what is at stake in this debate is the simple ability for any of us—in the US or around
the world—to be able to use the Internet without fear of surveillance. They continue to be willing to overstate their case in order to scare us into
allowing them to continue to “collect it all.” But the American people are getting wise and the media are increasingly double-checking their
claims. As a result, more Americans than ever now say that the NSA has gone too far and those tired old stories are starting to wear thin.
No link – Encryption not key Exts
Empirically, strong encryption doesn’t foil law enforcement. Their evidence is
baseless fearmongering.
Schneier 14 — Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer for Counterpane Internet Security, Fellow at
the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Program Fellow at the New
America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, Board Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2014 (“Stop the hysteria over
Apple encryption,” CNN, October 31st, Available Online at
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/03/opinion/schneier-apple-encryption-hysteria/index.html, Accessed 06-292015)
Last week Apple announced that it is closing a serious security vulnerability in the iPhone. It used to be that the phone's encryption only protected a small amount of
the data, and Apple had the ability to bypass security on the rest of it. From now on, all the phone's data is protected. It can no longer be accessed by criminals,
governments, or rogue employees. Access to it can no longer be demanded by totalitarian governments. A user's iPhone data is now more secure. To
hear U.S.
law enforcement respond, you'd think Apple's move heralded an unstoppable crime wave . See, the FBI had been
using that vulnerability to get into peoples' iPhones. In the words of cyberlaw professor Orin Kerr, "How is the public interest served by a policy that only thwarts
lawful search warrants?" Ah, but that's the thing: You
can't build a "back door" that only the good guys can walk through.
Encryption protects against cybercriminals, industrial competitors, the Chinese secret police and the FBI.
You're either vulnerable to eavesdropping by any of them, or you're secure from eavesdropping from all
of them. Back-door access built for the good guys is routinely used by the bad guys. In 2005, some unknown group
surreptitiously used the lawful-intercept capabilities built into the Greek cell phone system. The same thing happened in Italy in 2006. In 2010, Chinese hackers
subverted an intercept system Google had put into Gmail to comply with U.S. government surveillance requests. Back doors in our cell phone system are currently
being exploited by the FBI and unknown others. This
doesn't stop the FBI and Justice Department from pumping up the
fear . Attorney General Eric Holder threatened us with kidnappers and sexual predators. The former head of the
FBI's criminal investigative division went even further, conjuring up kidnappers who are also sexual predators.
And, of course, terrorists. FBI Director James Comey claimed that Apple's move allows people to place themselves beyond the law" and also invoked that now
overworked "child kidnapper." John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for the Chicago police department now holds the title of most hysterical: "Apple will become the
It's all bluster. Of the 3,576 major offenses for which warrants were granted for
communications interception in 2013, exactly one involved kidnapping. And, more importantly, there's no
evidence that encryption hampers criminal investigations in any serious way. In 2013, encryption foiled
the police nine times, up from four in 2012 – and the investigations proceeded in some other way . This
is why the FBI's scare stories tend to wither after public scrutiny. A former FBI assistant director wrote
about a kidnapped man who would never have been found without the ability of the FBI to decrypt an
iPhone, only to retract the point hours later because it wasn't true . We've seen this game before. During
the crypto wars of the 1990s, FBI Director Louis Freeh and others would repeatedly use the example of mobster John
Gotti to illustrate why the ability to tap telephones was so vital. But the Gotti evidence was collected
using a room bug, not a telephone tap. And those same scary criminal tropes were trotted out then, too.
Back then we called them the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: pedophiles, kidnappers, drug dealers,
and terrorists. Nothing has changed .
phone of choice for the pedophile."
No link - Warrants solve Ext
Law enforcement can still get a warrant — no link.
Cohn et al. 14 — Cindy Cohn, Executive Director and former Legal Director and General Counsel of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, holds a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, with
Jeremy Gillula, Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, holds a Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Stanford University, and Seth Schoen, Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, 2014 (“What Default Phone Encryption Really Means For Law Enforcement,” Vice News,
October 8th, Available Online at https://news.vice.com/article/what-default-phone-encryption-reallymeans-for-law-enforcement, Accessed 07-05-2015)
The common misconception among the hysteria is that this decision will put vital evidence outside the
reach of law enforcement. But nothing in this encryption change will stop law enforcement from seeking
a warrant for the contents of a phone, just as they seek warrants for the contents of a laptop or desktop
computer. Whether or not a person can be required to unlock the device is a complicated question —
intertwined with the right of due process and the right to avoid self-incrimination — that ought to be
carefully considered by a court in the context of each individual situation.
No impact: Terrorism not a threat
The threat of domestic terrorism in the U.S. and to its citizens is miniscule. Recent
State Department data proves.
Zenko, 6-19-15 [Micah, the Douglas Dillon fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the
Council on Foreign Relations, “Terrorism Is Booming Almost Everywhere But in the United States,”
Foreign Policy, 6-19-15, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/19/terrorism-is-booming-almost-everywherebut-in-the-united-states-state-department-report/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_]
Finally, terrorism
continues to pose an extremely small threat to the United States and its citizens. The number
of Americans killed by international terrorism grew over the past year from 16 to 24. However, this is still
fewer than the average number that has tragically been killed each year since 9/11, which is 28. Moreover,
not one U.S. citizen died from terrorism within the United States last year. Rather, as has been consistent with
previous years, Americans die from terrorism when they travel to war zones, or areas marked by violent
instability: Of the 24 deaths last year, 10 were in Afghanistan, 5 in Israel or the Occupied Territories, 3 in Somali, 3 in Syria, and 1 a piece in
Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
No existential threat
Buchanan, Analyst – MSNBC, 9/21/2007 (Patrick
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/is_terrorism_a_mortal_threat.html)
Terrorism, said Powell, is not a mortal threat to America. "What is the greatest threat facing us now?" Powell asked. "People will say it's terrorism.
But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill
somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?" History and common sense teach that
Powell speaks truth. Since
9-11, 100,000 Americans have been murdered -- as many as we lost in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq combined.
Yet, not one of these murders was the work of an Islamic terrorist, and all of them, terrible as they are, did not imperil the
survival of our republic. Terrorists can blow up our buildings, assassinate our leaders, and bomb our malls and stadiums. They cannot
destroy us. Assume the worst. Terrorists smuggle an atom bomb into New York harbor or into Washington, D.C., and
detonate it. Horrible and horrifying as that would be -- perhaps 100,000 dead and wounded -- it would not mean the end of
the United States. It would more likely mean the end of Iran, or whatever nation at which the United States chose to direct its rage and retribution. Consider.
Between 1942 and 1945, Germany and Japan, nations not one-tenth the size of the United States, saw their cities
firebombed, and their soldiers and civilians slaughtered in the millions. Japan lost an empire. Germany lost a third of its territory. Both were put under
military occupation. Yet, 15 years later, Germany and Japan were the second and third most prosperous nations
on Earth, the dynamos of their respective continents, Europe and Asia. Powell's point is not that terrorism is not a threat. It is that the terror threat must be
seen in perspective, that we ought not frighten ourselves to death with our own propaganda, that we cannot allow fear of terror to monopolize our every waking
hour or cause us to give up our freedom. For all the blather of a restored caliphate, the
"Islamofascists," as the neocons call them, cannot create
or run a modern state, or pose a mortal threat to America. The GNP of the entire Arab world is not equal to Spain's. Oil aside, its
exports are equal to Finland's.
AT Executive CP
Perm: Do both – only perm can give an executive order the power of law and
prevent roll back
Leanna Anderson (clerk for H.R. Lloyd, U.S. Magistrate) Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 2002
To be challengeable, an executive order must have the force and effect of law. Under the United States Code, federal court jurisdiction is limited
to "federal questions." "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the
United States." For federal courts to have jurisdiction over a civil action challenging an executive order, the order must have the "force and effect
if the order is issued in accordance with
Congressional statutory mandate or delegation, the order has the force and effect of law. However, if the
order is not based on an express Congressional grant of authority, federal courts may either look for an implied
Congressional basis for the order or find that no statutory basis exists so that the order does not have the force and
effect of law.
of law." There are two different branches of analysis under this requirement. First,
Congress key- future presidents won’t restrain themselves
Froomkin ‘12
[Dan, contributing editor, Nieman Reports. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/obama-white-house-leaks_b_1973649.html ETB]
Troubling legal and moral issues left behind by the previous administration remain unresolved. Far from
reversing the Bush-Cheney executive power grab, President Barack Obama is taking it to new extremes by
unilaterally approving indefinite detention of foreign prisoners and covert targeted killings of terror suspects, even when they are
American citizens.¶ There is little to none of the judicial and legislative oversight Obama had promised, so the
executive branch's most controversial methods of violence and control remain solely in the hands of the
president -- possibly about to be passed along to a leader with less restraint.
Solvency deficit – cannot solve Cloud or EU relations – Presidential Action can
easily be rolled back or circumvented – will be perceived as weak action.
No link and perm solvency – Presidential flexibility is structurally guaranteed,
unrestricted war powers do not guarantee more flex. Working with Congress
actually increases flexibility, best decision-making, and legitimatizes the policies
with various constituencies.
Mariah Zeisberg 2013, assistant professor of pol sci @ U of Michigan, War Powers: The Politics of
Constitutional Authority, p.15-6, KEL
While policy flexibility is important, the relationship between policy flexibility and interbranch behavior
is more complex than insularists claim. The president’s capacity to independently respond to crisis is
structurally guaranteed by a fixed term and by high barriers to impeachment. Given a massive military
establishment, he can pursue his policies even if very few people agree with him at all. Congress cannot, except
tinder exceptional circumstances, remove him personally from office. The need for flexibility through independence is
guaranteed at the structural level. There are good reasons not to expand this structurally guaranteed
independence into a norm of political insularity. In part, this is because the president’s decision space may be restricted
by many forces beyond Congress. Presidents who govern unilaterally may discover that their strategy becomes more and more
determined by the imperatives of a single force, say the views of a single cabinet. In fact, engaging the conflicting demands of
different political realities and institutions can open space for an agent to make flexible decisions in
a broader space . A president “freed” from Congress may end up chained by party. In the prelude to World War
II, Senator Nye sought restrictive legislation out of a worry that open presidential discretion would leave the president beholden to economic
interests against his own willl.52 Roosevelt affirmed this worry, telling certain senators that “[i]f war came in Europe, [he] did not want to be
forced to defend American commercial interests blindly—we would prefer to conduct American policy free from emotional and economic
pressures.”5 Even imagining a presidency that laces no external pressures at all, groupthink
in the cabinet may still restrict the
branch’s flexibility. Politicians can sometimes achieve policy flexibility in the US constitutional system
by working through a crossroads of conflicting imperatives, rather than being freed from any one of them.
Moreover, flexibility is not the only value for achieving a sound security policy . Wisdom, deliberateness,
stability, and consistency are also values, and Congress is well-positioned to contribute here. The right
response to a threat is often unclear. Diplomacy, embargoes, and even ignoring the incident may sometimes be more skillful than war.54 Some
legislators have more expertise than the president on particular security problems, and they may have
creative perspectives borne of long experience in difficult areas. So too, the inertia associated with decisionmaking in large groups can be a positive good for achieving policy stability. In certain contexts, like the provision of
security guarantees to other nations, long-term policy stability is required for a policy’s success. The time and effort it takes to
respond to Congress is time and effort spent toward convincing many people that the policy chosen is in
the national interest, and toward building and sustaining policy architectures along that path.55
Links to politics – immense opposition to bypassing debate
Hallowell 13
(Billy Hallowell, writer for The Blaze, B.A. in journalism and broadcasting from the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York and
an M.S. in social research from Hunter College in Manhattan, “HERE’S HOW OBAMA IS USING EXECUTIVE POWER TO BYPASS
LEGISLATIVE PROCESS” Feb. 11, 2013, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/11/heres-how-obamas-using-executive-power-to-bylasslegislative-process-plus-a-brief-history-of-executive-orders/, KB)
“In an era of polarized parties and a fragmented Congress, the opportunities to legislate are few and far between,” Howell said. “So presidents
have powerful incentive to go it alone. And they do.”¶ And the political opposition howls.¶ Sen. Marco Rubio, RFla., a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, said that on the gun-control front in particular, Obama
is “abusing his power by imposing his policies via executive fiat instead of allowing them to be debated
in Congress.Ӧ The Republican reaction is to be expected, said John Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project
at the University of California in Santa Barbara.¶ “For years there has been a growing concern about unchecked executive
power,” Woolley said. “It tends to have a partisan content, with contemporary complaints coming from the
incumbent president’s opponents.”
Separation of Powers Turn –
Executive power is expanding in the squo- continuing the trend will destroy
separation of powers- congressional checks are key to solve
Marshall ‘8
[William P. Marshall, Kenan Professor of Law, University of North Carolina. Boston Law Review
88:505. http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/documents/MARSHALL.pdf ETB]
Specifically, I contend that the
power of the Presidency has been expanding ¶ since the Founding, and that we need to
consider the implications of this ¶ expansion within the constitutional structure of separation of powers, no
matter ¶ which party controls the White House. Part I of this Essay makes the ¶ descriptive case by briefly canvassing a series of factors that have
had, and ¶ continue to have, the effect of expanding presidential power. Part II suggests ¶ this
expansion in presidential power has
created a constitutional imbalance ¶ between the executive and legislative branches, calling into doubt the
¶ continued efficacy of the structure of separation of powers set forth by the ¶ Framers. Part III then offers some
suggestions as to how this power imbalance ¶ can be alleviated, but it does not present a silver bullet solution. Because ¶ many, if not all, the
factors that have led to increased presidential power are ¶ the products of inevitable social and technological change, they are not easily
it is critical that those
on both sides of ¶ the aisle work to assure that the growth in presidential power is at least ¶ checked, if not
reversed.¶
remedied.3¶ Thus, the Essay ends with only the modest conclusion that ¶ regardless of who wins the Presidency,
Strong SOP key to heg
G. John Ikenberry, Professor @ Georgetown University, Spring 2001 (The National Interest)
First, America's
mature political institutions organized around the rule of law have made it a
relatively predictable and cooperative hegemon. The pluralistic and regularized way in which U.S.
foreign and security policy is made reduces surprises and allows other states to build long-term,
mutually beneficial relations. The governmental separation of powers creates a shared decisionmaking system that opens up the process and reduces the ability of any one leader to make abrupt
or aggressive moves toward other states. An active press and competitive party system also provide a service to outside states by generating
information about U.S. policy and determining its seriousness of purpose. The messiness of a democracy can, indeed, frustrate
American diplomats and confuse foreign observers. But over the long term, democratic institutions
produce more consistent and credible policies--policies that do not reflect the capricious and
idiosyncratic whims of an autocrat. Think of the United States as a giant corporation that seeks foreign investors. It is more likely to attract
investors if it can demonstrate that it operates according to accepted accounting and fiduciary principles. The rule of law and the institutions of policymaking in a
democracy are the political equivalent of corporate transparency and accountability. Sharp shifts in policy must ultimately be vetted within the policy process and pass
muster by an array of investigatory and decision-making bodies. Because
it is a constitutional, rule-based democracy, outside
states are more willing to work with the United States-or, to return to the corporate metaphor, to invest in ongoing partnerships.
Extensions
No link & turn - Interbranch deliberation doesn’t harm national security – it can
increase it
Mariah Zeisberg 2013, assistant professor of pol sci @ U of Michigan, War Powers: The Politics of
Constitutional Authority, p.16-17, KEL
A second pro-presidency insularist argument is that the challenging characteristic of interbranch deliberation
endangers the well-being of troops in the field by exposing a troubling lack of will.56 Legislators also sometimes
say they cannot cut off funds for an unconstitutional war because that would amount to stranding soldiers. This argument is largely
drawn from a Cold War security context where an almost global security guarantee seemed important for
US security interests. In some contexts, the concern may he sound. But not all security dilemmas are like those of the
Cold War. Nor should we overlook the costs of the security order that Cold War Congresses built. In many, if not all cases, the soundness of
the actual policies that the president and Congress enact should have greater consequence for enemies than the tenor of public conversation. If
contentiousness contributes to better-crafted security policies, then contentiousness can also support
security. Today we know that the contentiousness of democratic politics may keep the country from
entering or sustaining unwise hostilities, hostilities that themselves pose enormous costs to troops. Finally, a
refusal to fund continuing operations does not mean leaving troops in the field unprotected. The president continues to bear responsibility for
troops even as they withdraw.
Agent counterplans are a voting issue- they moot the 1ac with no 2ac recourse due
to lack of comparative solvency evidence between congress and the executive.
CP will get rolled back by future presidents
Friedersdorf 13
(CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, staff writer, “Does Obama Really Believe He Can Limit the Next President's Power?” MAY 28 2013,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/does-obama-really-believe-he-can-limit-the-next-presidents-power/276279/, KB)
Obama doesn't seem to realize that his legacy won't be shaped by any perspicacious limits he places on the executive branch, if he ever gets
around to placing any on it. The
next president can just undo those "self-imposed" limits with the same wave of a
hand that Obama uses to create them. His influence in the realm of executive power will be to expand it. By 2016
we'll be four terms deep in major policy decisions being driven by secret memos from the Office of Legal
Counsel. The White House will have a kill list, and if the next president wants to add names to it using
standards twice as lax as Obama's, he or she can do it, in secret, per his precedent.
CP Links to Politics Exts
Links to politics – the narrative inevitably gets twisted
Gyatso 13
(Ngawang Gyatso, B.A. in Political Economies from the University of California, Berkeley, “Obama’s Counterterrorism Strategy Isn’t Popular or
Idealistic. It’s Realistic!” May 24, 2013, http://jamandbutter.com/2013/05/24/obamas-counterterrorism-strategy-isnt-popular-or-idealistic-itsrealistic/, KB)
No sooner had the President delivered his speech, than superficial narratives on Obama not living up to
humanitarian image and campaign promises surfaced in the media. And what is especially disappointing is
reputable sources like the New York Times joining in unison with sensationalist news outlets like Huffington
Post and Slate in drumming the blame-it-on-Obama beat , when they surely understand the enormous weight Obama
shoulders in carefully repairing a failed and messy neoconservative American foreign policy in the Middle-East – while his administration
aggressively confronts the undeniable reality of terrorism.
Unpopular XOs spark massive congressional backlash
Risen 4
[Clay, Managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, M.A. from the University of Chicago “The Power of the Pen: The Not-So-Secret
Weapon of Congress-wary Presidents” The American Prospect, July 16, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_power_of_the_pen]
The most effective check on executive orders has proven to be political. When
it comes to executive orders, “The president is
much more clearly responsible,” says Dellinger, who was heavily involved in crafting orders under Clinton. “Not only is there no
involvement from Congress, but the president has to personally sign the order.” Clinton's Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument executive order may have helped him win votes, but it also set off a massive congressional and public
backlash. Right-wing Internet sites bristled with comments about “dictatorial powers,” and Republicans warned of an end to civil liberties as
we know them. “President Clinton is running roughshod over our Constitution,” said then–House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Indeed, an
unpopular executive order can have immediate--and lasting--political consequences. In 2001, for example,
Bush proposed raising the acceptable number of parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water. It was a bone he
was trying to toss to the mining industry, and it would have overturned Clinton's order lowering the levels. But the overwhelmingly
negative public reaction forced Bush to quickly withdraw his proposal--and it painted him indelibly as an
anti-environmental president.
Plan popular with dems, CP isn’t
Nzelibe ‘11
[Jibe, Professor of Law, Northwestern University Law School. William and Mary Law Review 53:389.
http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=facultyworkingpapers ETB]
But there is also reason to think that the long-term effects of an¶ expansion of presidential war powers will not be symmetric across¶ right-leaning
and left-leaning parties. A growing literature in¶ foreign policy shows that the use of force generates more electoral¶ and ideological benefits for
right-leaning governments than for leftleaning governments.86 More specifically, Foster and Palmer argue¶ that Republican Presidents in the
United States are more prone to¶ view the use of force as an instrumentally desirable political option ¶ because their core supporters are more
likely to reward, and less¶ likely to sanction, these Presidents for foreign military engagements¶ than their liberal counterparts.87 If this is the
case, and if politicians¶ are sensitive to the institutional conditions that make it more likely¶ that they will achieve their favored policy objectives,
then we would¶ expect Republican politicians to generally prefer more presidential¶ flexibility in the use of force. By contrast, we
would
expect leftleaning politicians to view expansive war powers as an obstacle to¶ their preferred policy and
electoral objectives. In other words, not¶ only may Democrats prefer less presidential flexibility in war¶
powers because of their supporters’ dovish preferences, but they¶ might also be concerned that if issues
like national security and¶ antiterrorism dominate the political agenda, they will crowd out¶ issues such as
health care, education reform, or welfare in which¶ Democrats are likely to have an electoral advantage
over¶ Republicans.88
AT Presidential Flexibility
Double bind- either CP doesn’t solve case or it can’t preserve flexibility. And
flexibility causes terrorism, turns the internal link
Englehardt ‘5
[Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. Each spring he is a
Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkel. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/32668/ ETB]
Here it is worth reviewing the positions Yoo advocated while in the executive branch and since, and their consequences in the "war on terror."
At every turn,
Yoo has sought to exploit the "flexibility" he finds in the Constitution to advocate an approach to the "war
on terror" in which legal limits are either interpreted away or rejected outright. Just two weeks after the September 11
attacks, Yoo sent an extensive memo to Tim Flanigan, deputy White House counsel, arguing that the President had unilateral authority to use military force not only
against the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks but against terrorists anywhere on the globe, with or without congressional authorization. ¶ Yoo followed
that opinion with a series of memos in January 2002 maintaining, against the strong objections of the State Department, that the Geneva Conventions should not be
applied to any detainees captured in the conflict in Afghanistan. Yoo argued that the president could unilaterally suspend the conventions; that al-Qaeda was not party
to the treaty; that Afghanistan was a "failed state" and therefore the president could ignore the fact that it had signed the conventions; and that the Taliban had failed to
adhere to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions regarding the conduct of war and therefore deserved no protection. Nor, he argued, was the president bound by
customary international law, which insists on humane treatment for all wartime detainees. Relying on Yoo's reasoning, the Bush administration claimed that it could
capture and detain any person who the president said was a member or supporter of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and could categorically deny all detainees the protections
of the Geneva Conventions, including a hearing to permit them to challenge their status and restrictions on inhumane interrogation practices.¶ Echoing Yoo, Alberto
Gonzales, then White House counsel, argued at the time that one of the principal reasons for denying detainees protection under the Geneva Conventions was to
"preserve flexibility" and make it easier to "quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors." When CIA officials reportedly raised concerns
that the methods they were using to interrogate high-level al-Qaeda detainees -- such as waterboarding -- might subject them to criminal liability, Yoo was again
consulted. In response, he drafted the August 1, 2002, torture memo, signed by his superior, Jay Bybee, and delivered to Gonzales. In that memo, Yoo "interpreted"
the criminal and international law bans on torture in as narrow and legalistic a way as possible; his evident purpose was to allow government officials to use as much
coercion as possible in interrogations.¶ Yoo
wrote that threats of death are permissible if they do not threaten "imminent
death," and that drugs designed to disrupt the personality may be administered so long as they do not
"penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him." He said that the law
prohibiting torture did not prevent interrogators from inflicting mental harm so long as it was not
"prolonged." Physical pain could be inflicted so long as it was less severe than the pain associated with "serious physical injury, such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily function, or even death."¶ Even this interpretation did not preserve enough executive "flexibility" for
Yoo. In a separate section of the memo, he argued that if these loopholes were not sufficient, the president
was free to order outright torture. Any law limiting the president's authority to order torture during wartime, the memo claimed, would "violate the
Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President."¶ Since leaving the Justice Department, Yoo has also defended the practice of
"extraordinary renditions," in which the United States has kidnapped numerous "suspects" in the war on terror and "rendered" them to third countries with records of
torturing detainees. He has argued that the federal courts have no right to review actions by the president that are said to violate the War Powers Clause. And he has
defended the practice of targeted assassinations, otherwise known as "summary executions."¶ In short, the
flexibility Yoo advocates allows the
administration to lock up human beings indefinitely without charges or hearings, to subject them to
brutally coercive interrogation tactics, to send them to other countries with a record of doing worse, to
assassinate persons it describes as the enemy without trial, and to keep the courts from interfering with all
such actions.¶ Has such flexibility actually aided the U.S. in dealing with terrorism? In all likelihood, the policies
and attitudes Yoo has advanced have made the country less secure. The abuses at Guantánamo and Abu
Ghraib have become international embarrassments for the United States, and by many accounts have
helped to recruit young people to join al-Qaeda. The U.S. has squandered the sympathy it had on September 12, 2001, and we now find
ourselves in a world perhaps more hostile than ever before. ¶ With respect to detainees, thanks to Yoo, the U.S. is now in an untenable bind: on the one hand, it has
become increasingly unacceptable for the U.S. to hold hundreds of prisoners indefinitely without trying them; on the other hand our coercive and inhumane
interrogation tactics have effectively granted many of the prisoners immunity from trial. Because the evidence we might use against them is tainted by their
mistreatment, trials would likely turn into occasions for exposing the United States' brutal interrogation tactics. This predicament was entirely avoidable. Had we
given alleged al-Qaeda detainees the fair hearings required by the Geneva Conventions at the outset, and had we conducted humane interrogations at Guantánamo,
Abu Ghraib, Camp Mercury, and elsewhere, few would have objected to the U.S. holding some detainees for the duration of the military conflict, and we could have
tried those responsible for war crimes. What has been so objectionable to many in the U.S. and abroad is the government's refusal to accept even the limited
constraints of the laws of war.¶ The
consequences of Yoo's vaunted "flexibility" have been self-destructive for the
U.S. -- we have turned a world in which international law was on our side into one in which we see it as
our enemy. The Pentagon's National Defense Strategy, issued in March 2005, states,¶ "Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those
who employ a strategy of the weak, using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." ¶ The proposition that judicial processes -- the very essence of the rule
of law -- are to be dismissed as a strategy of the weak, akin to terrorism, suggests the continuing strength of Yoo's influence. When the rule of law is seen simply as a
device used by terrorists, something has gone perilously wrong. Michael Ignatieff has written that "it
is the very nature of a democracy that it
not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behind its back. It is also in the nature of democracy
that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does." Yoo persuaded the Bush administration to
untie its hand and abandon the constraints of the rule of law. Perhaps that is why we are not prevailing.
A multitude of other actors hamper presidential flexibility
Rozell 12
(Mark Rozell, Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University, “From Idealism to Power: The Presidency in the Age of Obama” 2012,
http://www.libertylawsite.org/book-review/from-idealism-to-power-the-presidency-in-the-age-of-obama/, KB)
A substantial portion of Goldsmith’s book presents in detail his case that various
forces outside of government, and some within, are
responsible for hamstringing the president in unprecedented fashion: Aggressive, often intrusive, journalism, that at
times endangers national security; human rights and other advocacy groups, some domestic and other crossnational, teamed with big resources and talented, aggressive lawyers, using every legal category and
technicality possible to complicate executive action; courts thrust into the mix, having to decide critical national
security law controversies, even when the judges themselves have little direct knowledge or expertise on the topics brought before
them; attorneys within the executive branch itself advising against actions based on often narrow legal interpretations and
with little understanding of the broader implications of tying down the president with legalisms.
Flexibility will inevitability limited- ideological and electoral incentives
Nzelibe ‘11
[Jibe, Professor of Law, Northwestern University Law School. William and Mary Law Review 53:389.
http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=facultyworkingpapers ETB]
The problem, I suggest below, is that these institutional
accounts¶ do not capture the full range of pressures that
influence the¶ preferences of elected officials for expanding or contracting presidential authority. Although
Presidents and their copartisans in¶ Congress may be pushed towards an expansive vision of presidential¶ authority by a shared desire to
maintain maximum policy flexibility,¶ they are often pulled by their partisan commitments to try to¶ embrace
constraints that limit the President’s policy flexibility on¶ those issues that may be owned by the political
opposition.21 Indeed,¶ both electoral and ideological incentives may explain why politicians¶ are sometimes
willing to commit to institutional arrangements they¶ hope will constrain their successors even if it comes
at the expense¶ of maintaining policy flexibility. To be clear, some constitutional¶ scholars have recognized that societal actors
may try to usher in¶ new constitutional orders for partisan objectives, but these scholars¶ have focused largely on tactics like stacking the
judiciary, exerting¶ greater influence over administrative agencies, or establishing¶ policy agendas in a way that demobilizes political
opponents.22¶ However, these scholars have neither focused specifically on the¶ separation of powers nor examined the interaction between
partisan¶ issue ownership and constitutional structure, which is a crucial¶ aspect of the approach this Essay advances.
AT Supreme Court CP
2AC Frontline
Solvency Deficit - Congress solves better than the courts—have a significant
institutional advantage in regulating new technologies:
Orin S. Kerr, 2004 (Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School, Michigan Law
Review, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801, Accessed 7/7/2015, rwg)
In this part, I will argue that such enthusiasm for judicial solutions overlooks significant institutional limitations of judicial rulemaking. Courts
tend to be poorly suited to generate effective rules regulating criminal investigations involving new
technologies. In contrast, legislatures possess a significant institutional advantage in this area over
courts. While courts have successfully created rules that establish important privacy rights in many areas,
it is difficult for judges to fashion lasting guidance when technologies are new and rapidly changing. The
context of judicial decisionmaking often leaves the law surprisingly unclear. Courts lack the institutional
capacity to easily grasp the privacy implications of new technologies they encounter. Judges cannot readily
understand how the technologies may develop, cannot easily appreciate context, and often cannot even recognize [*859] whether the facts of the
case before them raise privacy implications that happen to be typical or atypical. Judicially
created rules also lack necessary
flexibility; they cannot change quickly and cannot test various regulatory approaches. As a result,
judicially created rules regulating government investigations tend to become quickly outdated or uncertain as
technology changes. The context of legislative rule-creation offers significantly better prospects for the
generation of balanced, nuanced, and effective investigative rules involving new technologies. In light of these
institutional realities, courts should proceed cautiously and with humility, allowing some room for political judgment and maneuvering in a
setting that is in such flux. n345
Perm – Do Both – Courts will shield Congressional action on surveillance – will look
like Courts forced Congress and Obama to act
Keith E. Whittington, 2007 politics at Princeton University, (Political Foundations of Judicial
Supremacy, p. 137-39)
Independent and active judicial review generates position-taking opportunities by reducing the
policy responsibility of the elected officials. They may vote in favor of a bill that they personally
dislike secure in the knowledge that it will never be implemented. State statutes regulating abortion after the Roe
decision, for example, were often pure symbolism, though they could also play a more productive role in pressing the Court to refine its
doctrine or in filling in the lacuna left by judicial decisions. More subtly, the
judicial backstop allows legislators to focus
on some dimensions of the proposed policy (the most optimistic and politically popular) while
downplaying others (the constitutionally subversive and treacherous). Legislators even gain a political
windfall when the courts actually act to strike down the popular law. The visibility of the exercise of
judicial review creates another opportunity for legislators to publicize their position on the issue, this
time by bewailing the Court’s actions.
Separation of Powers Turn A) Failure of other branches to play a proper role in interpreting the Constitution
undermines Separation of Powers:
Robert J. Kaczorowski, 2005 Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, March 2005.
[The Fordham Law Review, “Theories of taking the Constitution seriously outside the courts: popular
Constitutionalism versus justice in plain clothes: reflections from history,” p.lexis]
A majority of the American public today believes that the Supreme Court should have the final authority
to interpret the Constitution. In light of history, Kramer argues, the current acceptance of judicial
supremacy "is exceedingly anomalous." The practice of judicial supremacy takes control over
fundamental law away from the people and turns it over to "a judicial oligarchy." Consequently, Kramer contends
that advocates of judicial supremacy are anti-democratic who believe "that popular politics is by nature dangerous and arbitrary; that "tyranny of
the majority' is a pervasive threat; that a democratic constitutional order is therefore precarious and highly vulnerable; and that substantial checks
Kramer sees the current debate regarding judicial supremacy as the
same debate over the question of how to control an excess of democracy or popular rule that arose at the
founding and again during the middle of the nineteenth century. It is a debate between democracy and
aristocracy, and aristocracy is currently winning.
on politics are necessary lest things fall apart."
B) Flawed model of separation of powers causes global wars
Zakaria, 1997 editor of Newsweek International, ’97 (Fareed, Foreign Affairs, November, LN)¶
When divining the cause behind this correlation, one thing becomes clear: the democratic peace is¶ actually the liberal peace.
Writing in the eighteenth century, Kant believed that democracies were ¶ tyrannical, and he specifically excluded them from his conception of
"republican" governments, which lived in a zone of peace. Republicanism,
for Kant, meant a separation of powers, checks
and balances, the rule of law, protection of individual rights, and some level of representation in
government (though nothing close to universal suffrage). Kant's other explanations for the "perpetual peace" between republics are all closely
linked to their constitutional and liberal character: a mutual respect for the rights of each other's citizens, a system of checks and balances
assuring that no single leader can drag his country into war, and classical liberal economic policies -- most importantly, free trade -- which create
an interdependence that makes war costly and cooperation useful. Michael Doyle, the leading scholar on the subject, confirms in his 1997 book
Ways of War and Peace that without constitutional liberalism, democracy itself has no peace-inducing qualities: Kant distrusted unfettered,
democratic majoritarianism, and his argument offers no support for a claim that all participatory polities -- democracies -- should be peaceful,
either in general or between fellow democracies. Many participatory polities have been non-liberal. For two thousand years before the modern
age, popular rule was widely associated with aggressiveness (by Thucydides) or imperial success (by Machiavelli) . . . The decisive preference of
[the] median voter might well include "ethnic cleansing" against other democratic polities. The distinction between liberal and illiberal
democracies sheds light on another striking statistical correlation. Political scientists Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield contend, using an
impressive data set, that over the last 200 years democratizing states went to war significantly more often than either stable autocracies or liberal
democracies. In
countries not grounded in constitutional liberalism, the¶ rise of democracy often brings with
it hyper-nationalism and war-mongering. When the political¶ system is opened up, diverse groups with incompatible interests gain
access to power and press their¶ demands. Political and military leaders, who are often embattled remnants of the old authoritarian¶ order, realize
that to succeed that they must rally the masses behind a national cause. The
result is¶ invariably aggressive rhetoric and
policies, which often drag countries into confrontation and war.¶ Noteworthy examples range from Napoleon III's
France, Wilhelmine Germany, and Taisho Japan to¶ those in today's newspapers, like Armenia and Azerbaijan and Milosevic's Serbia. The
democratic¶ peace, it turns out, has little to do with democracy.¶
Can’t solve signal to foreign markets and EU - Congressional actions have stronger
legitimacy than Court actions
Araiza, 2005 Professor of Law @ Loyola Law School, 2005 (William, Tulane Law Review, February
2005, 79 Tul. L. Rev. 519; Lexis)
These concerns about overreaching and line-drawing are much less salient for a legislature. As a political
institution with a constantly renewed democratic mandate, Congress is less susceptible to the charge of
imperialism. n174 The idea of self-limitation is at least formally inapplicable to the body that represents
the people, and whose powers, within its proper sphere, are understood to be plenary. Congress's
democratic legitimacy also spares it from the requirement that it use legal reasoning to justify the lines it
draws.
CP links to politics - Controversial S Court decisions link to politics – Healthcare
proves
Stephen Manual, 2012 (6/28/2012, staff writer, “Will Supreme Court judgment help Obama win
presidential election?” Accessed 7/26/2012 at http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/12483143will-supreme-court-judgment-help-obama-win-presidential-election, rwg)
Finally, President Barack Obama
has carried the day. He stood winner as the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday to
uphold the Affordable Care Act. However, the president remained humble during his speech following the decision. He said that it
was a victory for the American people and his administration would continue to work for betterment of the people. The Supreme Court
judgment is clearly against the anticipation of Republicans, as they were predicting a contrary decision on the issue. The
judgment can be called one of the biggest victories of the Obama administration in years. However, the question arises whether
the Obama administration will be able to translate the victory into successful election campaign or not.
Observers believe the administration would definitely exploit the judgment in its favor and try its best to
convince electorates to cast vote for Obama in the upcoming presidential election. The visionary abilities of Obama would be highlighted and
people would be told about revolutionary plans of Obama for the people and that all these plans would be implemented only if he is reelected into
the office in November’s election. The judgment would also help the Obama administration to undermine capabilities of Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney. Observers opine the judgment dealt a heavy blow to the Republicans, as they believed the court would strike down the
individual mandate – at the very least. They were planning to celebrate the judgment and shaming the Obama administration once the verdict was
out, but they were shocked after the judgment was released. Observers believe that the Obama administration has got a fresh opportunity to set
the house in order and focus more on public-related issues so that they could bag maximum votes in the upcoming presidential election. It is the
best opportunity for Obama to sell his Health-Care law to the masses. Mitt Romney, while giving his reaction on the Supreme Court judgment,
said that he would repeal the law if elected to the presidency in the November election. He even said that there was a need to get rid of Obama if
people want to get rid of Obama-care. Definitely, Republicans
would lash out at the law in their public meetings and
try to invoke public anger on the issue. Republicans believe the ruling of the Supreme Court can hamper their campaign against
Obama.
Agent counterplans are a voting issue- they moot the 1ac with no 2ac recourse due
to lack of comparative solvency evidence between congress and the executive.
Congress solves better Ext
Congress key to regulate electronic surveillance:
Timothy Casey, 2008 (Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law,
“RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure,” UC Davis Law
Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)
n152. One
commentator has suggested that the legislature, and not the courts, are properly situated to
regulate electronic surveillance. Orin Kerr, The Fourth Amendment and New Technologies: Constitutional Myths and the Case for
Caution, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801, 804-06 (2004) ("Courts should place a thumb on the scale in favor of judicial caution
when technology is in flux, and should consider allowing legislatures to provide the primary rules
governing law enforcement investigations involving new technologies.").
Congress key to regulate electronic surveillance:
Timothy Casey, 2008 (Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law,
“RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure,” UC Davis Law
Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)
n152. One
commentator has suggested that the legislature, and not the courts, are properly situated to
regulate electronic surveillance. Orin Kerr, The Fourth Amendment and New Technologies: Constitutional Myths and the Case for
Caution, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801, 804-06 (2004) ("Courts should place a thumb on the scale in favor of judicial caution
when technology is in flux, and should consider allowing legislatures to provide the primary rules
governing law enforcement investigations involving new technologies.").
(--) Congress best to regulate Internet surveillance law:
Orin S. Kerr, 2004 (Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School, Michigan Law
Review, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801, Accessed 7/7/2015, rwg)
Of course, the legislative enactment of law enforcement regulations beyond the Fourth Amendment does not necessarily mean that these statutory
laws are adequate. I have argued both in congressional testimony and in my academic writing that Congress's
handiwork in the field
of Internet surveillance law offers a promising framework, but needs reforms to bolster privacy
protections. n334 At the same time, Congress's track record is often ignored by scholars even [*857] when statutes provide the most
important privacy protection against invasive government practices. n335 Both criminal procedure and privacy law scholars
have tended to focus their attention on the Fourth Amendment, overlooking the reality that since the
1960s Congress rather than the courts has shown the most serious interest in protecting privacy from new
technologies. Judicial decisions have played a role by shaping legislation, but the real work that has been done to regulate
law enforcement use of new technologies has come primarily from Congress, not the courts.
(--) Congress better at conducting Internet privacy laws:
Orin S. Kerr, 2004 (Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School, Michigan Law
Review, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801, Accessed 7/7/2015, rwg)
The statutory framework that governs Internet privacy demonstrates the flexibility and creative potential of legislative approaches. Congress
enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA") in 1986 to regulate the privacy of Internet communications. n420 Since that time,
Congress has amended the framework no less than eleven times: once in 1988, n422 three times in 1996, n424 twice in 2001, n426 Some of those
changes were only minor technical amendments, while others were more significant alterations to the statutory scheme. Moreover, the
structure of Congress's statutory Internet privacy laws demonstrates how legislative rules can impose
[*872] creative and flexible regulatory regimes involving new technologies. For example, Congress opted
to regulate both public and private parties to best protect privacy. This would be difficult if not impossible
under the Fourth Amendment, which regulates only the government and private parties acting on the
government's behalf. n427 But ECPA recognizes that private parties acting on their own can pose a serious threat to Internet privacy: if
America Online can look through the e-mails of its 30 million subscribers and disclose the evidence to the police without restriction, this would
gut Internet privacy protections. The Fourth Amendment does not restrict this disclosure, but ECPA does: n428 in addition to restricting the
ability of law enforcement to order private ISPs to disclose communications to law enforcement, n429 the law also restricts the ability of private
ISPs to disclose communications to law enforcement voluntarily. n430
Congress is superior to judiciary due to expertise in national security judgment
Mariah Zeisberg 2013, assistant professor of pol sci @ U of Michigan, War Powers: The Politics of
Constitutional Authority, p. 32-33, KEL
The first, most
obvious strength of the presidency and legislature vis-à-vis the judiciary is their
connectedness to policymaking. As they confront security politics every day, officials in the legislative
and executive branches acquire knowledge that is useful for making good judgments about foreign policy.
This shared distinctive strength partly grounds their actual dominance and normative prominence in
security politics relative to the judiciary. We can translate this constitutional capacity into two different standards for processual
assessment. The first is that the branches engage in reasoning over public policy that is sensitive to the security realities they encounter. Because
they are exposed to dilemmas of war and security in their daily governance tasks, they should he equipped to use reality-based assessments about
war and security in their deliberations. To what extent are the branches’ deliberations premised on reality, rather than fantasy? To what extent are
they using their governance capacities to generate the kind of information about the world they need? The extent to which each branch uses, and
cultivates, the knowledge available to it; the extent to which deliberative processes incorporate more rather than fewer relevant considerations;
the extent to which deliberation is able to clarify relevant alternatives; and a scalar consideration, about the extent to which the branches advance
high priorities over and above low priorities—these are all relatively ordinary ways that citizens, officials, and scholars already assess whether the
branches engage in politics that are sensitive to policy realities.94
Congress is better than Courts at legitimizing their decisions with the public – it
overcomes opposition
Mariah Zeisberg 2013, assistant professor of pol sci @ U of Michigan, War Powers: The Politics of
Constitutional Authority, p. 34, KEL
A second strength that Congress and the presidency share vis-a-vis the judiciary is the elected branches’
relatively tight link to the public.95 Given recurrent elections, the justifications the branches offer for their
policies and constitutional positions play out within a horizon of meaning and interpretability set by the need to justify
policy to larger publics. The branches make security and constitutional claims not only to persuade one another, but also to persuade
public constituencies that are watching, evaluating, and voting. In fact, the branches are often aware that their success in
winning over rivals may depend on their success in mobilizing public opinion. Both branches have
resources to woo that opinion.
CP links to Politics - Exts
Health care proves: Republicans will rally against Supreme Court decisions they
oppose:
Fox News Latino, 2012 6/28/2012 (“Supreme Court Upholds Health Care Reform Law in Big Win
for Obama,” http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/06/28/supreme-court-obama-health-carereform-act-is-constitutional/, rwg)
Republicans immediately cast the Supreme Court decision as a wake-up call for Americans. In what is
surely to be a campaign theme for Romney going forward, the Republican National committee chairman
Reince Priebus said: "We need market-based solutions that give patients more choice, not less. The answer to
rising health care costs is not, and will never be, Big Government.” Democrats heralded the decision as a much needed extension of basic health
care to millions of Americans without access to medical attention.
(--) Conservatives will push other branches of Congress to reverse unpopular
Supreme Court decisions:
Steffi Porter, 2012 6/28/2012 (staff writer, “Conservative groups denounce Supreme Court ruling on
‘ObamaCare’” Porter http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2012/06/conservative-groups-denounce-supremecourt-ruling-on-obamacare/, Accessed 7/26/2012, rwg)
Conservative opponents of “ObamaCare” were not happy to hear that the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in
favor of upholding the controversial health care law. Not just unhappy. Furious. “Today’s Supreme Court decision
will do serious harm to American families,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “Not only is the individual mandate a
profound attack on our liberties, but it is only one section among hundreds of provisions in the law that will force taxpayers to fund abortions,
violate their conscience rights, and impose a massive tax and debt burden on American families.”
American Conservative Union
Chairman Al Cardenas called for the law to be “thrown out.”
“Today’s unfortunate decision by the Supreme Court to
uphold an unpopular and ill-considered law puts the American healthcare system at the mercy of Washington bureaucrats,” Cardenas said in a
statement. “This law needs to be thrown out by the Congress and the President immediately, as it exceeds federal
power, asserting enormous federal control over the healthcare of every man, woman and child in America. We need a bill that that will actually
solve our healthcare problems and reduce the cost — not add to the legacy of debt to our children with trillions of dollars in new spending.”
(--) Liberal Supreme Court decisions quickly become fodder for the Republican
Party to rally their conservative base:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2005 7/10/2005; Lexis
With the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and the expected retirement of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a court that
has been unchanged since 1994 is about to take on a very different look. But it's not going to happen without a fight. The
conservative
movement that has taken control of the Republican Party --- and with it the legislative and executive
branches --- now sees its opportunity to remake the Supreme Court as well, clearing the last obstacle to the revolution
it seeks to create in American government and culture. To justify that makeoverof the court, Republican activists have
spun out an elaborate indictment of the current system, repeating it endlessly until it has taken on the aura
of absolute truth in some corners. For instance, much of the rhetoric coming from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist and other Republican leaders has focused on what they call "judicial activism," judges who in their minds have been
overly eager to impose their own personal beliefs on the political system.