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DDI NSA Data Surveillance Neg – Starter Pack
***Solvency***
No Solvency – Circumvention
FISA will circumvent
Bendix and Quirk 15 (assistant professor of political science at Keene State College; Phil Lind Chair in U.S. Politics and
Representation at the University of British Columbia)
(William Bendix and Paul J. Quirk, Secrecy and negligence: How Congress lost control of domestic surveillance, Issues in
Governance Studies, March 2015, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/02-secrecy-negligence-congressurveillance-bendix-quirk/ctibendixquirksecrecyv3.pdf)
Even if Congress at some point enacted new restrictions on surveillance, the executive might ignore the
law and continue to make policy unilaterally. The job of reviewing executive conduct would again fall
to the FISA Court.56 In view of this court’s history of broad deference to the executive, Congress would have a
challenge to ensure that legislative policies were faithfully implemented.
And the exec can circumvent via national security letters
Sanchez 15 (a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute)
(Julian Don’t (Just) Let the Sun Go Down on Patriot Powers, May 29, 2015, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dont-just-let-the-sungo-down-on-patriot-powers)
Also permanent are National Security Letters or NSLs, which allow
the FBI to obtain a more limited range of
telecommunications and financial records without even needing to seek judicial approval. Unsurprisingly,
the government loves these streamlined tools, and used them so promiscuously that the FBI didn’t even
bother using 215 for more than a year after the passage of the Patriot Act. Inspector General reports have also
made clear that the FBI is happy to substitute NSLs for 215 orders when even the highly accommodating
FISC manages a rare display of backbone. In at least one case, when the secret court refused an
application for journalists’ records on First Amendment grounds, the Bureau turned around and obtained the
same data using National Security Letters.
No Solvency – Foreign Surveillance
Foreign, not domestic, surveillance is what is driving data pull out – restrictions on domestic surveillance
will onlu further this push
Chander and Le 15 (Director, California International Law Center, Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research
Scholar, University of California, Davis; Free Speech and Technology Fellow, California International Law Center; A.B., Yale
College; J.D., University of California, Davis School of Law)
Anupam Chander and Uyên P. Lê, DATA NATIONALISM, EMORY LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 64:677,
http://law.emory.edu/elj/_documents/volumes/64/3/articles/chander-le.pdf)
First, the United States, like many countries, concentrates much of its surveillance efforts abroad. Indeed, the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is focused on gathering information overseas, limiting data gathering largely only
when it implicates U.S. persons.174 The recent NSA surveillance disclosures have revealed extensive foreign
operations.175 Indeed, constraints on domestic operations may well have spurred the NSA to expand
operations abroad. As the Washington Post reports, “Intercepting communications overseas has clear
advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight.”176 Deterred by a 2011 ruling
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by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court barring certain broad domestic surveillance of Internet
and telephone traffic,177 the NSA may have increasingly turned its attention overseas. Second, the use of
malware eliminates even the need to have operations on the ground in the countries in which
surveillance occurs. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports that the NSA has infiltrated every corner of the
world through a network of malicious malware.178 A German computer expert noted that “data was intercepted here [by
the NSA] on a large scale.”179 The NRC Handelsblad suggests that the NSA has even scaled the Great Firewall of
China,180 demonstrating that efforts to keep information inside a heavily secured and monitored ironclad firewall do not
necessarily mean that it cannot be accessed by those on the other side of the earth. This is a commonplace phenomenon on
the Internet, of course. The recent enormous security breach of millions of Target customers in the United States likely sent
credit card data of Americans to servers in Russia, perhaps through the installation of malware on point-of-sale devices in
stores.
No Solvency – No Reverse Perception
The Aff can’t undo the overwhelming perception of US surveillance
Fontaine 14 (President of the Center for a New American Security)
(Richard, Bringing Liberty Online: Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden Era, SEPTEMBER 2014, Center
for New American Security)
Such moves
are destined to have only a modest effect on foreign reactions. U.S. surveillance will
inevitably continue under any reasonably likely scenario (indeed, despite the expressions of outrage, not a single
country has said that it would cease its surveillance activities). Many of the demands – such as for greater transparency –
will not be met, simply due to the clandestine nature of electronic espionage. Any limits on surveillance that a
govern- ment might announce will not be publicly verifiable and thus perhaps not fully credible. Nor
will there be an international “no-spying” convention to reassure foreign citizens that their communications are
unmonitored. As it has for centuries, state- sponsored espionage activities are likely to remain accepted international
practice, unconstrained by international law. The one major possible shift in policy following the Snowden affair – a stop
to the bulk collection of telecommunications metadata in the United States – will not constrain the activ- ity most
disturbing to foreigners; that is, America’s surveillance of them. At the same time, U.S. offi- cials are highly
unlikely to articulate a global “right to privacy” (as have the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and some foreign
officials), akin to that derived from the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment, that would permit foreigners to sue in U.S.
courts to enforce such a right.39 The Obama administration’s January 2014 presidential directive on signals intelligence
refers, notably, to the “legiti- mate privacy interests” of all persons, regardless of nationality, and not to a privacy “right.”40
***Top Level Harms Ans***
No Data Flight – 1NC
Won’t flee – path dependence
Kehl et al 14 (Danielle Kehl is a Policy Analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI). Kevin Bankston is the Policy
Director at OTI, Robyn Greene is a Policy Counsel at OTI, and Robert Morgus is a Research Associate at OTI)
(New America’s Open Technology Institute Policy Paper, Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom
& Cybersecurity, July 2014)
Outside of the cloud computing industry, it is still too early to tell which of these shifts may be temporary and which will
have a more lasting impact. Despite an interest in finding alterna- tives, foreign companies and governments are
also discovering the challenges of avoiding U.S. businesses altogether—either because of path
dependence, because switching costs are too high, or because there simply are not enough alternative
providers in certain markets that offer comparable products at the same prices.77 This is particularly true for large
government deals and enterprise solutions, markets that many American businesses dominate, because of the
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amount of time, money, and effort it would take to move away from U.S. companies. Some have cynically
argued that the biggest “winners” in the long run will be Chinese companies like Huawei, which are also vulnerable to state
eavesdrop- ping but may be cheaper than the American alternatives.78
Any flight from US companies will have minimal impact
Panettieri 14
(Joe, Myth: NSA Security Fears Will Hurt Cloud Computing
Jan 3, 2014, Talkin Cloud, http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-sales-strategies/myth-nsa-security-fears-will-hurt-cloudcomputing)
The Risks Are Everywhere
Read between the lines, folks: The NSA's spying activities happen both (A) in the cloud and (B) on premises. While some
CIOs may be worried about cloud privacy and security, consider this question...
Who is in better position to safeguard and protect IT assets, applications and data:
Individual IT managers at independent companies that struggle to keep basic server operations going?
Massive cloud services providers that hire the best security consultants and spend millions -- perhaps billions -protecting their infrastructure and customer data?
Generally speaking, I'll vote my IT spending dollars on group 2.
Cloud Spending Still Rising. Fast
Still, Forrester Research says CIOs in Europe are concerned about the NSA and re-thinking whether to put data in the
cloud. That may be true but consider these Forrester findings:
Forrester believes the stable on-premise software market could grow 5% to 6% in 2014.
Forrester still expects spending on cloud technology to grow by 20% or more in 2014.
One other thought for CIOs that want to keep IT and applications on-premises. What's easier: Rolling out an on-
premises CRM system, or simply activating a CRM application in the cloud?
Yes, NSA will certainly impact the cloud market a bit. But don't let the scary headlines fool you. CIOs don't want
to be in the on-premises security business. If there is a data breach, surely most CIOs would rather
blame their CSP rather than an on-premises glitch
No Data Flight – 2NC Ext.
Cloud industry is still growing despite surveillance
Finley 14
(KLINT FINLEY , 02.27.14, AMAZON’S CLOUD KEEPS GROWING DESPITE FEARS OF NSA SPYING,
http://www.wired.com/2014/02/amazon-cloud-size/)
WHEN FORMER GOVERNMENT contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting
digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion
to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American
businesses would flee the cloud as well. People would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers,
the argument went, rather than host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA.
But it looks like the cloud industry is still growing. And in very big way.
The world’s largest cloud computing services — services where you can run software and store data without buying your
own hardware — are run by Amazon, and according to a new study from independent researcher Huan Liu, Amazon’s
operation grew by a whopping 62 percent over the past two years. What’s more, the study shows that growth
has been steady since June 2013, when the Snowden revelations first hit the news. In fact, there’s been a surge since
December of last year.
Several studies confirm that the economic impact is low
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Weise 15
(Elizabeth Weise, PRISM revelations didn't hit U.S. cloud computing as hard as expected, April 7, 2015 4:30 pm,
http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/04/07/prism-revelations-didnt-hit-u-s-cloud-computing-as-hard-as-expected/)
When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM spying program, there were
concerns that American cloud, hosting and outsourcing businesses would lose customers running to non-U.S.based companies safe from NSA’s prying eyes. “The assertion was that this would be a death blow to U.S. firms trying to
operating in Europe and Asia,” said Forrester Research analyst Ed Ferrara. But two recent reports from Forrester find
it was less catastrophic than expected. That’s good news for companies like Box (BOX), DropBox and others that
make their money by selling U.S.-based data storage. Forrester had originally predicted U.S. companies could lose as
much as $180 billion in sales. Instead, just 29% of technology decision-makers in Asia, Canada, Europe and Latin
America halted or reduced spending with U.S.-based firms offering Internet-based services due to the PRISM
scandal, Forrester’s Business Technographics Global Infrastructure Survey for 2014 found. “It’s a relatively small amount
of data,” Ferrara said. That’s because most of the companies didn’t need to move all their data, much of which was stored
in-house. Instead, only 33% of the data held by that 29% of companies was at a third-party data center or in a cloud system.
Forrester believes the overall loss to U.S. cloud providers for 2015 will be about $15 billion and in 2016, $12
billion, a far cry from projections that were ten times that a year ago. Forrester also found that companies are
looking at other ways to protect the integrity of their data, not just from the NSA but also from surveillance by other
nations. Chief among them was encryption. Eighty-four percent of the companies said they’re using various encryption
methods to protect sensitive material. The survey’s definition of cloud providers is broad, and includes both platform as a
service, infrastructure as a service and software as a service companies, said Ferrara.
Companies can’t give up the competitive advantage
Perez 13 (covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news
for The IDG News Service)
(Juan Carlos, Why IT execs stick with cloud computing despite NSA snooping scandal, IDG News Service | Dec 6, 2013,
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609291/cloud-security/why-it-execs-stick-with-cloud-computing-despite-nsa-snoopingscandal.html)
Explosive revelations in the past six months about the U.S. government's massive cyber-spying activities have spooked
individuals, rankled politicians and enraged privacy watchdogs, but top IT executives aren't panicking -- yet.
So far, they are monitoring the issue, getting informed and taking steps to mitigate their risk in various ways. But the
alarming reports haven't prompted them to roll back their decisions to host applications and data in the cloud.
That's the consensus from about 20 high-ranking IT executives interviewed in North America and Europe
about the effect that the U.S. National Security Agency's snooping practices have had on their cloud computing strategy.
The news broke in June, after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking the earth-shaking secrets to the
media.
Many of the IT executives interviewed say that they're not thrilled with the situation, and that it has made them more
careful about cloud computing plans and deployments, prompting them to review agreements with vendors, double-check
best practices and tighten security controls.
However, these IT executives haven't been completely surprised by the revelations. Whether by overt means
or through covert operations, it's well known that governments engage in surveillance of telecommunications and Internet
traffic.
"Government surveillance hasn't changed our opinion about cloud computing. The cloud model is attractive to us, and I was
never that naive to think that this type of government monitoring wasn't going on," said Kent Fuller, director of enterprise
infrastructure services at BCBG MaxAzria Group, a Los Angeles-based women's fashion designer and seller that uses
Microsoft's Office 365 public cloud suite primarily for employee email.
Stealthy monitoring of computer systems and communications by governments currently doesn't rank among the top IT
security concerns for many IT leaders. "Every CIO will tell you we worry every minute of every day about security,
privacy, redundancy, operational continuity, disaster recovery and the like," said Michael Heim, Whirlpool's corporate vice
president and global CIO. "We're probably the most paranoid guys on the planet."
Jacques Marzin, director of Disic, France's interministerial IT and communications directorate, said the NSA scandal
confirmed the known risks associated with the use of public cloud services. "We are of course concerned about any third
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party access to our data although we have limited usage of public clouds," he said.
However, having everything behind the firewall also carries risks. CIOs worry about the cost and complexity of running
servers on their own premises and the potential loss of competitiveness if rivals are taking advantage of the benefits of
cloud computing.
"At the end of the day, the capabilities and economics around the cloud computing model are so
compelling that when you artificially try to not take advantage of them you impact your ability to
compete, because others will take advantage of them," Heim said. Whirlpool recently decided to move about
30,000 employees from an on premises IBM Lotus Notes system to the Google Apps public cloud email and collaboration
suite.
Data Localization Inev – 1NC
Surveillance is a drop in the bucket – too many reasons why countries want data localization
Business Roundtable 12 (group of chief executive officers of major U.S. corporations formed to promote pro-business public
policy)
(Promoting Economic Growth through Smart Global Information Technology Policy The Growing Threat of Local Data Server
Requirements, http://businessroundtable.org/sites/default/files/Global_IT_Policy_Paper_final.pdf)
Several justifications have been offered for imposing local data server requirements. In some cases, local
data server requirements are viewed as necessary to advance national industrial policy and support
national service providers. In other cases, the stated justification is to ensure that regulatory, law
enforcement or national security personnel can access data residing on the servers. In still other cases,
governments assert that they are protecting personal privacy or restricting access to banned or unlawful
content. Although some of these various objectives may be legitimate if they are narrowly tailored to address the genuine
harm, the blanket imposition of local data server requirements can unnecessarily damage service providers and consumers
alike and slow economic growth. To avoid such disruption, governments should seek to narrowly tailor their regulatory
requirements to meet essential needs and should avoid ill-advised, blanket local data server requirements. Governments
should also ensure that their reviews, if any, of the national security implications of foreign investments focus exclusively
on genuine national security risks.
Data Localization Inev – 2NC
Russian localization happening now
Kozlovsky 15
(Sergey, Are Google and eBay Bowing to the Kremlin's Data Localization Demands?, Posted 10 April 2015 20:47 GMT,
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/04/10/are-google-and-ebay-bowing-to-the-kremlins-data-localization-demands/)
Google and online marketplace eBay may be caving to Russia's controversial new data retention law that
requires Internet companies to store Russian users’ data in Russia. Shifting data centers into Russian territory could leave
Google and eBay customers vulnerable to greater levels of surveillance.
On April 10, RBC news agency reported that Google allegedly agreed to comply with the new law and had already
moved some of its user data storage facilities to data centers on Russian soil.
RBC said the announcement was made at a conference hosted by the Communications Ministry in late March, and noted
that a representative of Rostelecom, one of Russia's leading telecommunications providers, claimed they were hired by
Google to store their data at a “high-security data-server facility with close ties to the state” in Russia.
Later, Rostelecom refused to comment on the matter and said it does not disclose its clients’ information without their
consent.
***A2: Tech Leadership Adv***
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No Tech Decline – 1NC
US rivals are not close to catching up – even if they can innovate tech they will not be able to turn it into
productivity to compete with the U.S. – Japan and Taiwan prove.
Bhidé ‘9
Amar Bhidé, Thomas Schmidheiny Professor in The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy @ Tufts, was
Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. “The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation
Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World”. Winter 2009. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance • Volume
21 Number 1. http://bhide.net/venturesome_press/JACF_Venturesome_Economy_1_bhide.pdf
The world is a long way from being “flat”—China
and India aren’t anywhere close to catching up with the U.S. in
their capacity to develop and use technological innovations. Starting afresh may allow China and India to
leapfrog ahead in some fields, in building advanced mobile phone networks, for example. But excelling in the
overall innovation game requires a great and diverse team, which, history suggests, takes a very long time to
build. Consider Japan, which began to “enter the world” after the Boshin War of 1868. In the subsequent Meiji Restoration,
the country abolished its feudal system and instituted a Western legal system and a quasi-parliamentary constitutional
government. In a few decades, Japan had modernized its industry, its military, and its educational system.
Today Japan is a highly developed economy and makes important contributions to advancing the
technological frontier. But nearly a century and a half after Japan started modernizing, its overall capacity to
develop and use innovations, as evidenced by the country’s average productivity, remains behind that of the
U.S. Similarly, Korea and Taiwan started industrializing (as it happens, under Japanese rule) about a century ago
and enjoyed miraculous rates of growth after the 1960s. In several sectors of the electronics industry, Korean and
Taiwanese companies are technological leaders. Yet their overall productivity suggests they have less
capacity than Japan to develop and use innovations. Is it likely, then, that within any reader’s lifetime China and India
will attain the parity with the U.S. that has eluded Japan, Korea, and Taiwan?
And the tech leadership thesis is bankrupt – no impact to other countries catching up
Galama 2008 – PhD and M.Sc in Physics from the University of Amsterdam, MBA from INSEAD (Titus, “U.S. Competitiveness in Science and
Technology,” Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense by the National Defense Research Institute of the RAND Corporation,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG674.pdf)
Another opposing view suggests that fears of a looming S&T crisis may result from a misunderstanding of
concepts driving the issue. The July 2006 Economist noted the “wide range of potential remedies” being suggested to the
purported S&T problem, which include “getting more Americans to study science and engineering, bigger tax
breaks for research and development, and trade protection to prevent the innovative hordes from China and India from
storming America’s gates” (The Economist, 2006). The piece continues by citing a new paper by Amar Bhide, of Columbia
University’s business school, who
argues that these supposed remedies, and the worries that lie behind them, are based on a misconception of how
innovation works and of how it contributes to economic growth. . . .This consists, first, of paying too much
attention to the upstream development of new inventions and technologies by scientists and engineers, and too
little to the downstream process of turn- ing these inventions into products that tempt people to part with
their money, and, second, of the belief that national leadership in upstream activities is the same thing as leadership in
generating economic value from innovation. . . . Mr Bhide argues that this downstream innovation . . . is the most valuable
kind and what America is best at . . . that most of the value of innovations accrues to their users not their
creators – and stays in the country where the innovation is consumed. So if China and India do more
invention, so much the better for American consumers. (The Economist, 2006)
No Tech Decline – China 2NC
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China wont catch up
Ernst 11 – Economist, analysis service provided by the East-West Center (Dieter, 6/20/11, “China not an Immediate Threat to U.S. Tech
Leadership,” http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news19061.html,)
Contrary to common misperceptions, China’s innovation policies do not pose a threat to U.S. leadership in science and
technology, East-West Center economist Dieter Ernst said June 15 in testimony before the congressionally mandated U.S.China Economic and Security Review Commission. “The U.S. retains a strong lead in overall innovative
capacity, and China still has a long way to go to close the innovation gap,” Ernst said. Instead, he said,
China’s progress in innovation should be seen as a wake-up call for America: “Rather than fearing China and blaming it for
our problems, we need to focus constructively on how this relationship can be improved.” Ernst urged the U.S. government
and private sector to work together in implementing proactive trade diplomacy that takes into account the diverse forces
and the conflicting agendas that drive China’s innovation policy, and in developing a national strategy to upgrade
America’s own innovation system in order to cope with the competitive challenges posed by China. “Trade diplomacy and
national innovation strategy are interrelated, and hence we need to pursue them simultaneously,” he testified. “Corrective
action needs to start now, but there is still time to adjust policies and corporate strategies to the new challenges of an
increasingly multi-polar global knowledge economy.” Ernst was among a handful of experts invited to testify before the
commission, which was created by Congress in 2000 to monitor the national security implications of the bilateral trade and
economic relationship between the United States and China, and to provide recommendations for legislative and
administrative action where appropriate. The topic of the hearing was “China’s Five-Year Plan, Indigenous Innovation and
Technology Transfers, and Outsourcing.” China’s innovation policy has produced massive investments in research and
development infrastructure and higher education, Ernst said. Since 2000, China has increased R&D spending roughly 10
percent each year, with the result that China’s share in global R&D spending has increased from 9.1 percent in 2008 to 12.3
percent in 2010, while the U.S. share has declined from 35.4 percent to 34.4 percent. China’s share is projected to grow
even further in 2011, Ernst said, overtaking Japan as the world’s second largest R&D investor. Since 1998, the number of
colleges in China has doubled, and the number of students has more than quintupled to around 6 million, he said. More
importantly, China’s domestic doctorate awards in science and engineering have increased more than ten-fold since the
early 1990s, nearing the number of such doctorates awarded in the United States. China’s patent boom is of particular
interest, Ernst said. In terms of total patenting activity, China has overtaken Korea and Europe, and it is catching up with
the U.S. and Japan. And in 2009, he said, Chinese nationals accounted for nearly 90 percent of the country’s domestic
patent applications, indicating that the government’s “indigenous innovation” policies have been successful, at least in
quantitative terms. Even so, Ernst said, the gap in innovation capacity persists, and China’s leadership is very conscious
that the U.S. retains a strong lead in R&D spending, patent applications and the per-capita number of scientists and
engineers. A telling example, he said, is that no Chinese company is among the top 20 global R&D spenders in
the information technology industry. In addition, China owns just two percent of worldwide patents, with 95
percent of its patents being domestic only. Ernst said that root causes of China’s continuing innovation gap
include severe quality problems in education, scientific plagiarism and barriers to private R&D
investment. A major weakness of China’s policy, he said, is its elaborate product and technology lists — constructed to
assess compliance with government standardization requirements — which can quickly become outdated. Even more
significant for China’s indigenous innovation push, he added, is that such control lists focus on existing technologies, rather
than on the future innovations they are designed to promote.
Not Key to Heg 1NC
Loss of tech leadership does not threaten U.S. economic power or leadership – your authors ignore how
innovation helps the economy and are blinded by nationalist sentiment.
Bhidé ‘9
Amar Bhidé, Thomas Schmidheiny Professor in The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy @ Tufts, was
Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. “Where innovation creates value”. February 2009.
http://whispersandshouts.typepad.com/files/where-innovation-creates-value.pdf
Now, perhaps, more than ever, the fear of globalization haunts the United States.
Many manufacturing companies that once
flourished there fell to overseas competition or relocated much of their work abroad. Then services embarked on the same journey. Just as the manufacturing
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exodus started with low-wage, unskilled labor, the offshoring of services at first involved data entry, routine software programming and testing, and the operation
of phone banks. But today, overseas workers analyze financial statements, test trading strategies, and design computer chips and software architectures for US
It is the offshoring of research and development—of innovation and the future—that arouses the
keenest anxiety. The economist Richard Freeman spoke for many Americans when he warned that the United States could become significantly less
companies.
competitive “as large developing countries like China and India harness their growing scientific and engineering expertise to their enormous, low-wage labor
forces.”1 What is the appropriate response? One, from the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, the TV broadcaster Lou Dobbs, and their like, calls for
Another, seemingly more progressive, approach would be to spend more money to promote
cutting-edge science and technology. Much of the establishment, Democratic and Republican alike, has embraced
what the economists Sylvia Ostry and Richard Nelson call techno-nationalism and techno-fetishism, which both claim
that US prosperity requires continued domination of these fields. We’ve heard such fears and prescriptions
before. In the 1980s, many people attributed the problems of the US economy to the proliferation of lawyers and managers and to a shortage of engineers and
protectionism.
scientists; Germany and Japan were praised as countries with a better occupational ratio. Yet in the 1990s, their economies slackened while the United States
prospered—and not because it heeded the warnings. Indeed, math and science education in US high schools didn’t improve much. Enrollment in law schools
remained high, and managers accounted for a growing proportion of the workforce. The US share of scientific articles, science and engineering PhDs, and patents
continued to decline, the service sector to expand, and manufacturing employment to stagnate. Of course, the United States can’t count on the same happy ending
The integration of China and India into the global economy is a seminal and
unprecedented phenomenon. Could the outcome be different this time? Is the United States on the verge of being
pummeled by a technological hurricane? In my view, the answer is no. Worries about the offshoring of R&D
and the progress of science in China and India arise from a failure to understand technological innovation
and its relation to the global economy. Innovation does play a major role in nurturing prosperity, but we
must be careful to formulate policies that sustain rather than undermine it—for instance, by favoring one form
of innovation over another.
to every episode of the “losing our lead” serial.
Not Key to Heg 2NC
Economic power is not key to hegemony
Kapila 10 (Dr. Subhash Kapila is an International Relations and Strategic Affairs analyst and the Consultant
for Strategic Affairs with South Asia Analysis Group and a graduate of the Royal British Army Staff College with
a Masters in Defence Science and a PhD in Strategic Studies., “21st Century: Strategically A Second American
Century With Caveats,” June 26, http://www.eurasiareview.com/201006263919/21st-century-strategically-asecond-american-century-with-caveats.html)
Strategically, the 20th Century was decidedly an American Century. United States strategic, military,
political and economic predominance was global and undisputed. In the bi-polar global power structure comprising
the United States and the Former Soviet Union it was the United States which globally prevailed. The 20th Century's dawn was
marked by the First World War which marked the decline of the old European colonial powers, noticeably Great Britain. The
Second World War marked the total eclipse of Great Britain and other colonial powers. The United States replaced Great Britain
as the new global superpower. The 20th Century's end witnessed the end of the Cold War, with the disintegration of the Former
Soviet Union as the United States strategic challenger and counter-vailing power. On the verge of the new millennium the
United States strode the globe like a colossus as the sole global super power. With a decade of the 21st
Century having gone past, many strategic and political analysts the world over have toyed with projections
that United States global predominance is on the decline, and that the 21st Century will not be a second American
Century. Having toyed, with such projections, these analysts however shy away from predicting whose century the 21st Century
will strategically be? The trouble with such projections is that they are based predominantly on analyses of
economic trends and financial strengths and less on detailed analyses of strategic and military strengths, and
more significantly strategic cultures. Presumably, it is easier for such analysts to base trends on much quoted
statistical data. Strategic analysis of global predominance trends is a more complex task in the opinion of the
Author, as it cannot be based on statistical data analysis. Global predominance trends need unravelling of strategic
cultures of contending powers, the reading of national intentions and resolve and the inherent national strengths and
willpower demonstrated over a considerable time span of half-centuries and centuries. Crisply put, one
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needs to remember that in the 1980's, Japan and Germany as "economic superpowers" could not emerge as global
superpowers. Hence global predominance calls for more than economic strengths. The United States getting
strategically bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st Century has not led to any
noticeable decline in American global predominance. Despite Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States reigns
supreme globally even in East Asia where China could have logically challenged it. More significantly, and normally
forgotten, is the fact that the off-quoted shift of global and economic power from the West to East was facilitated
by United States massive financial direct investments in China, Japan, South Korea and India. China quoted
as the next superpower to rival the United States would be economically prostate, should the United States
surgically disconnect China's economic and financial linkages to the United States. More significantly, while
examining the prospects of the 21st Century as a "Second American Century" it must be remembered that besides other factors,
that out of the six multipolar contenders for global power, none except China have shown any indications to
whittle down US global predominance. Even China seems to be comfortable with US power as long as it
keeps Japan in check. This Paper makes bold to assert that the 21st Century would be a Second American Century despite
China's challenge and the strategic distractions arising from the global Islamic flash-points.
Growth is not zero sum – wont impact US leadership
Bernd-Joachim Schuller and Marie Lidbom, University of Skövde, Sweden, 2009
“COMPETITIVENESS OF NATIONS IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. IS EUROPE INTERNATIONALLY
COMPETITIVE?” (http://www.ktu.lt/lt/mokslas/zurnalai/ekovad/14/1822-6515-2009-934.pdf)
In many countries, most of what is produced is generally also consumed there, which has been shown in the EU (Boschini &
Eriksson, 2005). This makes the economy less susceptible to things happening in other countries. However, discussions on
competitiveness often come with expressed concerns that positive economic developments in one part of the world are to a
disadvantage for another part. This is not necessarily true. Suppose that the firms of an internationally trading country find
ways which make them more competitive on the world market. This enables their products to be sold in larger amounts
both on domestic and foreign markets, i.e. both domestic supply and exports grow. The increasing supply and demand of
domestically produced goods and services boost the circular flow of income in the economy as productivity is rising.
Consequently, both public and private incomes increase. Saving, investment, consumption, export, but even import will
rise. Thus, positive economic developments in one part of the world are not automatically a disadvantage for other parts 5 .
It should be clear from the discussion that national competitiveness is not a zero-sum game, but rather a plus-sum game – success
breeds success. As mentioned before, countries engaging in international trade have the possibility to grow beyond their
production potential, and raise average productivity. This gives an opportunity to all participants in international trade to gain. A
country should not be seen as a gigantic firm. Running an economy differs obviously a lot from managing a firm. As discussed
above, a firm not being able to make profits will soon be forced out of the market, unless it improves its performance. But since
trade between countries is not profit driven, nations do not have a distinct bottom line. In a democracy with bad economic outlook,
the individuals have the choice to vote and to express their disappointment by not re-electing the ruling government. A nation
going bancrupt is virtually unheard of 6.
Not Key to US Econ Ext.
The U.S. is not locked into a “winner-take-all” race for science and tech leadership. Increased innovation
in China and India will increase production and consumption in the U.S. service sector.
Bhidé ‘9
Amar Bhidé, Thomas Schmidheiny Professor in The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy @ Tufts, was
Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. “The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation
Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World”. Winter 2009. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance • Volume
21 Number 1. http://bhide.net/venturesome_press/JACF_Venturesome_Economy_1_bhide.pdf
My analysis of the multiplayer game and cross-border interactions suggests outcomes that differ sharply from the dire predictions
of the techno-nationalists. According to my assessment, the United States is not locked into a “winner-take-all” race for
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scientific and technological leadership, and the growth of research capabilities in China and India —and thus
their share of cutting-edge research—does not reduce U.S. prosperity. Indeed my analysis suggests that advances
abroad will improve living standards in the U.S. Moreover, the benefits I identify are different from the conventional
economist’s account whereby prosperity abroad increases opportunities for U.S. exporters. Instead, I show that cutting-edge
research developed abroad benefits domestic production and consumption in the service sector . And contrary
to the policy prescriptions of techno-nationalists, I suggest that the U.S. embrace the expansion of research
capabilities abroad instead of devoting more resources to maintaining its lead in science and cutting-edge
technology.20
Tech development is not zero-sum – it does not matter the origin of innovation – the U.S. will still
capitalize on it.
Bhidé ‘9
Amar Bhidé, Thomas Schmidheiny Professor in The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy @ Tufts, was
Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. “The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation
Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World”. Winter 2009. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance • Volume
21 Number 1. http://bhide.net/venturesome_press/JACF_Venturesome_Economy_1_bhide.pdf
Any catch-up, even if it takes place gradually and in the normal course of development, will to some degree reduce the U.S.
“lead.” Furthermore, the global influence of techno-nationalism could accelerate this process. As alarmists in the U.S.
continue to remind us, governments in “emerging” countries such as China and India —also in the thrall of
techno-nationalist thinking—are making a determined effort to leap ahead in cutting-edge science and
technology. But I am skeptical that these efforts are going to do any more good for China’s and India’s
economy than similar efforts in Europe and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s.21 But putting aside the issue of whether
investing in cutting-edge research represents a good use of Chinese and Indian resources, does whatever erosion of U.S.
primacy in developing high-level know-how this might cause really threaten U.S. prosperity? Should the U.S.
government respond in kind by putting even more money into research? Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has long decried
what he refers to as the “dangerous obsession” with “national competitiveness.” As Krugman wrote in a 1994
article in Foreign Affairs, the widespread tendency to think that “the United States and Japan are competitors in the
same sense that Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi” is “flatly, completely and demonstrably wrong.” Although
“competitive problems could arise in principle, as a practical, empirical matter,” Krugman goes on to say, “the major nations of
the world are not to any significant degree in economic competition with each other.”22 The techno-nationalist claim that
U.S. prosperity requires that the country “maintain its scientific and technological lead” is particularly
dubious: the argument fails to recognize that the development of scientific knowledge or cutting-edge
technology is not a zero-sum competition. The results of scientific research are available at no charge to
anyone anywhere in the world. Most arguments for the public funding of scientific research are in fact based on the
unwillingness of private investors to undertake research that cannot yield a profit. Cutting-edge technology (as opposed to
scientific research) has commercial value because it can be patented; but patent owners generally don’t charge
higher fees to foreign licensors. The then tiny Japanese company Sony was one of the first licensors of Bell Labs’ transistor
patent. Sony paid all of $50,000—and only after first obtaining special permission from the Japanese Ministry of Finance—for
the license that started it on the road to becoming a household name in consumer electronics. Moreover, if patent holders
choose not to grant licenses but to exploit their inventions on their own, this does not mean that the country
of origin secures most of the benefit at the expense of other countries. Suppose IBM chooses to exploit
internally, instead of licensing, a breakthrough from its China Research Laboratory (employing 150 research staff
in Beijing). This does not help China and hurt everyone else. Rather, as I discuss at length later, the benefits go to
IBM’s stockholders, to employees who make or market the product that embodies the invention, and—above all—to
customers, who secure the lion’s share of the benefit from most innovations. These stockholders, employees, and customers, who
number in the tens of millions, are located all over the world. In a world where breakthrough ideas easily cross
national borders, the origin of ideas is inconsequential. Contrary to Thomas Friedman’s assertion, it does not matter
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that Google’s search algorithm was invented in California. After all, a Briton invented the protocols of the
World Wide Web—in a lab in Switzerland. A Swede and a Dane in Tallinn, Estonia, started Skype, the leading provider
of peer-to-peer Internet telephony. How did the foreign origins of these innovations harm the U.S. economy?
Tech Leadership Alt Cause – 1NC
Spending cuts prevent tech competitiveness now
Alivisatos et al 13 (Paul Alivisatos is director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Eric D. Isaacs is director of Argonne
National Laboratory. Thom Mason is director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
(PAUL ALIVISATOS, ERIC D. ISAACS, AND THOM MASONMAR 12 2013, The Sequester Is Going to Devastate U.S. Science
Research for Decades, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/the-sequester-is-going-to-devastate-us-science-researchfor-decades/273925/)
Less than one percent of the federal budget goes to fund basic science research -- $30.2 billion out of the
total of $3.8 trillion President Obama requested in fiscal year 2012. By slashing that fraction even further, the
government will achieve short-term savings in millions this year, but the resulting gaps in the innovation pipeline
could cost billions of dollars and hurt the national economy for decades to come.
As directors of the Department of Energy's National Laboratories, we have a responsibility both to taxpayers and to the
thousands of talented and committed men and women who work in our labs. We are doing everything we can to make sure
our scientists and engineers can keep working on our nation's most pressing scientific problems despite the cuts. It's not yet
clear how much funding the National Labs will lose, but it will total tens of millions of dollars. Interrupting -- or worse,
halting -- basic research in the physical, biological, and computational sciences would be devastating,
both for science and for the many U.S. industries that rely on our national laboratory system to power their research and
development efforts.
Instead, this drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two
years. This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the world
races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions in missed
future opportunities.
New ideas, new insights, new discoveries -- these are the lifeblood of science and the foundation of America's historic
culture of innovation and ingenuity. The science community recognizes the importance of those new ideas, so we have
systems in place to make sure great new ideas get a chance to thrive. Every ongoing federally funded science program is
reviewed regularly to make sure it's on track and likely to yield results. Each year, stalled programs are terminated to make
room for more promising lines of research. Under sequestration, we will continue to review and cull unsuccessful research
efforts, but we won't be able to bring in new ideas to take their place.
Every federal agency that supports basic scientific research is facing this impossible dilemma. The National Science
Foundation -- which funds 20 percent of all federally supported basic research at American colleges and universities -- just
announced it is cutting back on 1,000 new research grants it had planned to award this year. The Department of Energy's
Office of Science, the nation's largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences, will have to shut the door on
hundreds of new proposals as well. The impact will multiply as long-planned and overdue supercomputer upgrades and
other necessary investments in our scientific infrastructure are stretched out, delayed, or put on hold indefinitely.
The National Laboratories aren't just crucial to America's scientific infrastructure. They are also powerful engines of
economic development. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow has calculated that over the past half century, more
than half of the growth in our nation's GDP has been rooted in scientific discoveries -- the kinds of fundamental, missiondriven research that we do at the labs. This early-stage research has led to extraordinary real-world benefits, from nuclear
power plants to compact fluorescent bulbs to blood cholesterol tests. Because the United States has historically valued
scientific inspiration, our government has provided creative scientists and engineers with the support, facilities, and time
they need to turn brilliant ideas into real-world solutions.
Basing funding decisions solely on short-term fiscal goals risks the heart of America's scientific
enterprise and long-term economic growth -- diminishing our world leadership in science, technology
and in the creation of cutting-edge jobs.
Sequestration won't have an immediate, visible impact on American research. Laboratories will continue to open their
doors, and scientists and engineers will go to work. But as we choke off our ability to pursue promising new
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ideas, we begin a slow but inexorable slide to stagnation. We can't afford to lose a generation of new ideas
and forfeit our national future.
Domestic funding is driving science leadership decline
Anderson ’10 [Professor of Biology, CalTech. David, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/opinion/l13science.html]
As a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, where a large fraction of our students are Asian, I found
that your article rang true to me. Recently, one of my star Chinese graduate students announced to my
surprise and consternation that he would return to China after completing his training. Every move
requires not only a pull, but also a push. By focusing on a scientist, Shi Yigong, who was a well-funded Howard
Hughes Medical Institute investigator, the article did not mention a major force driving Asian and other foreignborn life scientists out of the United States: the difficulty in obtaining research funding from the
National Institutes of Health. For example, the N.I.H. currently prohibits its funds from being used to
support the graduate or the postdoctoral training of foreign-born science students, who make up the
majority of our talent pool in many fields. In addition, the N.I.H.’s conservative review panels make it
very difficult for young scientists to secure funding for creative, risky basic research, once they
establish their own labs. This affects senior scientists as well. Recently, for example, two of my
colleagues, both tenured full professors, left Caltech to take positions with Germany’s well-funded
Max Planck Institute. I myself came close to accepting such an offer. Our government research funding policies are
driving some of our best scientists out of the country. The brain gain that we achieved after World War II is
gradually being turned into a brain drain.
Tech Leadership Alt Cause – 2NC Ext.
US technological leadership collapse is inevitable because of population
Lempert 8
(Richard O., the Eric Stein Distinguished University Professor of Law and Sociology at The University of
Michigan Law School and a Research Professor in the George Washington Institute of Public Policy,
“Maintaining U.S. Scientific Leadership”, http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/03/maintaining-usscientific-leadership/, 3/3)
If these advantages were not enough, the competition for science leadership was weak thanks to the devastation that Europe
suffered in two world wars and the slow rebuilding of European economies in the post-war era. The upshot: U.S. science
leadership is not natural and inevitable, but the loss of that leadership may be. Countries much larger than the
United States, most notably India and China, are experiencing economic growth that outstrips ours, and
as they grow in wealth they are rapidly improving their educational systems and basic science
infrastructures. Moreover, as globalization leads companies born in the United States to move research and production
capacity abroad, market demand for trained scientists and engineers is increasing elsewhere while it is being dampened
here. Even if the United States retains a per capita education and investment advantage over India and
China, population differences alone mean that the number of trained scientists and engineers in these
countries will soon dwarf the number in America, with differences in the quantity and quality of
science innovation likely to follow. Added to the Asian challenge is a Europe that can no longer be seen as a set of
discrete countries when it comes to science. Rather, cross-border research teams are being encouraged, and European
Union-wide funding mechanisms are being established. In short, several decades from now we may find that
we
are not the world’s number one country when it comes to science, however measured, but perhaps no.
4 behind China, India, and the EU. We may also find that being in fourth place is not altogether bad. When children
in China are vaccinated against polio, they are not worse off because the vaccine was invented in the United States. When
an Indian inventor draws on two decades of U.S. government-funded research to achieve a technological breakthrough, her
accomplishment will not be lessened because it would not have happened had research in the United States not paved the
way.
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Heg Inevitable/Sustainable
US hegemony is uncontested and inevitable – no shift in power balance for the foreseeable future
Cohen 14 (Michael A., fellow at the Century Foundation, former columnist for Foreign Policy and the New York Times, former
senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the American Security Project, master’s degree from Columbia University where he
is also an adjunct lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs, “It’s Coming from Inside the House,” in A Dangerous
World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security, 2014)
Today, America’s
military, economic, and diplomatic power is unparalleled, and its global hegemony is
uncontested.
The United States confronts no plausible existential security threats, no great power rival, and no nearterm military competitor. The U.S. military is far and away the world’s most potent, and it is able to
effectively project power to every corner of the globe. America maintains a vast coterie of allies,
friends, and like-minded nations with similar values and political systems. Moreover, its position as the
world’s preeminent superpower is unlikely to change any time soon, because no country has the ability
or inclination to challenge it. China is its closest military rival—and China spends a fraction on
armaments compared with the United States. Even emerging from a sustained economic downturn, the
U.S. economy remains the largest in the world—with China, at best, two to three decades away from
surpassing it. Although the United States faces global challenges to its interests, they pose little actual risk to the
overwhelming majority of American citizens or to the country’s security.
Quite simply, the United States is the world’s most dominant nation,
unchallenged and more secure than
any other great power in history—and it will almost certainly remain so for the foreseeable future.
Heg Doesn’t Solve War – 1NC
US heg not key to global peace
Fettweis 14 (Christopher J., associate professor of political science at Tulane University, “Delusions of Danger: Geopolitical Fear
and Indispensability in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in A Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security, 2014)
According to what might be considered the indispensability fallacy, many Americans believe that
U.S. actions are primarily responsible for any stability that currently exists. “All that stands between civility
and genocide, order and mayhem,” explain Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, “is American power.”37 That belief is
an offshoot, witting or not, of what is known as “hegemonic stability theory,” which proposes that international peace is
possible only when one country is strong enough to make and enforce a set of rules.38 Were U.S. leaders to abdicate their
responsibilities, that reasoning goes, unchecked conflicts would at the very least bring humanitarian disaster and would
quite quickly threaten core U.S. interests.39
Brzezinski is typical in his belief that “outright chaos” and a string of specific horrors could be expected to follow a loss of
hegemony, from renewed attempts to build regional empires (by China, Turkey, Russia, and Brazil) to the collapse of the
U.S. relationship with Mexico as emboldened nationalists south of the border reassert 150-year-old territorial claims.
Overall, without U.S. dominance, today’s relatively peaceful world would turn “violent and bloodthirsty.”40 The liberal
world order that is so beneficial to all would come tumbling down.
Like many believers, proponents of hegemonic stability theory base their view on faith alone.41 There
is precious little evidence to suggest that the United States is responsible for the pacific trends that
have swept across the system. In fact, the world remained equally peaceful, relatively speaking, while
the United States cut its forces throughout the 1990s, as well as while it doubled its military spending
in the first decade of the new century.42 Complex statistical methods should not be needed to demonstrate that
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levels of U.S. military spending have been essentially unrelated to global stability.
Hegemonic stability theory’s flaws go way beyond the absence of simple correlations to support them,
however. The theory’s supporters have never been able to explain adequately how precisely 5 percent of the world’s
population could force peace on the other 95 percent, unless, of course, the rest of the world was simply not intent on
fighting. Most states are quite free to go to war without U.S. involvement but choose not to. The United
States can be counted on, especially after Iraq, to steer well clear of most civil wars and ethnic
conflicts. It took years, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the use of chemical weapons to spur even limited interest
in the events in Syria, for example; surely internal violence in, say, most of Africa would be unlikely to attract serious
attention of the world’s policeman, much less intervention. The continent is, nevertheless, more peaceful today than at any
other time in its history, something for which U.S. hegemony cannot take credit.43 Stability exists today in many such
places to which U.S. hegemony simply does not extend.
Overall, proponents of the stabilizing power of U.S. hegemony should keep in mind one of the most basic observations
from cognitive psychology: rarely are our actions as important to others’ calculations as we perceive them to be.44 The socalled egocentric bias, which is essentially ubiquitous in human interaction, suggests that although it may be natural for
U.S. policymakers to interpret their role as crucial in the maintenance of world peace, they are almost certainly
overestimating their own importance. Washington is probably not as central to the myriad decisions in
foreign capitals that help maintain international stability as it thinks it is.
The indispensability fallacy owes its existence to a couple of factors. First, although all people like to bask in the reflected
glory of their country’s (or culture’s) unique, nonpareil stature, Americans have long been exceptional in their
exceptionalism.45 The short history of the United States, which can easily be read as an almost uninterrupted and certainly
unlikely story of success, has led to a (perhaps natural) belief that it is morally, culturally, and politically superior to other,
lesser countries. It is no coincidence that the exceptional state would be called on by fate to maintain peace and justice in
the world.
Americans have always combined that feeling of divine providence with a sense of mission to spread their ideals around the
world and battle evil wherever it lurks. It is that sense of destiny, of being the object of history’s call, that most obviously
separates the United States from other countries. Only an American president would claim that by entering World War I,
“America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world.”46
Although many states are motivated by humanitarian causes, no other seems to consider promoting its values to be a
national duty in quite the same way that Americans do. “I believe that God wants everybody to be free,” said George W.
Bush in 2004. “That’s what I believe. And that’s one part of my foreign policy.”47 When Madeleine Albright called the
United States the “indispensable nation,” she was reflecting a traditional, deeply held belief of the American people.48
Exceptional nations, like exceptional people, have an obligation to assist the merely average.
Many of the factors that contribute to geopolitical fear—Manichaeism, religiosity, various vested interests, and
neoconservatism—also help explain American exceptionalism and the indispensability fallacy. And unipolarity makes
hegemonic delusions possible. With the great power of the United States comes a sense of great responsibility: to serve and
protect humanity, to drive history in positive directions. More than any other single factor, the people of the United States
tend to believe that they are indispensable because they are powerful, and power tends to blind states to their limitations.
“Wealth shapes our international behavior and our image,” observed Derek Leebaert. “It brings with it the freedom to make
wide-ranging choices well beyond common sense.”49
It is quite likely that the world does not need the United States to enforce peace. In fact, if virtually any of
the overlapping and mutually reinforcing explanations for the current stability are correct, the trends in international
security may well prove difficult to reverse. None of the contributing factors that are commonly suggested
(economic development, complex interdependence, nuclear weapons, international institutions,
democracy, shifting global norms on war) seem poised to disappear any time soon.50 The world will
probably continue its peaceful ways for the near future, at the very least, no matter what the United
States chooses to do or not do. As Robert Jervis concluded while pondering the likely effects of U.S. restraint on
decisions made in foreign capitals, “It is very unlikely that pulling off the American security blanket
would lead to thoughts of war.”51 The United States will remain fundamentally safe no matter what it does—in
other words, despite widespread beliefs in its inherent indispensability to the contrary.
Heg Doesn’t Solve War – 2NC
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No challengers – the only risk of war is from the US pursuing a primacy strategy
Green 14 (Brendan Rittenhouse Green, assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati who writes on
international relations theory, national security policy, and military behavior, PhD in political science from MIT, “Security Threats in
Contemporary World Politics: Potential Hegemons, Partnerships, and Primacy,” in A Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S.
National Security, 2014)
The United States faces very few security threats from nation-states. The era of potential hegemons
has passed: no state is going to conquer a region and turn its power against the Western Hemisphere.
The contemporary balance of power, a geography of peace, very difficult military tasks, and nuclear
weapons make large-scale continental conquest impossible. There will be no blockade of the Western
Hemisphere and no corresponding transformation of America into a garrison state. Hitler and Stalin still serve as the
backdrop to American grand strategy, yet we will never see their likes again.
Such threats as do exist from nation-states, Washington brings on itself. America’s primacy
strategy ties itself to regional politics in a way that helps little and could be quite dangerous. Managing
security relations abroad is either unnecessary, because of the high costs of war, or unlikely to work in
the case of highly dedicated revisionist states. But once committed to a strategy of primacy,
policymakers will probably not shy away from the wars they fail to prevent. Primacy will only further stoke
the longtime American obsession with credibility, as the strategy hinges on widespread beliefs that America will protect the
status quo. Political relationships will tend to take on a value of their own, whether or not they are worth defending. And a
powerful America committed abroad will be prone to adventures that have little to do with its security.
To put the point sharply: the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year —and risks war—largely to stop
other people from fighting among themselves. The common story that reducing regional competition abroad
makes America more secure at home is close to being backwards. The United States is tremendously
safe; ill-considered decisions to let its alliances lead it into unnecessary foreign conflicts are the only
threat Washington faces from states. Politics among nations may well still have some danger, but it is dangerous to
America only by its own choice.
***A2: Econ Adv***
Global Econ Resiliant – 1NC
It’s resilient—global economic governance worked
Drezner 12 – Daniel is a professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. (“The Irony of
Global Economic Governance: The System Worked”, October 2012,
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Ironyof-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)
It is equally possible, however, that a renewed crisis would trigger a renewed surge in policy
coordination. As John Ikenberry has observed, “the complex interdependence that is unleashed in an open and
loosely rule-based order generates some expanding realms of exchange and investment that result in a
growing array of firms, interest groups and other sorts of political stakeholders who seek to preserve the
stability and openness of the system.”103 The post-2008 economic order has remained open,
entrenching these interests even more across the globe. Despite uncertain times, the open economic system
that has been in operation since 1945 does not appear to be closing anytime soon.
Global Econ Resiliant – 2NC
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Glbobal Economy is resilient
Zakaria, 9 — Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and Editor of Newsweek International
(Fareed, “The Secrets of Stability”, Newsweek, 12/21/2009, lexis)
One year ago, the world seemed as if it might be coming apart. The global financial system, which had
fueled a great expansion of capitalism and trade across the world, was crumbling. All the certainties of the age of globalization--about the virtues of free markets, trade, and technology--were being called into question. Faith in the
American model had collapsed. The financial industry had crumbled. Once-roaring emerging markets like China, India, and
Brazil were sinking. Worldwide trade was shrinking to a degree not seen since the 1930s. Pundits whose bearishness had
been vindicated predicted we were doomed to a long, painful bust, with cascading failures in sector after
sector, country after country. In a widely cited essay that appeared in The Atlantic this May, Simon Johnson, former
chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote: "The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the
current slump 'cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.' This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse
than the Great Depression." Others predicted that these economic shocks would lead to political instability and
violence in the worst-hit countries. At his confirmation hearing in February, the new U.S. director of national intelligence,
Adm. Dennis Blair, cautioned the Senate that "the financial crisis and global recession are likely to produce a wave of
economic crises in emerging-market nations over the next year." Hillary Clinton endorsed this grim view. And she was
hardly alone. Foreign Policy ran a cover story predicting serious unrest in several emerging markets. Of one thing everyone
was sure: nothing would ever be the same again. Not the financial industry, not capitalism, not globalization. One year
later, how much has the world really changed? Well, Wall Street is home to two fewer investment banks (three, if
you count Merrill Lynch). Some regional banks have gone bust. There was some turmoil in Moldova and (entirely
unrelated to the financial crisis) in Iran. Severe problems remain, like high unemployment in the West, and we face new
problems caused by responses to the crisis--soaring debt and fears of inflation. But overall, things look nothing like
they did in the 1930s. The predictions of economic and political collapse have not materialized at all. A
key measure of fear and fragility is the ability of poor and unstable countries to borrow money on the debt
markets. So consider this: the sovereign bonds of tottering Pakistan have returned 168 percent so far this
year. All this doesn't add up to a recovery yet, but it does reflect a return to some level of normalcy. And that
rebound has been so rapid that even the shrewdest observers remain puzzled. "The question I have at the back of my
head is 'Is that it?' " says Charles Kaye, the co-head of Warburg Pincus. "We had this huge crisis, and now we're back to
business as usual?" This revival did not happen because markets managed to stabilize themselves on their own. Rather,
governments, having learned the lessons of the Great Depression, were determined not to repeat the
same mistakes once this crisis hit. By massively expanding state support for the economy--through central
banks and national treasuries--they buffered the worst of the damage. (Whether they made new mistakes in
the process remains to be seen.) The extensive social safety nets that have been established across the industrialized
world also cushioned the pain felt by many. Times are still tough, but things are nowhere near as bad as in
the 1930s, when governments played a tiny role in national economies. It's true that the massive state interventions of the
past year may be fueling some new bubbles: the cheap cash and government guarantees provided to banks, companies, and
consumers have fueled some irrational exuberance in stock and bond markets. Yet these rallies also demonstrate the
return of confidence, and confidence is a very powerful economic force. When John Maynard Keynes
described his own prescriptions for economic growth, he believed government action could provide only a temporary fix
until the real motor of the economy started cranking again--the animal spirits of investors, consumers, and companies
seeking risk and profit. Beyond all this, though, I believe ther e's a fundamental reason why we have not faced
global collapse in the last year. It is the same reason that we weathered the stock-market crash of 1987,
the recession of 1992, the Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian default of 1998, and the tech-bubble collapse
of 2000. The current global economic system is inherently more resilient than we think. The world today
is characterized by three major forces for stability, each reinforcing the other and each historical in nature.
US Not Key – 1NC
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Decoupling means US isn’t key to the global economy
Bloomberg 10 [“Wall Street Sees World Economy Decoupling From U.S.”, October 4th, 2010,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-03/world-economy-decoupling-from-u-s-in-slowdown-returns-as-wall-street-view.html,
Chetan]
The main reason for the divergence: “Direct transmission from a U.S. slowdown to other economies through exports is
just not large enough to spread a U.S. demand problem globally,” Goldman Sachs economists Dominic Wilson and
Stacy Carlson wrote in a Sept. 22 report entitled “If the U.S. sneezes...” Limited Exposure Take the so-called BRIC
countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. While exports account for almost 20 percent of their gross
domestic product, sales to the U.S. compose less than 5 percent of GDP, according to their estimates. That means
even if U.S. growth slowed 2 percent, the drag on these four countries would be about 0.1 percentage point,
the economists reckon. Developed economies including the U.K., Germany and Japan also have limited
exposure, they said. Economies outside the U.S. have room to grow that the U.S. doesn’t, partly because of
its outsized slump in house prices, Wilson and Carlson said. The drop of almost 35 percent is more than twice as large as
the worst declines in the rest of the Group of 10 industrial nations, they found. The risk to the decoupling wager is a repeat
of 2008, when the U.S. property bubble burst and then morphed into a global credit and banking shock that ricocheted
around the world. For now, Goldman Sachs’s index of U.S. financial conditions signals that bond and stock markets aren’t
stressed by the U.S. outlook. Weaker Dollar The break with the U.S. will be reflected in a weaker dollar, with the Chinese
yuan appreciating to 6.49 per dollar in a year from 6.685 on Oct. 1, according to Goldman Sachs forecasts. The bank is also
betting that yields on U.S. 10-year debt will be lower by June than equivalent yields for Germany, the U.K., Canada,
Australia and Norway. U.S. notes will rise to 2.8 percent from 2.52 percent, Germany’s will increase to 3 percent from 2.3
percent and Canada’s will grow to 3.8 percent from 2.76 percent on Oct. 1, Goldman Sachs projects. Goldman Sachs isn’t
alone in making the case for decoupling. Harris at BofA Merrill Lynch said he didn’t buy the argument prior to the
financial crisis. Now he believes global growth is strong enough to offer a “handkerchief” to the U.S. as it suffers a “growth
recession” of weak expansion and rising unemployment, he said. Giving him confidence is his calculation that the U.S.
share of global GDP has shrunk to about 24 percent from 31 percent in 2000. He also notes that, unlike the U.S.,
many countries avoided asset bubbles, kept their banking systems sound and improved their trade and budget positions.
Economic Locomotives A book published last week by the World Bank backs him up. “The Day After Tomorrow”
concludes that developing nations aren’t only decoupling, they also are undergoing a “switchover” that will make
them such locomotives for the world economy, they can help rescue advanced nations. Among the reasons for the
revolution are greater trade between emerging markets, the rise of the middle class and higher commodity prices, the book
said. Investors are signaling they agree. The U.S. has fallen behind Brazil, China and India as the preferred place
to invest, according to a quarterly survey conducted last month of 1,408 investors, analysts and traders who subscribe to
Bloomberg. Emerging markets also attracted more money from share offerings than industrialized nations last quarter for
the first time in at least a decade, Bloomberg data show. Room to Ease Indonesia, India, China and Poland are the
developing economies least vulnerable to a U.S. slowdown, according to a Sept. 14 study based on trade ties by HSBC
Holdings Plc economists. China, Russia and Brazil also are among nations with more room than industrial
countries to ease policies if a U.S. slowdown does weigh on their growth, according to a policy- flexibility
index designed by the economists, who include New York-based Pablo Goldberg. “Emerging economies kept their powder
relatively dry, and are, for the most part, in a position where they could act countercyclically if needed,” the HSBC group
said. Links to developing countries are helping insulate some companies against U.S. weakness. Swiss watch manufacturer
Swatch Group AG and tire maker Nokian Renkaat of Finland are among the European businesses that should benefit from
trade with nations such as Russia and China where consumer demand is growing, according to BlackRock Inc. portfolio
manager Alister Hibbert. “There’s a lot of life in the global economy,” Hibbert, said at a Sept. 8 presentation to reporters in
London.
US Not Key – 2NC
U.S. not key to the global economy.
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Caryl 10 [Christian, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a
contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, "Reality Check," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com, Crisis? What Crisis?
APRIL 5, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/05/crisis_what_crisis?page=full]
Many emerging economies entered the 2008-2009 crisis with healthy balance sheets. In most cases
governments reacted quickly and flexibly, rolling out stimulus programs or even expanding povertyreduction programs. Increasingly, the same countries that have embraced globalization and markets are
starting to build social safety nets. And there's another factor: Trade is becoming more evenly distributed
throughout the world. China is now a bigger market for Asian exporters than the United States. Some
economists are talking about "emerging market decoupling." Jonathan Anderson, an emergingmarkets economist at the Swiss bank UBS, showed in one recent report how car sales in emerging
markets have actually been rising during this latest bout of turmoil -- powerful evidence that emerging
economies no longer have to sneeze when America catches a cold. Aphitchaya Nguanbanchong, a
consultant for the British-based aid organization Oxfam, has studied the crisis's effects on Southeast Asian economies. "The
research so far shows that the result of the crisis isn't as bad as we were expecting," she says. Indonesia is a case in
point: "People in this region and at the policy level learned a lot from the past crisis." Healthy domestic
demand cushioned the shock when the crisis hit export-oriented industries; the government weighed in
immediately with hefty stimulus measures. Nguanbanchong says that she has been surprised by the
extent to which families throughout the region have kept spending money on education even as
incomes have declined for some. And that, she says, reinforces a major lesson that emerging-market governments can
take away from the crisis: "Governments should focus more on social policy, on health, education, and services. They
shouldn't be intervening so much directly in the economy itself."
Doesn’t Lead to War – 1NC
No impact—statistics prove
Drezner 12 – Daniel is a professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. (“The Irony of Global Economic
Governance: The System Worked”, October 2012, http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-ColloquiumMT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)
The final outcome addresses a dog that hasn’t barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border
conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis
would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.37 Whether through greater internal
repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict, there were genuine
concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border
disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global
public disorder.
The aggregate data suggests otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has constructed a “Global
Peace Index” annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from the 2012 report is that “ The average level of
peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.”38 Interstate violence in particular has
declined since the start of the financial crisis – as have military expenditures in most sampled countries.
Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict; the
secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.39 Rogers Brubaker concludes,
“the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might
have been expected.”40
None of these data suggest that the global economy is operating swimmingly. Growth remains unbalanced and fragile, and
has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational capital flows remain depressed compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a
drying up of cross-border interbank lending in Europe. Currency volatility remains an ongoing concern. Compared to the
aftermath of other postwar recessions, growth in output, investment, and employment in the developed world have all
lagged behind. But the Great Recession is not like other postwar recessions in either scope or kind; expecting a standard
“V”-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst characterized the post-2008 global economy as in a state of
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“contained depression.”41 The key word is “contained,” however. Given the severity, reach and depth of the 2008
financial crisis, the proper comparison is with Great Depression. And by that standard, the outcome
variables look impressive. As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This Time is Different: “that its
macroeconomic outcome has been only the most severe global recession since World War II – and not even worse – must
be regarded as fortunate.”42
No war from economic collapse
Barnett ’09
(Thomas P.M. Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett is an American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at
Wikistrat, 24 Aug 2009, “ The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis”,
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/4213/the-new-rules-security-remains-stable-amid-financialcrisis) SRK
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of
scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression
leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and
emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how
globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the
international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by
GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict
between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the
chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia
(where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was
specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external
trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between
Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the
usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent
Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one
side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with
the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistanbleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up
to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military
exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability
we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa
Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: *No
significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like
Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); *The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); *Not a single
state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); *No great improvement or
disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); *A
modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the
strain); and *No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things
we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to
outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and
investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record
set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented
"stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power
dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the
economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right
political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were
attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under
current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as
it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic
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radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's
growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward,
austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end
of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing
global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the
continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have
attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading"
America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial
markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in
which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that
this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international
liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not.
I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.
Doesn’t Lead to War – 2NC
No link between economic decline or government instability and conflict initiation
Sirin 11 (Cigdem V. Sirin, , University of Texas at El Paso, Department of Political Science, “Is it cohesion or
diversion? Domestic instability and the use of force in international crises,” International Political Science
Review 2011 32: 303, 5/12/11) DOI: 10.1177/0192512110380554
Specifically, when a country suffers from increased mass violence, a leader may choose to use external
force with the anticipation that such foreign policy action will increase national solidarity and consequently
(although indirectly) solve the problem of mass violence.4 By comparison, an economic downturn or government instability
will not necessarily generate incentives for the cohesionary use of force, since increasing national
solidarity does not typically constitute a possible solution for dealing with such domestic problems. In
sum, exploring the cohesionary incentives of political leaders and examining mass violence as a causal
factor presents a more plausible route to untangling the relationship between domestic instability and
the use of force
in international crises (see DeRouen and Goldfinch, 2005). These considerations lead to my baseline hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: A country’s likelihood of using external force in an international crisis increases in the presence of an increased level of mass violence within its borders. There exists a consensus among scholars that external conflict
increases internal cohesion and political centralization. That said, most scholars note that the level of cohesion in a group achieved by an external conflict also depends on certain conditions pertaining to the nature of the group and Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 5, 2014 308 International Political Science Review 32(3) the nature of the external conflict (see Coser, 1956;
Stein, 1976). Among these necessary preconditions (which act as intervening variables), the most important factors that scholars propose are (1) the presence of a degree of group consensus (solidarity) pre-dating the external conflict, and (2) a given group’s perception of the external conflict as a severe threat. Regarding the nature of the external conflict, Coser (1956) – who sought to systematize and qualify
Simmel’s (1955) original in-group/out-group argument – differentiates between violent and non-violent conflict by arguing that only violent conflict generates a sense of a serious threat to a given group and thereby increases cohesion. Taking into account this qualification, I focus on international crises that involve violent military acts. To capture the role of pre-existing group solidarity, I take into consideration
whether a given country is made up of a heterogeneous society with ethno-religious divisions. Many scholars suggest that civil violence seems to break out more frequently in countries with multiple ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups (e.g. Ellingsen, 2000; Vanhanen, 1999). I expect that one’s attachment to the nation as a whole (rather than to his or her sub-national ethnic group) is likely to be weaker in a
country that is composed of ethnically diverse groups compared with a country that is ethnically more homogenous. This is because sub-national group affiliations in an ethnically plural society may inhibit the potential for developing strong overall group identity affiliations at the national level. Consequently, given an identity divided between national and ethnoreligious attachments, external conflict is less
likely to elicit as much cohesionary power in a plural society as it is in a more homogenous one. In such cases, the politica l leader of an ethnically divided country may have less incentives to resort to cohesionary external conflict and may thus choose to deal with ongoing mass violence through other policy means such as the suppression of violent groups or the co-opting of opposition groups (see Bueno de
Mesquita, 1980: 361–98; Richards et al., 1993). On the other hand, I expect that a political leader of a homogenous society has more incentives to engage in external conflict in the presence of increased social unrest. This occurs because the presence of minimum divisions beyond an existing group identity at the national level makes external conflict a viab le venture for increasing cohesion and, therefore,
stopping ongoing mass violence. These considerations lead to the following hypothesis on the effect of mass violence, which is conditional upon the level of ethno-religious heterogeneity in a country: Hypothesis 2: Countries with lower levels of ethno-religious heterogeneity are more likely to use external force in an international crisis in the presence of an increased level of mass violence within their borders.
Nevertheless, even in the presence of ethnic and religious divisions in a country, a sense of national identity may persist, especially if the defining characteristics and membership rules of such national identity go beyond ethno-religious attributes (as in the case of the United States). This brings us to the difference between civic and ethnic nationalism. Civic nationalism concerns one’s membership and loyalty to
a state in terms of citizenship, common laws, and political participation regardless of ethnicity and lineage (Brown, 2000; Ipperciel, 2007). Ethnic nationalism, in contrast, defines an individual’s membership in and loyalty to a nation-state in terms of ethnicity and lineage; hence, individuals belonging to different ethnicities, even if they reside in and are citizens of a state, cannot become part of the dominant
national group (Alter, 1994; Ignatieff, 1993; Smith, 1991). In the case of ethnic nationalism, there already exists a strong sense of cohesion among the dominant group and little interest in extending the cohesion to domestic out-groups (see Shulman, 2002). In such instances, options for dealing with rising mass violence are likely to exclude cohesionary policy acts, since pre-existing ethnic nationalist group
solidarity often produces a ‘ceiling Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 5, 2014 Sirin 309 effect’, which limits the cohesionary influence that the external use of force may have for curbing mass violence. On the other hand, civic nationalism often fails to be the sole (or at least primary) basis for group identification and falls short of evoking strong emotional attachment to the
nation. As Shulman (2002: 580) puts it: most civic components of nationhood are external to the individual, whereas ethnic and cultural components are internal. Territory, political institutions and rights, and citizenship exist outside the individual, whereas ancestry, race, religion, language, and traditions are a part of a person’s physical and psychological makeup. As a result, the intensity of attachment to
communities founded predominantly on the latter will likely exceed those founded predominantly on the former. When one considers regime type differences from the theoretical framework of cohesionary incentives, democracies are more likely than autocracies to promote a civic (rather than ethnic) nationalist identity (Habermas, 1996; Ipperciel, 2007; Kymlicka, 2001). Under conditions of increased mass
violence, therefore, the incentives for democratic leaders to attempt to increase national cohesion through external conflict should be stronger. Accordingly, in terms of regime differences on the cohesionary use of force, I hypothesize that: Hypothesis 3a: Democracies are likely to use external force in an international crisis in the presence of an increased level of mass violence within their borders. Hypothesis
3b: In contrast to democracies, autocracies are unlikely to use external force in an international crisis in the presence of an increased level of mass violence within their borders. As a separate note, a dominant perception in the diversionary literature is that different factors of domestic instability are interchangeable with one another such that selecting one of them is a matter of conceptual taste and analytical
convenience (but see, e.g., Pickering and Kisangani, 2005; Russett, 1990, 123–40). However, if different sources of domestic disturbance generate different policy incentives, the measures of domestic problems may not always act as proxies or alternatives to each other. In that sense, it would be better to incorporate these different measures simultaneously in an analytical model to control for and compare their
distinctive impact on the propensity for leaders to use external force. Data and research design For empirical testing of my hypotheses, I employ data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project that covers 139 countries from 1918 to 2005. The ICB dataset is unique in the sense that it provides data on international crises and different forms of domestic problems (i.e. social, economic, and political) for a
broad range of countries within a long time span. The ICB project allows one to examine the data on two different levels: actor level and system level. The variables that I use in my analyses are from the actor-level ICB dataset, with the exception of the variable ‘contiguity’, which I adopt from the system-level dataset. I exclude all the intra-war crises within this period to avoid confounding the results, given
that such crises have already escalated to violence and war (see Brecher and Wilkenfeld, 2000; DeRouen and Sprecher, 2004). I employ a monadic analysis because the theoretical focus of this project centers on whether and how specific sources of instability in a country determine the incentives and utility of that country for using force in international crises. Specifically, I am testing whether particular sources
of Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 5, 2014 310 International Political Science Review 32(3) domestic strife have an independent effect on a state’s international crisis behavior rather than whether certain characteristics of the target state will influence the behavior of that state. Thus, the research question at hand requires a monadic test. Accordingly, the analytical models used
here are not designed to elucidate strategic interactions between crisis actors, such as whether democracies or autocracies tend to use force against states with similar or different political systems in international crises or whether likely targets may strategically avoid violent conflict with states experiencing domestic instability. I do, however, introduce several control variables into my models to account for
certain international environmental characteristics (such as power discrepancy) and crisis-specific factors (such as crisis trigger) that have been shown to affect a state’s likelihood of using force in an international crisis.5 Dependent variable External use of force. The ICB ‘major response’ variable identifies the specific action a state takes after it perceives a threat from an event or act that triggers a crisis. This
variable ranges across nine categories, from no action to violent military action. Since the focus of my analysis is the use of force, I determine the cut-off criterion for the dependent variable as violent versus non-violent acts. I collapse the variable into a dichotomous measure by coding the events that involve violent military action where the crisis actor resorts to the use of force (ICB categories 8–9; e.g.
invasion of air space, border clash, etc.) as ‘1’ and ‘0’ otherwise (ICB categories 1–7; e.g. no response, verbal acts such as protest, economic acts such as embargo, etc.). Major independent variables Mass violence. This variable assesses the level of violence within the society of the crisis actor as evidenced by insurrections, civil war, and revolution. The ICB dataset uses a code of ‘1’ if there is a significant
increase in the level of domestic violence during the relevant period preceding the crisis, a code of ‘2’ if the level is normal, and a code of ‘3’ if there is a significant decrease. I collapse the ICB variable into a dichotomous variable and code it as ‘1’ if there is a significant increase in the level of mass violence and ‘0’ otherwise. In this way, I obtain a more direct measure to test my hypotheses. Last, the ICB
dataset uses a code of ‘4’ if the crisis actor is a newly independent state. I exclude the observations of this category from the analysis for this variable (as well as for the measures of economic downturn and government instability), since such cases do not provide information on the level of the domestic problem under investigation. Economic downturn. This variable assesses the overall state of the economy for
the crisis actor during the period preceding a crisis. I base this measure on the ICB variable labeled ‘economic status of actor’, which provides a summary indicator of the cost of living, unemployment, food prices, labor disruption, and consumer goods shortages. Since there is a considerable amount of missing data for a number of individual economic indicators, this composite index takes advantage of the
available partial information, and thus enables a more parsimonious model. The data are examined from the year of the crisis to the fourth preceding year. The ICB dataset has the values coded as ‘1’ if there is an increase in economic problems, ‘2’ if the economic situation is normal, and ‘3’ if there is a decrease in economic problems. For a more direct measure of worsening economic conditions, I generate a
dichotomous variable and code the cases where there is a significant increase in economic problems as ‘1’ and ‘0’ otherwise. Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 5, 2014 Sirin 311 Government instability. The ICB actor-level dataset provides information on whether the crisis actor experiences government instability, which may include executive, constitutional, legal, and/ or
administrative structure changes within the relevant period preceding an international crisis. For this measure, the ICB dataset codes the observations as ‘1’ if there is a significant increase in government instability, ‘2’ if the government is stable, and ‘3’ if there is a significant decrease in government instability. For a more direct measure of escalating governmental instability, I create a dichotomous variable
coding the cases where there is a significant increase in the level of government instability as ‘1’ and ‘0’ otherwise. Ethno-religious heterogeneity. For the operationalization of this concept, I use two different measures that I adopt from the dataset of Fearon and Laitin’s (2003) study. The first measure is the number of distinct languages spoken by groups exceeding 1 percent of the country’s population (see
Grimes and Grimes, 1996). The second alternative measure captures the level of religious fractionalization, which Fearon and Laitin constructed using data from the CIA Factbook and other sources. In order to test my interactive hypothesis (H2), I generate two alternative multip licative variables by interacting mass violence separately with each of the two measures of ethno-religious heterogeneity. Regime
type. The ICB dataset provides five different categories of this indicator including democratic regime, civil authoritarian regime, military-direct rule, military-indirect rule, and military dual authority. I generate a dummy variable where ‘1’ denotes democratic regimes and ‘0’ denotes authoritarian regimes, mainly because the original variable does not differentiate between levels of democracy while providing
dissimilar types of authoritarianism.6 Control variables Power discrepancy. Several studies of state dyads have demonstrated that disparity in a dyad’s capabilities reduces the likelihood of violence initiation (see, e.g., Bremer, 1992). On the other hand, some scholars argue that states that possess a power advantage over an adversary are much more likely to take military action in crisis situations (see, e.g., Prins,
2005). My model controls for this external determinant of interstate conflict by including the ICB variable ‘power discrepancy’. The ICB dataset assigns a power score for each crisis actor and its principal adversary based on six separate scores measuring population size, GNP, territorial size, alliance capability, military expenditure, and nuclear capability at the onset of a crisis. The power that a crisis actor
possesses and has at its disposal from alliance partners (i.e. those countries that are connected to the crisis actor through some type of collective security agreement) immediately prior to an international crisis is then compared with that of the actor’s principal adversary (or adversaries) to create a final power discrepancy score, which ranges from −179 to +179. Negative values indicate a power discrepancy that is
to the disadvantage of a crisis actor whereas positive values demonstrate that a crisis actor is stronger than an adversary. To generate a measure that indicates less power disparity as the score gets closer to zero (and vice versa), I take the square of the original ICB power discrepancy variable. This allows one to also capture the potential non-linear nature of this variable. Contiguity. On contiguity, Geller (2000:
413) presents two major perspectives. The first is that geographic opportunity provides physical opportunity for wars and increases a nation’s Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 5, 2014 312 International Political Science Review 32(3) involvement in a foreign conflict. The second thesis suggests that proximity structures the ‘context of interaction’, which increases the
probability of conflictual relations and enhances the motivations for war. At the dyad level, proximity is the strongest predictor of war probability (see Henderson, 1997; Vasquez, 1993). Hence, I control for this factor with the expectation that when crisis actors share a border, there will be a greater likelihood of the external use of force. The ICB system level data refers to this variable as the geographical
proximity of principal adversaries. The coding values are ‘1’ distant, ‘2’ near neighbors, and ‘3’ contiguous. Gravity. This ICB variable identifies the ‘gravest’ threat a crisis actor faces during a crisis, which ranges from 0 to 7. Most studies suggest that increases in this measure lead to increases in the likelihood of violence in an international crisis (see Hewitt and Wilkenfeld, 1999; Trumbore and Boyer, 2000).
That said, DeRouen and Sprecher (2004) find that gravity – as a measure of domestic political loss – has a negative impact on the use of force due to a tendency to reject violence as an initial policy option when the regime is threatened. Following DeRouen and Sprecher, I recode the original ICB variable as ‘1’ if there is a political threat and ‘0’ otherwise to capture any serious political risk a crisis actor faces
during a crisis. Trigger level. The trigger or precipitating cause of a foreign policy crisis refers to the specific act, event, or situational change that leads to (1) a crisis actor’s perception of the crisis as a threat to one’s basic values, (2) constrained time pressure for responding to the threat, and (3) heightened probability of involvement in military hostilities (Brecher and Wilkenfeld, 2000). It is reasonable to expect
that states will react to a crisis with the level of action (be it economic, diplomatic, or military) that matches the level of the trigger (see Trumbore and Boyer, 2000). More specifically, I expect that the likelihood of the use of force will increase in response to more violent triggers. For this variable, I employ the original ICB indicator ‘trigger to foreign policy crisis’, which ranges from 1 (verbal act) to 9 (violent
act) in line with the trigger’s level of intensity. Empirical results Some states are more likely than others to get involved in international crises, such as major powers and enduring rivals. An attempt to identify possible factors that are specific to each crisis actor would be a strenuous and redundant task. Instead, I employ a panel-estimated approach – random effects probit – to control for country-specific effects
likely to be present in the error term. In accordance with my theoretical framework, I adopt the crisis actor as my unit of analysis. The baseline analytical model is as follows: Pr(Y ij = 1 | X ij , v i ) = f(b 0 + b 1 (mass violence) ij + b 2 (economic downturn) ij + b 3 (government instability) ij + b 4 (power discrepancy) ij + b 5 (contiguity) ij + b 6 (gravity) ij + b 7 (trigger level) ij + b 8 (regime type) ij + v i )
where Pr(Y ij = 1 | X ij , v i ) denotes the probability of external use of force; vi represents unit-specific effects. For the analysis of the interactive effects of mass violence and ethno-religious heterogeneity, I add a multiplicative interaction variable to the baseline model, along with the constitutive terms of that interaction. For the testing of my hypotheses regarding regime type differences, I run the baseline
model (excluding the regime type variable) for the subsets of democracies and autocracies. As the Wald λ2 results of the analyses demonstrate (see Tables 2, 3 and 4), the fit of each model is good. Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 5, 2014 Sirin 313 Table 1. Frequency of the Use of Force according to a Crisis Actor’s Experience of Domestic Problems Prior to an International
Table 1 provides descriptive statistics on the
cross-tabulations of the use of force in international crises with three different forms of domestic
problems (mass violence, economic downturn, and government instability). Among crisis actors who experience increased
Crisis, 1918–2005 Mass violence Economic downturn Government instability 0 1 0 1 0 1 No use of force Use of force 443 226 76 52 317 178 151 67 403 212 117 64 Use of force % 33% 40% 36% 30% 34% 35%
mass violence prior to the crisis, 40 percent use force. By comparison, if the country does not experience an increase in mass violence, only 33 percent resort to the use of force.
n cases of economic decline, 30 percent of crisis actors use force, whereas cases of no economic
downturn demonstrate the use of force 36 percent of the time. Finally, a change in the level of
I
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government instability indicates almost no variation across the use of force and non-use of force options (34 percent for no government
instability and 35 percent for increased government instability). These preliminary results fall in line with my theoretical expectations that increased mass violence is more likely
to lead to the use of force rather than other forms of domestic problems.
Decline Doesn’t Lead to War – Ext.
No empirical support for economic decline causing conflict
O’Neal and Tir 6 (John R. O’Neal, University of Alabama, Jaroslav Tir, University of Georgia “Does the
Diversionary Use of Force Threaten the Democratic Peace? Assessing the Effect of Economic Growth on
Interstate Conflict, 1921–2001,” International Studies Quarterly (2006) 50, 755–779)
The empirical
evidence offered by Hess and Orphanides (1995) is not compelling, however. Economic
recessions are statistically related to forceful action by an incumbent U.S. president in fewer than half
of their tests. Economic performance is important in their model because it affects the popularity of an
American leader, which is the direct measure of his prospects for reelection. Consequently, they also correlate the
conflictual behavior of the United States with the president’s public approval rating. This association is statistically
significant in only one of four tests, and this is with the weakest possible standard of statistical significance
(.10 with a one-tailed test). Even the limited support they report for their diversionary theory must be treated
cautiously because they rely on bivariate tests of association. They do not evaluate their theory within a
general model of interstate conflict, so their findings may be spurious, a result of the omission of
important determinants of conflict.2 Indeed, based on a large sample of countries in the post-World War I
period for which the probability of conflict is carefully modeled, Chiozza and Goemans (2003) report that
democratic leaders are unlikely to initiate a crisis when they risk losing office. Some studies find that,
contrary to diversionary theory, a president is more likely to use force when his public approval rating
is high (Morgan and Bickers 1992; Morgan and Anderson 1999).3 This is consistent with traditional analyses of U.S.
foreign policy (e.g., George 1971; Blechman and Kaplan 1978): presidential popularity increases the president’s freedom of
action because he can be confident that the public is behind him. In this view, presidents are more apt to use force
when they are popular, instead of using force to become popular. A number of other empirical analyses,
however, report no relationship between America’s involvement in interstate conflict and a president’s approval rating
(Lindsay, Sayrs, and Steger 1992; Meernik 1994; 2004; Meernik and Waterman 1996; Wang 1996; Fordham 1998a, 1998b;
DeRouen 2000; Moore and Lanoue 2003). The evidence regarding the influence of economic growth on the use of force
by the United States is also mixed. Fordham (1998a, 1998b) and DeRouen (1995) find no relation in the postWorld War II period. Gowa (1998) finds none over a longer temporal span, 1870–1992; but Fordham (2002) has
revised Gowa’s analyses to show some effect. Clark (2003) reports evidence for Smith’s (1996) theory regarding the
importance of strategic interaction, with the United States responding to diversionary incentives but potential targets acting
to limit this opportunity. On the other hand, Meernik (2000) concludes that the state of the American economy
does not influence others’ initiation of crises with the United States. DeRouen and Peake (2002) report that a
use of force diverts the public’s attention from a poor economy. In an early analysis of pooled data by Russett (1990a),
slow growth increased the likelihood that the United States would become involved in militarized disputes, 1853–1976.
Yet, slow growth did not affect the behavior of other democracies, including Great Britain and France, or
authoritarian countries. Miller’s (1995, 1999) results are quite different: autocracies are significantly more likely than
democracies to use force when economic growth is slow, and the United States is particularly unlikely to do so. Oneal and
Russett (1997) reported that slow growth increased the incidence of militarized disputes for all types of regimes; but with
more complete data (Russett and Oneal 2001:152–153), they find no significant relationship. Leeds and Davis (1997)
conclude that the conflict-initiating behavior of 18 industrialized democracies is unrelated to either
economic conditions or the electoral cycle, and Pickering and Kisangani (2005) report no connection for any
type of regime even when countries are divided into fine-grained political categories. 4
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Economic decline doesn’t cause war
Apps ’10
( Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent for Reuters, Jun 8, 2010, “ Crisis fuels unrest, crime, but war risk eases”,
http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/06/08/idINIndia-49123220100608)
The global financial crisis has made the world less peaceful by fuelling crime and civil unrest, a worldwide
study showed on Tuesday, but the risk of outright armed conflict appears to be falling. The 2010 Global
Peace Index -- which examines several dozen indicators from the crime rate to defence spending, conflicts with
neighbouring states and respect for human rights -- showed an overall reduction in the level of peacefulness.
The key drivers were a five percent rise in homicide, more violent demonstrations and a perceived greater fear of crime.
"We have seen what looks like a direct impact from the crisis," Steve Killelea, the Australian entrepreneur behind the
index, told Reuters. "At least some unrest is probably unavoidable but the important thing is to target measures to keep it to
a minimum." That could mean ensuring any economic pain was equitably shared across society, he said, to maintain social
cohesion. Perhaps as a result of the more cash-strapped times, defence spending as a percentage of gross
domestic product was down to its lowest in four years with countries also showing generally better
relations with their neighbours. "In most areas of the world, war risk seems to be declining," he said. "That is
very important." The index is compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace based on data From the Economist
Intelligence Unit. They estimate violence costs the global economy $7 trillion a year. A 25 percent reduction in violence
would save about $1.7 trillion a year, enough to pay off Greece's debt, fund the United Nations millennium development
goals and pay for the European Union to reach its 2020 climate and carbon targets. "There are such clear economic benefits
to peace and it is something investors are now looking at much more closely," he said, adding that some were using the
index alongside the World Bank governance indicators and other key rating systems to inform investment decisions. NEW
ZEALAND "MOST PEACEABLE" The struggling euro zone economies of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain
showed a particular rise in unrest risks, while Africa and the Middle East were the only two regions to have become safer
since the survey began in 2007. Africa had seen a drastic fall in the number of armed conflicts and an
improvement in relations between neighbours, he said, overshadowing the impact of greater crime. Better ratings
for the Middle East and North Africa came primarily from improving relations between nations.
Economic collapse doesn’t cause war
Ferguson 6
(Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, September/October 2006, “ The Next War of the
World”,http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61916/niall-ferguson/the-next-war-of-the-world)
Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern
historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story
leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered. Not
all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such
regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is
discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than
the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.
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A2: Protectionism Add-On
No impact and alt causes to trade wars – immigration, capital, and tech transfer
Freeman ’03 [Richard B. Freeman, Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, CoDirector of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, Senior Research Fellow on Labour
Markets at the Centre for Economic Performance “Trade Wars: The exaggerated impact of trade in economic
debate” Nationial Bureau of Economic Research working paper 10,000]
3. An Alternative View¶ At
the heart of the trade wars is the belief that changes in trade arrangements have
huge impacts on economies and on labor markets and worker Well-being. Adherents to WC style¶ globalization
believe that developing countries can only grow through exports and openness. ¶ They fear that LDC trade with advanced
countries is so fragile that it must be protected from¶ global labor standards. Opponents believe that good labor standards
are so fragile that they must¶ be protected from a race to the bottom. in which bad standards drive out good standards. ¶
While complete autarky or imposition of advanced country standards on LDCs would¶ have huge effects
on economies around the world. the actual policies around which debate has¶ focused and observed changes in
trade patterns have not come close to having their ballyhooed¶ or feared effects on labor markets or on
economies writ large. Both the proponents and¶ opponents of globalization WC style have exaggerated the importance
of trade. Instead of¶ dominating economic outcomes. changes in trade policy and trade have had modest
impacts on¶ labour market and economic outcomes beyond trade flows. Other aspects of globalization -¶
immigration. capital flows. and technology transfer - have greater impacts on the labour market.¶ with
volatile capital flows creating great risk for the Well-being of workers. As for labour¶ standards. global
standards do not threaten the comparative advantage of developing countries ¶ nor do poor labour standards create a "race to
the bottom". Globalization and standards are¶ complementary rather than competing activities.
Alt causes to perceptions of protectionism – Chinese companies
Parker 12 – James Parker writes for The Diplomat. (“Playing the Protectionism Game”, The Diplomat, October 22, 2012,
http://thediplomat.com/pacific-money/2012/10/22/chinas-protectionism-hypocrisy/, Callahan)
Recent weeks have seen three leading Chinese companies run into political and regulatory obstacles in
their attempts to expand in the United States market. The issue, associated partly of course with the U.S. political environment
during a campaign year, has been developing gradually but has recently burst into the media spotlight. The most striking
case involves Huawei and ZTE, both Chinese telecoms equipment giants. They found themselves on the wrong side of a strongly
negative report from the U.S. Senate House Intelligence Committee October 8th, which expressed concern about their
alleged ties to the Chinese government and military, lack of openness and failure to assist the
Congressional investigation openly. The consequences for their U.S. operations will be significant and long running. Things became
especially heated after the report was released as Huawei labeled the report “China-bashing” and
“misguided protectionism.” The rhetoric was turned up this last Thursday in a separate dispute by the
Tycoon CEO of Sany Group, a company which has ridden China’s real estate and infrastructure boom to become a leading producer and supplier of heavy
construction equipment. Xiang Wenbo, a Sany executive, labeled the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.
(CFIUS) and President Obama “petty scoundrels,” while also stating that U.S. regulators “can’t be
reasoned with.” Xiang was furious with Obama’s support of CFIUS’s decision to block a Sany
associated wind farm project in Oregon – on grounds that it was too close to a military no-fly zone (where drones are allegedly tested). Ralls, the
Sany affiliate suing CFIUS over the decision, then added Obama’s name to the court case, making
Ralls the first Chinese company to sue a U.S. president. Xiang went on to tout the Ralls case as a symbolic action to safeguard Chinese
enterprises and set a precedent for future Chinese companies. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation ( CNOOC), on the other hand, whose gigantic bid to acquire
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is also waiting on a
decision from CFIUS. In Washington, objections have been voiced about a Chinese state enterprise
owning U.S. strategic assets (oil) and about the possibility of Nexen’s offshore drilling technology
being used in the South China Sea to strengthen China’s territorial claims vis-à-vis various its
Southeast Asian neighbors, many of whom are U.S. allies or strategic partners. Hence the overall impression is of Chinese
firms being “under siege” as they try to grow or gain access to the U.S. market. A sense of
discrimination is growing, and the electioneering and China rhetoric emerging from the presidential
campaign is only adding to this narrative.
Canadian oil firm Nexen has raised some concern across the globe (Nexen has various international assets – including in the U.S.)
A2: Big Data/Cloud Computing Add-On
Reject internet doomsaying – no chance of collapse or a ton of other stuff would cause it
Bernal 14 (Lecturer in Information Technology, Intellectual Property and Media Law at the University of East Anglia Law School)
(Paul, So who’s breaking the internet this time?, November 11, 2014, http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/so-whos-breakingthe-internet-this-time/)
I’m not sure how many times I’ve been told that the internet is under dire threat over the last few years. It sometimes seems
as though there’s an apocalypse just around the corner pretty much all the time. Something’s going to ‘break’ the
internet unless we do something about it right away. These last few weeks there seem to have been a particularly rich crop
of apocalyptic warnings – Obama’s proposal about net neutrality yesterday being the most recent. The internet as we know
it seems as though it’s always about to end.
Net neutrality will destroy us all…
If we are to believe the US cable companies, Obama’s proposals will pretty much break the internet, putting development back 20 years. How many of us
remember what the internet was like in 1994? Conversely, many have been saying that if we don’t have net neutrality – and Obama’s proposals are pretty
close to what most people I know would understand by net neutrality – then the cable companies will break the internet. It’s apocalypse one way, and
apocalypse the other: no half measures here.
The cable companies are raising the spectre of government control of the net, something that has been a terror of internet freedom activists for a very long
time – in our internet law courses we start by looking at John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, with its memorable
opening:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask
you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
the UN, through the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) was about to take over the internet, crushing our freedom and ending the Internet as we know it.
Anyone with real experience of the way that UN bodies work would have realised this particular apocalypse had next-to-no chance
Another recent incarnation of this terror has been the formerly much hyped fear that
of every coming into fruition, and last week that must have become clear to most of even the more paranoid of internet freedom fighters, as the ITU
effectively resolved not to even try… Not that apocalypse, at least not now.
More dire warnings and apocalyptic worries have been circling about the notorious ‘ right to be forgotten’ – either in its data protection reform
version or in the Google Spain ruling back in May. The right to be forgotten, we were told, is the biggest threat to freedom of speech in the coming
decade, and will change the internet as we know it. Another thing that’s going to break the internet. And yet, even though it’s now effectively in force in
one particular way, there’s not much sign that the internet is broken yet…
The deep, dark, disturbing web…
At times we’re also told that a lack of privacy will break the net – or that privacy itself will break the net. Online
behavioural advertisers have said that if they’re not allowed to track us, we’ll break the economic model that sustains the net, so the net itself will
break. We need to let ourselves be tracked, profiled and targeted or the net itself will collapse. The authorities seem to have a similar view – recent
pronouncements by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe and new head of GCHQ Robert Hannigan are decidedly apocalyptic, trying
to terrify us with the nightmares of what they seemingly interchangeably call the ‘dark’ web or the ‘deep’ web. Dark or deep, it’s designed to disturb and
frighten us – and warn us that if we keep on using encryption, claiming anonymity or pseudonymity or, in practice, any kind of privacy, we’ll turn the
internet into a paradise only for paedophiles, murderers, terrorists and criminals. It’s the end of the internet as we know it, once more.
And of course there’s the converse view – that mass surveillance and intrusion by the NSA, GCHQ etc, as revealed by Edward Snowden – is itself
destroying the internet as we know it.
Money, money, money
Mind you, there are also dire threats from other directions. Internet freedom fighters have fought against things like SOPA, PIPA and ACTA – ways in
which the ‘copyright lobby’ sought to gain even more control over the internet. Again, the arguments go both ways. The content industry suggest that
uncontrolled piracy is breaking the net – while those who fought against SOPA etc think that the iron fist of copyright enforcement is doing the same. And
for those that have read Zittrain’s ‘The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It’, it’s something else that’s breaking the net – ‘appliancization’ and
‘tethering’. To outrageously oversimplify, it’s the iPhone that’s breaking the net, turning it from a place of freedom and creativity into a place for
consumerist sheep.
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It’s the end of the internet as we know it…..…or as we think we know it. We all have different visions of the internet, some historical, some pretty much
entirely imaginary, mowith elements of history and elements of wishful thinking. It’s easy to become nostalgic about what we imagine was some golden
The internet was never a ‘wild
west’ – and even the ‘wild west’ itself was mostly mythical – and ‘freedom of speech’ has never been as absolute
as its most ardent advocates seem to believe. We’ve always had some control and some freedom – but the thing about
the internet is that, in reality, it’s pretty robust. We, as an internet community, are stronger and more wilful than some
of those who wish to control it might think. Attempts to rein it in often fail – either they’re opposed or they’re sidestepped, or they’re just absorbed into the new shape of the internet, because the internet is always changing, and we
age, and fearful about the future, without taking a step back and wondering whether we’re really right.
need to understand that. The internet as we know it is always ending – and the internet as we don’t know it is always
beginning.
***A2: I-Freedom***
Doesn’t Solve I-Freedom 1NC
China undermines global i-freedom
Chang 14 (Research Associate, Technology & National Security Program, the Center for a New American Security)
(Amy Chang, How the 'Internet with Chinese Characteristics' Is Rupturing the Web, 12/15/2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amychang-/china-internet-sovereignty_b_6325192.html)
China is openly undermining the United States' vision of a free and open Internet. Motivated by maintaining
the fragile balance between information control, social and political stability, and continued modernization and economic
growth for an online population of over 600 million, the Chinese government is attempting to alter how nations
understand their role in Internet governance through a concept called "Internet sovereignty."
Internet sovereignty refers to the idea that a country has the right to control Internet activity within its own borders, and it
is what China refers to as a natural extension of a nation-state's authority to handle its own domestic
and foreign affairs. For the United States and other Western nations, however, Internet governance is delegated to an
inclusive and distributed set of stakeholders including government, civil society, the private sector, academia, and national
and international organizations (also known as the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance).
And US allies destroy i-freedom signal
Hanson 10/25/12, Nonresident Fellow, Foreign Policy, Brookings http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/10/25ediplomacy-hanson-internet-freedom
Another challenge is dealing with close partners and allies who undermine internet freedom. In August
2011, in the midst of the Arab uprisings, the UK experienced a different connection technology infused movement, the
London Riots. On August 11, in the heat of the crisis, Prime Minister Cameron told the House of Commons: Free flow of
information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services
and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we
know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality. This policy had far-reaching implications. As recently as January
2011, then President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, ordered the shut-down of Egypt’s largest ISPs and the cell phone network, a
move the United States had heavily criticized. Now the UK was contemplating the same move and threatening to create a
rationale for authoritarian governments everywhere to shut down communications networks when they threatened
“violence, disorder and criminality.” Other allies like Australia are also pursuing restrictive internet policies.
As OpenNet reported it: “Australia maintains some of the most restrictive Internet policies of any Western country…”
When these allies pursue policies so clearly at odds with the U.S. internet freedom agenda, several
difficulties arise. It undermines the U.S. position that an open and free internet is something free societies
naturally want. It also gives repressive authoritarian governments an excuse for their own monitoring and
filtering activities. To an extent, U.S. internet freedom policy responds even-handedly to this challenge because the vast
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bulk of its grants are for open source circumvention tools that can be just as readily used by someone in London as Beijing,
but so far, the United States has been much more discreet about criticising the restrictive policies of allies
than authoritarian states.
US Online gambling ban kills internet freedom signal
Kibbe 4/28/14 (Matt, FreedomWorks, "Coalition Letter: No Federal Ban on Internet Gambling")
We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, are writing to express our deep concerns about the Restoration of
America’s Wire Act (H.R. 4301), which would institute a de facto ban on internet gaming in all 50 states. The legislation is
a broad overreach by the federal government over matters traditionally reserved for the states. H.R. 4301 will reverse
current law in many states and drastically increase the federal government’s regulatory power. As we have seen in the past,
a ban will not stop online gambling. Prohibiting states from legalizing and regulating the practice only
ensures that it will be pushed back into the shadows where crime can flourish with little oversight. In
this black market, where virtually all sites are operated from abroad, consumers have little to no protection from predatory
behavior.¶ Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that this bill allows the federal government to take a
heavy hand in regulating the Internet, opening the door for increased Internet regulation in the future. By banning
a select form of Internet commerce, the federal government is setting a troubling precedent and
providing fodder to those who would like to see increased Internet regulation in the future. We fear
that H.R. 4301 will begin a dangerous process of internet censorship that will simultaneously be
circumvented by calculated international infringers while constraining the actions of private
individuals and companies in the United States.
Doesn’t Solve I-Freedom – 2NC
Gambling ban spills over to internet freedom generally
Hammond 3/12/14, writer for RedState http://www.redstate.com/diary/mikehammond/2014/03/12/crony-online-gambling-banthreatens-gun-owners-rights/
And, frankly, the fact is that neither the sponsors nor the beneficiaries of the Internet gambling regulation
are people who have given a lot of thought to constitutional principle — or the precedential impact of
extending regulation into this area. Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) is sponsoring the ban on behalf of the owner of a Las
Vegas casino, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is reportedly jumping on board. Heller represents Nevada and will hawk
the interests of the casino owners who handed Harry Reid his current six-year term. Thanks for that! Graham has a different
reason for his involvement. Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson has pledged to “spend whatever it takes” to have it
the federal ban enacted. And Graham, after years of stabbing conservatives in the back, has his back against the wall. With
a contentious primary and polls suggesting Graham could be forced into a runoff, he would like nothing more than a
billionaire casino owner to rain campaign ads from the heavens to help him survive. True, billionaire Las Vegas casino
owners are on both sides of this issue. And I certainly don’t begrudge billionaires their billions. But I’m staking my claim
with the billionaires who don’t believe that Big Government should stick its heavy hand into the market in
order to protect their billions. The bottom line? This “camel’s nose in the tent” of Internet regulation
creates a dangerous precedent for those concerned about Internet freedom. It should scare those who
want to stop Chuck Schumer and his gun-grabber choir form moving the central element of Barack Obama’s gun control
agenda. To coin a phrase, “Ideas have consequences.” And regulation of Internet gaming opens the door to
regulation of other things congressmen or billionaire political spenders find objectionable. Obviously, that includes
firearms.
Gambling ban undoes internet freedom promotion
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Aronson 14 Institute for International Economic Policy Working Paper Series Elliott School of International Affairs The George
Washington University Can Trade Policy Set Information Free? IIEP-WP-2014-9 Susan Ariel Aaronson George Washington
University
http://www.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2014WP/AaronsonIIEPWP20149.pdf
T here is a contradiction at the heart of the Internet. Al though the Internet has become a platform for trade,
trade policies have both enhanced and undermined Internet freedom and the open Internet. Two recent events illuminate
this paradox. First, The New York Times ( America’s paper of record ) reported it had b een repeatedly hacked after it
published several articles delineating the financial holdings of the families of China’s highest leaders. The hackers inserted
malware and stolen its employees’ e - mail account passwords, allegedly to find out information abou t the Times’ sources.
Soon thereafter, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Voice of America and other media outlets publicly
claimed their computers were hacked, allegedly also by Chinese hackers. And in late February the government of A
ntigua announced that it would retaliate against America’s ban of Antiguan online gambling sites. The
World Trade Organization (WTO) gave the small island nation approval to sell items protected under US copyright law as a
means of compensation for trade p ractices that “devastated” its economy. Antigua plans to set up a website to sell US copyrighted material without paying the copyright holders. In short , while China was using trade to steal information and
in so doing reduce Internet openness , Antigua will use trade to undermine property rights while advancing
information flows. Although t he global Internet is creating a virtuous circle of expanding growth,
opportunity, and information flows , policymakers and market actors are taking steps tha t undermine
access to information, reduce freedom of expression and splinter the Internet. Almost every country has
adopted policies to protect privacy, enforce intellectual property rights, protect national security, or thwart cyber - theft,
hacking, and sp am. While these actions may be necessary to achieve important policy goals, these policies may distort
cross - border information flows and trade. Meanwhile, US, Canadian and European firms provide much of the
infrastructure as well as censor ware or blockin g services to their home governments and repressive states such as Iran,
Russia, and China
Online gambling is the BIGGEST internal link
Braithwaite and Blitz 5/6/9 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7d47231c-3a82-11de-8a2d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3E1KKpH4h
staff, Financial Times
Barney Frank, chairman of the House financial services committee, presented
legislation on Wednesday that would
legalise internet gambling in the US and pave the way for overseas companies to return to the market.
Calling existing law “the single biggest example of an intrusion” into internet freedom, Mr Frank said
he was confident of some cross-party support for the bill, which would regulate and tax online gambling.
Doesn’t Solve Authoritarianism – 1NC
No evidence that the internet actually spurs democratization
Aday et al. 10 (Sean Aday is an associate professor of media and public affairs and international affairs at The George Washington University, and director of the Institute for Public
Diplomacy and Global Communication. Henry Farrell is an associate professor of political science at The George Washington University. Marc Lynch is an associate professor of political science and
international affairs at The George Washington University and director of the Institute for Middle East Studies. John Sides is an assistant professor of political science at The George Washington
University. John Kelly is the founder and lead scientist at Morningside Analytics and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Ethan Zuckerman is senior
researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and also part of the team building Global Voices, a group of international bloggers bridging cultural and linguistic
differences through weblogs. August 2010, “BLOGS AND BULLETS: new media in contentious politics”, http://www.usip.org/files/resources/pw65.pdf)
New media, such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have played a major role in episodes of contentious political action. They are often described as
important tools for activists seeking to replace authoritarian regimes and to promote freedom and
democracy, and they have been lauded for their democratizing potential. Despite the prominence of “Twitter revolutions,” “color revolutions,” and
the like in public debate, policymakers and scholars know very little about whether and how new media affect
contentious politics. Journalistic accounts are inevitably based on anecdotes rather than rigorously designed research .
Although data on new media have been sketchy, new tools are emerging that measure linkage patterns and content as well as track memes across media outlets and thus might offer fresh insights into new
media. The impact of new media can be better understood through a framework that considers five levels of analysis: individual transformation, intergroup relations, collective action, regime policies, and
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. New media have the potential to change how citizens think or act, mitigate or exacerbate
group conflict, facilitate collective action, spur a backlash among regimes, and garner international
attention toward a given country. Evidence from the protests after the Iranian presidential election in June 2009 suggests the utility of examining the role of new media at
each of these five levels. Although there is reason to believe the Iranian case exposes the potential benefits of new media, other evidence—such as the Iranian regime’s use of
the same social network tools to harass, identify, and imprison protesters—suggests that, like any media, the
Internet is not a “magic bullet.” At best, it may be a “rusty bullet.” Indeed, it is plausible that traditional media sources were
equally if not more important. Scholars and policymakers should adopt a more nuanced view of new
media’s role in democratization and social change, one that recognizes that new media can have both positive
and negative effects. Introduction In January 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton articulated a powerful vision of the Internet as promoting freedom and global political
external attention
transformation and rewriting the rules of political engagement and action. Her vision resembles that of others who argue that new media technologies facilitate participatory politics and mass mobilization,
help promote democracy and free markets, and create new kinds of global citizens. Some observers have even suggested that Twitter’s creators should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the 2009
these
technologies may actually exacerbate conflict, as exemplified in Kenya, the Czech Republic, and
Uganda, and help authoritarian regimes monitor and police their citizens. 2 They argue that new media
encourage self-segregation and polarization as people seek out only information that reinforces their
prior beliefs, offering ever more opportunities for the spread of hate, misinformation, and prejudice.3
Some skeptics question whether new media have significant effects at all. Perhaps they are simply a tool
used by those who would protest in any event or a trendy “hook” for those seeking to tell political
stories. Do new media have real consequences for contentious politics—and in which direction?4 The sobering answer is that, fundamentally, no one knows. To this point, little research
has sought to estimate the causal effects of new media in a methodologically rigorous fashion, or to
gather the rich data needed to establish causal influence. Without rigorous research designs or rich data,
Iranian protests.1 But not everyone has such sanguine views. Clinton herself was careful to note when sharing her vision that new media were not an “unmitigated blessing.” Pessimists argue that
partisans of all viewpoints turn to anecdotal evidence and intuition
Doesn’t Solve Authoritarianism – 2NC
Internet freedom is just as likely to be used to cursh dissent
Siegel 11 (Lee Siegel, a columnist and editor at large for The New York Observer, is the author of “Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce — and Why It
Matters. “‘The Net Delusion’ and the Egypt Crisis”, February 4, 2011, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/the-net-delusion-and-the-egypt-crisis)
Morozov takes the ideas of what he calls “cyber-utopians” and shows how reality perverts them in one
political situation after another. In Iran, the regime used the internet to crush the internet-driven protests in
June 2009. In Russia, neofascists use the internet to organize pogroms. And on and on. Morozov has written hundreds of pages to make the point
that technology is amoral and cuts many different ways. Just as radio can bolster democracy or — as in
Rwanda — incite genocide, so the internet can help foment a revolution but can also help crush it. This seems
¶
obvious, yet it has often been entirely lost as grand claims are made for the internet’s positive, liberating qualities. ¶And suddenly here are Tunisia and, even more dramatically, Egypt, simultaneously
In Tunisia and Egypt
— and now across the Arab world — Facebook and Twitter have made people feel less alone in their
rage at the governments that stifle their lives. There is nothing more politically emboldening than to feel, all at once, that what you have experienced as personal bitterness is actually
an objective condition, a universal affliction in your society that therefore can be universally opposed. ¶ Yet at the same time, the Egyptian government
shut off the internet, which is an effective way of using the internet. And according to one Egyptian blogger, misinformation is being spread
through Facebook — as it was in Iran — just as real information was shared by anti-government protesters. This is the “dark side of internet
freedom” that Morozov is warning against. It is the freedom to wantonly crush the forces of freedom.
¶All this should not surprise anyone. It seems that, just as with every other type of technology of communication, the internet is not a solution to human conflict
but an amplifier for all aspects of a conflict. As you read about pro-government agitators charging into
crowds of protesters on horseback and camel, you realize that nothing has changed in our new internet
age. The human situation is the same as it always was, except that it is the same in a newer and more intense way. Decades from now, we will no doubt be celebrating a spanking new technology that
proving and refuting Morozov’s argument. In both cases, social networking allowed truths that had been whispered to be widely broadcast and commented upon.
promises to liberate us from the internet. And the argument joined by Morozov will occur once again.
Mobilization and Internet access are not correlated – other factors are more important
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Kuebler 11 (Johanne Kuebler, contributor to the CyberOrient journal, Vol. 5, Iss. 1, 2011, “Overcoming the Digital Divide: The Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia”,
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=6212)
The assumption that the uncensored accessibility of the Internet encourages the struggle for democracy
has to be differentiated. At first sight, the case studies seem to confirm the statement, since Egypt, featuring a usually
uncensored access to the Internet, has witnessed mass mobilisations organised over the Internet while Tunisia had not.
However, the mere availability of freely accessible Internet is not a sufficient condition insofar as
mobilisations in Egypt took place when a relative small portion of the population had Internet access
and, on the other hand, mobilisation witnessed a decline between 2005 and 2008 although the number of
Internet users rose during the same period. As there is no direct correlation between increased Internet use and political
action organised through this medium, we have to assume a more complex relationship. A successful social
movement seems to need more than a virtual space of debate to be successful, although such a space can be
an important complementary factor in opening windows and expanding the realm of what can be said in public. A
political movement revolves around a core of key actors, and "netizens" qualify for this task. The Internet also
features a variety of tools that facilitate the organisation of events. However, to be successful, social movements need
more than a well-organised campaign. In Egypt, we witnessed an important interaction between print
and online media, between the representatives of a relative elitist medium and the traditional, more accessible print
media. A social movement needs to provide frames resonating with grievances of the public coupled
with periods of increased public attention to politics in order to create opportunity structures. To further
transport their message and to attract supporters, a reflection of the struggle of the movement with the
government in the "classical" media such as newspapers and television channels is necessary to give the
movement momentum outside the Internet context.
Doesn’t Solve Censorship – 1NC
Even absent data localization private companies will voluntarily self-censor – nominal internet freedom is
irrelevant
Morozov 11 (Evgeny Morozov, visting scholar at Stanford University, Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, 2011, “The Net Delusion,” ch. 8)
What is clear is that, contrary to the expectations of many Western policymakers, Facebook is hardly ideal
for promoting democracy; its own logic, driven by profits or ignorance of the increasingly global context in which it operates,
is, at times, extremely antidemocratic. Were Kafka to pen his novel The Trial—in which the protagonist is arrested and tried
for reasons that are never explained to him—today, El Ghazzali's case could certainly serve as inspiration. That much of
digital activism is mediated by commercial intermediaries who operate on similar Kafkaesque principles is
cause for concern, if only because it introduces too much unnecessary uncertainty into the activist chain,
imagine that El Ghazzali's group was planning a public protest on the very day that its page got deleted: The protest could
have easily been derailed. Until there is complete certainty that a Facebook group won't be removed at the
most unfortunate moment, many dissident groups will shy away from making it their primary channel
of communication. In reality, there is no reason why Facebook should even bother with defending
freedom of expression in Morocco, which is not an appealing market to its advertisers, and even if it were, it would
surely be much easier to make money there without crossing swords with the country's rulers. We do not
know how heavily Facebook polices sensitive political activity on its site, but we do know of many cases similar to El
Ghazzali s. In February 2010, for example, Facebook was heavily criticized by its critics in Asia for
removing the pages of a group with 84,298 members that had been formed to oppose the Democratic
Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, the pro-establishment and pro-Beijing party.
According to the group's administrator, the ban was triggered by opponents flagging the group as "abusive" on Facebook.
This was not the first time that Facebook constrained the work of such groups. In the run-up to the Olympic torch relay
passing through Hong Kong in 2008, it shut down several groups, while many pro-Tibetan activists had their accounts
deactivated for "persistent misuse of the site." It's not just politics: Facebook is notoriously zealous in policing
other types of content as well. In July 2010 it sent multiple warnings to an Australian jeweler for posting photos of
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her exquisite porcelain doll, which revealed the doll's nipples. Facebook's founders may be young, but they are apparently
puritans. Many other intermediaries are not exactly unbending defenders of political expression either.
Twitter has been accused of silencing online tribute to the 2008 Gaza War. Apple has been bashed for
blocking Dalai Lama-related iPhone apps from its App Store for China (an application related to Rebiya Kadeer,
the exiled leader of the Uighur minority, was banned as well). Google, which owns Orkut, a social network that is
surprisingly popular in India, has been accused of being too zealous in removing potentially controversial
content that may be interpreted as calling for religious and ethnic violence against both Hindus and Muslims. Moreover, a
2009 study found that Microsoft has been censoring what users in the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Algeria, and
Jordan could find through its Bing search engine much more heavily than the governments of those
countries.
Doesn’t Solve Censorship – 2NC
Non-state actors and social media monitoring make censorship impossible to counter
Morozov 11 (Evgeny Morozov, visting scholar at Stanford University, Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, 2011, “The Net Delusion,” ch. 4)
governments do not need to wait until breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to make more accurate
decisions about what it is they need to censor. One remarkable difference between the Internet and
other media is that online information is hyperlinked. To a large extent, all those links act as nano-endorsements.
But
If someone links to a particular page, that page is granted some importance. Google has managed to aggregate all these nano-endorsements—making the number of incom- ing links the key predictor of
relevance for search results—and build a mighty business around it. Hyperlinks also make it possible to infer the context in which particular bits of information appear online without having to know the
meaning of those bits. If a dozen antigovernment blogs link to a PDF published on a blog that was previously unknown to the Internet police, the latter may assume that the document is worth blocking
Thanks to Twitter,
Facebook, and other social media, such associations are getting much easier for the secret police to
trace. If authoritarian governments master the art of aggregating the most popular links that their
opponents share on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, they can create a very elegant, sophisticated, and, most
disturbingly, accurate solution to their censorship needs. Even though the absolute amount of
information—or the number of links, for that matter—may be growing, it does not follow that there will be less "censorship"
in the world. It would simply become more fine-tuned. If anything, there might be less one-size-fits-all
"wasteful" censorship, but this is hardly a cause for celebration. The belief that the Internet is too big to
censor is dangerously naive. As the Web becomes even more social, nothing prevents governments— or
any other interested players—from building censorship engines powered by recommendation technology similar to that of Amazon
without ever reading it. The links—the "nano-endorsements" from antigovernment bloggers—speak for themselves. The PDF is simply guilty by association.
and Netflix. The only difference, however, would be that instead of being prompted to check out the "recommended" pages, we'd be denied access to them. The "social graph"—a collection of all our
connections across different sites (think of a graph that shows everyone you are connected to on different sites across the Web, from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube)—a concept so much beloved by the
The main reason why censorship methods have not yet become more social is
because much of our Internet browsing is still done anonymously. When we visit different sites, the people who administer them cannot
easily tell who we are. There is absolutely no guarantee that this will still be the case five years from now; two powerful forces may destroy online anonymity . From
the commercial end, we see stronger integration between social networks and different websites— you
can now spot Facebook's "Like" button on many sites—so there are growing incentives to tell sites
who you are. Many of us would eagerly trade our privacy for a discount coupon to be used at the Apple store. From
the government end, growing concerns over child pornography, copyright violations, cybercrime, and
cyberwarfare also make it more likely that there will be more ways in which we will need to prove our
identity online. The future of Internet control is thus a function of numerous (and rather complex) business and social forces; sadly, many of them originating in free and democratic societies.
"digerati," could encircle all of us.
Western governments and foundations can't solve the censorship problem by just building more tools; they need to identify, publicly debate, and, if necessary, legislate against each of those numerous forces.
The West excels at building and supporting effective tools to pierce through the firewalls of authoritarian governments, but it is also skilled at letting many of its corporations disregard the privacy of their
users, often with disastrous implications for those who live in oppressive societies. Very litde about the currently fashionable imperative to promote Internet freedom suggests that Western policymakers are
Another reason why so much of today's
Internet censorship is invisible is because it's not the governments who practice it. While in most cases
it's enough to block access to a particular critical blog post, it's even better to remove that blog post
from the Internet in its entirety. While governments do not have such mighty power, companies that enable users to publish such blog posts on their sites can do it in a blink.
Being able to force companies to police the Web according to a set of some broad guidelines is a dream come true for any government. It's the companies who incur all the
committed to resolving the problems that they themselves have helped to create. We Don't Censor; We Outsource!
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costs, it's the companies who do the dirty work, and it's the companies who eventually get blamed by
the users. Companies also are more likely to catch unruly content, as they know their online
communities better than government censors. Finally, no individual can tell companies how to run
those communities, so most appeals to freedom of expression are pointless. Not surprisingly, this is the direction in which Chinese
censorship is evolving. According to research done by Rebecca MacKinnon, who studies the Chinese Internet at New America Foundation and is a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing, censorship of
Chinese user-generated content is "highly decentralized," while its "implementation is left to the Web companies themselves". To prove this, in mid-2008 she set up anonymous accounts on a dozen Chinese
blog platforms and published more than a hundred posts on controversial subjects, from corruption to AIDS to Tibet, to each of them. MacKinnon's objective was to test if and how soon they would be
deleted. Responses differed widely across companies: The most vigilant ones deleted roughly half of all posts, while the least vigilant company censored only one. There was little coherence to the
The
more leeway companies have in interpreting the rules, the more uncertainty there is as to whether a
certain blog post will be removed or allowed to stay. This Kafkaesque uncertainty can eventually cause
more harm than censorship itself, for it's hard to plan an activist campaign if you cannot be sure that
your content will remain available. This also suggests that, as bad as Google and Facebook may look to us, they still probably undercensor compared to most companies
companies' behavior, but then this is what happens when governments say "censor" but don't spell out what it is that needs to be censored, leaving it for the scared executives to figure out.
operating in authoritarian countries. Global companies are usually unhappy to take on a censorship role, for it might cost them dearly. Nor are they happy to face a barrage of accusations of censorship in
Local companies, on the other hand, couldn't care less Social networking sites in Azerbaijan
probably have no business in the United States or Western Europe, nor are their names likely to be mispronounced at congressional hearings.) But this is
one battle that the West is already losing. Users usually prefer local rather than global services; those
are usually faster, more relevant, easier to use, and in line with local cultural norms. Look at the
Internet market in most authoritarian states, and you'll probably find at least five local alternatives to
each prominent Web 2.0 start-up from Silicon Valley. For a total online population of more than 300 million,
Facebook's 14,000 Chinese users, by one 2009 count, are just a drop in the sea (or, to be exact, 0.00046 percent). Companies, however, are not the
their own home countries. (:
only intermediaries that could be pressured into deleting unwanted content. RuNet (the colloquial name for the Russian-speaking Internet), for example, heavily relies on "com-munities," which are
somewhat akin to Facebook groups, and those are run by dedicated moderators. Most of the socially relevant online activism in Russia happens on just one platform, Livejournal. When in 2008 the online
community of automobile lovers on Livejournal became the place to share photos and reports from a wave of unexpected protests organized by unhappy drivers in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok,
its administrators immediately received requests from FSB, KGB's successor, urging them to delete the reports. They complied, although they complained about the matter in a subsequent report that they
Formally, though, nothing has been blocked; this is the kind
The more intermediaries—whether human or corporate—
are involved in publishing and disseminating a particular piece of information, the more points of
control exist for quietly removing or altering that information. The early believers in "dictator's dilemma" have grossly underestimated the need
for online intermediaries. Someone still has to provide access to the Internet, host a blog or a website, moderate an
online community, or even make that community visible in search engines. As long as all those entities
have to be tied to a nation state, there will be ways to pressure them into accepting and facilitating
highly customized censorship that will have no impact on economic growth.
posted to the community's webpage (within just a few hours that post disappeared as well).
of invisible censorship that is most difficult to fight .
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