NEG TERROR DA
Uniqueness
NSA surveillance is protecting American citizens from the ever-prevalent threat of
terrorism but transparency is key—public knowledge would directly undermine its
success.
Bolton ‘15 [John R. Bolton, 4/28/15, American Enterprise Institute, “NSA activities key to terrorism
fight”] Accessed Online: 6/29/15 http://www.aei.org/publication/nsa-activities-key-to-terrorism-fight/
Congress is poised to decide whether to re-authorize programs run by the National Security Agency that assess patterns of domestic and
international telephone calls and emails to uncover linkages with known terrorists. These
NSA activities, initiated after alQaeda’s deadly 9/11 attacks, have played a vital role in protecting America and our citizens around the
world from the still-metastasizing terrorist threat. The NSA programs do not involve listening to or reading conversations,
but rather seek to detect communications networks. If patterns are found, and more detailed investigation seems
warranted, then NSA or other federal authorities, consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition
against unreasonable searches and seizures, must obtain judicial approval for
more specific
investigations. Indeed, even the collection of the so-called metadata is surrounded by procedural
protections to prevent spying on U.S. citizens. Nonetheless, critics from the right and left have attacked the NSA for infringing
on the legitimate expectations of privacy Americans enjoy under our Constitution. Unfortunately, many of these critics have absolutely no idea
what they are talking about; they are engaging in classic McCarthyite tactics, hoping to score political points with a public justifiably worried
about the abuses of power characteristic of the Obama administration. Other critics, following Vietnam-era antipathies to America’s
intelligence community, have never reconciled themselves to the need for robust clandestine capabilities. Still others yearn for simpler times,
embodying Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s famous comment that “gentlemen don’t read each others’ mail.” The ill-informed nature of the
debate has facilitated scare-mongering, with one wild accusation about NSA’s activities after another being launched before the mundane
reality catches up. And there is an important asymmetry at work here as well. The critics can say whatever their imaginations conjure up, but
NSA and its defenders are significantly limited in how they can respond. By
definition, the programs’ success rests on the
secrecy fundamental to all intelligence activities. Frequently, therefore, explaining what is not happening
could well reveal information about NSA’s methods and capabilities that terrorists and others, in turn,
could use to stymie future detection efforts. After six years of President Obama, however, trust in government is in short
supply. It is more than a little ironic that Obama finds himself defending the NSA (albeit with obvious hesitancy and discomfort), since his
approach to foreign and defense issues has consistently reflected near-total indifference, except when he has no alternative to confronting
challenges to our security. Yet if harsh international realities can penetrate even Obama’s White House, that alone is evidence of the
seriousness of the threats America faces. In fact,
just in the year since Congress last considered the NSA programs, the global
terrorist threat has dramatically increased. ISIS is carving out an entirely new state from what used to be Syria
and Iraq, which no longer exist within the borders created from the former Ottoman Empire after World War I. In already-chaotic
Libya, ISIS has grown rapidly, eclipsing al-Qaeda there and across the region as the largest terrorist
threat. Boko Haram is expanding beyond Nigeria, declaring its own caliphate, even while pledging
allegiance to ISIS. Yemen has descended into chaos, following Libya’s pattern, and Iran has expanded
support for the terrorist Houthi coalition. Afghanistan is likely to fall back under Taliban control if, as
Obama continually reaffirms, he withdraws all American troops before the end of 2016. This is not the time to cripple our
intelligence-gathering capabilities against the rising terrorist threat. Congress should unquestionably
reauthorize the NSA programs, but only for three years. That would take us into a new presidency, hopefully one that inspires more
confidence, where a calmer, more sensible debate can take place.
US is making progress in counter-terrorism efforts- global commitment is strong
Shinkman 15
Paul D. Shinkman June 16, 2015 “Pentagon: Al-Qaida Leader’s Death Shows Vigor of U.S.
Counterterrorism” Accessed 7/3/15 at http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/06/16/pentagontop-al-qaida-leader-nasir-al-wahishis-death-shows-vigor-of-us-counterterrorism
The Department of Defense refuses to acknowledge any part in killing Nasir al-Wahishi in Yemen but insists the
death of the
commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and likely successor as top leader for the global
extremist network proves the U.S. strength in fighting terrorism worldwide, despite its perceived retrenchment and
battlefield losses. Reports of al-Wahishi’s death in a suspected drone strike were confirmed by al-Qaida groups Tuesday morning and by the
National Security Council at the White House. Tight lips from the Pentagon starkly contrast against news it broadcast the day before of having
successfully targeted Islamic extremist leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar in Libya. The refusal to offer any further information hints at involvement
from the CIA, which has waged a drone warfare campaign in Yemen for years that has been bolstered under President Barack Obama. This
latest hit to al-Qaida – considered the most significant since U.S. commandos killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 – also follows a string of what the
Pentagon calls “strategic setbacks” to U.S. operations worldwide, such as the retreat by Iraqi partner forces from the key city of Ramadi in the
face of an Islamic State group offensive and the U.S. being forced to withdraw all of its special operations ground forces in Yemen amid fighting
from the Iran-backed Houthi rebels there. “We
still have global reach,” Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steven Warren said Tuesday
Recently we, frankly, have had some well publicized setbacks in Iraq, but it’s
important for all of us to keep our eye on the bigger picture, which is that we remain committed to
destroying this enemy, and there is nowhere on Earth you can hide if you are a terrorist. We will find you, and we will kill you.” Almorning. “It’s an important note:
Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has reportedly replaced al-Wahishi with military commander Qasm al-Rimi, also known as Abu Hureira alSanaani, according to CNN. Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor says many other senior militants within the organization can also
ascend to leadership positions. Warren cited “continued momentum” around the key Iraqi town of Baiji, home to a critical oil refinery. He also
lauded Kurdish forces’ ability to capture the key town of Tal Abyad near the Turkish border with Syria, which Warren says will help stem the
flow of foreign fighters across a porous border toward Islamic State group strongholds like the city of Raqqa. When asked how these supposed
victories relate to the latest strike against al-Qaida, which has denounced partnership with the Islamic State group, Warren said there is a
higher level, strategic connection. “The
U.S. government and our coalition partners are committed to degrading,
defeating and ultimately destroying this terrorist threat around the world,” he said, repeating the phrase the White
House has used to define its strategy against Islamic extremism. “We are in this fight, and whether this fight is in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in
Libya, or in another place, we are in this fight and we are fully capable and fully willing to take actions that are necessary to
protect America.” So far this year the U.S. has carried out eight strikes against targets in Yemen, according to The Long War Journal, which
tracks these numbers. The strikes have accounted for 40 enemy deaths. While Warren was speaking, the
White House released a
statement confirming the death of al-Wahishi, which it says “strikes a major blow” to al-Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula, considered the network’s most potent branch. The statement did not attribute any cause to his death.
The US is countering threats now by ramping up surveillance
Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, June 27, 2015, Authorities warn of possible terrorist threats
around July 4, http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/politics/july-4-terror-threats/
Authorities are warning of possible terrorist threats around the July 4 holiday, several law enforcement officials
told CNN on Friday. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center issued a
joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement across the U.S. The bulletin doesn't warn of any known active plots. But it serves
as a general warning of heightened threats. It says extremists could launch attacks tied to Independence Day or
in reaction to perceived defamation of the Prophet Mohammed. CNN reported in recent weeks that U.S. law enforcement officials
believe the Islamist terrorist threat is the highest in years. The officials have raised concern about possible domestic
attacks tied to the July 4 holiday and the upcoming visit of Pope Francis. The FBI and the Justice Department's national
security division have moved aggressively in recent weeks to arrest and charge extremists thought to
be plotting attacks or supporting groups such as ISIS. The FBI has increased its surveillance and
monitoring of some suspects. Also on Friday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson
issued a statement in response to the attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait, saying in part, "Particularly with the
upcoming July 4th holiday here in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI
continue to communicate with state and local law enforcement about what we know and see. "We are
encouraging all law enforcement to be vigilant and prepared," the statement continued. "We will also adjust
security measures, seen and unseen, as necessary to protect the American people."
Links
Generic Surveillance
Domestic surveillance is key to preventing future terrorist attacks- three reasons
Paul E. McGreal in 2007, Professor of Law, Southern Illinois University School of Law, ESSAY:
Counteracting Ambition: Applying Corporate Compliance and Ethics to the Separation of Powers
Concerns with Domestic Surveillance, 60 SMU L. Rev. 1571
The intelligence challenge posed by terrorism can be stated rather simply: Predict where and when
terrorists are likely to strike so the government can prevent future attacks. As will be discussed in Part III,
counterterrorism's preventive focus means that government often starts without individualized
suspicion, instead casting a wide intelligence net. This net will inevitably ensnare data of United States citizens
for three main reasons. First, due to the nature of modern technology, even communications between individuals
outside the United States may pass through and commingle with communications made solely within
the United States. 17Link to the text of the note Detection of such foreign communications necessarily requires
surveillance of the commingled domestic communications. Second, some foreign terrorists, such as those who
perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, plan and attack from within the United States. And third, some terrorist activity will
be perpetrated by United States citizens, as was the [1576] attack on the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. In short, some
domestic surveillance is inherent in effective counterterrorism efforts.
Domestic terrorists outnumber foreign threats – as many as 300,000 involved in
sovereign citizen extremism
Perez ‘15( Evan Perez and Wes Bruer, 2/20/15, CNN, “DHS intelligence report warns of domestic rightwing terror threat” http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/19/politics/terror-threat-homeland-security)
Washington (CNN)
They're carrying out sporadic terror attacks on police, have threatened attacks on
government buildings and reject government authority. A new intelligence assessment, circulated by the
Department of Homeland Security this month and reviewed by CNN, focuses on the domestic terror threat from right-wing
sovereign citizen extremists and comes as the Obama administration holds a White House conference to
focus efforts to fight violent extremists. Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the
domestic terror threat from sovereign citizen groups as equal to -- and in some cases greater than -- the
threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, that garner more public attention. The Homeland Security
report, produced in coordination with the FBI, counts 24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks across
the U.S. since 2010. ISIS burned up to 40 people alive in Iraq, official says The government says these are extremists who believe that
they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a
court order. They've lashed out against authority in incidents such as one in 2012, in which a father and son were accused of engaging in a
shootout with police in Louisiana, in a confrontation that began with an officer pulling them over for a traffic violation. Two officers were killed
and several others wounded in the confrontation. The men were sovereign citizen extremists who claimed police had no authority over them.
Among the findings from the Homeland Security intelligence assessment: "(Sovereign citizen) violence during 2015 will occur most frequently
during routine law enforcement encounters at a suspect's home, during enforcement stops and at government offices." DHS
has
documented examples of violence by sovereign citizen extremists since 2010. They range from incidents
that occurred in the home and at traffic stops to attacks on government buildings. The report adds that
"law enforcement officers will remain the primary target of (sovereign citizen) violence over the next year due
to their role in physically enforcing laws and regulations." The White House has fended off criticism in recent days for its reluctance to say the
words "Islamist extremism," even as the conference this week almost entirely focused on helping imams and community groups to counteract
the lure of groups like ISIS. Absent from
the White House conference is any focus on the domestic terror threat
posed by sovereign citizens, militias and other anti-government terrorists that have carried out multiple
attacks in recent years. An administration official says the White House is focused on the threat from all terrorists, including from
sovereign citizen and other domestic groups. "I don't think it's fair to say the (White House) conference didn't address this at all," the official
said, adding that President Barack Obama addressed the need to combat "violent ideologies" of all types. An official at the Justice Department,
which is leading the administration's counter-radicalization effort, says many of the tactics aimed at thwarting radical Islamic recruitment of
young people can also be used to fight anti-government extremist groups. While
groups like ISIS and al Qaeda garner the
most attention, for many local cops, the danger is closer to home. A survey last year of state and local
law enforcement officers listed sovereign citizen terrorists, ahead of foreign Islamists, and domestic
militia groups as the top domestic terror threat. The survey was part of a study produced by the University of Maryland's
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. In 2013, a man who held anti-government views carried out a
shooting attack on three Transportation Security Administration employees at Los Angeles International Airport, killing one TSA officer. Last
year, a couple killed two police officers and a bystander at a Las Vegas Walmart store.Officers inspect a car outside Los Angeles International
Airport in 2013 after three TSA employees were shot. Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some
estimates,
there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism.
Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said. The federal government's focus on the domestic groups
waxes and wanes, Potok said, in part because the threat from foreign groups like al Qaeda and its affiliates. Potok says sovereign citizen groups
have attracted support because of po
or economic conditions. Some groups travel the country pitching their ideology as a way to help homeowners escape foreclosure or get out of
debt, by simply ignoring the courts and bankruptcy law. The Homeland Security report's focus on right-wing terrorists is a subject that garnered
political controversy for the Obama administration in the past. In 2009, a Homeland Security report on possible recruitment of military veterans
by right-wing militia groups prompted an outcry from veterans groups. The report was produced by staff members during the Bush
administration but wasn't published until then Homeland Security Janet Napolitano had taken office. Napolitano criticized her own agency for
the report.
Surveillance is key to American Safety- No other alternatives are effective
Sanger and Shanker on 10/12/13 (David and Thom, “N.S.A. Director Firmly Defends Surveillance Efforts”,
The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/nsa-director-gives-firm-and-broaddefense-of-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0)
FORT MEADE, Md. — The director of the National Security Agency, Gen.
Keith B. Alexander, said in an interview that to prevent
terrorist attacks he saw no effective alternative to the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of telephone and other
electronic metadata from Americans. But he acknowledged that his agency now faced an entirely new reality, and the possibility of Congressional
restrictions, after revelations about its operations at home and abroad. While offering a detailed defense of his agency’s work, General Alexander said the broader
lesson of the controversy over disclosures of secret N.S.A. surveillance missions was that he and other top officials have to be more open in explaining the agency’s
role, especially as it expands its mission into cyberoffense and cyberdefense. Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, testified on
Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee.N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. CitizensSEPT. 28, 2013 “Given where we are and all the issues
that are on the table, I do feel it’s important to have a public, transparent discussion on cyber so that the American people know what’s going on,” General
Alexander said. “And in order to have that, they need to understand the truth about what’s going on.” General
Alexander, a career Army
intelligence officer who also serves as head of the military’s Cyber Command, has become the public
face of the secret — and, to many, unwarranted — government collection of records about personal
communications in the name of national security. He has given a number of speeches in recent weeks to counter a
highly negative portrayal of the N.S.A.’s work, but the 90-minute interview was his most extensive personal statement on
the issue to date. Speaking at the agency’s heavily guarded headquarters; General Alexander acknowledged that
his agency had stumbled in responding to the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the contractor who stole
thousands of documents about the N.S.A.’s most secret programs. But General Alexander insisted that the
chief problem was a public misunderstanding about what information the agency collects — and what it
does not — not the programs themselves. “The way we’ve explained it to the American people,” he said,
“has gotten them so riled up that nobody told them the facts of the program and the controls that go
around it.” But he was firm in saying that the disclosures had allowed adversaries, whether foreign governments or terrorist organizations, to learn how to
avoid detection by American intelligence and had caused “significant and irreversible damage” to national security. General Alexander said that he was extremely
sensitive to the power of the software tools and electronic weapons being developed by the United States for surveillance and computer-network warfare, and that
he set a very high bar for when the nation should use them for offensive purposes. “I see no reason to use offensive tools unless you’re defending the country or in
a state of war, or you want to achieve some really important thing for the good of the nation and others,” he said. Those comments were prompted by a document
in the Snowden trove that said the United States conducted more than 200 offensive cyberattacks in 2011 alone. But American officials say that in reality only a
handful of attacks have been carried out. They say the erroneous estimate reflected an inaccurate grouping of other electronic missions. But General Alexander
would not discuss any specific cases in which the United States had used those weapons, including the best-known example: its years-long attack on Iran’s nuclear
enrichment facility at Natanz. To critics of President Obama’s administration, that decision made it easier for China, Iran and other nations to justify their own use of
cyberweapons. General Alexander, who became the N.S.A. director in 2005, will retire early next year. The timing of his departure was set in March when his tour
was extended for a third time, according to officials, who said it had nothing to do with the surveillance controversy spawned by the leaks. The appointment of his
successor is likely to be a focal point of Congressional debate over whether the huge infrastructure that was built during his tenure will remain or begin to be
restricted. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who leads the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already drafted legislation to eliminate the N.S.A.’s ability
to systematically obtain Americans’ calling records. And Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and co-author of the Patriot Act, is drafting a
bill that would cut back on domestic surveillance programs. General Alexander was by turns folksy and firm in the interview. But he was unapologetic about the
agency’s strict culture of secrecy and unabashed in describing its importance to defending the nation. He insisted that it would have been impossible to have made
public, in advance of the revelations by Mr. Snowden, the fact that the agency collected what it calls the “business records” of all telephone calls, and many other
electronic communications, made in the United States .
The agency is under rules preventing it from investigating that socalled haystack of data unless it has a “reasonable, articulable” justification, involving communications
with terrorists abroad, he added. But he said the agency had not told its story well. As an example, he said, the agency itself killed a program in
2011 that collected the metadata of about 1 percent of all of the e-mails sent in the United States. “We terminated it,” he said. “It was not operationally relevant to
what we needed.” However, until it was killed, the N.S.A. had repeatedly defended that program as vital in reports to Congress. Senior officials also said that one
document in the Snowden revelations, an agreement with Israel, had been misinterpreted by those who believed that it meant the N.S.A. was sharing raw
intelligence data on Americans, including the metadata on phone calls. Officials said the probability of American content in the shared data was extremely small.
General Alexander said that confronting what he called the two biggest threats facing the United States
— terrorism and cyberattacks — would require the application of expanded computer monitoring. In both
cases, he said, he was open to much of that work being done by private industry, which he said could be more efficient than government. In fact, he said, a direct
government role in filtering Internet traffic into the United States, in an effort to stop destructive attacks on Wall Street, American banks and the theft of
intellectual property, would be inefficient and ineffective. “I think it leads people to the wrong conclusion, that we’re reading their e-mails and trying to listen to
their phone calls,” he said. Although
he acknowledged that the N.S.A. must change its dialogue with the public,
General Alexander was adamant that the agency adhered to the law. “We followed the law, we follow
our policies, we self-report, we identify problems, we fix them,” he said. “And I think we do a great job, and we do,
I think, more to protect people’s civil liberties and privacy than they’ll ever know.”
Comprehensive Domestic Surveillance is key to prevent terror
Sulmasy 13
Captian Professor Glenn Sulmasy is a judge advocate, an expert in national security law and Professor of
Law, U.S. Coast Guard Academy. “Why we need government surveillance” CNN June 10 2013 accessed
6/29/15 at http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/10/opinion/sulmasy-nsa-snowden/
This 21st century war is different and requires new ways and methods of gathering information. As
technology has increased, so has our ability to gather valuable, often actionable, intelligence. However, the move toward "homegrown" terror will necessarily require, by accident or purposefully, collections of U.S. citizens' conversations with
potential overseas persons of interest. An open society, such as the United States, ironically needs to use this
technology to protect itself. This truth is naturally uncomfortable for a country with a Constitution that prevents the federal
government from conducting "unreasonable searches and seizures." American historical resistance towards such activities is a bedrock of our
laws, policies and police procedures. But
what might have been reasonable 10 years ago is not the same any
longer. The constant armed struggle against the jihadists has adjusted our beliefs on what we think our
government can, and must, do in order to protect its citizens.
Deterrence is an effective method of counterterrorism for current threats
Rascoff 14, Samuel J. Rascoff (Assoc. Professor of Law), “Counterterrorism and New Deterrence”,
2014, NYU Law Review, http://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-89-number-3/counterterrorismand-new-deterrence
It has been widely assumed that deterrence has little or no role to play in counterterrorism on the grounds
that the threat of punishment is powerless to dissuade ideologically inspired terrorists. But an emerging literature in strategic studies
argues, and aspects of contemporary American national security practice confirm, that this account
misunderstands the capacity of deterrence to address current threats. In fact, a great deal of American
counterterrorism a cluster of refinements to traditional deterrence theory that speaks to a world of asymmetric threats. Yet the
emergence of new deterrence has been largely lost on lawyers, judges, and legal academics, resulting in significant
gaps between the practice of national security in this area and the legal architecture ostensibly designed to
undergird and oversee it. In particular, the legal framework of counterterrorism precisely the two fields
thought to converge in counterterrorism. In this Article, I debut in legal scholarship a sustained analysis of new deterrence and
highlight its consequences for national security law, thus ushering in a serious reckoning for jurists with counterterrorism deterrence. - See
more at: http://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-89-number-3/counterterrorism-and-new-deterrence#sthash.HL4LtKgf.dpuf
Every surveillance tool is key to stopping terrorism-it’s a team effort
Lewis 14 James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy
Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., December
2014, “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate”, Center for Strategic International Studies,
Assertions that a collection program contributes nothing because it has not singlehandedly prevented
an attack reflect an ill-informed understanding of how the United States conducts collection and analysis
to prevent harmful acts against itself and its allies. Intelligence does not work as it is portrayed in films—solitary agents
do not make startling discoveries that lead to dramatic, last-minute success (nor is technology
consistently infallible). Intelligence is a team sport. Perfect knowledge does not exist and success is the
product of the efforts of teams of dedicated individuals from many agencies, using many tools and
techniques, working together to assemble fragments of data from many sources into a coherent picture.
Analysts assemble this mosaic from many different sources and based on experience and intuition. Luck is still more important than
anyone would like and the alternative to luck is acquiring more information. This ability to blend
different sources of intelligence has improved U.S. intelligence capabilities and gives us an advantage
over some opponents. Portrayals of spying in popular culture focus on a central narrative, essential for storytelling but deeply
misleading. In practice, there can be many possible narratives that analysts must explore simultaneously. An analyst might decide, for example,
to see if there is additional confirming information that points to which explanation deserves further investigation. Often, the contribution from
collection programs comes not from what they tell us, but what they let us reject as false.
Surveillance essential for American security
Lewis in 2014 (James, Senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance
Debate”, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
http://csis.org/files/publication/141209_Lewis_UnderestimatingRisk_Web.pdf)
The threat of attack is easy to exaggerate, but that does not mean it is nonexistent. Australia’s
then-attorney general said in
August 2013 that communications surveillance had stopped four “mass casualty events” since 2008. The
constant planning and preparation for attack by terrorist groups is not apparent to the public. The dilemma
in assessing risk is that it is discontinuous. There can be long periods with no noticeable activity, only to have the
apparent calm explode. The debate over how to reform communications surveillance has discounted
this risk. Communications surveillance is an essential law enforcement and intelligence tool. There is no
replacement for it. Some suggestions for alternative approaches to surveillance, such as the idea that the
National Security Agency (NSA) only track known or suspected terrorists, reflect wishful thinking, as it is
the unknown terrorist who will inflict the greatest harm.
Surveillance effective for ending terrorist activity
Lewis in 2014 (James, Senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance
Debate”, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
http://csis.org/files/publication/141209_Lewis_UnderestimatingRisk_Web.pdf)
Broad surveillance of communications is the least intrusive and most effective method for discovering
terrorist and espionage activity. Many countries have expanded surveillance programs since the 9/11
attacks to detect and prevent terrorist activity, often in cooperation with other countries, including the
United States. Precise metrics on risk and effectiveness do not exist for surveillance, and we are left with conflicting opinions from
intelligence officials and civil libertarians as to what makes counterterrorism successful. Given resurgent authoritarianism and
continuing jihad, the new context for the surveillance debate is that the likelihood of attack is increasing.
Any legislative change should be viewed through this lens.
United States such a large target that surveillance must be addressed
Lewis in 2014 (James, Senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance
Debate”, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
http://csis.org/files/publication/141209_Lewis_UnderestimatingRisk_Web.pdf)
Our goal should be to increase accountability without an unacceptable increase in risk. Some proposed
measures would do the exact opposite. Adding a permanent advocate to the FISA Court, for example,
could return the United States to pre-9/11 gridlock for counterterrorism. The echoes of September 11 have faded
and the fear of attack has diminished. We are reluctant to accept terrorism as a facet of our daily lives, but major
attacks—roughly one a year in the last five years—are regularly planned against U.S. targets, particularly
passenger aircraft and cities. America’s failures in the Middle East have spawned new, aggressive
terrorist groups. These groups include radicalized recruits from the West—one estimate puts the
number at over 3,000—who will return home embittered and hardened by combat. Particularly in Europe, the
next few years will see an influx of jihadis joining the existing population of homegrown radicals, but the United States itself
remains a target.
NSL specific
NSLs are needed to prevent terror attacks
Stimson and Grossman in 2008
(Charles D. Stimson is Senior Legal Fellow, and Andrew M. Grossman is Senior Legal Policy Analyst, in the
Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation “National Security Letters: Three
Important Facts” The Heritage Foundation, March 14, 2008
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/03/national-security-letters-three-important-facts)
Congress authorized the FBI to use NSLs in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations.
Both OIG reports related to the FBI's use of NSLs unequivocally state that NSLs are an indispensable tool
in national security investigations. Law enforcement officials, working closely with the intelligence
community, need the tools contained within those authorized NSLs to keep Americans safe and to
prevent future terrorist attacks. As the latest OIG report highlights, FBI Director Robert Mueller has made it a top
priority to reduce the accidental misuse of NSLs, and the Department of Justice has made significant
progress in doing so since the issuance of the 2007 OIG report. Although the report notes the significant progress the
Department has made in the past 12 months, it is too early to tell how effective the new systems and controls will be in achieving the ultimate
goal of eliminating all inadvertent misuses of NSLs.
Every aspect of NSL’s help in counterterror and counterintelligence operations
Stimson and Grossman in 2008
(Charles D. Stimson is Senior Legal Fellow, and Andrew M. Grossman is Senior Legal Policy Analyst, in
the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation “National Security Letters: Three
Important Facts” The Heritage Foundation, March 14, 2008
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/03/national-security-letters-three-important-facts)
As noted in each of the two OIG reports, NSLs
have proven to be invaluable tools in counterterrorism and
counterintelligence investigations. According to the FBI, the principal uses of NSLs are to: Establish evidence to
support FISA applications for electronic surveillance, physical searches, or pen register/trap and trace
orders; Assess communication or financial links between investigative subjects or others; Collect information
sufficient to fully develop national security investigations; Generate leads for other field divisions, Joint
Terrorism Task Forces, and other federal agencies or to pass to foreign governments; Develop analytical
products for distribution within the FBI; Develop information that is provided to law enforcement
authorities for use in criminal proceedings; Collect information sufficient to eliminate concerns about
investigative subjects and thereby close national security investigations; and Corroborate information
derived from other investigative techniques. [12] Information obtained from each type of NSL has allowed
investigators to crack cases, especially in the realms of counterterrorism and counterintelligence. A brief
examination of the success stories outlined in the OIG reports under each type of NSL proves the point.
The following examples, excerpted from the OIG report, show how counterterrorism and counterintelligence
investigations are supported through the lawful use of NSLs:
The NSLs have helped the FBI combat terrorism
Sinnar in 2013
(Shirin Sinnar; Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, “Protecting Rights from Within?
Inspectors General and National Security Oversight”, LexisNexis.com, 65 Stan. L. Rev. 1027, 2013; The
Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, 49 pgs., Database, 6/28/15,
http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.library.umkc.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/)
Despite these trenchant critiques, the IG investigations supported the FBI's position in several respects.
Most importantly, the IG concluded that the information obtained from NSLs had "contributed
significantly" to terrorism investigations n108 and that the Patriot Act's changes to the law, according to
agency [*1046] officials, made NSLs more useful. n109 The IG also concluded that in most cases where the FBI
had violated the law, it could have legally obtained the same information. n110
FBI Specific
The FBI needs every resource to help fight terrorism
Perez and Prokupecz in 15
(Evan Perez; a justice reporter in 2013; Shimon Prokupecz; covers law enforcement for CNN, “FBI
struggling with surge in homegrown terror cases”, cnn.com, CNN 5/30/15, website, 7/1/15,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/28/politics/fbi-isis-local-law-enforcement/)
The New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies around the nation are increasing
their surveillance of ISIS supporters in the U.S., in part to aid the FBI which is struggling to keep up with a
surge in the number of possible terror suspects, according to law enforcement officials. The change is part of the fallout from the
terrorist attack in Garland, Texas earlier this month. The FBI says two ISIS supporters attempted a gun attack on a Prophet Mohammad cartoon contest but were
killed by police. One of the attackers, Elton Simpson, was
already under investigation by the FBI but managed to elude
surveillance to attempt the foiled attack. FBI Director James Comey told a group of police officials around the country in a
secure conference call this month that the FBI needs help to keep tabs on hundreds of suspects. As a result, some police
agencies are adding surveillance teams to help the FBI monitor suspects. Teams of NYPD officers trained
in surveillance are now helping the FBI's surveillance teams to better keep track of suspects, law enforcement
officials say. NYPD Commissioner William Bratton has said he wants to add 450 officers to the force's counterterrorism unit, partly to counter the increasing
domestic threat posed by ISIS sympathizers. The same is happening with other police departments around the country. The Los Angeles Police Department's
counterterrorism unit is also beefing up its surveillance squads at the request of the FBI, law enforcement officials say. Comey
said at an unrelated news
conference Wednesday that he has less confidence now that the FBI can keep up with the task. "It's an
extraordinarily difficult challenge task to find -- that's the first challenge -- and then assess those who may be on a
journey from talking to doing and to find and assess in an environment where increasingly, as the attorney general said, their communications are
unavailable to us even with court orders," Comey said "They're on encrypted platforms, so it is an incredibly difficult task that
we are enlisting all of our state, local and federal partners in and we're working on it every single day, but I can't stand here with any high
confidence when I confront the world that is increasingly dark to me and tell you that I've got it all covered," he said.
"We are working very, very hard on it but it is an enormous task."
The FBI is struggling to keep up with homegrown domestic terrorism in the status quo
Perez and Prokupecz 2015 (Perez, Evan, and Shimon Prokupecz. "FBI Struggling with Surge in Homegrown
Terror Cases." CNN.com. Cable News Network, 30 May 2015. Web. 1 July 2015.)
New York (CNN)The New York Police Department and other law
enforcement agencies around the nation are increasing their
surveillance of ISIS supporters in the U.S., in part to aid the FBI which is struggling to keep up with a
surge in the number of possible terror suspects, according to law enforcement officials. The change is part of the fallout from the terrorist
attack in Garland, Texas earlier this month. The FBI says two ISIS supporters attempted a gun attack on a Prophet Mohammad cartoon contest but were killed by
police. One of the attackers, Elton Simpson, was already under investigation by the FBI but managed to elude surveillance to attempt the foiled attack. FBI
Director James Comey told a group of police officials around the country in a secure conference call this
month that the FBI needs help to keep tabs on hundreds of suspects. As a result, some police agencies are adding surveillance
teams to help the FBI monitor suspects. Teams of NYPD officers trained in surveillance are now helping the FBI's surveillance teams to better keep track of suspects,
law enforcement officials say. Why ISIS is winning, and how to stop it NYPD Commissioner William Bratton has said he wants to add 450 officers to the force's
counterterrorism unit, partly to counter the increasing domestic threat posed by ISIS sympathizers. The same is happening with other police departments around the
country. The Los Angeles Police Department's counterterrorism unit is also beefing up its surveillance squads at the request of the FBI, law enforcement officials say.
Comey said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday that he has less confidence now that the FBI can
keep up with the task. "It's an extraordinarily difficult challenge task to find -- that's the first challenge -- and then assess those who may be on a journey
from talking to doing and to find and assess in an environment where increasingly, as the attorney general said, their communications are unavailable to us even with
court orders," Comey said. Interactive: The rise and rise of ISIS "They're on encrypted platforms, so it
is an incredibly difficult task that we are
but I can't stand here with any high
confidence when I confront the world that is increasingly dark to me and tell you that I've got it all
covered," he said. "We are working very, very hard on it but it is an enormous task." On Saturday, an FBI spokesman
enlisting all of our state, local and federal partners in and we're working on it every single day,
said the bureau doesn't have a shortage of resources and the Garland attack wasn't the result of lack of surveillance personnel. If agents had any indication that
Simpson was moving toward an attack, they would have done everything to stop it, the spokesman said. The appeal for local help isn't intended to seek more
surveillance, but more broadly to encourage local law enforcement to increase vigilance given the heightened threat, the FBI said. The Garland attack prompted a
reassessment for FBI officials. Simpson's social media and other communications with known ISIS recruiters drew the FBI's interest earlier this year. The Americans
linked to ISIS FBI agents in Phoenix began regular surveillance of Simpson, though it was not round-the-clock monitoring, according to a U.S. official. The agents
watching Simpson noticed he disappeared for a few days. Investigators looked into his communications and found social media postings making reference to the
Garland cartoon contest. That discovery is what prompted the FBI to send a bulletin to the joint terrorism task force that was monitoring the Garland event. The
bulletin arrived about three hours before the attack. Comey told reporters this month the FBI had no idea Simpson planned to attack the event or even that he had
traveled from his home in Phs oenix to Texas.
Deference Link
The courts and congress defer to the executive now on issues of domestic
surveillance- it has become a key strategy in the war on terror
Benjamin G. Davis in 2008, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law, ARTICLE:
A Citizen Observer's View of the U.S. Approach to the War on Terrorism, 17 Transnat'l L. & Contemp.
Probs. 465, lexis
New evidence suggests that two
key categories of conduct embody the U.S. approach to terrorism:
differentiated repression in the domestic sphere and segmented aggression (used in a descriptive manner only and
not as a reference to international crimes) on the international plane. By differentiated repression, I am describing the
use of target groups, methods, and technology selection for information gathering and investigation, and the use
of judicial or administrative processes and tools to combat perceived terrorist threats in the United States. Over the past five years, the
Executive has sought to enhance its ability to act with or without congressional consent or judicial
oversight. 41 Congress generally has been compliant with the Executive demands. This congressional
compliance has been most notable in the U.S. PATRIOT Act, 42 but also in the Authorizations to Use Military Force Act,
43 Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, 44 the Defense Authorization Acts, 45 and most recently, the Military Commissions Act. 46 In addition to
these [481] examples of legislation, the
past five years have been remarkable in demonstrating significant
congressional deference to the Executive by ranking members of both the Democratic and Republican
parties as expressed by relatively unobtrusive oversight. 47 However, Congress's deference to the Executive has waned
in the wake of the November 2006 mid-term elections where a reversal of the majorities in both houses occurred. 48 The decisions of
the federal courts, while significant, indicate that the Judiciary passively has acquiesced to the other
branches and has held less than a coequal status in the War on Terrorism. While important cases, such as
Hamdan, 49 have come forward, the courts have essentially deferred many important issues to the executivecongressional political dialogue. 50 When the executive and legislative branches strip the courts of jurisdiction or
change the law, recent decisions suggest that the courts have been willing to acquiesce. In particular, the
courts have allowed other branches to decide what distinguishes a citizen from an alien, both in the United States and abroad. 51 In difficult
civil suits touching on peremptory norms of international law, the courts regularly have ruled in favor of the government through the
acceptance of doctrinal assertions such as the state secrets, political question, and federal officer immunity doctrines. 52 The courts'
acquiescence has created an environment of repression in which many individuals are more hesitant to exercise their civil liberties.
Internals
Domestic attacks likely general
Attacks are extremely likely to come from within the state making domestic
surveillance critical
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 41, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
The war on terror is also marked by the growing irrelevance of nation-states. The nation-state is the fundamental unit of international
diplomacy, law enforcement, and discourse. We assume a country is responsible for its sovereign territory. When a criminal crosses a national
border, we rely on the country he or she then resides in to handle the arrest, and we go through a formal extradition process to get that nation
to hand over that criminal. This hierarchical approach is rendered useless when a
tiny group can create weapons that threaten
the population of entire continents. A strategic terror attack, whether nuclear or biological, will very
likely be planned by people residing in Western Europe or the United States—countries with strict laws
protecting individual freedoms. Terrorists in a desert outpost in Sudan or a cave on the Pakistani tribal
frontier have to worry about Special Forces commandos, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and Hellfire rockets. In
Paris, Munich, or San Diego, they won’t have any such concerns.
Domestic Terrorism is a nightmare for national security and requires extensive
surveillance
SEWELL in 2015 (Dan is a writer for Associated Press; “New FBI official: Terror threat in Ohio is surprising”
Published: 2:44 p.m. EDT May 30, 2015 Accessed: 7/1/15;
http://www.bucyrustelegraphforum.com/story/news/state/2015/05/30/new-fbi-official-terror-threat-ohiosurprising/28217115/)
CINCINNATI – The new head of the FBI's wide-ranging Cincinnati division says the threat of homegrown terrorists in her native state is surprising and scary.
Angela Byers became
in charge of the office that covers 48 of Ohio's 88 counties in late February, just after back-to-back arrests of young men in
told The Associated
Press in an interview she was surprised at the threat level in Ohio, and she suspects many people in the Midwest
don't realize that "violent extremists" can pop up anywhere. "It's scary. And it's scary to us. I'm not sure the general
public quite gets the gravity of it," she said. She said counterterrorism efforts are ongoing in her office, although she couldn't comment on any possible other
special agent
Cincinnati and Columbus in separate cases alleging they were plotting attacks in the United States. Both have pleaded not guilty to all charges. Byers
cases. "It seems like once we get one guy, another guy pops up high on the radar," she said. "We just keep moving from one to the next." The cases that broke this year in her division were the
arrests of Christopher Lee Cornell, of suburban Cincinnati, on charges he planned to attack the U.S. Capitol, and Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, 23, of Columbus, accused of planning to attack a
Mark Ensalaco, the director of human rights research at the
University of Dayton, who has written about Middle East terrorism and the Sept. 11 attacks, said trying to detect homegrown "lone
wolves" before they act is "a nightmare for national security." But he said use of confidential informants and federal electronic surveillance
can raise concerns about protecting citizens' rights. Byers said she knows people are worried about privacy, but said the FBI has legal parameters to meet before it would monitor
suspected "bad guys." Electronic surveillance also has limitations because of the extremists' use of secure and
encrypted communication channels. "So it's more important than ever now for us to get cooperation
from the public," she said, adding that family and friends are more able to recognize changes in behavior, adopting of radical views and support for terrorist groups and
military base or prison after returning from terrorist training in Syria.
acts. The 25-year FBI special agent from Shadyside, in eastern Ohio, came to Cincinnati from FBI headquarters, where she headed the financial crimes section of the Criminal Investigative
Division. In other FBI posts, she has investigated financial fraud, health care fraud, public corruption and drug crimes, among assignments. She said she hopes to further strengthen the FBI's
good ties to state and local authorities in the region, and plans ride-alongs with police in Warren and Hamilton counties in southwest Ohio. She said such cooperation will help efforts to fight
the region's serious problems with heroin, and she also wants to learn about other issues. "They (local police) can point out to me what their concerns are and where we might be interested in
knowing things that are going on in their territory," she said.
Domestic terror is on the rise- lone actors
Konstantinides 15
ANNETA KONSTANTINIDES 13 February 2015 “Report claims 'Lone Wolf' domestic terrorism is on the
rise... with an attack or plan foiled every 34 days since 2009” Daily Mail accessed 7/1/15 at
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2952467/Southern-Poverty-Law-Center-finds-lone-wolfdomestic-terrorism-rise.html
A terrorist attack or foiled encounter has taken place, on average, every 34 days in the US since 2009,
according to a study released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The watchdog group urged the government to pay
more attention to domestic terrorist attacks, citing 63 victims in six years from plots carried out by
American extremists, including right-wing radicals and homegrown jihadists. Mark Potok, the study's editor, said the report was not
'trying to diminish the very real jihadist threat' abroad, but rather implored the government to take notice of the dangers at home as well,
according to Yahoo! News. 'We have known since Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 that
there is a very
real and very substantial threat in terms of terrorism from our fellow Americans,' he said. The concept of the
'lone wolf', defined as a person who carries out a terrorist attack entirely on his own, gained popularity in the 1980s from a violent member of
the Ku Klux Klan. Louis Beam advocated for radicals to stop acting together in large groups - which only made it easier for them to get caught and instead called for 'lone wolf action or leaderless resistance' that involved no more than six men. The SPLC study found that 74
per cent
of the 63 incidents examined from April 1, 2009, through Feburary 1, 2015, were carried out or planned
by a single person. And 90 per cent of the incidents were just the work of one or two people. According to the
report, lone wolf's are all the more dangerous because often nobody else knows about their plan for
violence
ISIS Attacks
Islamic State nuclear bomb attack likely
Spencer on 5/22/15 (Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent, “John Cantlie claims 'infinitely'
greater threat of nuclear attack on US”, 5/22/15, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamicstate/11625425/John-Cantlie-claims-infinitely-greater-threat-of-nuclear-attack-on-US.html, 6/30/15)
The chances of Islamic State jihadists smuggling a nuclear weapon to attack the United States have risen
“infinitely”, John Cantlie, the British journalist the group is holding hostage, claims in a new article. Mr Cantlie’s article appears in
the new edition of Dabiq, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s English-language online magazine. Mr Cantlie, whose fellow journalist hostages have all either been
released or beheaded, has appeared in the group’s propaganda videos and written previous pieces. In his latest
work, presumed to be written under pressure but in his hall-mark style combining hyperbole, metaphor
and sarcasm, he says that President Obama’s policies for containing Isil have demonstrably failed and
increased the risk to America. He raises a “hypothetical” possibility under which Isil operatives in Pakistan bribe
an official to provide them with a nuclear device which is smuggled into America via Libya, Nigeria,
South America and Mexico. “Perhaps such a scenario is far-fetched but it’s the sum of all fears for Western
intelligence agencies and it’s infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago,” he writes.
“And if not a nuke, what about a few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosive? That’s easy enough to
make.” He says it is no secret that Isil are planning to attack America on a large scale. “They’re not going to mince about with two
mujahideen taking down a dozen casualties,” he says. “They’ll be looking to do something big, something that would make any
past operation look like a squirrel shoot.” Mr Cantlie’s family will be reassured that he was alive at the time of writing – he mentions the battle for Tikrit,
which took place at the end of March. As with his other articles, “The Perfect Storm” walks a fine line between analysis and advocacy, ridiculing the West in line with Isil’s ideology and using its
language without supporting its objectives.
ISIS has access to dirty bombs and soon could have access to nuclear weapons
Friedman and Edelman 15
DAN FRIEDMAN (covers Congress, the White House and the New York delegation) , ADAM EDELMAN (a political reporter at the Daily News,
where he covers national politics.) “ISIS has enough radioactive material to make dirty bomb: report” New York Daily News June 10, 2015
accessed 6/30/15 at http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/isis-nuclear-material-dirty-bomb-report-article-1.2253492
The montrous fiends with
the Islamic State hope to add another horrific weapon to their arsenal of terror — a
“dirty” bomb. The bloodthirsty jihadist group looted radioactive chemicals from government labs as they rampaged
across Iraq and Syria and hope to assemble explosive devices with them, a British newspaper reported, citing Australian
intelligence officials and ISIS propaganda. The militants bragged in Dabiq, their perverted publicity magazine, that they could soon have
the capability to build or purchase nuclear weapons. A more immediate threat could be “dirty” bombs
— devices that use conventional explosives to spread radioactive or other hazardous materials. According
to The Independent, Australian intelligence officials were so concerned about the group’s intentions, they called for a meeting of the “Australia
Group,” an international forum for stopping the proliferation of chemical weapons. ISIS
“is likely to have amongst its tens of
thousands of recruits the technical expertise necessary to further refine precursor materials and build
chemical weapons,” Julie Bishop, Australia’s minister of foreign affairs, said at the meeting, the newspaper reported, citing intelligence
reports. The renewed concerns over a potential radioactive weapon in the hands of ISIS come a year after
Iraqi officials warned the UN the group had obtained materials that could “be used in manufacturing
weapons of mass destruction."
ISIS is a unique group that is has had success in recruiting Americans
Temple Raston 15
By DINA TEMPLE-RASTON (reports about counterterrorism at home and abroad for NPR News., part of NPRs national security team) • MAY 27,
2015 “For Next President, The Fight Against Extremism Will Hit Closer To Home” accessed 7/1/15 at http://wlrn.org/post/next-president-fightagainst-extremism-will-hit-closer-home
In the past two years, nearly 200 Americans have either tried to travel to Syria and were stopped, are actively considering going, or have
actually made it to the ISIS battlefields there. Al-Qaida has never had that kind of attraction and appeal in the U.S.
The threat of prison clearly isn't solving the problem. So law enforcement officials are starting to entertain alternatives, and that means the next president will likely have to do so as well.
The one thing everyone seems to agree with in regard to ISIS is that it is fundamentally different from alQaida. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sees himself as a religious figure, a descendant of the prophet who has been chosen to create a homeland, or caliphate, for the world's Muslims.
Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, fancied himself a warrior, locking horns with the West. A caliphate, he said, could come later. Similarly, ISIS' goals — at least at this point — are
different. While bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri are focused on attacking the U.S.; IS
and women to leave home to create a state in Syria and Iraq.
IS is endlessly creative in trying to get young men
Impacts
White Supremacists Attacks
Domestic “lone wolf” terrorism very likely from White Supremacist Groups
Konstantinides 13/2/2015 (ANNETA KONSTANTINIDES, freelance Reporter,13/2/2015 'Lone wolf'
domestic terrorism is on the rise, according to new report," Mail Online,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2952467/Southern-Poverty-Law-Center-finds-lone-wolfdomestic-terrorism-rise.html
While recent attacks in Paris and Sydney dominate the headlines, a
new report has found that domestic terrorism by 'lone wolf'
assailants is on the rise. A terrorist attack or foiled encounter has taken place, on average, every 34 days in
the US since 2009, according to a study released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The watchdog group
urged the government to pay more attention to domestic terrorist attacks, citing 63 victims in six years from plots carried out by American extremists, including
the report was not 'trying to diminish the very real jihadist threat' abroad,
but rather implored the government to take notice of the dangers at home as well, according to Yahoo! News. 'We have
known since Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 that there is a very real and very substantial threat in
terms of terrorism from our fellow Americans,' he said. The concept of the 'lone wolf', defined as a person
who carries out a terrorist attack entirely on his own, gained popularity in the 1980s from a violent member
of the Ku Klux Klan. Louis Beam advocated for radicals to stop acting together in large groups - which only made it easier for them to get caught - and
right-wing radicals and homegrown jihadists. Mark Potok, the study's editor, said
instead called for 'lone wolf action or leaderless resistance' that involved no more than six men. The SPLC study found that 74 per cent of the 63 incidents examined
from April 1, 2009, through Feburary 1, 2015, were carried out or planned by a single person. And 90 per cent of the incidents were just the work of one or two
people. According
to the report, lone wolf's are all the more dangerous because often nobody else knows
about their plan for violence. This is because homegrown terrorists are hiding themselves 'in the
anonymity and safety of the Internet', Potok said. he 2012 massacre of six people at a Wisconsin Sikh temple by a neo-Nazi, and the murder of
two police officers and a bystander last summer by a Las Vegas couple with anti-government views, were two of the incidents included in the stu dy. Following the
recent attacks in Sydney and Paris, the White House will hold a summit next week to discuss countering violent extremism. Another recent terrorist act included
was the massacre of six people at a Wisconsin Sikh temple by neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page (pictured) Another recent terrorist act included was the massacre of six
people at a Wisconsin Sikh temple by neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page (pictured) But Potok has concerns the meeting will focus too heavily 'on the threat of Islamist
terrorism'. 'The government, at least in our view, has fallen down in many ways with respect to dealing with domestic terrorism' he said. National Security Council
spokesman Ned Price said the summit will not focus 'on any particular religion, ideology or political movement,' he wrote in an email to Yahoo News. He said the
summit will 'address contemporary challenges' and attempt to 'draw lessons that are applicable to the full spectrum of violent extremists'. A task force dedicated to
domestic terrorism was created after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but it disbanded not long after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The
Department of Homeland Security's team dedicated to non-Islamic domestic terrorism similarly fell
apart in 2009 after it was heavily criticized for a report stating that right-wing radicalism grew
exponentially following the election of Barack Obama to office in 2009. Attorney General Eric Holder announced last
summer that the task force that disintegrated in 2001 would be revived, although the SPLC has noted that a meeting has yet to be held. The report found
that there were two main motivations fueling domestic terrorism. Almost half of the attacks in the last six years
were fueled by anti-government radicals, whereas 51 percent of the incidents were inspired by
ideologies 'of hate', including both white supremacy and radical Islamism. But after the recent attacks in Paris and
Sydney, combined with the ongoing brutality of ISIS, Potok said Muslims in America are 'clearly under fire'. This week three young American-born Muslim students
in North Carolina were brutally executed by their neighbor Craig Stephen Hicks. Although the most recent shooting in Chapel Hill has yet to be ruled a hate crime police believe it was caused by a parking dispute - Potok said he believes the country will only continue to see similar violence. 'It is very likely to get worse before it
gets better
America is most vulnerable to “homegrown” terrorist threats
Margolin & Ross ’15 [Brian Margolin & Josh Ross, 5/08/15, ABC News, “The Gaping Hole in Obama's FBI
Surveillance Reform”] http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attack-spurs-increase-fbi-surveillance-marginalterror/story?id=30910372
But the officials who spoke to ABC News described
a “panic” and “crisis” inside the FBI because the agency and
the rest of the nation’s homeland security infrastructure are not built to deal with the non-stop flow of
homegrown extremists and possible threats that mark the current environment within the U.S. Another FBI spokesperson did not
respond to request for comment on the broader concerns at the Bureau. Another senior FBI official who was on the call with Comey and
Johnson told ABC News of the domestic threat, “Every city has a subject or subjects of concern.” Speaking to reporters, Comey and senior
leaders did not characterize the atmosphere as either “crisis” or a “panic” but acknowledged that the bureau if facing
serious “challenges” because the system is stretched thin. The officials said the FBI is increasingly seeing online ISIS
supporters and recruiters urge Americans to direct their efforts to target their own country if they can’t travel to Syria or Iraq to join the Islamic
State. In one Twitter message to Simpson from an ISIS recruiter known as “Miski” prior to the Texas shooting, Simpson was told he could more
easily meet Allah by staying in the U.S. than by “touring,” or traveling to Syria. Comey told reporters Thursday that the messaging shift has been
detected in recent weeks by American analysts and it’s troubling. “If
you can’t travel, kill where you are,” Comey said,
explaining the new directives coming from ISIS recruiters. ABC News contributor Steve Gomez, the former head of
counter-terror investigations at the FBI’s Los Angeles division, said, “This upends the entire U.S. counter-terror
protocol, which has always called for the U.S. to fight terror in the Mideast to keep it from winding up
inside the homeland.” More than a hundred U.S. residents are considered possible terror threats, the FBI announced recently. The
number of “borderline” or “marginal” suspects is substantially larger and would badly strain FBI
resources if they required 24/7 surveillance by agents. Typically, it takes at least 30 agents for a full,
round-the-clock surveillance of just one suspect.
Homegrown terrorists are the worst threat because even after arrest, they remain at
large
Margolin & Ross ’15 [Brian Margolin & Josh Ross, 5/08/15, ABC News, “The Gaping Hole in Obama's FBI
Surveillance Reform”] http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attack-spurs-increase-fbi-surveillance-marginalterror/story?id=30910372
Comey said that Simpson
was first placed under FBI watch since 2006, when the agency first learned the
Phoenix-area man wanted to join al-Shabab, the al Qaeda-linked group in Somalia. Simpson was ultimately
indicted on terrorism charges and convicted, but due to questions over the government’s case, he never
went to prison and was sentenced to probation. The FBI officially closed its case into Simpson last year.
Two months ago, however, the FBI found out about Simpson’s newer social media postings, suggesting “renewed interest in jihad” with ISIS.
Agents then tried to determine “what he was up to,” the director said. Just hours before the controversial gathering in Garland Sunday, the FBI
realized that Simpson might consider attacking the site. About three hours before the event was to begin, the FBI sent Garland police an
intelligence bulletin warning that Simpson may be interested in traveling to Texas and attacking the event, according to Comey, who said the
bulletin included a picture of Simpson and a suspected license plate. Prior
to that, Comey insisted the FBI had no reason to
believe Simpson would actually try to carry out an attack. The incident is the starkest example to date
showing the tenuous position American counter-terror officials now find themselves in. “It’s back to the
unknown, like post 9/11,” said one senior FBI officials. “Are we really one step ahead of it? The threat has evolved in the just last
six months.” In addition to the fear that people perceived as “marginal” extremists could act, the FBI is
being “overwhelmed” by the exponential growth of recruitment activities in cyberspace. “The problem
is there are so many new platforms and new media forums it’s trying to catch up on that,” said one of
the FBI officials. “The threats are moving a hundred miles an hour and the difficulty is differentiating between kids who are just tweeting
and guys that are for real.”
Right wing extremist terrorism is growing and by far outweighs foreign attacks
Obeidallah ’14 [Dean Obeidallah, Obeidallah has a J.D. from Fordham Law School and practiced law from 1996-2000 6/11/14,
The Daily Beast, “Home-Grown, Right-Wing Terrorism: The Hate the GOP Refuses to See”] Accessed
Online: 7/01/15 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/11/home-grown-right-wing-terrorismthe-hate-the-gop-refuses-to-see.html
As the Las Vegas shootings show, right-wing extremism is real and on the rise. But for Republicans, better to focus
on the Muslims. Remember in 2009, right at the start of the Obama era, when then-Secretary of Department of Homeland Security Janet
Napolitano issued a report (PDF) entitled: “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization
and Recruitment”? The report was truly prescient. It alerted us to the rise of right-wing
extremism, such as from white
supremacist groups, and warned that unchecked, it could lead to violence. How did Republicans respond? They
went ballistic attacking the report. John Boehner was especially upset that Napolitano would use the term “terrorist” to “describe American
citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation,” adding, “using such broad-based generalizations about
the American people is simply outrageous.” Well, what have we seen since 2010? An
explosion in the number of hate groups
and a rash of domestic terrorist acts committed by those very right-wing groups Napolitano warned us about. Per the
Southern Poverty Law Center, since 2010, there have been 32 instances of terrorism by far-right groups—that
equals eight attacks per year. (Of course, citing the SPLC won’t move many on the right because they continually tell me on Twitter
that the SPLC is biased. They’re correct, the SPLC is biased. Against bigotry.) The attacks include a plot in 2011 by members of
a Georgia militia group to bomb a federal building and release deadly ricin in Atlanta; an attack by a
white supremacist on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that killed six people; another white supremacist
planting bombs at a Martin Luther King parade in Seattle; and numerous plots against or actual killings of law enforcement
officers. And this list doesn’t even include the anti-government LAX gunman who killed a TSA officer and wounded another in November 2013,
or the attack we saw this past weekend by Jerad and Amanda Miller, who executed two Las Vegas policemen and then tossed the Gadsden flag
used by the Tea Party onto the dead officers’ bodies. So how have Republicans responded to the rise of attacks by right-wing groups? By
ignoring it and keeping their focus on foreign terrorists and Muslim-Americans. Perhaps the Republican members of Congress would find it
instructive to reread the oath they took upon being sworn into office that provides in part: “I do solemnly swear to defend the United
States…against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Republicans won’t investigate right-wing extremists because it would not only anger their
base, it would actually indict some parts of it. I’m sure they are fully aware of these words. The actual reason Republicans won’t investigate
right-wing extremists is that it would not only anger their base, it would actually indict some parts of it. Let’s be honest: In a time when
establishment Republicans are concerned about getting challenged in primaries by more conservative Tea Party types, calling for hearings to
investigate right-wing organizations could be political suicide. So instead, in 2011 and 2012 we saw Rep. Peter King hold five sets of hearings
about the radicalization of Muslims when he was chair of the House Homeland Security Committee. I attended the first of these hearings and
listened as Democratic members of the committee urged King to broaden his investigation to look at radicalization of Americans regardless of
faith. They cited studies warning of a record number of right-wing hate groups and resurgence of anti-government chatter. But King wouldn’t
have any of it. We have seen similar tactics by Republicans in state legislatures. Instead of focusing on potential far-right groups in their state,
they have passed laws intended to demonize Muslims because it plays to their base. In fact, just last month in Florida, an anti-sharia measure
was signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott even though supporters admitted there hadn’t been even one instance of Muslims in Florida trying to
impose Islamic law. Yet, in
Florida there has been a documented upsurge in the Ku Klux Klan, with the group
now boasting more than 1,000 members. And some Republican elected officials have even implicitly given their blessings to the
right-wing view that weapons may be needed to fight off an overreaching federal government. We saw this during the recent standoff between
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and federal officers. Rand Paul and other GOP officials praised Bundy with full knowledge that there was in
essence an armed militia of private citizens who had their guns trained on federal officers. The
threat of right-wing domestic
terrorism is very real. In fact, just last week, the Department of Justice announced that it was reviving its
domestic terrorism taskforce. As Attorney General Eric Holder explained, we must be vigilant in
protecting Americans against the “danger we face from individuals within our own borders who may be
motivated by a variety of other causes from anti-government animus to racial prejudice.” It’s time that
the GOP join in the fight against the threats posed to our nation by right-wing extremists. True, this
could cause them problems with parts of their own political base, but saving American lives must trump
politics.
Right wing extremist terrorism is growing and by far outweighs foreign attacks
DHS ‘09 [The Department of Homeland Security, 4/07/09, “Home-Grown, Right-Wing Terrorism: The
Hate the GOP Refuses to See”] Accessed Online: 7/01/15
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/041609_extremism.pdf
Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to
recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda. (U//FOUO)
The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled
largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other
foreign powers. — (U//FOUO) During the 1990s, these issues contributed to the growth
in the number of domestic rightwing
terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law
enforcement officers, banks, and infrastructure sectors. — (U//FOUO) Growth of these groups subsided in reaction to
increased government scrutiny as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and disrupted plots, improvements in the economy, and the
continued U.S. standing as the preeminent world power. (U//FOUO) The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of
military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or
lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.
Al’ Qaeda Attacks
Growing Terrorist Threats- Al Qaeda committed to attacking the West
Hubbard 15, Ben Hubbard, June 9th 2015, “Al Qaeda Tries a New Tactic to Keep Power: Sharing it”,
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/world/middleeast/qaeda-yemen-syriahouthis.html?_r=0
Beirut, Lebanon- after they routed the army in southern Yemen, fighters from Al Qaeda stormed into the city of Al Mukalla, seizing government buildings, releasing
jihadist from prisons and stealing millions of dollars from the central bank. Then they surprised everyone. Instead of raising their flags and imposing Islamic law,
they passed control to a civilian council and gave it a budget to pay salaries, import fuel and hire teams to clean up garbage. The fighters receded into the
background, maintaining only a single police station to arbitrate disputes . Al Qaeda’s takeover
of Yemen’s fifth-largest city in April was the
most direct indication yet that the group’s most potent regional affiliates are evolving after years of
American drone strikes killing their leaders and changing to meet the challenge posed by the Islamic
State’s competing and land-grabbing model of jihad. In doing so, they are distancing themselves from
one of Osama bin Laden’s central precepts: That fighters should focus on the “far enemy” in the West
and not get bogged down in local insurgencies. In recent weeks, the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen has allied with armed tribes to fight Iranianbacked Houthi rebels, putting that alliance on the same side of the country’s civil war as the United States and Saudi Arabia. In Syria, Qaeda-allied fighters are
important members of a rebel coalition against President Bashar al-Assad that includes groups supported by the West. This strategy has clear benefits for a group
that has long been near the top of the United States’s list of enemies by allowing it to build local support while providing some cover against the threat of foreign
military action.
But despite Al Qaeda’s increased involvement in local battles, American officials say the group
remains committed to attacking the West, a goal that could be easier to plot from sanctuaries where it
enjoys local support. Cooperating with others could also give Al Qaeda a long-term advantage in its
competition with the extremists of the Islamic State, analysts said. Since its public break with Al Qaeda last year,
the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has stolen the jihadist limelight by seizing cities in Syria and Iraq
and declaring a caliphate in the territory it controls. This has won it the allegiances of other militant cells
from Libya to Afghanistan. The Islamic State has insisted that other groups join it or be considered enemies, a
tactic that has alienated many in areas it controls. And its public celebration of violence, including the beheading of Western hostages, helped spur the formation of
a United States-led military coalition that is bombing the group. Al Qaeda’s branches in Syria and Yemen have taken a different route, building ties with local groups
and refraining from the strict application of Shariah, the legal code of Islam, when faced with local resistance, according to residents of areas where Al Qaeda holds
sway. When Al Qaeda took over Al Mukalla in April, it seized government buildings and used trucks to cart off more than $120 million from the central bank,
according to the bank’s director, Abdul-Qader Foulihan. That sum could not be independently verified. But it soon passed control to a civilian council, giving it a
budget of more than $4 million to provide services, an arrangement that made sense to local officials seeking to serve their people during wartime. “We are not
Qaeda stooges,” said Abdul-Hakeem bin Mahfood, the council’s secretary general, in a telephone interview. “We formed the council to avoid the destruction of the
city.” While the council pays salaries and distributes fuel, Al Qaeda maintains a police station to settle disputes, residents said. It has so far made no effort to ban
smoking or regulate how women dress. Nor has it called itself Al Qaeda, instead using the name the Sons of Hadhramaut to emphasize its ties to the surrounding
province. One self-described Qaeda member said that the choice of name was deliberate, recalling that after the group seized territory in southern Yemen in 2011,
the country’s military had mobilized to push it out with support from the United States. “We were in control for a year and six months, we applied God’s law, we
created a small state and the whole world saw it, but they did not leave us alone,” the man said in an interviewwith a Yemeni television station. “So we came here
with the name the Sons of Hadhramaut, but the people here know who we are.” American
officials have long considered the terrorist
group’s Yemeni branch, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the most dangerous to the West. It has sought
to carry out attacks against the United States, and it retains sophisticated bomb-making expertise. Now,
Yemen’s civil war has given the group an opportunity to expand, analysts said. After Houthi rebels seized the Yemeni capitaland
forced the president into exile, Saudi Arabia began leading a bombing campaign aimed at pushing the Houthis back. With all that going on, no one has tried to
dislodge Al Qaeda from Al Mukalla, although American drone strikes have killed top Qaeda leaders nearby. April Longley Alley, a Yemen analyst with the
International Crisis Group, said there was reason to worry that the close ties between Qaeda fighters and other armed elements meant that any foreign military
support given to fight the Houthis could eventually end up in Al Qaeda’s hands.
The threat of nuclear terror is high, particularly from al Qaeda
Bunn et al 13 (Matthew, Valentin Kuznetsov, Martin B. Malin, Yuri Morozov, Simon Saradzhyan, William H. Tobey, Viktor I. Yesin, and
Pavel S. Zolotarev. "Steps to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism." Paper, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School,
October 2, 2013, Matthew Bunn. Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School andCo-Principal Investigator of Project on
Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. • Vice Admiral Valentin Kuznetsov. Senior
research fellow at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Senior Military Representative of the Russian
Ministry of Defense to NATO from 2002 to 2008. • Martin Malin. Executive Director of the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center
for Science and International Affairs. • Colonel Yuri Morozov (retired Russian Armed Forces). Professor of the Russian Academy of Military
Sciences and senior research fellow at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, chief of department at
the Center for Military-Strategic Studies at the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces from 1995 to 2000. • Simon Saradzhyan. Fellow at
Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Moscow-based defense and security expert and writer from 1993 to
2008. • William Tobey. Senior fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and director of the U.S.-Russia
Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism, deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the U.S. National Nuclear Security
Administration from 2006 to 2009. • Colonel General Viktor Yesin (retired Russian Armed Forces). Leading research fellow at the Institute for
U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and advisor to commander of the Strategic Missile Forces of Russia, chief of staff
of the Strategic Missile Forces from 1994 to 1996. • Major General Pavel Zolotarev (retired Russian Armed Forces). Deputy director of the
Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the Information and Analysis Center of the Russian Ministry
of Defense from1993 to 1997, section head - deputy chief of staff of the Defense Council of Russia from 1997 to 1998., 10/2/2013, "Steps to
Prevent Nuclear Terrorism: Recommendations Based on the U.S.-Russia Joint Threat Assessment",
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23430/steps_to_prevent_nuclear_terrorism.html)
Nuclear terrorism is a real and urgent threat. Urgent actions are required to reduce the risk. The risk is driven
by the rise of terrorists who seek to inflict unlimited damage, many of whom have sought justification for their plans in radical interpretations
of Islam; by the spread of information about the decades-old technology of nuclear weapons; by the increased availability of weapons-usable
nuclear materials; and by globalization, which makes it easier to move people, technologies, and materials across the world. • Making
a
crude nuclear bomb would not be easy, but is potentially within the capabilities of a technically sophisticated
terrorist group, as numerous government studies have confirmed. Detonating a stolen nuclear weapon would likely be
difficult for terrorists to accomplish, if the weapon was equipped with modern technical safeguards (such as the electronic locks known as
Permissive Action Links, or PALs).
Terrorists could, however, cut open a stolen nuclear weapon and make use of its
nuclear material for a bomb of their own. • The nuclear material for a bomb is small and difficult to
detect, making it a major challenge to stop nuclear smuggling or to recover nuclear material after it has
been stolen. Hence, a primary focus in reducing the risk must be to keep nuclear material and nuclear weapons from being stolen by
continually improving their security, as agreed at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April 2010. • Al-Qaeda has sought
nuclear weapons for almost two decades. The group has repeatedly attempted to purchase stolen
nuclear material or nuclear weapons, and has repeatedly attempted to recruit nuclear expertise. AlQaeda reportedly conducted tests of conventional explosives for its nuclear program in the desert in
Afghanistan. The group’s nuclear ambitions continued after its dispersal following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Recent
writings from top al-Qaeda leadership are focused on justifying the mass slaughter of civilians, including the use of weapons of mass
destruction, and are in all likelihood intended to provide a formal religious justification for nuclear use. • While there are significant gaps in
coverage of the group’s activities, al-Qaeda appears to have been frustrated thus far in acquiring a nuclear capability; it is unclear whether
the the group has acquired weapons-usable nuclear material or the expertise needed to make such material into a bomb. Furthermore,
pressure from a broad range of counter-terrorist actions probably has reduced the group’s ability to manage large, complex projects, but has
not eliminated the danger. However, there is no sign the group has abandoned its nuclear ambitions. On the contrary,
leadership
statements as recently as 2008 indicate that the intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is as
strong as ever. • Terrorist groups from the North Caucasus have in the past planned to seize a nuclear
submarine armed with nuclear weapons; have carried out reconnaissance on nuclear weapon storage sites; and have repeatedly
threatened to sabotage nuclear facilities or to use radiological “dirty bombs.” In recent years, these groups have become
more focused on an extreme Islamic objective which might be seen as justifying the use of nuclear
weapons. These groups’ capabilities to manage large, complex projects have also been reduced by counter-terrorist actions, though they
have demonstrated a continuing ability to launch devastating attacks in Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian heartland.
Growing Terrorist Threats- Al Qaeda committed to attacking the West
Hubbard 15, Ben Hubbard, June 9th 2015, “Al Qaeda Tries a New Tactic to Keep Power: Sharing it”,
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/world/middleeast/qaeda-yemen-syriahouthis.html?_r=0
Beirut, Lebanon- after they routed the army in southern Yemen, fighters from Al Qaeda stormed into the city of Al Mukalla, seizing government
buildings, releasing jihadist from prisons and stealing millions of dollars from the central bank. Then they surprised everyone. Instead of raising
their flags and imposing Islamic law, they passed control to a civilian council and gave it a budget to pay salaries, import fuel and hire teams to
clean up garbage. The fighters receded into the background, maintaining only a single police station to arbitrate disputes.
Al Qaeda’s
takeover of Yemen’s fifth-largest city in April was the most direct indication yet that the group’s most
potent regional affiliates are evolving after years of American drone strikes killing their leaders and
changing to meet the challenge posed by the Islamic State’s competing and land-grabbing model of
jihad. In doing so, they are distancing themselves from one of Osama bin Laden’s central precepts: That
fighters should focus on the “far enemy” in the West and not get bogged down in local insurgencies. In
recent weeks, the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen has allied with armed tribes to fight Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, putting that alliance on the same
side of the country’s civil war as the United States and Saudi Arabia. In Syria, Qaeda-allied fighters are important members of a rebel coalition
against President Bashar al-Assad that includes groups supported by the West. This strategy has clear benefits for a group that has long been
near the top of the United States’s list of enemies by allowing it to build local support while providing some cover against the threat of foreign
military action.
But despite Al Qaeda’s increased involvement in local battles, American officials say the
group remains committed to attacking the West, a goal that could be easier to plot from sanctuaries
where it enjoys local support. Cooperating with others could also give Al Qaeda a long-term advantage
in its competition with the extremists of the Islamic State, analysts said. Since its public break with Al
Qaeda last year, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has stolen the jihadist limelight by seizing
cities in Syria and Iraq and declaring a caliphate in the territory it controls. This has won it the
allegiances of other militant cells from Libya to Afghanistan. The Islamic State has insisted that other
groups join it or be considered enemies, a tactic that has alienated many in areas it controls. And its public celebration of
violence, including the beheading of Western hostages, helped spur the formation of a United States-led military coalition that is bombing the
group. Al Qaeda’s branches in Syria and Yemen have taken a different route, building ties with local groups and refraining from the strict
application of Shariah, the legal code of Islam, when faced with local resistance, according to residents of areas where Al Qaeda holds sway.
When Al Qaeda took over Al Mukalla in April, it seized government buildings and used trucks to cart off more than $120 million from the central
bank, according to the bank’s director, Abdul-Qader Foulihan. That sum could not be independently verified. But it soon passed control to a
civilian council, giving it a budget of more than $4 million to provide services, an arrangement that made sense to local officials seeking to serve
their people during wartime. “We are not Qaeda stooges,” said Abdul-Hakeem bin Mahfood, the council’s secretary general, in a telephone
interview. “We formed the council to avoid the destruction of the city.” While the council pays salaries and distributes fuel, Al Qaeda maintains
a police station to settle disputes, residents said. It has so far made no effort to ban smoking or regulate how women dress. Nor has it called
itself Al Qaeda, instead using the name the Sons of Hadhramaut to emphasize its ties to the surrounding province. One self-described Qaeda
member said that the choice of name was deliberate, recalling that after the group seized territory in southern Yemen in 2011, the country’s
military had mobilized to push it out with support from the United States. “We were in control for a year and six months, we applied God’s law,
we created a small state and the whole world saw it, but they did not leave us alone,” the man said in an interviewwith a Yemeni television
station. “So we came here with the name the Sons of Hadhramaut, but the people here know who we are.” American
officials have
long considered the terrorist group’s Yemeni branch, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the
most dangerous to the West. It has sought to carry out attacks against the United States, and it retains
sophisticated bomb-making expertise. Now, Yemen’s civil war has given the group an opportunity to
expand, analysts said. After Houthi rebels seized the Yemeni capitaland forced the president into exile, Saudi Arabia began leading a
bombing campaign aimed at pushing the Houthis back. With all that going on, no one has tried to dislodge Al Qaeda from Al Mukalla, although
American drone strikes have killed top Qaeda leaders nearby. April Longley Alley, a Yemen analyst with the International Crisis Group, said
there was reason to worry that the close ties between Qaeda fighters and other armed elements meant that any foreign military support given
to fight the Houthis could eventually end up in Al Qaeda’s hands.
Generic Terrorism
Terrorism causes extinction---intelligence key to stop, outweighs aff impacts, worse
HR violations than privacy
Nathan Myhrvold '13, Phd in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton, and founded
Intellectual Ventures after retiring as chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft
Corporation , July 2013, "Stratgic Terrorism: A Call to Action," The Lawfare Research Paper Series No.2,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Strategic-Terrorism-Myhrvold-7-3-2013.pdf
Several powerful
trends have aligned to profoundly change the way that the world works. Technology ¶ now
allows stateless groups to organize, recruit, and fund ¶ themselves in an unprecedented fashion. That,
coupled ¶ with the extreme difficulty of finding and punishing a stateless group, means that stateless groups are
positioned to be ¶ lead players on the world stage. They may act on their own, ¶ or they may act as proxies for
nation-states that wish to ¶ duck responsibility. Either way, stateless groups are forces ¶ to be reckoned with.¶ At the same time, a
different set of technology trends ¶ means that small numbers of people can obtain incredibly ¶ lethal power.
Now, for the first time in human history, a ¶ small group can be as lethal as the largest superpower. Such ¶ a group could execute an
attack that could kill millions of ¶ people. It is technically feasible for such a group to kill billions of people, to end modern
civilization—perhaps even ¶ to drive the human race to extinction. Our defense establishment was shaped over decades to ¶ address what
was, for a long time, the only strategic threat ¶ our nation faced: Soviet or Chinese missiles. More recently, ¶ it has started retooling to address tactical terror
attacks like ¶ those launched on the morning of 9/11, but the reform ¶ process is incomplete and inconsistent. A
real defense will ¶ require
rebuilding our military and intelligence capabilities from the ground up. Yet, so far, strategic terrorism has ¶ received
relatively little attention in defense agencies, and ¶ the efforts that have been launched to combat this
existential threat seem fragmented.¶ History suggests what will happen. The only thing that shakes
America out of complacency is a direct threat from a determined adversary that confronts us with our
shortcomings by repeatedly attacking us or hectoring us for decades.
Nuclear Terrorism
Nuclear terrorism poses a threat to global security – nuclear protections still not up to
par
Dahl ’14 (Fredrik Dahl, Reuters, Mar 25, “U.S. and Russia agree on nuclear terrorism threat - up to a
point” http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/25/us-nuclear-security-summitidUSBREA2O12820140325)
World leaders called on countries on Tuesday to cut their use and their stocks of highly enriched nuclear
fuel to the minimum to help prevent al Qaeda-style militants from obtaining material for atomic bombs.
Winding up a third nuclear security summit since 2010, this one overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis, 53 countries - including the United States
and Russia at a time of high tension between them - agreed much headway had been made in the past four years. But they also underlined that
many challenges remained and stressed the need for increased international cooperation to make sure highly enriched uranium (HEU),
plutonium and other radioactive substances do not fall into the wrong hands. The United States and Russia set aside their differences over
Crimea to endorse the meeting's final statement aimed at enhancing nuclear security around the world, together with other big powers
including China, France, Germany and Britain. But Russia, China and 16 other countries shunned a separate initiative of the United States, the
Netherlands and South Korea at the summit to incorporate U.N. nuclear agency security guidelines into national rules. "The absence of Russia,
China, Pakistan, and India — all nuclear weapons states with large amounts of nuclear material —as well as others ... weakens the initiative's
impact," said the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG) of security experts. The Dutch hosts hailed the summit as "a major step towards a
safer world". By contrast, the FMWG said the summit had taken "moderate steps" toward stopping dangerous weapons-usable nuclear
materials from going astray but that bolder, more concerted action was needed. U.S. President Barack Obama said Ukraine's decision at the
first nuclear security summit in Washington in 2010 to remove all of its HEU was a "vivid reminder that the more of this material we can secure,
the safer all of our countries will be". "Had that not happened, those dangerous nuclear materials would still be there now," Obama told a news
conference. "And the difficult situation we are dealing with in Ukraine today would involve yet another level of concern." LACKING SECURITY?
At this year's summit, Belgium and Italy announced that they had shipped out HEU and plutonium to the United States for down-blending into
less proliferation-sensitive material or disposal. Japan said it would send hundreds of kilograms (pounds) of such material to the United States.
Like plutonium, uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power plants but also provides the fissile core of a bomb if refined to a high level. "We
encourage states to minimize their stocks of HEU and to keep their stockpile of separated plutonium to the minimum level," said the summit
communiqué, which went further in this respect than the previous summit, in Seoul in 2012. A fourth meeting will be held in Chicago in 2016,
returning to the United States where the process was launched by Obama. "We still have a lot more work to do to fulfill the ambitious goals we
set four years ago to fully secure all nuclear and radiological material, civilian and military," Obama said.
To drive home the
importance of being prepared, the hosts sprang a surprise by organizing a simulation game for the
leaders in which they were asked to react to a fictitious nuclear attack or accident in a made-up state,
officials said. Analysts say that radical groups could theoretically build a crude but deadly nuclear bomb
if they had the money, technical knowledge and fissile substances needed. Obtaining weapons-grade nuclear
material - HEU or plutonium - poses the biggest challenge for militants, so it must be kept secure both at civilian and military sites, they say.
Around 2,000 metric tonnes (2204 tons) of highly-radioactive materials are spread across hundreds of sites in 25 countries. Most of the
materials is under military control but a significant quantity is stored in less secured civilian locations, the FMWG said. "DIRTY BOMB" Since
1991, the number of countries with nuclear weapons-usable material has roughly halved from some 50. However, more than 120 research and
isotope production reactors around the world still use HEU for fuel or targets, many of them with "very modest" security measures, a Harvard
Kennedy School report said this month. "With at least two and possibly three groups having pursued nuclear weapons in the past quarter
century, they are not likely to be the last," the report said. Referring to a push to use low-enriched uranium (LEU) as fuel in research and other
reactor types instead of HEU, the summit statement said: "We encourage states to continue to minimize the use of HEU through the conversion
of reactor fuel from HEU to LEU, where technically and economically feasible. "Similarly, we will continue to encourage and support efforts to
use non-HEU technologies for the production of radio-isotopes, including financial incentives," it said. An
apple-sized amount of
plutonium in a nuclear device and detonated in a highly populated area could instantly kill or wound
hundreds of thousands of people, according to the Nuclear Security Governance Experts Group (NSGEG) lobby group. But a socalled "dirty bomb" is seen as a more likely threat than an atomic bomb: conventional explosives are used to disperse radiation from a
radioactive source, which can be found in hospitals or other places that may not be very well secured.
In December, Mexican police
found a truck they suspected was stolen by common thieves and which carried a radioactive medical
material that could have provided such an ingredient. In another incident that put nuclear security in the
spotlight and embarrassed U.S. officials, an elderly nun and two peace activists have admitted breaking
into a Tennessee defense facility in 2012 where uranium for atomic bombs is stored.
Nuclear terrorism is real- at least 46 other nations agree that this threat is real and
dangerous
Brill and Luongo in 2012 (Kenneth c. Brill and Kenneth n. Luongo, “Nuclear Terrorism: A Clear
Danger”, MARCH 15, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/opinion/nuclear-terrorism-a-cleardanger.html?_r=0, 6/30/15)
Terrorists exploit gaps in security. The current global regime for protecting the nuclear materials that
terrorists desire for their ultimate weapon is far from seamless. It is based largely on unaccountable,
voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders. Its weak links make it dangerous and
inadequate to prevent nuclear terrorism. Later this month in Seoul, the more than 50 world leaders who
will gather for the second Nuclear Security Summit need to seize the opportunity to start developing an
accountable regime to prevent nuclear terrorism. There is a consensus among international leaders
that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, not a Hollywood confection. President Obama, the leaders
of 46 other nations, the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, and
numerous experts have called nuclear terrorism one of the most serious threats to global security and
stability. It is also preventable with more aggressive action. At least four terrorist groups, including Al
Qaeda, have demonstrated interest in using a nuclear device. These groups operate in or near states
with histories of questionable nuclear security practices. Terrorists do not need to steal a nuclear
weapon. It is quite possible to make an improvised nuclear device from highly enriched uranium or
plutonium being used for civilian purposes. And there is a black market in such material. There have
been 18 confirmed thefts or loss of weapons-usable nuclear material. In 2011, the Moldovan police
broke up part of a smuggling ring attempting to sell highly enriched uranium; one member is thought to
remain at large with a kilogram of this material. A terrorist nuclear explosion could kill hundreds of
thousands, create billions of dollars in damages and undermine the global economy. Former Secretary
General Kofi Annan of the United Nations said that an act of nuclear terrorism “would thrust tens of
millions of people into dire poverty” and create “a second death toll throughout the developing
world.”
Terrorists are likely to strike for the purpose of nuclear counterattack
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 40, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
The newer and less understood danger arises from the increasing likelihood that stateless groups, bent on
terrorism, will gain access to nuclear weapons, most likely by theft from a nation-state. Should this happen,
the danger we now perceive to be coming from rogue states will pale in comparison. The ultimate
response to a nuclear attack is a nuclear counterattack. Nation states have an address, and they know that we will retaliate
in kind. Stateless groups are much more difficult to find which makes a nuclear counterattack virtually
impossible. As a result, they can strike without fear of overwhelming retaliation, and thus they wield
much more effective destructive power. Indeed, in many cases the fundamental equation of retaliation
has become reversed. Terrorists often hope to provoke reprisal attacks on their own people, swaying
popular opinion in their favor.
Terrorists want nukes and we cannot exclude them from our decision calculus
Mattox 10
MATTOX, JOHN MARK. Mattox the Director of the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Graduate
Fellowship Program and a Senior Research Fellow at the National Defense University Center for the
Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction. "Nuclear Terrorism: The 'Other' Extreme Of Irregular Warfare."
Journal Of Military Ethics 9.2 (2010): 160-176. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 June 2015.
Meanwhile, nuclear weapons continue to exist and terrorists have stated their intention to acquire them.
Even the presidential vision, enshrined in the Nuclear Posture Review Report, of ‘the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons’
(US Defense Department 2010: 1) does not necessarily equate to ‘a world without threats which nuclear weapons may be necessary to deter’.
This means, of course, that the
discussion of nuclear weapons, as pleasant as it would be to avoid, cannot logically be
excluded from the calculus of national defense. We live in a world that is less stable, in nuclear terms,
than it ever has been. Our cherished notion that the consequences of nuclear weapons use by terrorists
are too terrible to contemplate, with the result that we simply won’t contemplate them, is itself morally problematic.
Nuclear Terrorism and Chemical Terrorism are both likely and have high magnitude
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 41-42, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
The cost of nuclear weapons has had two stabilizing effects. First, the list of nations that could afford to play the nuclear game was very small. Second, each leader
with a finger on “the button” bore the full responsibility for a large and complex state—each understood that using the weapons would bring a very dangerous
reprisal. The inescapable equation tying highly lethal weapons systems to high cost and complexity meant that the power to devastate was available only to the
richest and most sophisticated states—until now. Two major factors change this equation. The first is that nuclear
weapons are now in the
hands of countries like Pakistan, North Korea, and perhaps soon Iran. These countries have an official
posture toward United States that is hostile, and each has internal elements even more radical than
their official policy, some supporting state sponsored conventional terrorism. It is hard to discount the
possibility that their nuclear weapons will be stolen, or diverted to terrorists by corrupt, ineffective or
ideologically motivated elements in their own governments. Stealing is much cheaper than building, and it
could be a route for nuclear weapons to reach stateless groups. A nuclear weapon smuggled into an American city could kill
between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people, depending on the nature and location of the device. An optimist might say that it will take decades
for such a calamity to take place; a pessimist would point out that the plot may already be under way The second major factor is that modern technology
allows very small groups the ability to create immensely powerful weapons with small teams of people and
trivial budgets compared to nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons, particularly nerve agents, are part of the terrorist
arsenal. Sarin, a frighteningly lethal poison was produced and released in locations in the Tokyo subway
system in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese religious cult. The attack injured nearly 3,800 people and killed 12. A
botched distribution scheme spared many of the intended victims; better dispersal technology would have resulted in a vastly higher death
toll. Experts estimated that Aum Shinrikyo had the ingredients to produce enough Sarin to kill millions of
people in an all-out attack. Frightening as such possibilities are, nuclear bombs and chemical agents pale in lethality when compared with biological
weapons. The cost and technical difficulty of producing biological arms has dropped precipitously in recent decades with the boom in molecular biology. A small
team of people with the necessary technical training and cheap equipment can create weapons far more terrible than any nuclear bomb.
High Magnitude attacks are extremely likely from terrorist groups
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 41, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
Stateless groups have the same level of ambition as nation-states and ought to be treated as operating
on the same footing. Was it rational to worry that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear war to further their communist hegemony
or simply to destroy the United States—or out of fear that we would attack them in this way first? Dealing with those questions consumed $1
trillion of defense spending and shaped the Cold War. When
compared to the Soviets, the risk that al-Qaeda or some
future group will use high M-impact weapons seems higher on every level. Their geopolitical goals are
more ambitious. The ideology is more extreme. The vulnerability to counterattack or reprisal is low.
Terrorists have demonstrated a shocking degree of ruthlessness. Under any rational theory of risk, these
foes must be considered likely to act. Plus, it is no secret that the United States aims to exterminate al-Qaeda and similar terrorist
groups—and rightly so. With revenge and self-preservation on their minds, our primary adversaries are not likely to show us unnecessary
mercy. Additionally, terrorism
survives by making a big impact; when the world gets desensitized to car
bombs, mass shootings, and beheadings, the temptation to one-up the last attack increases. The belief
that terror groups will not use terrible weapons if they get them seems foolish in the extreme. To borrow a
phrase from A Streetcar Named Desire, to hold this belief is, in effect, to rely “on the kindness of” terrorists. Any rational analysis
must assign a substantial amount of the terror risk to large-scale, high magnitude events. Yet that is not how
our defenses are organized and not how we are spending our resources. Instead, we focus most of our counterterrorism efforts on thwarting
small-scale attacks.
A2:No Nuclear Terror
Dedicated terrorist groups can obtain nuclear weapons
Brill and Luongo in 2012 (KENNETH C. BRILL; is a former U.S. ambassador to the I.A.E.A.is president of the
Partnership for Global Security. Both are members of the Fissile Material Working Group, a nonpartisan
nongovernmental organization. And KENNETH N. LUONGO, “On nuclear terrorism”, The International
Herald Tribune, March 16, 2012 Friday, 2 pgs., Database, 6/30/15, Lexisnexis.com
There is a consensus among international leaders that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, not a Hollywood
confection. President Obama, the leaders of 46 other nations, the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency
and the United Nations, and numerous experts have called nuclear terrorism one of the most serious
threats to global security and stability. It is also preventable with more aggressive action. At least four terrorist
groups, including Al Qaeda, have demonstrated interest in using a nuclear device. These groups operate in or
near states with histories of questionable nuclear security practices. Terrorists do not need to steal a
nuclear weapon. It is quite possible to make an improvised nuclear device from highly enriched uranium
or plutonium being used for civilian purposes. And there is a black market in such material. There have been 18
confirmed thefts or loss of weapons-usable nuclear material. In 2011, the Moldovan police broke up part of a smuggling
ring attempting to sell highly enriched uranium; one member is thought to remain at large with a kilogram of this material. A terrorist
nuclear explosion could kill hundreds of thousands, create billions of dollars in damages and under-mine
the global economy. Former Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations said that an act of nuclear terrorism
''would thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty'' and create ''a second death toll throughout the
developing world.'' Surely after such an event, global leaders would produce a strong global system to ensure nuclear security. There is
no reason to wait for a catastrophe to build such a system. The conventional wisdom is that domestic regulations, U.N. Security Council
existing global
arrangements for nuclear security lack uniformity and coherence. There are no globally agreed
standards for effectively securing nuclear material. There is no obligation to follow the voluntary
standards that do exist and no institution, not even the I.A.E.A., with a mandate to evaluate nuclear security
performance. This patchwork approach provides the appearance of dealing with nuclear security; the reality is there are gaps
through which a determined terrorist group could drive one or more nuclear devices. Obama's initiative in
resolutions, G-8 initiatives, I.A.E.A. activities and other voluntary efforts will prevent nuclear terrorism. But
launching the nuclear security summit process in Washington in 2010 helped focus high-level attention on nuclear security issues.
the actions produced by the 2010 Washington Summit and that are planned for the
upcoming Seoul Summit are voluntary actions that are useful, but not sufficient to create an effective
global nuclear security regime. The world cannot afford to wait for the patchwork of nuclear security arrangements to fail before
Unfortunately,
they are strengthened. Instead, we need a system based on a global framework convention on nuclear security that would fill the gaps in
existing voluntary arrangements. This framework convention would commit states to an effective standard of nuclear security practices,
incorporate relevant existing international agreements, and give the I.A.E.A. the mandate to support nuclear security by evaluating whether
states are meeting their nuclear security obligations and providing assistance to those states that need help in doing so.
Nuclear
terrorism is a real and present danger for all states, not just a few. Preventing it is an achievable goal. The current
focus on nuclear security through voluntary actions, however, is not commensurate with either the risk or consequences of nuclear terrorism.
This must be rectified. If the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit makes this a priority, there can be an effective global nuclear security regime in
place before this decade ends.
Terrorism Kills ALL
Extinction—nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. would cause retaliation, especially
during tensions with Russia
Ayson 10 - Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand
at the Victoria University of Wellington (Robert, July. “After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging
Catalytic Effects.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 33, Issue 7. InformaWorld.)
But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable.
It is just possible that some
sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a
chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that
possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new
state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising
the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the
superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about
nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation
where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on
the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they
seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be
involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do
suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of
nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct
attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al.
that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it
detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the
materials used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear
terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at
all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably
Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program
continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at
what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of
nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in
Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers,
would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring
would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they
were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse
might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict
with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible
perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s
early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also
raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise
and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place
the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when
careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly
read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the
temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with
a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a
significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support
that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such action as being far
too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but
perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action
resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the “Chechen insurgents’ … long-standing interest in all
things nuclear.”42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of
advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to provide. There is also the question of how other
nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that
following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, bothRussia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington
and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia
and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to
retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply
underwhelming, (neither “for us or against us”) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again
perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed
in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest
level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability
Nuclear terrorism is likely and causes extinction – security experts agree.
Rhodes 9 (Richard, affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University, Former visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”
which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award,
“Reducing the nuclear threat: The argument for public safety” 12-14, http://www.thebulletin.org/webedition/op-eds/reducing-the-nuclear-threat-the-argument-public-safety, RSR)
"The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the
United States and other nations will face an
existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." It's paradoxical
that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world
where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or
likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead
us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A
terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever
country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round
of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11
frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the
fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name
of sending a message.
Attack causes retrenchment- power projection becomes impossible post attack
Watts 05
[CDR Bob Watts is a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and has served six tours at sea conducting drug/migrant operations, most
recently commanding the USCGC STEADFAST (WMEC 623). He is currently assigned as the chief of drug and migrant interdiction at Coast Guard
Headquarters, where his responsibilities include drafting migrant policy and strategy, including planning for mass migration. A 2006 graduate of
the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, he has advanced degrees from the Naval War College, Old
Dominion University, American Military University, and is a doctoral candidate at the Royal Military College of Canada.] Maritime Critical
Infrastructure Protection: Multi-Agency Command and Control in an Asymmetric Environment http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=1.2.3
Throughout its history, the
United States has been a global maritime nation, dependent upon the oceans for
world economy has increased this
economy, welfare, and defense. In the modern era emphasis on globalization and the
dependence considerably. There are some 95,000 miles of United States’ coastline and 3.4 million square miles of territorial seas and
exclusive economic zones in the U.S. maritime domain. 1 Connecting the continental United States to this zone are over
1,000 harbors and ports, 361 of which are cargo capable. Through these ports enter approximately
21,000 containers daily, representing ninety-five percent of the nation’s overseas cargo, including 100
percent of U.S. petroleum imports. 2 In addition to commerce, there are seventy-six million recreational boaters in the United
States. Six million cruise ship passengers visit U.S. ports annually. In the strategic/military sense, a substantial portion of
U.S. national power relies on the sea, both in the form of traditional Navy Carrier Strike groups that deploy from ports in the
continental United States and the subsequent ability to reinforce deployed forces overseas. Without
unimpeded access to the sea, the ability of the United States to project national power is extremely
limited. Maritime infrastructure is crucial in maintaining this link to the sea. From naval bases to
commercial ports, maritime infrastructure is well developed nationwide and is crucial to both the economic sector
and military strategy. Maritime infrastructure is critical to the employment of national maritime power
and as such is a logical (if not desirable) target for acts of terrorism by our enemies. A successful attack against a
port could incur serious economic and military damage, present an enemy with the opportunity to inflict
mass casualties, and have serious long-term detrimental effects on our national economy. Maritime
Critical Infrastructure Protection (MCIP) presents many challenges in an asymmetric environment. Previous
models of maritime defense have focused on protecting ships from traditional naval attack; even when ports and supporting infrastructure
have been considered targets, emphasis was on defense against a military threat. The Global War On Terror (GWOT) has created a number of
heretofore unconsidered vulnerabilities in this traditional outlook. Many targets that would not be considered legitimate (economic, symbolic,
etc.) in a conventional war must now be considered in strategic defensive planning. In
conducting these attacks the unimpeded
use of the sea is a force multiplier for an enemy dedicated to striking a wide range of potential targets.
Possible threats from the sea are wide-ranging and diverse, relying on a combination of asymmetric offensive tactics while
exploiting the variety of the littoral. This asymmetric nature of GWOT requires a multi-agency approach to devise effective command and
control for modern port defense. The Coast Guard and Navy have made important strides in this area by devising experimental Joint Harbor
Operations Centers (JHOCs) as a component of maritime anti-terrorist force protection. The expansion of this concept into multi-agency
maritime homeland security is a logical next step in the evolving problem of port security and defense. This
is made evident by
examining likely terrorist threats to ports and studying the lessons of the past that apply in this
environment which can be used to expand the current command and control system to meet the new
threat NEW THREAT MATRIX: PORTS AS TARGETS The GWOT threat to ports is a relatively new element in the spectrum of naval warfare.
This is largely due to the evolving nature of the shipping industry and the nation’s growing reliance on sea power. Historically, a nation’s
maritime strength has been measured by the size and capability of its merchant fleet and Navy; attacks against a nation’s sea power meant the
physical destruction of these ships. Ports, until quite recently, were composed of infrastructure that was relatively easy to replace or replicate,
making them relatively low priority targets for an enemy dedicated to striking at maritime strength. This has changed in the modern era of
containerization and the increased size and technical nature of ships. In
modern times ports have become centers of highly
technical, well-integrated infrastructure designed for the rapid loading and unloading of cargo, an
evolution that has become highly complex in the era of containerization. Commercially efficient, port cargo
operations are also highly dependent on networked operations, making the disruption of the process far
simpler for a potential attacker. Additionally, the complexity of this evolution, combined with the increasing size of seagoing
merchant vessels (and warships), has greatly reduced the number of commercial ports available for use by global shipping. This has the
duel effect of making major ports more important economically and strategically while simultaneously making
them more attractive targets for offensive action. The attractiveness of ports as targets for terrorists can
be summarized as follows: A. Economic Impact: An unprecedented amount of trade — both imports and exports — relies on
shipment by sea. A successful attack on maritime infrastructure would affect this trade in far greater
proportion than the actual damage. It is likely that an attack on one port would have a cascade effect on others as increased
security measures are applied nationwide. The recent impact of the London bombings can be seen as illustrative of this effect; although there
was no indication of additional terrorist activity, security measures were increased at transportation hubs worldwide. Increasing security alerts
at a train station is one thing; closing a huge economic entity such as a port is quite another. Delay of shipping in loading and offloading cargo is
one of the most costly elements of the shipping process. We
must also consider the impact to the shipping industry
itself. During the Persian Gulf re-flagging operations of the late 1980s, for example, analysis showed the greatest impact to the shipping of oil
was not the damage to tankers inflicted by the warring Iraqis and Iranians (which was, in fact, minimal), but the increased insurance costs of
operating in that area. 3 An attack on a U.S. port could have a similar, if not larger, effect. B. High visibility/High Casualties: Ports are
not isolated areas, but rather major centers of commerce, usually surrounded by large cities and economic centers. An attack on a port could
be highly visible and potentially the scene of mass conflagration. As a result of urban development, most major ports are no longer confined to
strictly industrial areas, but rather have become well-developed centers of commerce and entertainment, surrounded by built up waterside
areas dedicated to tourism and recreation. Many of these facilities are located next to volatile maritime infrastructure (fuel tanks, docks, etc.)
that could create mass conflagration if attacked through large explosive force. Sympathetic detonation, fires, and other catastrophic effects
would certainly create mass casualties. C. Ease of attack: Commercial ports are not fortresses. The ocean itself presents a
number of distinct advantages to a dedicated attacker, especially when employing maritime suicide terrorism or means to rapidly deliver large
explosive force. Water is not only a tremendously efficient transport medium (allowing for rapid transit), but the large amount of legitimate
commercial and recreational traffic in ports allows for an enemy to mask movements prior to an attack, making effective defense difficult.
Given the importance of ports to our economy and military power, the potential for creating mass
casualties, and the ease by which an enemy can attack, a strong case can be made that ports will
become a target for future terrorist attacks. If this is the case, we can apply the military planning process to meeting this threat.
The first step in this process is looking for lessons learned that could be used in the current scenario: have we faced this threat before, and if so,
what can we learn from the experience?
BioTerrorism
Bioterrorism is likely and would kill millions in some instances
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 44, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
A 2003 study found that an airborne release of one kilogram of an anthrax-spore containing aerosol in a
city the size of New York would result in 1.5 million infections and 123,000 to 660,000 fatalities, depending
on the effectiveness of the public health response. A 1993 U.S. government analysis determined that 100 kilograms of
weaponized anthrax, if sprayed from an airplane upwind of Washington, D.C., would kill between
130,000 and three million people. What is more, because anthrax spores remain viable in the
environment for more than 30 years, portions of a city blanketed by an anthrax cloud might have to be
abandoned for years while extensive cleaning was done. Unfortunately, anthrax is not the worst case; indeed it is rather benign as
biological weapons go. The pathogen is reasonably well understood, having been studied in one form or another in bio warfare circles for more
than 50 years. Natural strains of the bacterium are partially treatable with long courses of common antibiotics if taken sufficiently quickly.
Vaccination soon after exposure seems to reduce mortality further. But bioengineered
anthrax that is resistant to both
antibiotics and vaccines is known to have been produced in both Soviet and American bioweapons
laboratories. In 1997, a group of Russian scientists even published the recipe for a super lethal strain in a scientific journal. Numerous
other agents are similar to anthrax in that they are highly lethal but not contagious. The lack of contagion means that an attacker must
administer the pathogen to the people he wishes to infect. Thus, the weapon can be directed at a well-defined target, and with luck, little
collateral damage will result. Unfortunately, many
biological agents are contagious and can spread quickly.
Infectious pathogens are inherently hard to control because there is usually no reliable way to stop an
epidemic once it starts. This property makes such biological agents difficult for nation-states to use as conventional weapons.
Smallpox, for example, is highly contagious and spreads through casual contact. Smallpox, eradicated in
the wild in 1977, still exists in both U.S. and Russian laboratories.7 Experts estimate that a large-scale,
coordinated smallpox attack on the United States might kill 55,000 to 110,000 people, assuming that
suf-ficient vaccine is available to contain the epidemic and that the vaccine works.8 The death toll may
be far higher if the smallpox strain has been engineered to be vaccine-resistant or to have enhanced
virulence. Moreover, a smallpox attack on the United States could broaden into a global pandemic. Planes
leave American cities every hour of the day for population centers around the globe. Even if “only” 50,000 people were killed in
the U.S., a million or more would probably die worldwide before the disease could be contained, and
containment would probably require years of effort. As horrible as this would be, such a pandemic is by no means the worst
attack one can imagine. Advances in molecular biology have utterly transformed the field in the last few
decades. High school biology students routinely perform molecular-biology manipulations that were
impossible even for the best superpower-funded program back in the heyday of biological-weapons
research. Tomorrow’s terrorists now have far more deadly bugs from which to choose. Consider this sobering development: in 2001,
Australian researchers working on mousepox, a nonlethal virus that infects mice, discovered that a simple genetic modification transformed the
virus.9 Instead of producing mild symptoms, the new virus killed 60 percent of mice, even those already immune to the naturally occurring
strains. The new virus was unaffected by existing vaccines or antiviral drugs. A team of researchers at Saint Louis University, led by Mark Buller,
picked up on that work and, by late 2003, found a way to improve on it. Buller’s variation was 100 percent lethal.10 While the genetically
altered virus is not contagious, it is quite possible that future tinkering will change that property, too.
A2: Access to bioweapons
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 44, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
Never has lethal power of this potency been accessible to so many, so easily. Hundreds of universities in
Europe and Asia have curricula sufficient to train people in the skills necessary to make a sophisticated
biological weapon, and hundreds more in the United States accept students from all over the world. The
repercussions of their use are hard to estimate. One approach is to look at how the scale of destruction they may cause compares with that of
other calamities that the human race has faced.
Chemical Terrorism
Chemical weapons are both cheap and easily obtainable by terrorists
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 41, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
7/1/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
modern technology allows very small groups the ability to create immensely
powerful weapons with small teams of people and trivial budgets compared to nuclear weapons. Chemical
weapons, particularly nerve agents, are part of the terrorist arsenal. Sarin, a frighteningly lethal poison was
produced and released in locations in the Tokyo subway system in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese
religious cult. The attack injured nearly 3,800 people and killed 12. A botched distribution scheme
spared many of the intended victims; better dispersal technology would have resulted in a vastly higher
death toll. Experts estimated that Aum Shinrikyo had the ingredients to produce enough Sarin to kill
millions of people in an all-out attack.
The second major factor is that
U.S Lacks Defensive Tools
We lack defensive tools needed to protect against stateless groups
MYHRVOLD in 2013 (NATHAN P. Is chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief
technology officer at Microsoft; “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” PG: 41, Published July 3, 2013 Accessed
6/29/15; http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf)
Several powerful trends have aligned to profoundly change the way that the world works. Technology
now allows stateless groups to organize, recruit, and fund themselves in an unprecedented fashion. That,
coupled with the extreme difficulty of finding and punishing a stateless group, means that stateless groups
are positioned to be lead players on the world stage. One small group can be as lethal as the largest
superpower. Such a group could execute an attack that could kill millions of people. It is technically
feasible. Our defense establishment was shaped over decades to address what was, for a long time, the only
strategic threat our nation faced: Soviet or Chinese missiles. More recently, it is retooling to address tactical
terror attacks like 9/11, but the reform process is incomplete and inconsistent. An effective defense will require
rebuilding our military and intelligence capabilities from the ground up. Yet strategic terrorism has received relatively little
attention in defense agencies, and the efforts that have been launched are fragmented
Turns Case
Turn – Terror attacks lead to increased surveillance and roll back any changes the plan
makes
Tuccile in 2015 (J.D. managing editor of Reason.com; “What’s a Terrorist Attack If Not an Excuse for More
Domestic Spying?” Published: Jan. 14, 2015 10:26 am, Accessed: 7/1/15;
http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/14/whats-a-terrorist-attack-if-not-an-excus)
Following on last week's terrorist attacks in France, the British government has dusted off a long-sought "snooper's
charter"—better known as the Data Communications Bill—to ease the power of officials to track people's
private communications. "It is too soon to say for certain, but it is highly probable that communications data was used in the Paris
attacks to locate the suspects and establish the links between the two attacks," Home Secretary Theresa May told Parliament.
"Quite simply, if we want the police and the security services to protect the public and save lives, they
need this capability. You get that? There's no evidence that the bill would have prevented the Charlie Hebdo
attack, but that incident is why you should pass the bill. Prime Minister David Cameron even says that messaging services
that can't be intercepted should be banned. Using the latest outrage to inject new life into old security-state
legislation isn't a British specialty. When the Patriot Act was introduced in 2001, then-Senator Joseph
Biden boasted, "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was
my bill." This is a game in which politicians everywhere can participate. Never mind that, as Reason's Ron Bailey pointed out in November,
"there is very little evidence that the Internet is making terrorism easier to do." But pretending otherwise, and passing
legislation that
empowers security services, lets government officials accumulate power and give the appearance of
doing something when the public is frightened. Added Bailey: As [David Benson, a political scientist at the University of
Chicago] argues, exaggerating the Internet's usefulness to terrorism has "egregious costs." Some officials, for example, have been calling for a
"kill switch" that would allow the government to shut down the Internet in an emergency. Noting how much Americans depend upon the Net
for commerce, communication, medical care, and so forth, Benson points out that "It is difficult to imagine a terrorist attack being as costly as
turning off the Internet would be." Terrorism
also gives officials an excuse to tighten censorship—especially in
jurisdictions, including many democratic countries in Europe, where the whole free speech thing has relatively shallow roots. So get ready
for the ride. Driven by a need to appear proactive, and a preexisting taste for accumulating power,
government officials once again exploit a murderous incident to increase their authority over us. Which
escalates the ongoing cold war between people who want to be left alone, and the governments that seek to control them.
Turn - A terrorist attack leads to more surveillance—turns the entirety of the case
Margolin & Ross ’15 [Brian Margolin & Josh Ross, 5/08/15, ABC News, “The Gaping Hole in Obama's
FBI Surveillance Reform”] http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attack-spurs-increase-fbi-surveillancemarginal-terror/story?id=30910372
The FBI has ordered more U.S. terror suspects be put under 24/7 surveillance in the wake of the
Garland, Texas shooting and a renewed emphasis by ISIS and other terror groups for potential American recruits to launch
attacks at home, according to three FBI officials. The officials told ABC News that agents have been ordered to review the
cases of so-called “marginal” or “borderline” suspects, terms that had been applied to one of the gunmen in the Texas
attack, Elton Simpson of Phoenix. FBI agents were familiar with Simpson and the views he espoused, but he was not put under 24/7
surveillance. He was viewed as being “more talk than action,” one agent said. “We do not want to risk another marginal, homegrown extremist
who was viewed as dangerous going active,” said one of the FBI officials. All three FBI officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because
they are not authorized to speak publicly. Agents
are now reviewing cases and “gauging” how many more targets
should be placed under 24/7 surveillance. Today FBI Director James Comey and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh
Johnson held a video conference call with “federal, state and local law enforcement partners” to discuss the Texas attack and the “current
threat environment,” a spokesperson for the FBI said. The spokesperson said such conference calls were “commonplace and assist in the timely
and comprehensive information sharing needed to address the persistent and pervasive threats fueled by social media.”
AFF ANSWERS
Surveillance doesn’t solve
Mass Surveillance Won’t Stop Terrorism – because bulk collection does nothing to
prevent terrorism
Macri, 3-16-2015 (Giuseppe Macri, writer, 3-16-2015, "Edward Snowden Says Mass Surveillance
Won’t Stop Terrorism," Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/16/edward-snowden-says-masssurveillance-doesnt-stop-terrorism/)
National Security Agency whistleblower Edward
Snowden spent the weekend popping up at tech conferences across the globe,
accusing governments of falsely equating terrorism with mass surveillance and calling on Silicon Valley
to take action against them. While speaking virtually at FutureFest London on Saturday, the former NSA contractor called on the
U.S., UK and Australia to stop masking mass surveillance underneath sugar-coated terms such as “bulk
collection,” which he said does nothing to prevent terrorism. “They’re not going to stop the next attacks
either,” Snowden said, referencing the recent terror attacks in Sydney and against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in
Paris, which were perpetrated by assailants already known to their governments. “Because they’re not public safety programs.
They’re spying programs.” “But the question that we as a society have to ask, are our collective rights
worth a small advantage in our ability to spy,” Snowden said according to news.com.au. Snowden spoke via video
to “roughly two dozen people from across the technology and policy world” during a closed door meeting at SXSW Sunday, The Verge reports,
which one attendee described as a “call to arms” encouraging tech companies to build better tools to combat spying. With government reform
stalled in Congress and the White House, Snowden
suggested companies take more aggressive approaches to
securing data, calling in particular for the widespread implementation of end-to-end encryption, which
keeps even companies themselves from accessing data. “
Mass surveillance doesn’t catch terrorists – France and UK proves
Corrigan 15 Ray Corrigan (Ray Corrigan is a senior lecturer in mathematics, computing, and technology
at the Open University, U.K. ), “Mass Surveillance Will Not Stop Terrorism” Jan. 25, 2015,
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2015/01/mass_surveillance_against_
terrorism_gathering_intelligence_on_all_is_statistically.html
In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the
U.K. government is redoubling its efforts to engage in mass
surveillance. Prime Minister David Cameron wants to reintroduce the so-called snoopers’ charter—properly, the
Communications Data Bill—which would compel telecom companies to keep records of all Internet, email, and cellphone activity. He also wants
to ban encrypted communications services. Cameron seems to
believe terrorist attacks can be prevented if only mass
surveillance, by the U.K.’s intelligence-gathering center GCHQ and the U.S. National Security Agency, reaches the
degree of perfection portrayed in his favorite TV dramas, where computers magically pinpoint the bad guys.
Computers don’t work this way in real life and neither does mass surveillance. Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi
and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered 17 people, were known to the French security services and considered a serious threat. France has
blanket electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert what happened. Police,
intelligence, and security systems are imperfect.
They process vast amounts of imperfect intelligence data and do not have the resources to monitor all
known suspects 24/7. The French authorities lost track of these extremists long enough for them to carry out their murderous acts.
You cannot fix any of this by treating the entire population as suspects and then engaging in
suspicionless, blanket collection and processing of personal data. Mass data collectors can dig deeply
into anyone’s digital persona but don’t have the resources to do so with everyone. Surveillance of the
entire population, the vast majority of whom are innocent, leads to the diversion of limited intelligence
resources in pursuit of huge numbers of false leads. Terrorists are comparatively rare, so finding one is a
needle-in-a-haystack problem. You don’t make it easier by throwing more needleless hay on the stack. It is statistically
impossible for total population surveillance to be an effective tool for catching terrorists. Even if your magic
terrorist-catching machine has a false positive rate of 1 in 1,000—and no security technology comes anywhere near this—every time you asked
it for suspects in the U.K. it would flag 60,000 innocent people. Law enforcement and security services need to be able to move with the times,
using modern digital technologies intelligently and through targeted data preservation—not a mass surveillance regime—to engage in courtsupervised technological surveillance of individuals whom they have reasonable cause to suspect. That is not, however, the same as building an
infrastructure of mass surveillance. Mass
surveillance makes the job of the security services more difficult and the
rest of us less secure.
Mass surveillance does not stop terrorism – Aff answer to DA
Corrigan in 2015 (Ray Corrigan; a senior lecturer in mathematics, computing, and technology at the
Open University, U.K, “Mass Surveillance Will Not Stop Terrorism”, 01/25/15 New Scientist, Website,
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2015/01/mass_surveillance_against_
terrorism_gathering_intelligence_on_all_is_statistically.html
Some U.K. politicians are trying once again to pass mass surveillance laws after the Paris attacks. It’s a
misguided approach, says a computing researcher. In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.K.
government is redoubling its efforts to engage in mass surveillance. Prime Minister David Cameron
wants to reintroduce the so-called snoopers’ charter—properly, the Communications Data Bill—which
would compel telecom companies to keep records of all Internet, email, and cellphone activity. He also
wants to ban encrypted communications services. Cameron seems to believe terrorist attacks can be
prevented if only mass surveillance, by the U.K.’s intelligence-gathering center GCHQ and the U.S.
National Security Agency, reaches the degree of perfection portrayed in his favorite TV dramas, where
computers magically pinpoint the bad guys. Computers don’t work this way in real life and neither does
mass surveillance. Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered 17 people,
were known to the French security services and considered a serious threat. France has blanket
electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert what happened. Police, intelligence, and security systems are
imperfect. They process vast amounts of imperfect intelligence data and do not have the resources to
monitor all known suspects 24/7. The French authorities lost track of these extremists long enough for
them to carry out their murderous acts. You cannot fix any of this by treating the entire population as
suspects and then engaging in suspicionless, blanket collection and processing of personal data. Mass
data collectors can dig deeply into anyone’s digital persona but don’t have the resources to do so with
everyone. Surveillance of the entire population, the vast majority of whom are innocent, leads to the
diversion of limited intelligence resources in pursuit of huge numbers of false leads. Terrorists are
comparatively rare, so finding one is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. You don’t make it easier by
throwing more needleless hay on the stack. It is statistically impossible for total population surveillance
to be an effective tool for catching terrorists. Even if your magic terrorist-catching machine has a false
positive rate of 1 in 1,000—and no security technology comes anywhere near this—every time you
asked it for suspects in the U.K. it would flag 60,000 innocent people. Law enforcement and security
services need to be able to move with the times, using modern digital technologies intelligently and
through targeted data preservation—not a mass surveillance regime—to engage in court-supervised
technological surveillance of individuals whom they have reasonable cause to suspect. That is not,
however, the same as building an infrastructure of mass surveillance. Mass surveillance makes the job of
the security services more difficult and the rest of us less secure.
Increasing surveillance does nothing – little evidence proving it to stop terrorist
threats
Tuccille ’15 (J.D. Tuccille Managing Editor for reason.com, 1/14/15, “What's a Terrorist Attack If Not
An Excuse for More Domestic Spying?” http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/14/whats-a-terrorist-attack-ifnot-an-excus)
Following on last week's terrorist attacks in France, the British government has dusted off a long-sought
"snooper's charter"—better known as the Data Communications Bill—to ease the power of officials to
track people's private communications. "It is too soon to say for certain, but it is highly probable that
communications data was used in the Paris attacks to locate the suspects and establish the links
between the two attacks," Home Secretary Theresa May told Parliament. "Quite simply, if we want the
police and the security services to protect the public and save lives, they need this capability. You get
that? There's no evidence that the bill would have prevented the Charlie Hebdo attack, but that incident
is why you should pass the bill. Prime Minister David Cameron even says that messaging services that
can't be intercepted should be banned. Using the latest outrage to inject new life into old security-state
legislation isn't a British specialty. When the Patriot Act was introduced in 2001, then-Senator Joseph
Biden boasted, "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft
sent up was my bill." This is a game in which politicians everywhere can participate. Never mind that, as
Reason's Ron Bailey pointed out in November, "there is very little evidence that the Internet is making
terrorism easier to do." But pretending otherwise, and passing legislation that empowers security
services, lets government officials accumulate power and give the appearance of doing something when
the public is frightened. Added Bailey: As [David Benson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago]
argues, exaggerating the Internet's usefulness to terrorism has "egregious costs." Some officials, for
example, have been calling for a "kill switch" that would allow the government to shut down the
Internet in an emergency. Noting how much Americans depend upon the Net for commerce,
communication, medical care, and so forth, Benson points out that "It is difficult to imagine a terrorist
attack being as costly as turning off the Internet would be." Terrorism also gives officials an excuse to
tighten censorship—especially in jurisdictions, including many democratic countries in Europe, where
the whole free speech thing has relatively shallow roots. So get ready for the ride. Driven by a need to
appear proactive, and a preexisting taste for accumulating power, government officials once again
exploit a murderous incident to increase their authority over us. Which escalates the ongoing cold war
between people who want to be left alone, and the governments that seek to control them.
Mass surveillance doesn’t prevent terrorism – Impractical mass surveillance reduces
effectiveness
Corrigan, 1-13-2015 (Ray Corrigan, is Senior Lecturer in Technology at The Open University, 1-132015, "Mass surveillance will never be able to stop all known terrorists," Conversation,
http://theconversation.com/mass-surveillance-will-never-be-able-to-stop-all-known-terrorists-36177)
The French intelligence and security services could not keep track of the Kouachi brothers, known
extremists, to a sufficient degree to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Likewise Amedy Coulibaly who
murdered a police officer on the street and four others in a supermarket. France has blanket electronic
surveillance and armed police. It even has the ID cards so beloved (and so tantalisingly out of reach) of
Tony Blair and his succession of home secretaries. It has an inquisitorial justice system, the purveyors of
the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill’s “prevent duty” seem to be hankering after. It arguably also has
a constitution that mass surveillance, at least, offends against. None of it was enough to stop the
Kouchais and Coulibaly. Absolute security and guaranteed prevention of these kinds of extreme acts is
impossible. Mass surveillance cannot and will not move us any closer to that goal. Counterintuitively, it
actually makes us all less secure. Diverting limited intelligence resources from pursuing truly dangerous
suspects, in order to watch everyone, is a really bad idea. If it takes a conservative 20 intelligence and
security staff to monitor a suspect 24/7, the state would need to figure out how to muster the 1.2 billion
staff and associated resources to keep tabs on the UK’s 60m-plus people. In case you’d forgotten.
whatleydude via Flickr, CC BY And if it can’t monitor all of us 24/7, the government will need ways to
decide who and how many to watch, in addition to the known dangerous individuals it’s already unable
to keep track of.
Mass surveillance hinders finding terrorist- makes rest of us less secure- turns impact
Corrigan 1/25/15 (Roy Corrigan, teacher at Open University, U.K., 1/25/15, “Mass Surveillance Will
Not Stop Terrorism”,
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2015/01/mass_surveillance_against_
terrorism_gathering_intelligence_on_all_is_statistically.html, 7/1/15)
Cameron seems to believe terrorist attacks can be prevented if only mass surveillance, by the U.K.’s
intelligence-gathering center GCHQ and the U.S. National Security Agency, reaches the degree of
perfection portrayed in his favorite TV dramas, where computers magically pinpoint the bad guys.
Computers don’t work this way in real life and neither does mass surveillance. Brothers Said and Cherif
Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered 17 people, were known to the French security services
and considered a serious threat. France has blanket electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert what
happened. Police, intelligence, and security systems are imperfect. They process vast amounts of
imperfect intelligence data and do not have the resources to monitor all known suspects 24/7. The
French authorities lost track of these extremists long enough for them to carry out their murderous acts.
You cannot fix any of this by treating the entire population as suspects and then engaging in
suspicionless, blanket collection and processing of personal data. Mass data collectors can dig deeply
into anyone’s digital persona but don’t have the resources to do so with everyone. Surveillance of the
entire population, the vast majority of whom are innocent, leads to the diversion of limited intelligence
resources in pursuit of huge numbers of false leads. Terrorists are comparatively rare, so finding one is a
needle-in-a-haystack problem. You don’t make it easier by throwing more needleless hay on the stack. It
is statistically impossible for total population surveillance to be an effective tool for catching terrorists.
Even if your magic terrorist-catching machine has a false positive rate of 1 in 1,000—and no security
technology comes anywhere near this—every time you asked it for suspects in the U.K. it would flag
60,000 innocent people. Top Comment . The most permanent thing in the world is a temporary
government bureau. More... -Formerly Pepin the Short 68 CommentsJoin In Law enforcement and
security services need to be able to move with the times, using modern digital technologies intelligently
and through targeted data preservation—not a mass surveillance regime—to engage in courtsupervised technological surveillance of individuals whom they have reasonable cause to suspect. That is
not, however, the same as building an infrastructure of mass surveillance. Mass surveillance makes the
job of the security services more difficult and the rest of us less secure.
NSLs Specific
National Security Letters are not needed- time is not an issue
Baker and Sanger on May 1 , 2015 (Peter Baker and Peter Sanger, Political writer and chief
st
Washington correspondent, “Why the N.S.A. Isn’t Howling Over Restrictions”, May 1 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/us/politics/giving-in-a-little-on-national-security-agency-datacollection.html, 6/29/15) DPC
st
“N.S.A. believes that on at least a few occasions, information derived” had “contributed to its efforts to
prevent possible terrorist attacks, either in the United States or somewhere else in the world,” the report
said. But the panel concluded that its review showed that the information collected under the program
“was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using
conventional” court orders. The panel recommended legislation that “terminates the storage of bulk
telephony metadata by the government” and that, it be held instead by telecommunications companies or some
other third party, ensuring that the government gained access only when the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court issued an order. Although the government said nothing at the time, General Alexander, then in his
last months as the head of the N.S.A., told Mr. Obama that it would be preferable if legislation were
passed that moved the program to private hands.
President’s closest advisors say that the National Security Letter does not help with
terrorism- This shows that it is ineffective
Ross in 13 (Brian Ross, ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent, “President Obama's Own Experts
Recommend End to NSA Phone Data Spying”, December 18 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/nsasurveillance-obamas-experts-recommend-end-nsa-phone/story?id=21265133, 6/29/15) DPC
th
In calling for sweeping curbs on the NSA, the panel said stressed the need for increased transparency and
less secrecy. "Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials," the report
concluded. The NSA declined to comment on the report today. The President's review group, which had access to top-secret
information, concluded the bulk collection of American citizens' phone records served little useful purpose
in combatting terrorism, producing only 12 tips to the FBI in 2012. "There are very few pieces of data
that have been collected in this program that have been useful," Clarke said. The NSA has maintained the program is
essential in the efforts to stop terror attacks. In response to the panel report, Leahy, Chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, praised the recommendations. "The message to the NSA is now coming from every
branch of government and from every corner of our nation: You have gone too far," he said. "This
momentous report from the President's closest advisers is a vindication of the efforts of a bipartisan
group of legislators that has been working for years to protect Americans' privacy by reining in these
intelligence authorities. I welcome the report and call on the President to immediately consider
implementing the recommendations that can be achieved without legislation."
A2: Nuclear Terrorism
Realistically, terrorist groups do not try to obtain nukes – conventional weapons
achieve their cause
Weiss 15 Leonard Weiss (scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University, USA, member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and NonProliferation, staff director of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and its Subcommittee
on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation), “On fear and nuclear terrorism”, Feb 13, 2015, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
Although there has been much commentary on the interest that Osama bin Laden, when he was alive,
reportedly expressed in obtaining nuclear weapons (see Mowatt-Larssen, 2010), and some terrorists no
doubt desire to obtain such weapons, evidence of any terrorist group working seriously toward the theft
of nuclear weapons or the acquisition of such weapons by other means is virtually nonexistent. This may
be due to a combination of reasons. Terrorists understand that it is not hard to terrorize a population
without committing mass murder: In 2002, a single sniper in the Washington, DC area, operating within
his own automobile and with one accomplice, killed 10 people and changed the behavior of virtually the
entire populace of the city over a period of three weeks by instilling fear of being a randomly chosen
shooting victim when out shopping. Terrorists who believe the commission of violence helps their cause
have access to many explosive materials and conventional weapons to ply their “trade.” If public
sympathy is important to their cause, an apparent plan or commission of mass murder is not going to
help them, and indeed will make their enemies even more implacable, reducing the prospects of
achieving their goals. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorists is not like the acquisition of
conventional weapons; it requires significant time, planning, resources, and expertise, with no
guarantees that an acquired device would work. It requires putting aside at least some aspects of a
group’s more immediate activities and goals for an attempted operation that no terrorist group has
previously accomplished. While absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence (as thenSecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld kept reminding us during the search for Saddam’s nonexistent
nuclear weapons), it is reasonable to conclude that the fear of nuclear terrorism has swamped realistic
consideration of the threat. As Brian Jenkins, a longtime observer of terrorist groups, wrote in 2008:
Nuclear terrorism … turns out to be a world of truly worrisome particles of truth. Yet it is also a world of
fantasies, nightmares, urban legends, fakes, hoaxes, scams, stings, mysterious substances, terrorist
boasts, sensational claims, description of vast conspiracies, allegations of coverups, lurid headlines,
layers of misinformation and disinformation. Much is inconclusive or contradictory. Only the terror is
real. (Jenkins, 2008: 26)
Low probability of nuclear terrorism - The implications of terrorists obtaining nuclear
weapons are expensive and unreliable
Weiss 15 Leonard Weiss (scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University, USA, member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and NonProliferation, staff director of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and its Subcommittee
on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation), “On fear and nuclear terrorism”, Feb 13, 2015, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
There is clearly some risk of nuclear terrorism via theft of weapons, but the risk is low, and a successful
theft of a nuclear weapon would likely require a team of insiders working within an otherwise highly
secure environment. There is also some risk that a nuclear-armed country might use a terrorist group to
launch a nuclear attack on an adversary. This possibility is also of low probability, because the sponsor
country would almost inevitably risk nuclear annihilation itself. Finally, a terrorist group might try to
design and build its own weapon, possibly with the help of disaffected persons from a weapon state
who might provide them with nuclear know-how and/or materials. Given all the steps needed to
achieve a weapon that is workable with high probability—without being discovered and without
suffering an accident—this scenario is also fraught with risk for the terrorists. As a result, terrorists are
much more likely to try to achieve their aims using conventional weapons, which are cheaper, safer, and
technically more reliable. Thus, while no one can discount completely the acquisition by a terrorist
group of a nuclear explosive weapon, such an event appears to be of very low probability over the next
decade at least, and can be made still lower using techniques or policies that do not require
constitutionally problematic steps by the federal government or an optional war whose death rate could
match or exceed what the terrorists are capable of.
Fear of nuclear terrorism allows security to be invasive – the population gives up
freedom because of their distorted fear
Weiss 15 Leonard Weiss (scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University, USA, member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and NonProliferation, staff director of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and its Subcommittee
on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation), “On fear and nuclear terrorism”, Feb 13, 2015, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
The rise of the national surveillance state. Lowering the
risk of terrorism, particularly the nuclear kind, is the quintessential
reason that the mandarins of the national security state have given for employing the most invasive national
surveillance system in history. “Finding the needle in the haystack” is how some describe the effort to
discern terrorist plots from telephone metadata and intercepted communications. But the haystack keeps expanding, and large
elements of the American population appear willing to allow significant encroachments on the constitutional
protections provided by the Fourth Amendment. The fear of terrorism has produced this change in the
American psyche even though there is no evidence that the collection of such data has resulted in the
discovery of terrorist plots beyond those found by traditional police and intelligence methods. It is doubtful that we
shall soon (if ever) see a return to the status quo ante regarding constitutional protections. This reduction in the freedom of
Americans from the prying eyes of the state is a major consequence of the hyping of terrorism, especially
nuclear terrorism. This is exemplified by the blithe conclusion in the previously referenced paper by Friedman and Lewis (2014), in which
readers are advised to “be more proactive in supporting our government’s actions to ameliorate potential risks.” The National Security Agency
should love this.
Security policies scare the public with nuclear terrorism to achieve policy outcomes –
the real nuclear threat is in national nuclear programs
Weiss 15 Leonard Weiss (scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University, USA, member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-
Proliferation, staff director of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and its Subcommittee
on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation), “On fear and nuclear terrorism”, Feb 13, 2015, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
There is a tendency on the part of security policy advocates to hype security threats to obtain support
for their desired policy outcomes. They are free to do so in a democratic society, and most come by their
advocacy through genuine conviction that a real security threat is receiving insufficient attention. But
there is now enough evidence of how such advocacy has been distorted for the purpose of overcoming
political opposition to policies stemming from ideology that careful public exposure and examination of
data on claimed threats should be part of any such debate. Until this happens, the most appropriate
attitude toward claimed threats of nuclear terrorism, especially when accompanied by advocacy of
policies intruding on individual freedom, should be one of skepticism.
Interestingly, while all this attention to nuclear terrorism goes on, the United States and other nuclear
nations have no problem promoting the use of nuclear power and national nuclear programs (only for
friends, of course) that end up creating more nuclear materials that can be used for weapons. The use of
civilian nuclear programs to disguise national weapon ambitions has been a hallmark of proliferation
history ever since the Atoms for Peace program (Sokolski, 2001), suggesting that the real nuclear threat
resides where it always has resided—in national nuclear programs; but placing the threat where it
properly belongs does not carry the public-relations frisson currently attached to the word “terrorism.”
Confronting rouge states with nuclear weapons reduces any chance of terrorists
getting nuclear weapons
Levi in 2004 (Michael Levi, a physicist, “Deterring Nuclear Terrorism”, spring 2004, Issues.org) DPC
Yet in confronting the prospect of nuclear terrorism–and there is no more dire threat facing America
today–this logic is flawed. Its purported truth in addressing nuclear terror relies almost entirely on its
assumption that rogue states could provide nuclear weapons “secretly” to terrorists. But were such
now-secret links to be exposed, deterrence could largely be restored. The United States would threaten
unacceptable retaliation were a state to provide the seeds of a terrorist nuclear attack; unable to use
terrorists for clandestine delivery, rogue states would be returned to the grim reality of massive
retaliation. Most policymakers have assumed that exposing such links would be impossible. It is not.
Building on scientific techniques developed during the Cold War, the United States stands a good chance
of developing the tools needed to attribute terrorist nuclear attacks to their state sponsors. If it can put
those tools in place and let its enemies know of their existence, deterrence could become one of the
most valuable tools in the war on terror. Terrorists cannot build nuclear weapons without first acquiring
fissile materials–plutonium or highly enriched uranium–from a state source. They might steal materials
from poorly secured stockpiles in the former Soviet Union, but with the right investment in cooperative
threat reduction, that possibility can be precluded. Alternatively, they could acquire fissile materials
from a sympathetic, or desperate, state source. North Korea presented this threat most acutely when it
threatened in May 2003 to sell plutonium to the highest bidder. The Bush administration appears to be
acutely aware of such a possibility and is trying to prevent it by fighting state-based nuclear proliferation
and by attempting to eliminate terrorist groups. Yet it has taken few effective steps to break direct
connections between terrorists and nuclear rogues. The elimination of terrorist networks and
prevention of nuclear proliferation should be top goals, but a robust policy cannot be predicated on
assuming universal success in those two endeavors.
A2: Terrorism Generic
The world is the safest it’s ever been, terror isn’t a large threat
Matthews 15
Dylan Matthews “Ignore the headlines. The world is getting safer all the time.” Vox January 14, 2015 accessed 7/1/15 at
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/14/7546165/world-getting-safer
But if you take a broader view, Dempsey is completely, utterly wrong. If anything, the world is safer than it's ever been. The
threat of nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union has lifted. Great power wars of the kind that plagued Europe until 1945 are a
thing of the past. Peoples' odds of dying from violence, including warfare, have never been lower. A Dangerous World?, an edited volume
released by the Cato Institute this past October, makes the case that the
level of danger posed to the US by everything
from terrorism to the rise of China to cyberattacks has been greatly exaggerated by policymakers and the press.
I spoke with Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, Christopher Preble, who edited the book with Ohio State professor and
Cato senior fellow John Mueller, on Tuesday. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation follows. Dylan Matthews: What's the
basic case that the world is getting safer? Christopher Preble: It's understandable why some people believe that we live in a particularly
dangerous world. As the cliché goes, the media doesn't cover the planes that land safely. But if you look at it empirically, which Steven Pinker
among others has done, a
person's chances of dying a violent death are at historic lows. We're living longer, healthier
lives. It's not unique to the United States, or even modern, Western countries. There's quite a bit of evidence worldwide that
we're living longer, better lives and that we're safer. The counterargument is that, while it's true that war is claiming fewer lives globally
and the US has been remarkably secure from war for a long time, there are a whole range of new threats in addition to interstate war that
collectively pose a greater danger than faced us in the past. We wanted to scrutinize that at a granular level, including terrorism, cyberattacks,
climate change, human security, traditional state threats like China, etc. The end result is a collection of essays that hang together along one
major theme:
the world is not uniquely dangerous, it is not more dangerous than it has ever been, and if
you look at it dispassionately it's safer than it was two or three decades ago.
What the world says about terrorism is not true- Death toll of Terrorist attacks is close
to the death toll of lightning strikes- reject negative argument
Matthews on 1/14/15 (Dylan Matthews, staff writer, 1/14/15, “Ignore the headlines, The world is
getting safer all the time”, http://www.vox.com/2015/1/14/7546165/world-getting-safer, 7/1/15)
It's easy to feel like the world is becoming a scarier place. ISIS has established a foothold in Syria and
Iraq. Russia is taking territory from Ukraine. North Korea (allegedly) attacked a major US movie studio. And, most
recently, terrorists stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve. Policymakers certainly seem to
think things are getting worse; in 2013, even before any of those developments, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Martin Dempsey declared
that the world was "more dangerous than it has ever been." But if you take a broader view, Dempsey is
completely, utterly wrong. If anything, the world is safer than it's ever been. The threat of nuclear
exchange between the US and the Soviet Union has lifted. Great power wars of the kind that plagued
Europe until 1945 are a thing of the past. Peoples' odds of dying from violence, including warfare, have
never been lower. A Dangerous World?, an edited volume released by the Cato Institute this past October, makes the case that the level of danger posed to the US
by everything from terrorism to the rise of China to cyberattacks has been greatly exaggerated by
policymakers and the press. I spoke with Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, Christopher Preble, who edited the book with Ohio State professor and Cato senior fellow John
Mueller, on Tuesday. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation follows. Dylan Matthews: What's the basic case that the world is getting safer? Christopher Preble: It's understandable why
some people believe that we live in a particularly dangerous world. As the cliché goes, the media doesn't cover the
planes that land safely. But if you look at it empirically, which Steven Pinker among others has done, a person's chances of dying a
violent death are at historic lows. We're living longer, healthier lives. It's not unique to the United
States, or even modern, Western countries. There's quite a bit of evidence worldwide that we're living
longer, better lives and that we're safer. "IT'S EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO PILFER OR BUILD A FUNCTIONING THERMONUCLEAR DEVICE" The counterargument is that, while it's true that
war is claiming fewer lives globally and the US has been remarkably secure from war for a long time, there are a whole range of new threats in addition to interstate war that collectively pose a greater danger than faced us in the
past. We wanted to scrutinize that at a granular level, including terrorism, cyberattacks, climate change, human security, traditional state threats like China, etc. The end result is a collection of essays that hang together along one
: the world is not uniquely dangerous, it is not more dangerous than it has ever been, and if you
look at it dispassionately it's safer than it was two or three decades ago. DM: What about nuclear weapons? Cold War-style
brinkmanship is a thing of the past, but if proliferation to Pakistan and North Korea increased the odds of a weapon actually being used, by a state or a terrorist group, then that suggests
the world has gotten less safe over the past two decades. Kim Jong-Un (Ed Jones / AFP / Getty) CP: John Mueller has written a whole book on this. He argues that most states and most
terrorists have concluded that nuclear weapons are more trouble than they're worth. If the object is to terrorize, a determined
terrorist can accomplish that, tragically, by purely conventional means, and fairly small-scale conventional means, like a
backpack bomb. There's evidence some terrorist groups recognize this. John cites a message sent between al-Qaeda leaders recovered in Pakistan in 2004 that says, essentially, "don't waste your time on things
that aren't attainable." That's not to say there's no concern. We'd all agree that trying to limit the amount of weapons-grade nuclear
material in the world makes a low risk even lower, and the costs of doing that are manageable. The
reason it's hard for terrorists to acquire this material is that they've attempted it in the past, and doing
that attracts the attention of lots of people, including other people looking for nuclear material. This is an argument for normal, ongoing intelligence work.
"TERRORISM WORKS THROUGH OUR REACTION TO IT" Having said that, it's extremely difficult to pilfer or build a
functioning thermonuclear device. Acquiring nuclear material and spreading it around through a dirty
bomb is less difficult, but those effects can be and have been exaggerated. We have very high standards for determining what's an
major theme
acceptable level of exposure to radiological material, and that can lead to fears out of proportion to the actual danger. DM: Proliferation also has the potential to destabilize the balance of power in certain regions — East Asia in
particular — in a way that makes war more likely. Do you worry about that? CP: I worry about it, but I don't worry about it as much as many. Many international relations experts think that the number one reason why the US
behaves as it does is to discourage other people from acquiring nuclear weapons. That's the leading argument for why the US provides security guarantees to South Korea and Japan and Germany. Those concerns are overdone.
You have evidence from history, which is in Frank Gavin's chapter, suggesting that when states acquire nuclear weapons, it doesn't spark a cascade. Israel getting nuclear weapons didn't cause a proliferation of nuclear weapons
states across the Mideast. Pakistan and India are locked in this back and forth, but I don't think you can call that a proliferation cascade. North Korea is a nuclear weapons state, as we define it. They seem to be perfecting the ability
to refine uranium and to make an actual device. We see no evidence that South Korea and Japan are more seriously considering acquiring weapons because North Korea has moved in this direction. There's a lot of confidence in
traditional deterrence. I think there's some evidence that nuclear weapons have a deterrent effect, but many states have concluded that the effect isn't great enough to warrant their own arsenal. So many states that could have a
: Let's talk about conventional terrorism. Mueller has for years argued persuasively that the potential for harm just isn't that great — the
death toll is comparable to that of lightning strikes. The counterargument is that deaths from terrorism have a much greater psychological impact than deaths from
lightning or bee stings. What do you say to that? CP: We wrote another book — me, Benjamin Friedman, and Jim Harper — on this topic, to which John contributed two chapters. The bottom line is that
terrorism works through our reaction to it. That's both a psychological effect — how do people change
behavior on the basis of their fear? — and an effect on policymakers — what policies do they implement? If
those policies are demonstrably harmful to liberty, if they are unwise fiscally, then they're doing the terrorists' work
for them. Terrorism is different. We don't dispute that. It's incumbent on policymakers and elite opinion makers to speak candidly and honestly to the public, to treat them like adults, and to put the terrorism threat in
weapon if they chose to don't. DM
context — not to diminish that threat, but to reduce its effectiveness. It's about building resiliency in society across the board. There's very little penalty for people making unsubstantiated claims about threats — not just terrorism
— and we need to recognize that making outrageous claims is harmful in itself. There needs to be some pressure on people to speak dispassionately. DM: Did ISIS change your thinking on this at all? ISIS fighter An ISIS fighter in
. ISIS may be a terrorist organization, and may be an insurgency, and may be
a quasi-nation-state or attempting to become a quasi-nation-state, but it's hard to be all of those things
simultaneously. Austin Long writes about this in his chapter, about the differences between insurgents and terrorists. Most terrorists operate in the shadows.
The hard part is not killing them, it's finding them. That's why traditional counterterrorism is an
intelligence and information-gathering process. It's a lot like police work. By declaring itself a state and raising a flag
over territory it seizes and holds, ISIS is trading away one of its key advantages, and opening itself up to
more traditional military attacks. It's a virulent, reprehensible state, but it's not clear to me that it's a greater terrorist threat than other organizations that are continuing to operate in the
Syria. (AFP/Getty Images) CP: Not really, for a couple reasons
shadows. DM: The Sony hack, and the US government's allegation that North Korea was behind it, has given cyberattacks more prominence as a potential threat. Martin Libicki talks about this in the book; how concerning is it,
really? CP: I really like Martin's chapter, and it's the first time I had studied this in any detail. We assume a bit too casually that a major cyber incident, even if it doesn't cause longstanding damage, would have long-term
ramifications. Martin effectively challenges that by pointing to the multi-hour NASDAQ outage in 2013. There's no evidence that it was a deliberate attack, and yet afterwards the market recovered to the point that we barely
remember that incident. Martin doesn't mention this case specifically, but accidents that cause major disruptions to the power grid — like, as the legend goes, a squirrel running into a transformer and causing a major power
outage throughout the Northeast in 2003 — don't have a longstanding effect either. "WE HAVE PLEDGED TO GO TO WAR WITH RUSSIA OVER PIECES OF TERRITORY THAT MOST AMERICANS COULDN'T IDENTIFY ON A MAP EVEN
IF THEY WERE GIVEN SERIOUS HINTS" If accidents don't have longstanding effects, then why should we believe a deliberate attack would have a much greater effect? In the past, deliberate cyberattacks have not had longstanding
permanent effects. Yes, we will encounter something in the future that is unlike anything we've encountered before. But we can build in resiliency to deal with events we've already witnessed, and maybe reduce the effectiveness
of future events. That's worthwhile. DM: Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't directly threaten the US, but because of our treaty obligations under NATO, a similar incursion into, say, Estonia would create a problem for us. How big of
a threat would that be? CP: Because we have treaty obligations to Estonia — but didn't to Georgia in 2008, or to Ukraine in 2014 — we have to think seriously about what those commitments mean. We have pledged to go to war
with Russia over pieces of territory that most Americans couldn't identify on a map even if they were given serious hints. We did not have a serious debate in this country when NATO expansion was pushed forward, and as NATO
moved closer to Russia's borders, the likelihood of these sorts of incidents rose, and the likelihood of US involvement grew with it. My colleague Justin Logan and I have said that this is an opportunity to revisit those commitments,
to think seriously about whether we should maintain them and whether they're credible. DM: You sometimes hear the argument that the US is needed to balance against China and prevent war between them and Japan, or them
the US,
in both economic and military power, is declining in relative terms even though it remains very powerful
objectively, and therefore the effectiveness of its deterrent threats, with respect to NATO and disputed territories in the Asia-Pacific, attenuates over
and South Korea. How necessary are we there? xi jinping obama Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama make some solid facial expressions. (Feng Li/Getty Images) CP: The short answer is that
time. The US commitment to defend Japanese territorial claims is less credible than it was 20 years ago, because China's military capability is rising (slowly, but measurably) and the logical response would be for Japan, which has a
much greater interest in defending those claims, to enhance its ability to defend them itself rather than remain dependent on the US. The US security guarantee is a less effective deterrent that is, in turn, inhibiting a more effective
deterrent. "I DO NOT ENVY A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WHO HAS THIS ENORMOUS MILITARY POWER AT HIS DISPOSAL" So what I'd like to have is a better deterrent, and I think a better deterrent is one that's founded on
the nation in question, or those that are most proximate to the territory in dispute, not a country that's over 5,000 miles away. DM: What would a foreign policy that acknowledges the world has gotten safer look like? What should
Obama's national security team do differently? CP: When someone comes to them with a particular crisis and concern, they need to accurately assess the urgency of that crisis — whether it's an imminent threat, if it's just a threat
that bears watching — and whom it threatens. Does it threaten the US directly, or primarily US allies' interests? I don't think it's inappropriate to think in a fairly hierarchical way.
The things we should
be most worried about are the ones that effect the US first, just as I'd expect Japan to be most worried about things that effect them first. That's just human
nature. After you establish what's really worth worrying about and you have some kind of hierarchy, it's important to
understand the policy tools available. Managing a problem is often a better approach than trying to solve it, if by solving it
you actually make the problem worse. We've seen that play out tragically a number of times in recent years. I do not envy a President of the
United States who has this enormous military power at his disposal. In any given instance, any given
crisis, he appears to have the ability to address it, and if he chooses not to, he will only be criticized for
not using that instrument. But he can't use it everywhere. We're not omnipotent. He's inevitably going to make choices. We need a
rigorous process, and a fairly transparent process, where we lay out what we've chosen to do in each instance, and why. Hopefully that would inform peoples' responses in the future. Our allies could say, " In the last
case the US chose to not engage, and therefore we should expect them to do that in the future, so
maybe we should be in a position to do more instead of expecting the US to deal with it."
A2: Cyberterrorism
Cyber-attacks are extremely unlikely—lack of incentive, knowledge, and ability all check
Singer ‘12 [Peter W. Singer, Singer received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard and a BA from the Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton, November of 2012, Brookings Institute, “The Cyber Terror Bogeyman”]
Accessed Online: 7/01/15 http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2012/11/cyber-terror-singer
The deputy defense secretary was conflating fear and reality, not just about what stimulant-drinking programmers are actually hired to do, but
also what is needed to pull off an attack that causes meaningful violence. The
requirements go well beyond finding top
cyber experts. Taking down hydroelectric generators, or designing malware like Stuxnet that causes nuclear
centrifuges to spin out of sequence doesn’t just require the skills and means to get into a computer system. It’s
also knowing what to do once you are in. To cause true damage requires an understanding of the
devices themselves and how they run, the engineering and physics behind the target. The Stuxnet case, for
example, involved not just cyber experts well beyond a few wearing flip-flops, but also experts in areas that ranged from
intelligence and surveillance to nuclear physics to the engineering of a specific kind of Siemens-brand industrial
equipment. It also required expensive tests, not only of the software, but on working versions of the target
hardware as well. As George R. Lucas Jr., a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, put it, conducting a truly
mass-scale action using cyber means “simply outstrips the intellectual, organizational and personnel
capacities of even the most well-funded and well-organized terrorist organization, as well as those of
even the most sophisticated international criminal enterprises.” Lucas said the threat of cyber terrorism has
been vastly overblown. “To be blunt, neither the 14-year-old hacker in your next-door neighbor’s upstairs bedroom, nor the two- or
three-person al-Qaida cell holed up in some apartment in Hamburg are going to bring down the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams,” he said.
A major cyberattack on the U.S is unlikely—risk and impacts are blown out of proportion
Libicki ‘13 [Martin C. Lib, Dr. Libicki has a PhD from the University of California, 8/14/13, Foreign Affairs, “Don’t Buy
Cyberhype”] Accessed Online: 7/01/15 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2013-0814/dont-buy-cyberhype
General Keith Alexander, the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, recently characterized “cyber exploitation” of U.S. corporate computer systems
as the “greatest transfer of wealth in world history.” And in January, a report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board argued that cyber risks
should be managed with improved defenses and deterrence, including “a nuclear response in the most extreme case.” Although
the risk
of a debilitating cyberattack is real, the perception of that risk is far greater than it actually is. No person has
ever died from a cyberattack, and only one alleged cyberattack has ever crippled a piece of critical
infrastructure, causing a series of local power outages in Brazil. In fact, a major cyberattack of the kind intelligence officials fear
has not taken place in the 21 years since the Internet became accessible to the public. Thus, while a cyberattack
could theoretically disable infrastructure or endanger civilian lives, its effects would unlikely reach the scale U.S. officials have warned of. The
immediate and direct damage from a major cyberattack on the United States could range anywhere from
zero to tens of billions of dollars, but the latter would require a broad outage of electric power or
something of comparable damage. Direct casualties would most likely be limited, and indirect causalities
would depend on a variety of factors such as whether the attack disabled emergency 911 dispatch
services. Even in that case, there would have to be no alternative means of reaching first responders for
Terrorism Inev.
No way to completely solve for all of terrorism- doing so causes backslide into
totalitarian temptation
FRIEDERSDORF in 2014 (CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, Politics and national affairs staff writer,
“Counterterrorism and the Totalitarian Temptation”, The Atlantic, 1/7/14,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/counterterrorism-and-the-totalitariantemptation/282865/, 6/29/15) DPC
Through no fault of any individual, the logic of counterterrorism verges toward totalitarianism. Nationalsecurity officials can keep us safe from a surprise attack by the Russians or Chinese by keeping tabs on a small number of foreign elites. Asking
them to keep us safe from any terrorist attack is a radically different proposition. Thus the
dangers of a national-security state
focused on terrorism. Vanishingly few individuals have the desire to carry out a terrorist attack, but
virtually everyone has the means to do so. If the goal is to be zero terrorist attacks, there is a certain
logic in attempting to conduct surveillance on literally everyone on earth. Little wonder that the NSA is doing so
much to invade privacy at home and abroad. Its very mission tends to prevent its leadership—and presumably many of its employees—from
more fully tempering their actions, in accordance with the recognition that a free society which values privacy and liberty will always be
vulnerable to terrorism.
The threat can't be eliminated at a cost worth bearing. If we strike the proper balance,
the NSA will sometimes fail in its mission. That is tragic. But America had better face up to that reality,
because General Keith Alexander and his supporters won't do so, and the only alternative is much more
grim: much less liberty in a state where national-security officials are more free to act without
constraints ... but where terrorism happens anyway, as any Russian will attest. It is prudent to spend
resources on counterterrorism, and I hope and pray that no terrorist attack ever succeeds again, but
liberty is imperiled when public policy operates as if total safety from terrorists is the appropriate goal.
Hear this: A national-security state that spies on everyone is not justified in doing so even if it does reduce
the risk of terrorism, because safety is not the only good—privacy is integral to self-government and
liberty—and terrorism is far from the only danger. Terrorism is much less dangerous to life and property
than insufficiently constrained state actors (as any fair reading of history, including U.S. history, confirms). The last time
Congress constrained the national-security establishment, the NSA was largely focused on protecting
the United States from state actors. Now that the national-security establishment has increased its focus
on terrorism, more constraints are needed to check the totalitarian temptation particular to that
mission’
Virtually any individual could carry out a terrorist attack- no solution except total
totalitarian control
FRIEDERSDORF in 2014 (CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, Politics and national affairs staff writer, “A Free
Society Cannot Escape All Terrorism”, The Atlantic, 1/13/14,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/a-free-society-cannot-escape-allterrorism/283014/, 6/29/15) DPC
The NSA's outgoing deputy director, Chris Inglis, has given a wide-ranging interview to NPR, where host
Steve Inskeep asked about the practice of collecting and storing information on the telephone calls of
virtually all Americans. That program requires money, manpower, and time. It is politically controversial.
And a presidential review doubted that it stopped any terrorist attacks. So has it been worth the costs?
Inglis, who incidentally claims that it played a role in stopping one terrorist attack, says yes. "I think we
as a nation have to ask ourselves the policy question of what risks do we want to cover," he said. "Do we
want to cover 100 percent of the risk? Or do we want to perhaps take a risk that from time to time
something will get through? 9/11 was the single execution, it was the execution of a single plot with
multiple threats. And about 3,000 people lost their lives that day. That's one terrorist plot coming to
fruition. If that is an acceptable cost, if we can say, we can take the risk that we'll miss something, then
we don't need to have all of the tools that cover these various seams." That is a worrisome answer. It
displays just the sort of attitude I warned about in "Counterterrorism and the Totalitarian Temptation."
A signals-intelligence agency charged with anticipating attacks from state actors can focus surveillance
on a small group of foreign elites. In contrast, virtually any individual could carry out a terrorist attack of
some sort. If a signals-intelligence agency attempts "to cover 100 percent of the risk," its leaders will
constantly be intruding more deeply into the privacy of citizens, because there is, in fact, no 100 percent
solution, only ever-increasing-because-always-inadequate attempts at total-information awareness.
(Even Vladimir Putin, who transgresses against privacy and civil liberties far more than would be
permitted in the U.S., can't eliminate the terrorist threat.) In fact, later in the interview, Inglis seems to
contradict his earlier answer and acknowledges that covering 100 percent of the risk is imprudent:
Can't win WOT - Terrorism is an
ever growing threat
Rothkopf 6-10-2014 (David Rothkopf, 6-10-2014, "We Are Losing the War on Terror," Foreign Policy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/10/we-are-losing-the-war-on-terror/)
The ground truth about the spread of terrorism will be a hard one for many Americans to swallow after 13 costly years of war. Terrorism
is spreading
worldwide. Our enemies have sustained our blows, adapted, and grown. Two questions loom large as a consequence:
Where did we go wrong and what do we do now? Recent headlines and new studies support the conclusion that global terror trends are heading in an ever more
dangerous direction. In early June, the
Rand Corporation released a study that detailed the growing threat. It reports that in
2007, there were 28 Salafi-jihadist groups like al Qaeda. As of last year, there were 49. In 2007, these groups conducted 100 attacks. Last
year, they conducted 950. The study estimates that there were between 18,000 and 42,000 such terrorists active seven years ago. The low-end
estimate for last year, at 44,000, is higher than the top estimate for 2007, and the new high-end estimate is 105,000. The
administration rightly argues that "core al Qaeda" has sustained "huge" damage. But "core al Qaeda" no
longer poses the principle threat to the U.S. homeland. That comes, according to the Rand report, from al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula. As Rand summarizes the report: "Since 2010, there has been a 58 percent increase in the
number of jihadist groups, a doubling of jihadist fighters and a tripling of attacks by Al Qaeda affiliates. The most significant threat to the United
States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan." As legitimate as the questions that have emerged in
the Bowe Bergdahl case may be, they are secondary to the deteriorating situation associated with the war the recently released prisoner went to Afghanistan to
fight. There is no denying that the contempt for Congress shown in failing to inform it of the deal — even as perhaps 100 in the administration knew of it — starkly
reveals the cynicism behind last year’s faux deferral to Congress on Syria. But it would be far more cynical to continue with the Obama team’s variation on the
"mission accomplished" misrepresentations of his predecessor. The
war in Iraq was not over or won when we said it was. Nor is
the war on terror won or the threat it poses resolved simply by no longer using the term or suggesting our goal was merely to inflict
damage on the tiny fraction of terrorists who were associated with the 9/11 attacks . The reality is that we are still fighting the last war
on terror even as a new set of risks loom and are made worse by our minimizing their implications for
political purposes.
Although the US is winning the WoT, the end will never come – terrorists will exist as
long as mass communication and technology exists
Zenko 15 (“CIA Director: We’re Winning the War on Terror, But It Will Never End”, Micah Zenko (Council on
Foreign Relations), April 8, 2015http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/author/mzenko/)
Last night, Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan participated in a question-and-answer session at Harvard Kennedy
School’s Institute of Politics. The first thirty-seven minutes consisted of an unusually probing exchange between Brennan and Harvard professor
Graham Allison (full disclosure: Graham is a former boss of mine). Most notably, between 19:07 and 29:25 in the video, Allison pressed Brennan
repeatedly about whether the United States is winning the war on terrorism and why the number of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups has only
increased since 9/11: “There seem to be more of them than when we started…How are we doing?” Brennan replied: If I look across the
board in terms of since 9/11 at terrorist organizations, and if the United States in all of its various forms. In intelligence, military, homeland
security, law enforcement, diplomacy. If
we were not as engaged against the terrorists, I think we would be facing
a horrendous, horrendous environment. Because they would have taken full advantage of the opportunities that they have had
across the region… We have worked collectively as a government but also with our international partners
very hard to try and root many of them out. Might some of these actions be stimulants to others joining their ranks? Sure,
that’s a possibility. I think, though it has taken off of the battlefield a lot more terrorists, than it has put on. This
statement is impossible to evaluate or measure because the U.S. government has consistently refused to state publicly which terrorist
organizations are deemed combatants, and can therefore be “taken out on the battlefield.” However, relying upon the State Department’s
annual Country Reports on Terrorism,the estimated strength of all al-Qaeda-affiliated groups has grown or stayed the same since President
Obama came into office. Of course, non-al-Qaeda-affiliated groups have arisen since 9/11, including the self-proclaimed Islamic State, which the
Central Intelligence Agency estimated last September to contain up to 31,500 fighters, and Boko Haram, which has perhaps 10,000 committed
members. However, the most interesting question posed to Brennan came at the very end from a Harvard freshman who identified himself as
Julian: “We’ve been fighting the
war on terror since 2001. Is there an end in sight, or should we get used to this new state of existence?
long war, unfortunately. But it’s been a war that has been in existence for millennia, at the
same time—the use of violence for political purposes against noncombatants by either a state actor or a
subnational group. Terrorism has taken many forms over the years. What is more challenging now is, again, the
technology that is available to terrorists, the great devastation that can be created by even a handful of
folks, and also mass communication that just proliferates all of this activity and incitement and encouragement. So you have an
environment now that’s very conducive to that type of propaganda and recruitment efforts, as well as the
ability to get materials that are going to kill people. And so this is going to be something, I think, that we’re always going to
Brennan replied: It’s a
have to be vigilant about. There is evil in the world and some people just want to kill for the sake of killing…This is something that, whether it’s
from this group right now or another group, I
think the ability to cause damage and violence and kill will be with us
for many years to come. We just have to not kill our way out of this because that’s not going to address
it. We need to stop those attacks that are in train but we also have to address some of those underlying factors and conditions. I’m not saying
that poverty causes somebody to become a terrorist, or a lack of governance, but they certainly do allow these terrorist organizations to grow
and they take full advantage of those opportunities. To
summarize, the war on terrorism is working, compared to
inaction or other policies. But, the American people should expect it to continue for millennia, or as long
as lethal technologies and mass communication remain available to evil people.
FBI looking towards local law enforcement to help with domestic terrorist surveillance
– Garland attack makes FBI reassess strategies
Perez and Prokupecz 15 (justice and law enforcement reporters @ CNN) 15 “FBI struggling with
surge in homegrown terror cases”, Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz (, CNN, May 30, 2015,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/28/politics/fbi-isis-local-law-enforcement/
New York (CNN)The New York Police Department and other law
enforcement agencies around the nation are increasing their
surveillance of ISIS supporters in the U.S., in part to aid the FBI which is struggling to keep up with a
surge in the number of possible terror suspects, according to law enforcement officials. The change is part of the
fallout from the terrorist attack in Garland, Texas earlier this month. The FBI says two ISIS supporters
attempted a gun attack on a Prophet Mohammad cartoon contest but were killed by police. One of the
attackers, Elton Simpson, was already under investigation by the FBI but managed to elude surveillance to attempt the foiled attack. Texas man
charged with providing support to ISIS Texas man charged with providing support to ISIS 01:03 PLAY VIDEO FBI Director
James Comey
told a group of police officials around the country in a secure conference call this month that the FBI
needs help to keep tabs on hundreds of suspects. As a result, some police agencies are adding
surveillance teams to help the FBI monitor suspects. Teams of NYPD officers trained in surveillance are
now helping the FBI's surveillance teams to better keep track of suspects, law enforcement officials say. Why ISIS is
winning, and how to stop it NYPD Commissioner William Bratton has said he wants to add 450 officers to the force's counterterrorism unit,
partly to counter the increasing domestic threat posed by ISIS sympathizers. The same is happening with other police
departments
around the country. The Los Angeles Police Department's counterterrorism unit is also beefing up its surveillance
squads at the request of the FBI, law enforcement officials say. Comey said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday that he
has less confidence now that the FBI can keep up with the task. "It's an extraordinarily difficult challenge task to find -- that's the first challenge
-- and then assess those who may be on a journey from talking to doing and to find and assess in an environment where increasingly, as the
attorney general said, their communications are unavailable to us even with court orders," Comey said. "They're on encrypted platforms, so it
is an incredibly difficult task that we are enlisting all of our state, local and federal partners in and we're working on it every single day, but I
can't stand here with any high confidence when I confront the world that is increasingly dark to me and tell you that I've got it all covered," he
said. "We are working very, very hard on it but it is an enormous task." On Saturday, an
FBI spokesman said the bureau doesn't
have a shortage of resources and the Garland attack wasn't the result of lack of surveillance personnel. If
agents had any indication that Simpson was moving toward an attack, they would have done everything to stop it, the spokesman said. The
appeal for local help isn't intended to seek more surveillance, but more broadly to encourage local law enforcement to increase vigilance given
the heightened threat, the FBI said. The Garland attack prompted a reassessment for FBI officials. Simpson's social media
and other communications with known ISIS recruiters drew the FBI's interest earlier this year. The Americans linked to ISIS FBI agents in
Phoenix began regular surveillance of Simpson, though it was not round-the-clock monitoring, according to a U.S. official. The agents watching
Simpson noticed he disappeared for a few days. Investigators looked into his communications and found social media postings making
reference to the Garland cartoon contest. That discovery is what prompted the FBI to send a bulletin to the joint terrorism task force that was
monitoring the Garland event. The bulletin arrived about three hours before the attack. Comey told reporters this month the FBI had no idea
Simpson planned to attack the event or even that he had traveled from his home in Phoenix to Texas.
The War on Terror has been counterproductive and we are losing ground
Rothkopf, 2014 (David. "We Are Losing the War on Terror." ForeignPolicy.com. Foreign Policy, 10 June 2014.
Web. 1 July 2015.)
The ground truth about the spread of terrorism will be a hard one for many Americans to swallow after 13 costly years of war. Terrorism is
spreading worldwide. Our enemies have sustained our blows, adapted, and grown. Two questions loom large as a consequence: Where did we go
wrong and what do we do now? Recent headlines and new studies support the conclusion that global terror trends are
heading in an ever more dangerous direction. In early June, the Rand Corporation released a study that
detailed the growing threat. It reports that in 2007, there were 28 Salafi-jihadist groups like al Qaeda. As of last
year, there were 49. In 2007, these groups conducted 100 attacks. Last year, they conducted 950. The
study estimates that there were between 18,000 and 42,000 such terrorists active seven years ago. The
low-end estimate for last year, at 44,000, is higher than the top estimate for 2007, and the new high-end
estimate is 105,000. The administration rightly argues that "core al Qaeda" has sustained "huge" damage. But "core al Qaeda" no longer
poses the principle threat to the U.S. homeland. That comes, according to the Rand report, from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As Rand
summarizes the report: "Since 2010, there has been a 58 percent increase in the number of jihadist groups, a
doubling of jihadist fighters and a tripling of attacks by Al Qaeda affiliates. The most significant threat to the United
States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan." As legitimate as the questions
that have emerged in the Bowe Bergdahl case may be, they are secondary to the deteriorating situation associated with the war the recently
released prisoner went to Afghanistan to fight. There is no denying that the contempt for Congress shown in failing to inform it of the deal —
even as perhaps 100 in the administration knew of it — starkly reveals the cynicism behind last year’s faux deferral to Congress on Syria. But it
would be far more cynical to continue with the Obama team’s variation on the "mission accomplished" misrepresentations of his predecessor. The
war in Iraq was not over or won when we said it was. Nor is the war on terror won or the threat it poses resolved simply by no longer using the
term or suggesting our goal was merely to inflict damage on the tiny fraction of terrorists who were associated with the 9/11 attacks. The reality is
that we are still fighting the last war on terror even as a new set of risks loom and are made worse by our minimizing their implications for
political purposes. In its recent assessment, "Country Reports on Terrorism 2013," the State Department acknowledged the trend. It observes that
last year attacks worldwide increased almost by half, from 6,700 to 9,700. Nearly 18,000 people died and nearly 33,000 were injured. While the
report hails allied forces for making progress combating al Qaeda’s core in the AfPak region, it also notes that the group’s affiliates are becoming
more dangerous. The report takes particular note of the threat posed by foreign extremists in Syria, which has become a kind of petri dish in
which a growing global terror threat is being cultivated. Estimates on the number of such fighters range from 7,000 to over 20,000. The news that
one recent suicide bomber in Syria was an American and that one of the attackers behind the recent shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium
spent time in Syria suggests how this threat may evolve over time. It’s not unlikely that, if left unchecked, the long-term consequences of a cadre
of fighters trained in Syria who will soon return to their home countries will be one of the darkest legacies of that war — a legacy that may well
echo the long-term costs associated with training jihadists in the battle against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, among whom, of course,
was Osama bin Laden. Sleepwalking Into a Trap On just one day this week, Pakistani Taliban claimed credit for an attack on Karachi’s
international airport that killed 30 people, while in Baluchistan 23 Shiite pilgrims were killed in gun and bomb attacks. (A follow-up attack on the
Karachi airport’s security academy occurred less than 48 hours later.) That same day, 52 people were killed in bombings in Baghdad. Elsewhere
that day a female suicide bomber attacked a barracks in Nigeria. Scores more died in the fighting in Syria — many at the hands of the
government, to be sure, but many also as victims of extremists. Such attacks pass with little more than perfunctory comment from our leaders or
the media. Yet we are numbed to such attacks at our peril.Such attacks pass with little more than perfunctory comment from our leaders or the
media. Yet we are numbed to such attacks at our peril. We compound the risk associated with such numbing by rationalizing them away. The
Rand report notes that the number of "near abroad" attacks is up while the number of "far abroad" attacks has gone down. This is a way of saying
that the threat to the U.S. homeland appears to be less from these fragmented, decentralized groups. The report also suggests that such groups are
more easily defeated or turned against one another. The State Department presented its report with comments from its spokesperson that "the
numbers [of attacks] against Americans have been very low for a long time and have continued to go down." That fewer Americans are being
killed and fewer terrorists are seeking to hit targets on U.S. soil is no doubt a very good thing. Much credit for producing such an outcome is due
to the U.S. intelligence community and our military for reducing those risks to our homeland security establishment and the private sector
organizations with which they must collaborate to be successful. But it would be as dangerous today to interpret current trends as being positive
because one particular past enemy is in decline or because at the moment the risk to Americans at home is lower as it was for top officials to
underappreciate the threat posed by bin Laden immediately before the 9/11 attacks. That’s the dangerous trap into which we risk falling. By
overly focusing on narrowly addressing the threats identified with the attacks 13 years ago, we risk creating precisely the same conditions that led
to those attacks… and ignoring other, perhaps more serious, emerging threats. For example, serious threats exist to U.S. interests that are not
threats to the homeland. The disintegration of Syria is such a threat. The creation of a failed state bordering Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and
Iraq poses deep and lasting risks to the region. One manifestation of how such a threat can spread is visible right now in Iraq, where ISIS (the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), a group that cut its teeth in the Syria conflict, has just seized control of much of Iraq’s second largest city,
Mosul. This compounds ISIS gains in Fallujah and across Anbar province. Should the Iraqi government fail to regain control of this region, the
consequences of an extremist rump state on Jordan’s eastern border and of conflict with Kurds in the north are grave. Such a scenario is quite
possible, in fact; 11 years after the United States went to war with Iraq we could be on the verge of seeing it fracture into an extr emist Sunni state
in the west and an Iranian puppet state in the east — perhaps the worst possible outcome we could have envisioned. It raises the question: What is
the opposite of "mission accomplished?" And another: Who lost Iraq? (That the destabilization that caused this was triggered by an Afghan-based
extremist’s group attack on the United States is illustrative of how unpredictable, convoluted, and widespread the aftershocks of terror attacks can
be.) This last point in turn should lead to the recognition that the cultivation of extremist threats within failed states like Syria or weak states like
Iraq, Yemen, or Libya or those in sub-Saharan Africa seems certain to produce a new generation of jihadists who will soon pose a threat
worldwide. That such groups have gained important footholds in Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and in the Horn of Africa should be very worrying to us.
While they seem like distant places and the damage is not now being visited on Americans, what will be the cost in terms regional stability,
access to vital resources, flows of immigrants and refugees to new countries that can ill-afford to house them, etc.? The Risks Posed by National
Narcissism In the wake of the 9/11 attacks we had a number of reactions to the trauma it caused. Some were natural — like seeking to exact a
punishment on those behind the attacks. Some were sound national security policy — like seeking to keep the attackers from ever attacking us
again, and increasing the tools we have to anticipate or mitigate future risks. Some were dangerously ill-considered — like invading Iraq. Some
were damaging to our national standing — like surveillance overreach or the use of torture. Today, we are learning the lessons of this period of
reaction, this era in which so many of our initiatives seemed to be driven by fear of a future attack. That is why it would be both ironic and
perilous for us to fail to learn one of the first lessons of what happened on 9/11, which is that in today’s globalized, technologically empowered
world, there is no such thing as a distant problem. All can make their way to our doorstep with lightning speed. This does not mean we must
intervene everywhere against everyone. The first War on Terror was clearly mismanaged in many sometimes
profoundly damaging ways. Indeed, some of our best antidotes to the risk posed by terror are not war at all but good intelligence, good
police work, and a renewed focus on economic, social, and institutional development. Certainly, invading and destabilizing extraneous countries
only makes matters worse. One of the most pervasive problems behind the first War on Terror was national
narcissism — the sense that now that this problem that had afflicted so many for so long had taken a big enough toll on us, it was all about us,
entirely up to us to handle in whatever way we saw fit, the laws of nations and the international community be damned. But there is another
insidious consequence of such nationalism. It is the mistaken belief — the one that afflicted us prior to 9/11 and was one of its proximate causes
— that if such problems did not impact our shores and our people, they never would; they weren’t our concern. We can’t let such a view delude
us into complacency now. As Seth Jones, the author of the Rand report, has said, "Based on these threats, the United States cannot afford to
withdraw or remain disengaged from key parts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan
and Iraq, it may be tempting for the U.S. to turn its attention elsewhere and scale back on counterterrorism efforts. But [our] research indicates
that the struggle is far from over." We dare not drop our guard. And we must find ways to work even more vigorously with the international
community, with our allies, with stable regional governments upon which we can depend and with whom we can collaborate, to do whatever we
can to reverse this disturbing recent trend. President Barack Obama’s West Point speech — which suggested that we could now safely start to
hand off such issues to partners on the ground — has, in the case of Pakistan and Iraq, been debunked within the last few days. We cannot put
this effort on autopilot and forget about it. Instead we must develop new strategies and new active and committed alliances — like finding ways
to work more closely with the Chinese, who face a similar threat at home, reinvigorating how the Atlantic Alliance works together on such issues,
and working more closely with the more moderate Sunni states in the Middle East. Our new efforts will require more aid (and unlike with some
of our Syria promises, aid that is swiftly delivered when it can make a difference). They will mean more technical assistance and training. More
shared intelligence. More military support and, yes, action when it is the only and best available option. And above all it will mean instilling the
sense of urgency that should be associated with any endeavor, like this one to protect our citizens and interests, in which we are so clearly
losing ground