Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative Answers – Table of Contents
Summary.............................................................................................................................................. 2
Glossary............................................................................................................................................... 3
Solvency Answers
No Solvency – Overbroad Surveillance ................................................................................................ 4
No Solvency – Internal Threat Surveillance .......................................................................................... 5
Solvency Turn – Collapses Hegemony ................................................................................................. 6
Solvency Turn – Leaks Destroy Foreign Relations ............................................................................... 7
Solvency Turn – Decreased Capabilities .............................................................................................. 8
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Summary
The Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative position denies that the best course of action is to protect
whistleblowers laws and contends that their originally proposed plan is best suited to solve the
problems highlighted by both teams in the debate. This evidence contends that past whistleblower
reforms have failed and will continue to do so, despite claims from the Negative team that say
otherwise. Furthermore, the reason that whistleblower laws have failed in the past is because
surveillance itself is currently far too broad for whistleblowers to provide adequate protection and
transparency. More simply, there is too much surveillance for whistleblowers to protect against all
wrongdoing. Another point made by the Affirmative team is that if whistleblower laws are enhanced,
then the NSA could simply shift its own practices, making it harder for whistleblowers to detect
wrongdoing, even from within the agency.
The Affirmative responses to the counterplan also claim that the international community has already
lost most of its trust in the U.S. government because of its surveillance practices. Thus, any further
whistleblowing could push the NSA beyond the point of no return, making it impossible for that
agency to ever regain foreign or domestic trust. A lack of trust by foreign nations in U.S. surveillance
practices could then have increasingly negative impacts on our foreign relations as a whole with other
nations. Finally, the Affirmative team argues that unchecked whistleblowing could damage national
security, putting domestic residents, foreign allies, and troops in danger of attacks from international
powers.
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Glossary
Angela Merkel – A German politician and a former research scientist who has been the leader of the
Christian Democratic Union since 2000 and the Chancellor of Germany since 2005. She is the first
woman to hold either office. It was revealed to the world in 2013 that the NSA had tapped her mobile
phone.
Chelsea Manning – known before 2013 as Bradley Edward Manning, is a United States Army soldier
who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing
to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified but sensitive military and
diplomatic documents.
Disclosure – The action of making new or secret information known.
Edward Snowden – An American computer contractor who leaked classified information from the
NSA in 2013. The information revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the
NSA with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. As of 2015,
he was living in an undisclosed location in Russia while seeking asylum elsewhere.
FAA – FISA Amendments Act of 2008 – an Act of Congress that amended the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. It has been used as the legal basis for mass surveillance programs disclosed by
Edward Snowden in 2014, including PRISM.
Human Rights Watch – An international non-governmental organization that conducts research and
advocacy on human rights.
NGO – Non-governmental Organization – An organization that is neither a part of a government nor a
conventional for-profit business.
SOR Act and STA Act – The Surveillance Order Reporting Act and Surveillance Transparency Act of
2013 – Two proposed pieces of legislation that seek to give companies more options for disclosing
when and how often they received national security-related requests and provided data to the
government.
Transparency – The right and the means to examine the process of decision-making.
Whistleblower – A person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal,
dishonest, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public.
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
No Solvency – Overbroad Surveillance
[___]
[___] Whistleblower transparency reforms fail – the problem is the surveillance itself is
overbroad.
Greene, 2014
(John Marshall Law School, B.S. in Political Science (Michael, “Where Has Privacy Gone? How
Surveillance Programs Threaten Expectations of Privacy”, The John Marshall Journal of Information
Technology & Privacy Law, Summer 2014, http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/
jmjcila30&div=36&g_sent=1&collection=journals)
Next, analyzing the SOR Act and STA Act, the focus of these Acts are to push for a more immediate
resolution to some of the concerns that U.S. persons have regarding private companies turning over
their private information to government surveillance programs. However, these legislative pushes run
far shorter than the proposed legislation under the aforementioned ISOR Act. Currently, companies
can only report on the amount of data requests.156 While these requests can be reported in blocks of
1,000, a single request could encompass millions of users.157 The SOR and STA Acts would focus
on refining the language used in the FAA of 2008 to allow private companies to give more detailed
reports regarding the frequency and amount of user data that has been requested under FISC court
orders. All of the above being considered, the SOR and STA Acts are more likely to be passed in
Congress and moving onto the next stage of the legislation process, due to the substantial lobbying of
the technology industry and that these acts will not alter any significant parts of the FAA of 2008.
Lobbying by several large technology companies has increased support in the legislation that would
give the companies more ability to inform their customers and future users about information
requests.158 These companies hope that more transparency will alleviate customer’s concerns about
information security. Endorsement by technology companies also provides more persuasive support
to the SOR and ACT Acts by showcasing the private sector backing of these acts. However, both the
SOR and STA Acts still fall short of offering a substantive solution to the problems of implementing
FISA programs because they do not halt or change any of the policies currently used to collect
information.
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
No Solvency – Internal Threat Surveillance
[___]
[___] The NSA will just shift towards increased internal surveillance to get rid of
whistleblowing opportunities.
Dilanian, 2013
(Ken, reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “Clapper: Snowden case brings healthy debate; more
disclosures to come,” September 12, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/12/world/la-fg-wnclapper-snowden-disclosures-20130912)
WASHINGTON -- James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Thursday that Edward
Snowden's disclosures of secret surveillance programs at home and abroad have generated a useful
public debate on the trade-offs between privacy and national security. "I think it's clear that some of
the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen," Clapper told a
defense and intelligence contractor trade group. "If there's a good side to this, maybe that's it."
Clapper defended the work of the National Security Agency, where Snowden worked on contract as a
systems analyst, and took no responsibility for the glaring security lapse that allowed Snowden to
download and remove at least 50,000 classified documents from an NSA listening post in Hawaii.
The "continuous stream of revelations" that has appeared in U.S. and British newspapers has
damaged national security, and is far from over, Clapper said. "Unfortunately, there is more to
come," he said. He said the intelligence community is taking steps to prevent other employees or
contractors from compromising security. "There's been a lot of focus on insider threat detection,
which we were into, but probably not with the emphasis and the energy that we are now," Clapper
said. His statement suggested that the digital theft of more than 700,000 classified documents in 2010
by Chelsea Manning, then an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq known as Bradley, did not prompt the
intelligence bureaucracy to adequately plug its holes. Manning has been convicted of espionage and
other charges. Joseph DeTrani, a retired intelligence official who is president of the Intelligence and
National Security Alliance, asked Clapper why the public seemed skeptical about Obama
administration claims that the NSA does not spy on Americans in violation of the law. Clapper cited
the challenge of trying to track terrorists and other foreign adversaries who communicate over the
same telephone lines, airwaves and Internet servers as Americans. He also cited what he called
distorted reporting in the news media for causing misunderstanding. Journalists examining the
surveillance programs that Snowden disclosed "go to the deepest darkest place they can and make
the most conspiratorial case for what the intelligence community is doing." Clapper noted that he
spent six years as an intelligence contractor, and he defended the role of private companies working
with the intelligence community. "Contractors continue to serve as a crucial part of the community,"
he said. "We could not do our mission without you and we need you to stick with us and help us get
through this difficult period."
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Solvency Turn – Collapses Hegemony
[___] Surveillance disclosures pushed U.S. intelligence capabilities and credibility to the
brink—they collapse US power projection.
Mukasey, 2014
(Former U.S. Attorney General, judge for the Southern District of New York, B.A. from Columbia,
LL.B. from Yale (Michael, SAFE AND SURVEILLED: FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL
MICHAEL B. MUKASEY ON THE NSA, WIRETAPPING, AND PRISM, National Security Law Journal,
3/25/14, https://www.nslj.org/wp-content/uploads/3_NatlSecLJ_196-209_Mukasey.pdf)
What damage has been done to our national security by Snowden’s disclosure? Well, the Defense
Intelligence Agency has prepared a report for the House permanent subcommittee that’s classified,
but what is already clear is that although press reports have focused on NSA foreign intelligence
collection, much of the information that Snowden stole actually relates to current U.S. military
operations, and in the words of [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] Chairman Mike
Rogers, is likely to have “lethal consequences for our troops in the field.” According to the Ranking
Member to the Committee Dutch Ruppersberger, we have already seen terrorists changing their
methods because of Snowden’s leaks. The operations affected ranged beyond terrorism, into
cybercrime, narcotics, and human trafficking. A program in Latin America that helped rescue women
in that part of the world from human trafficking rings had to be abandoned because documents
relating to it were leaked and the identity of informants was compromised. Vital operations for all four
of our military services have been affected. The exposures as to foreign intelligence operations are
potentially devastating. They include, for example, an NSA report of self-assessment in fifty aspects
of counterterrorism that reveals gaps in our knowledge about the security of Pakistani nuclear
material when it’s being transported; of the capabilities of China’s next generation of fighter aircraft
(that includes secrets that were stolen from our own F35 planes back in 2007); of what plans Russian
leaders might have to deal with destabilizing events, such as large protests or terrorists incidents. The
capabilities he has disclosed, thus far, include how NSA intercepts e-mails, phone calls, and radio
transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan; the fact that NSA is watching the security of Pakistan’s
nuclear weapons; that NSA is capable of measuring the loyalty of CIA recruits in Pakistan; [and] how
NSA hacks into telephones in Honk Kong and the rest of China. Just last weekend, The New York
Times carried another leak from the Snowden trove, a story that describes how NSA has tried—
apparently successfully—to penetrate a Chinese manufacturer of electronic equipment, including
communications equipment, [of] Huawei, so that it could monitor what purchasers of that equipment,
including foreign governments, do with it. Right in the body of that story was the revelation that the
Times had withheld certain technical details from the story at the request of the Obama
administration, but nonetheless the Chinese government and Huawei are now on notice of the effort
and can set about taking steps to guard against it. You want to imagine the nature of the damage that
he has done? Think of someone disclosing the acoustic signature of a nuclear submarine. That’s
among the most closely guarded of secrets that we have, because if it is disclosed, it makes that
submarine—an investment of literally billions of dollars—useless. That is the nature of what he has
done to a lot our intelligence capabilities.
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Solvency Turn – Leaks Destroy Foreign Relations
[___] Surveillance disclosures destroy our foreign relationships because of their public
nature.
Mukasey, 2014
(Former U.S. Attorney General, judge for the Southern District of New York, B.A. from Columbia,
LL.B. from Yale (Michael, SAFE AND SURVEILLED: FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL
MICHAEL B. MUKASEY ON THE NSA, WIRETAPPING, AND PRISM, National Security Law Journal,
3/25/14, https://www.nslj.org/wp-content/uploads/3_NatlSecLJ_196-209_Mukasey.pdf)
It is, of course, no accident that Snowden has wound up in Russia, whose geopolitical goals are
consistent with weakening U.S. intelligence. Russia itself is technologically and economically and
militarily a basket case, but undermining the capabilities of the United States can’t help [but even] the
playing field. The distortion in allocating resources is another byproduct of these disclosures. As you
can imagine, if a single disclosure is made, all possible sources of damage have to be considered
and mitigated to the extent possible. If means and methods are disclosed, adjustments have to be
made. If human assets are disclosed, steps have to be taken to get them and others with whom they
may have a relationship to safety. Two disclosures complicate the problem still further. When you
have millions of documents with varied disclosures, the problem of building a protective wall around
what can be salvaged in each case is one that could absorb virtually the entire resources of even the
best-resourced agency. And, of course, resources devoted to damage control are not then available
for the active protection of our national security. But that’s just the damage within our own intelligence
community. Relationships between the United States and Europe, between European nations
themselves, are undermined because confidence is undermined—and I’m not speaking of the Angela
Merkel cellphone problem. In fact, for years it had been an open secret in the intelligence community
[that] Angela Merkel used a conventional cell phone that could be overheard, and we were by no
means the only country that overheard it. The French were quite active in that regard. Besides, even
if we were the only country, if you’re dealing with a country like Germany that’s been champing at the
bit trying to avoid sanctions on Iran for years, you would certainly want to know what the leaders of
that country is saying in her less-guarded moments. Rather, what I’m talking about is simply how
seriously we can be taken by even our friends. If we can’t keep secrets secure from somebody like
Snowden, how willing do you think foreign intelligence agencies will be to share information with us?
Because the United States is a leader in the gathering of intelligence, the result is to paralyze western
intelligence capabilities and our self-defense. Snowden and his public handlers . . . have sold the
public in general, and some conservatives in particular, on the idea that what they have disclosed is
that the United States Government is secretly spying on all of its citizens, on their communications,
and indeed on all aspects of their lives—of any electronic interaction, whether through e-mail,
banking, telephone calls, card transactions, you name it. They portray Snowden as romantic and
idealistic rather than self-absorbed and traitorous—as someone who more closely resembles Robin
Hood or Paul Revere than Alger Hiss or Benedict Arnold. And the popular press, which has an
ongoing interest in being able to continue to get stories from the Snowden trough, has gone along
with the message in the way it reports information, which guarantees continued access.
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Whistleblower Counterplan Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Solvency Turn – Decreased Capabilities
[___]
[___] Unchecked disclosures seriously damage our national security. We need to eliminate
the situations that create such discomfiture to begin with.
Blake, 2013
(Aaron Blake, reporter for The Washington Post, “Clapper: Leaks are ‘literally gut-wrenching,’ leaker
being sought,” June 9, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/postpolitics/wp/2013/06/09/clapper-leaks-are-literally-gut-wrenching-leaker-being-sought/)
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in an interview that aired Saturday night that the
leaks regarding the Obama administration's surveillance programs are "literally gut-wrenching" and
that the administration has requested a criminal investigation into who leaked the information.
"For me, it is literally – not figuratively – literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the
huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities," Clapper told NBC News's Andrea
Mitchell. Clapper accused the media of using "hyperbole" in describing the programs. The National
Security Agency's collection of phone records was first reported by the Guardian, while a separate
program that tracks Internet data of foreigners as revealed by the Guardian and the Washington Post.
He said the NSA has asked the Justice Department to find whoever leaked the information. "I think
we all feel profoundly offended by that," Clapper said. "This is someone who, for whatever reason,
has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country. And so I hope we're able to track down
whoever's doing this, because it is extremely damaging to, and it affects the safety and security of this
country." Appearing on a separate Sunday show, the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence
committees -- Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), respectively -- both urged
an investigation into who leaked the information. Rogers had tough words for both the leaker and the
reporter who first broke the story, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald. "(Greenwald) doesn’t have a
clue how this thing works; neither did the person who released just enough information to make this
dangerous," Rogers said on ABC's "This Week." "I absolutely think (the leaker) should be
prosecuted."
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