Terrorism Disadvantage
Negative
1NC Shell
Uniqueness: Expiration of NSA authority is a massive signal of weakness --- terrorist
groups are looking to exploit any vulnerability
Daily Mail 15, 5/31/2015. “Head of CIA warns that US is at risk of lone wolf terror attack after NSA powers to monitor all phone calls
expired – as Isis ‘watch carefully’ for security gaps,” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3105089/Senate-makes-ditch-bid-extend-NSA-sbulk-collection-phone-records-Rand-Paul-swears-block-legislation-let-Patriot-Act-expire.html.
the CIA has warned that Americans are now at risk after the Senate was unable to extend laws
giving authorities special powers to fight terrorists. Politicians in the upper house were unable to come to an agreement to extend key
The head of
parts of the Patriot Act - that legalize controversial methods of surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) - which expired on Sunday. Attempts were
frustrated by Presidential candidate Rand Paul, who has taken a firm stance against the extension of powers allowing the mass collection of phone records, wire
taps and warrants without evidence. But the Head of the CIA John Brennan claims ordinary Americans, who expect the NSA to do their jobs, have been put at risk by
'political grandstanding and crusading for ideological causes' that fueled the debate. Speaking on CBS show Face The Nation, he
warned that the US is now in danger from technologically 'sophisticated' terrorists who are watching developments
carefully and 'looking for the seams to operate' within. He claimed that the authorities do not abuse the powers,
extended in 2011 to help fight lone wolf terror suspects not connected to a specific group, and that without them, it's difficult for the
NSA to protect America. Mr Brennan said: 'I think terrorist elements have watched very carefully what
has happened here in the United States, whether or not it's disclosures of classified information or whether it's changes in the law and
policies. They are looking for the seams to operate within. 'And this is something that we can't afford to do
right now, because if you look at the horrific terrorist attacks and violence that is being perpetrated
around the globe, we need to keep our country safe. And our oceans are not keeping us safe the way they did a century ago.' The
and Europe -
Patriot Act was passed in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Now that the provisions have expired, government agents will need to subpoena phone
companies for the records. The White House previously justified collecting the records because of the Patriot Act's Section 215, which expired on Sunday. Two other
provisions, added in 2011, also expired with it. The first is a 'roving wiretap' provision which allows government agencies to keep tracking suspects as they switch
devices. The second is a 'lone wolf' clause which allows warrants to be granted without any evidence linking a suspect to a foreign power or terrorist group. Political
struggles over the NSA and its data collection have become a national issue since whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government programs in
2013. The senate's efforts to pass a replacement bill were frustrated by Kentucky's junior senator Rand Paul, who has spoken at length against the NSA's activities,
which he has excoriated as illegal and unconstitutional. Paul, a Republican who is running for president, came up against members of his own party, as well as the
Obama administration. With his presidential campaign waning, he has been accused of irresponsible political opportunism by opponents, by fighting a bill on
ideological grounds that may put ordinary people at risk. He was criticized by the White House Sunday night, which called the Patriot Act expiration an 'irresponsible
lapse'. While Brennan didn't mention Paul by name, he said on Face The Nation: 'Unfortunately I think there is a little too much political grandstanding and
crusading for ideological causes that have really fuelled the debate on this issue. He added: 'These are authorities that have been used by the government to make
sure that we're able to safeguard Americans. And the sad irony is that most Americans expect the government to protect them. And so although there's a lot of
debate that goes on, on the Congress and the Hill on this issue, I think, when you go out to Boise or Tampa or Louisville, Americans are expecting their law
enforcement and homeland security and intelligence professionals to do their work. And these authorities are important.' Paul argued 'there must be another way'
but even he agrees that the lapse in these powers are likely to be temporary as politicians work on the USA Freedom Act, which is expected to pass within the next
week. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called a rare Sunday session to try to pass the replacement law, but was unable to push it through in
time. And although the replacement is set to pass this week, Paul said the expiration was 'a victory no matter how you look at it'. In a statement, he said: 'It might
be short lived, but I hope that it provides a road for a robust debate, which will strengthen our intelligence community, while also respecting our Constitution. He
added: 'The expiration of the NSA's sweeping, all-encompassing and ineffectual powers will not relinquish functions necessary for protecting national security. The
expiration will instead do what we should have done all along - rely on the Constitution for these powers.' According to a top lawmaker, as of 8pm Sunday no NSA
employee could access their enormous phone records database, which holds metadata on millions of phone conversations handed over by telecoms companies like
Verizon and AT&T. Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr said on Sunday: 'There is no way to get any type of agreement tonight -- either an
extension or passage of a bill. So at 8pm tonight, NSA employees can not query the database'. In a statement issued Sunday night, Obama's press secretary Josh
Earnest, urged action to pass the USA Freedom Act as quickly as possible. He said: 'The Senate took an important - if late - step forward tonight. We call on the
Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible. 'On a matter as critical as our national security, individual Senators must put
aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly. The American people deserve nothing less.' Some lawmakers have said the lapse raises alarming questions about
how US authorities can keep the homeland safe with a diminished security toolbox. 'I think it's very very unfortunate that we're in this position,' said Senator Mike
Lee, a conservative Republican who supports the reform bill. 'We've known this date was coming for four years. Four years. And I think it's inexcusable that we
With
the clock ticking, CIA chief John Brennan warned Sunday that allowing vital surveillance programs to lapse could
increase terror threats, and argued that the phone metadata dragnet has not abused civil liberties and only serves to safeguard citizens. 'This is
adjourned' for a weeklong break last week without resolving the issue. Lee, too, conceded that the reform bill would most likely pass in the coming week.
something that we can't afford to do right now,' Brennan said of allowing the counterterrorism provisions to expire. 'Because if you look at the horrific terrorist
attacks and violence being perpetrated around the globe, we need to keep our country safe, and our oceans are not keeping us safe the way they did century ago,'
he said on CBS talk show Face the Nation. Brennan added that online threats from groups like Isis would continue to grow over the next five to ten years. He said:
'Isis has been very sophisticated and adept at using the Internet to propagate its message and reach out to individuals. We see what is happening as far as
thousands upon thousands of individuals, including many thousands from the West, that have traveled into Syria and Iraq. And a number of these individuals are
traveling back. 'And what we see, they're also using the Internet as a way to incite and encourage individuals to carry out acts of violence.'So as the director of FBI
says, you know, this use of these websites and their Internet capabilities is something of great concern. So yes, I think ISIS is a threat not just in the Middle East and
South Asia and African regions but also to Europe as well as to the United States.'
Link: Warrantless mass surveillance is critical to prevent terrorism --- casting a wide
net and being able to act quickly is critical to identify networks
Yoo 15 John Yoo, 5/8/2015. Emanuel Heller professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a Visiting Scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, former official in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. “Will Congress reject the
dangerous NSA ruling by reauthorizing the Patriot Act?” American Enterprise Institute, https://www.aei.org/publication/will-congress-rejecttodays-dangerous-nsa-ruling-by-reauthorizing-the-patriot-act/.
Finally, the Court displays a deep misunderstanding of the challenges of counterterrorism policy, which Congress understands far better. As Judge Richard Posner
has recognized, an intelligence search “is a search for the needle in a haystack. ” Rather than pursue suspects who have already committed a crime and whose
identity is already known, intelligence agencies must search for clues among millions of potentially innocent connections, communications, and links. “The
intelligence services,” Posner writes, “must cast a wide net with a fine mesh to catch the clues that may
enable the next attack to be prevented.” Our government can detect terrorists by examining phone and e-mail communications, as well as
evidence of joint travel, shared assets, common histories or families, meetings, and so on. If our intelligence agents locate a lead, they
must quickly follow its many possible links to identify cells and the broader network of terrorists. A
database of call data would allow a fast search for possible links in the most important place — the
United States, where terrorists can inflict the most damage. Most of the calling records may well be innocent (just as most of the
financial records of a suspected white-collar criminal may also be innocent), but the more complete the database, the better our
intelligence agencies can pursue a lead into the U.S.
And, more transparency causes an increased risk in terror.
Grassley 13 (SENATOR CHARLES GRASSLEY (R-IA), July 31, 2013, Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subject: "Strengthening
Privacy Rights and National Security: Oversight of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Surveillance Programs"
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=741931)
Finally,
increased transparency is a worthy goal in general. And as I suggested before, whenever we can talk about these programs, I think there's less
questions out there in the minds of people, and we probably created some public relations problems for us and for this program and for our national security community because maybe we
I say that understanding that we can't tell our enemies what we -- what tools we
use. But if we consider any reform that may bring more transparency to the FISA process, we should
keep in mind, then, that every piece of information we make available to the public will be read by a
determined adversary, and that adversary has already demonstrated the capacity to kill thousands of
Americans, even on our own soil.
haven't made enough information available.
Impact: A terrorist attack escalates to a global nuclear exchange
Speice 06 – 06 JD Candidate @ College of William and Mary [Patrick F. Speice, Jr., “NEGLIGENCE AND NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION:
ELIMINATING THE CURRENT LIABILITY BARRIER TO BILATERAL U.S.-RUSSIAN NONPROLIFERATION ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS,” William & Mary
Law Review, February 2006, 47 Wm and Mary L. Rev. 1427
Accordingly, there
is a significant and ever-present risk that terrorists could acquire a nuclear device or fissile
material from Russia as a result of the confluence of Russian economic decline and the end of stringent Soviet-era nuclear security measures. 39 Terrorist groups
could acquire a nuclear weapon by
a number of methods, including "steal[ing] one intact from the stockpile of a
country possessing such weapons, or ... [being] sold or given one by [1438] such a country, or [buying or
stealing] one from another subnational group that had obtained it in one of these ways." 40 Equally
threatening, however, is the risk that terrorists will steal or purchase fissile material and construct a
nuclear device on their own. Very little material is necessary to construct a highly destructive nuclear weapon. 41 Although nuclear devices are
extraordinarily complex, the technical barriers to constructing a workable weapon are not significant. 42 Moreover, the
sheer number of methods
that could be used to deliver a nuclear device into the United States makes it incredibly likely that
terrorists could successfully employ a nuclear weapon once it was built. 43 Accordingly, supply-side controls that are aimed
at preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear material in the first place are the most effective means of countering the risk of nuclear terrorism. 44 Moreover, the
end of the Cold War eliminated the rationale for maintaining a large military-industrial complex in Russia, and the nuclear cities were closed. 45 This resulted in at
least 35,000 nuclear scientists becoming unemployed in an economy that was collapsing. 46 Although the economy has stabilized somewhat, there [1439] are still at
least 20,000 former scientists who are unemployed or underpaid and who are too young to retire, 47 raising the chilling prospect that these scientists will be
tempted to sell their nuclear knowledge, or steal nuclear material to sell, to states or terrorist organizations with nuclear ambitions. 48 The potential consequences
of the unchecked spread of nuclear knowledge and material to terrorist groups that seek to cause mass destruction in the United States are truly horrifying. A
terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be devastating in terms of immediate human and
economic losses. 49 Moreover, there would be immense political pressure in the United States to
discover the perpetrators and retaliate with nuclear weapons, massively increasing the number of
casualties and potentially triggering a full-scale nuclear conflict. 50 In addition to the threat posed by terrorists, leakage of
nuclear knowledge and material from Russia will reduce the barriers that states with nuclear ambitions face and may trigger widespread proliferation of nuclear
weapons. 51 This proliferation will
increase the risk of nuclear attacks against the United States [1440] or its allies by hostile states, 52 as well as increase
the likelihood that regional conflicts will draw in the United States and escalate to the use of nuclear
weapons.
And, The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review gives the U.S. the right to retaliate with nuclear
weapons. There would be extreme pressure to do so in the wake of a terrorist attack.
ISIS 10 (Institute for Science and International Security, “What the Nuclear Posture Review means for proliferation and nuclear ‘outliers,’”
http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/what-the-nuclear-posture-review-means-for-proliferation-and-nuclear-outlier, *bolded text preserved
from article)
the NPR makes clear that the United States reserves the right to “hold fully accountable”
any state or group “that supports or enables terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass
destruction, whether by facilitating, financing, or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts.” (p. 12) The implication is that
the United States reserves the right to retaliate with nuclear weapons against a state whose nuclear
explosive material is used in an attack, whether by a state or terrorist group. While the NPR makes clear that the
At the same time,
United States would only consider the use of such weapons under “extreme” circumstances, it is important to be aware that in the event of a
terror attack, the use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly proscribed. This
leaves a potentially dangerous opening for the
use of a nuclear weapon when demands for retaliation will be especially acute and intelligence and
forensic information vulnerable to misinterpretation.
Uniqueness Extensions
Offensive cyber operations are limited now, but mobility is key to prevent national
security threats
Fisher 2013 (Max, Washington Post Staff, 2013, "Leaked documents hint at Obama’s emerging
cyberwar doctrine", http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/07/leakeddocuments-hint-at-obamas-emerging-cyberwar-doctrine/)
President Obama
has tasked senior national security and intelligence officials with preparing a list of
potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber attacks, the Guardian reports, the latest in a series of stories sourced to leaked
documents. The story offers a rare glimpse into the Obama administration’s cyber offensive planning and
the contours of when it is and isn’t willing to use those capabilities. The leaked government documents
portray the Obama administration as willing to hack foreign targets to preempt perceived threats
against U.S. interests. Attacks in foreign countries without that country’s consent are permissible, they
say, when “U.S. national interests and equities” are at stake or as “anticipatory action taken against
imminent threats.” According to the Guardian, the documents reference offensive cyber capabilities by the U.S.
military and state “several times that cyber operations are to be used only in conjunction with other
national tools and within the confines of law.” And it’s worth noting that preparing a potential target list is not the same thing
as planning to strike those targets; for many years, the Pentagon maintained worst-case-scenario plans for invading Canada. The Obama
administration, based on these documents, seems to see offensive cyber attacks as most appropriate when
used to preempt a possible incoming attack. In this sense, their cyber doctrine bears a striking resemblance to Obama’s case
for the use of drone strikes, which he articulated in a recent speech. Drones, he argues, are justified on the one hand by the need to remove
impending national security threats and, on the other, by the fact that all other options would be much costlier. Of course, as with drone
strikes, preemptive cyber attacks risk collateral damage and mistakenly targeting someone who was not actually a threat. The document does
not appear to reference any planned or recent attacks. But the most famous U.S. cyber attack is of course Stuxnet, the virus developed and
deployed in conjunction with Israel to set back Iran’s nuclear program. The virus was a remarkable success, sending Iranian centrifuges spinning
out of control, before it began spreading across the Internet by mistake, ultimately outing the program. Stuxnet appears consistent with the
contours of a cyber doctrine hinted at in these documents. It was meant to preempt an impending national security threat – Iran’s nuclear
program – worked in secret and was certainly offensive. It was part of a larger effort that included diplomacy, sanctions and the threat of
physical strikes. It’s also worth noting what Stuxnet was not: a revenge attack meant to punish Iran. The virus was meant to work in secret;
ideally, the Iranians were not even to know it had been deployed. Similarly, the Obama administration has insisted that it deploys drone strikes
only against people who pose an ongoing threat to the U.S. rather than as “revenge” strikes. (Many critics of the drone program doubt this.)
This apparent cyber doctrine of quiet, drone-like preemption differs widely from another cyber strategy
that many observers have believed the U.S. would or should take: deterrence. In this thinking, the U.S. would
counter the growing threat of foreign hackers by, essentially, scaring them away from even trying. This would mean developing offensive cyber
capabilities that could be used to hit back at hackers who attempt to breach U.S. systems and then making sure that foreign hackers
understand they’re putting themselves at risk by even trying. In this way, offensive cyber capabilities would be kind of like nuclear weapons,
which exist primarily to deter adversaries from using their weapons first. After all, preemptive cyber attacks might be able to slow Iranian
centrifuges but they’re much less suited to, say, shutting down Chinese military hackers. Nor are simple cyber defenses up to that task; because
foreign hackers risk little in trying to tap into sensitive U.S. servers; merely building more protections is only going to extend the time it takes
them to finally succeed. This is why many U.S. companies already want to develop “hacking back” capabilities, something that is forbidden
under U.S. law.
Surveillance is necessary to prevent a terror attack.
Yoo 14 John Yoo, Summer 2014, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law School; Visiting Scholar,
American Enterprise Institute, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, THE LEGALITY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY'S BULK DATA
SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2013/11/Yoo1.pdf, p. 929-30
The real problem with FISA, and even the Patriot Act, as they existed before the 2008 Amendments, is
that they remained rooted in a law enforcement approach to electronic surveillance. They tied the government's
counterterrorism efforts to individualized suspicion. Searches and wiretaps had to target a specific individual already believed to be involved in harmful activity. But
detecting al Qaeda members who have no previous criminal record in the United States, and who are undeterred by the possibility of criminal sanctions, requires
To prevent attacks successfully, the government has to devote surveillance
resources where there is a reasonable chance that terrorists will appear or communicate, even if their
specific identities remain unknown. What if the government knew that there was a fifty percent chance that terrorists would use a certain
the use of more sweeping methods.
communications pipeline, such as e-mail provided by a popular Pakistani ISP, but that most of the communications on that channel would not be linked to
terrorism? An approach based on individualized suspicion would prevent computers from searching through that channel for the keywords or names that might
suggest terrorist communications because there are no specific al Qaeda suspects and thus no probable cause .
Searching for terrorists depends
on playing the probabilities rather than individualized suspicion, just as roadblocks or airport screenings
do. The private owner of any website has detailed access to information about the individuals who visit the site that he can exploit for his own commercial
purposes, such as selling lists of names to spammers or gathering market data on individuals or groups. Is the government's effort to find violent terrorists a less
legitimate use of such data? Individualized suspicion dictates the focus of law enforcement, but war demands that our armed forces defend the country with a
broader perspective. Armies do not meet a "probable cause" requirement when they attack a position, fire on enemy troops, or intercept enemy communications.
The purpose of the criminal justice system is to hold a specific person responsible for a discrete crime that has already happened. But focusing on individualized
suspicion does not make sense when the purpose of intelligence is to take action, such as killing or capturing members of an enemy group, to prevent future harm
to the nation from a foreign threat. FISA should be regarded as a safe harbor that allows the fruits of an authorized search to be used for prosecution. Using FISA
sacrifices speed and breadth of information in favor of individualized suspicion, but it provides a path for using evidence in a civilian criminal prosecution. If the
President chooses to rely on his constitutional authority alone to conduct warrantless searches, then he should generally use the information only for military
purposes. The
primary objective of the NSA program is to "detect and prevent" possible al Qaeda attacks on
the United States, whether another attack like September 11; a bomb in apartment buildings, bridges,
or transportation hubs such as airports; or a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. These are not
hypotheticals; they are all al Qaeda plots, some of which U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have
already stopped. A President will want to use information gathered by the NSA to deploy military,
intelligence, and law enforcement personnel to stop the next attack. The price to pay for speed, however, is foregoing any
future criminal prosecution. If the President wants to use the NSA to engage in warrantless searches, he cannot use its fruits in an ordinary criminal prosecution.
Al Qaeda has launched a variety of efforts to attack the United States, and it intends to continue them.
The primary way to stop those attacks is to find and stop al Qaeda operatives, and the best way to find
them is to intercept their electronic communications. Properly understood, the Constitution does not subject the government to
unreasonable burdens in carrying out its highest duty of protecting the nation from attack.
NSA still has sufficient surveillance authority after the PATRIOT Act expiration.
Salon 15, 6/1/2015. Marcy Wheeler. “Reports of the Patriot Act’s death are greatly exaggerated,”
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/01/reports_of_the_patriot_acts_death_are_greatly_exaggerated/.
The PATRIOT Act-authorized phone dragnet expired last night. For the first time since 2006, the NSA won’t receive records of the phone calls
you make within the United States. But that doesn’t mean spying on Americans has stopped. The NSA still obtains
records of calls — potentially all calls — you make with people overseas. It still tracks Americans’ Internet
communications using metadata obtained overseas. The FBI can still access the content of any
communications Americans have with foreigners targeted under PRISM without a warrant or even any
evidence of wrong doing. FBI can still, and indeed does, obtain phone records of individuals in
conjunction with national security investigations without any court review. Not even the spying
conducted under Section 215 — the authority that had been used to collect all of Americans’ phone
records, but which is also used to collect certain kinds of Internet data — or the two other expiring
provisions will stop. Because they’re tied to more focused investigations (though the Internet collection is probably not
targeted at one individual), they will probably continue under a grandfather clause allowing ongoing investigations
using those authorities to continue.
'Terror
threats are growing --- NSA surveillance is vital.
Bolton 15 John R. Bolton, 4/28/2015. Formerly served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, and under secretary
of state for arms control and international security. At AEI, Ambassador Bolton’s area of research is U.S. foreign and national security policy.
“NSA activities key to terrorism fight,” American Enterprise Institute, https://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 al-Qaeda’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 surveillance is increasing to deal with new terrorist threats
Bennett 15 (Brian Bennett, washington based reporter for the LA Times, "White House Steps Up Warning About Terrorism on US Soil"
May 18th, 2015 http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-terror-threat-20150518-story.html#page=1)
Alarmed about the growing threat from Islamic State, the Obama administration has dramatically
stepped up warnings of potential terrorist attacks on American soil after several years of relative calm.¶ Behind the
scenes, U.S. authorities have raised defenses at U.S. military bases, put local police forces on alert and increased surveillance at the nation's
airports, railroads, shopping malls, energy plants and other potential targets.¶ Driving
the unease are FBI arrests of at least 30
Americans on terrorism-related charges this year in an array of "lone wolf" plots, none successful, but nearly
all purportedly inspired by Islamic State propaganda or appeals.¶ The group's leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi, drove home
the danger in a 34-minute audio recording released online Thursday. He urged Muslims everywhere to "migrate to the Islamic State or fight in
his land, wherever that may be."¶ It is pretty easy for [Islamic State] to reach out to a very large number of people
using a very robust social media presence. I suspect we should see more plots going forward.¶ - J.M. Berger, a nonresident fellow at the
Brookings Institution¶ The audio was released with translations in English, French, German, Russian and Turkish, signaling the militants'
increasingly ambitious attempts to draw new recruits — and to spark violence — around the world.¶ U.S. officials estimate the Sunni Muslim
group has drawn 22,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, including about 3,700 from Western nations. About
180 Americans have
gone, or tried to go.¶ U.S. counter-terrorism officials initially viewed Islamic State as primarily a regional
security threat, focused on expanding and protecting its self-proclaimed Islamist caliphate in Syria and Iraq, rather than launching attacks
abroad.¶ But the analysis has shifted sharply as gunmen inspired by the group, but not controlled or
assisted by them, opened fire at the Parliament in Ottawa; at a cafe in Sydney, Australia; at a kosher grocery in Paris;
and, on May 3, in Garland, Texas.¶ In the Texas case, two would-be terrorists apparently prompted by Islamic State social media
messages tried to shoot their way into a provocative contest for caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Both gunmen were shot to death, and
no one else was killed. Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the assault, the first time it has done so for an attack on U.S. soil. ¶ James B.
Comey, the FBI
director, warned this month that "hundreds, maybe thousands" of Americans are seeing
recruitment pitches from Islamic State on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, as well as messages sent to smartphones of
"disturbed people" who could be pushed to attack U.S. targets.¶ "It's like the devil sitting on their shoulders saying, 'Kill, kill, kill,'" Comey told
reporters.¶ The United States has entered a "new phase, in my view, in the global terrorist threat," Jeh Johnson, director of Homeland Security,
said Friday on MSNBC.¶ "We have to be concerned about the independent actor, and the independent actor who is here in the homeland who
may strike with little or no warning," he said. "The
nature of the global terrorist threat has evolved."¶ That poses a
special challenge for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which spent years desperately trying to
penetrate and understand Al Qaeda's rigid hierarchy and top-down approach to terrorism.¶ Now they are struggling to detect and prevent
lethal attacks by individuals — such as the April 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon by two Russian-born brothers — with little or no outside
communication or support.¶ The
administration has sought to stiffen homeland defenses, and intelligence
gathering, in response
An attack on the US is likely, surveillance intelligence key.
Collins 15 (Eliza Collins, wirter for Politico, "Mike McCaul Warns of Growing Us Terrorist Threat" May 10
th,
2015
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/mike-mccaul-warns-of-growing-us-terrorist-threat-117787.html)
More people are being recruited by terrorist groups than the FBI estimates, the chairman of the House Homeland
Security Committee said on Sunday.¶ FBI Director James Comey said last week that hundreds, maybe thousands of people, are being recruited
on encrypted websites that the FBI can’t penetrate to carry out attacks in the U.S.¶ “We
have this phenomenon in the United
States where they can be activated by the Internet. Really, terrorism has gone viral,” Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas)
said on “Fox News Sunday.”¶ The Texas shooting was a textbook case of law enforcement intercepting a threat, McCaul said, but homegrown
terrorism is nonetheless difficult to stop.¶ Late last week, the
U.S. raised the threat level at all U.S. military bases.¶ “This
threat is like finding a needle in the haystack sometimes - and it’s going to get worse, not better,” McCaul
warned.
Recruiting levels are high and the likelihood of a homegrown attack is huge
VOA New 15 (Homeland Security Chief: Global Terror Threat Has Entered 'New Phase'" May 11 2015
th
http://www.voanews.com/content/us-security-chief-warns-of-new-phase-in-terrorist-threat/2762237.html)
Appearing on the Fox News Sunday broadcast from Paris, Congressman Michael McCaul, chairman of the
House Homeland
Security Committee, said there has been an uptick in threat streams against local police and military
bases.¶ "We're seeing these on an almost daily basis. It's very concerning. I'm over here with the French counter-terrorism experts on the
Charlie Hebdo case, how we can stop foreign fighters coming out of Iraq and Syria to Europe. But then, we have this phenomenon in the United
States where they (terrorists) can be activated by the Internet. And,
really, terrorism has gone viral," said McCaul.¶ McCaul said
the potential terror threat may even be greater than the FBI has outlined. He said the United States faces two threats: one
from fighters coming out of the Middle East and the other from thousands at home who will take up the
call to arms when the IS group sends out an Internet message. He warned the threat will only get worse,
largely because of the existence of so many failed states in the Middle East and North Africa.
The probability of a lone wolf attack is increasing.
Zenko 15 (Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations, "Is US Foreign Policy Ignorning Homegrown Terrorists?" May 19
th
, 2015
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/05/us-foreign-policy-ignoring-homegrown-terrorists/113197/)
On February 12, National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:¶ “We
face a much greater, more frequent, recurring threat from lone offenders and probably loose networks
of individuals. Measured in terms of frequency and numbers, it is attacks from those sources that are
increasingly the most noteworthy…”¶ On February 26, during the annual worldwide threats hearing, Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper warned:¶ “Home-grown violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to
the homeland.”¶ Last Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson stated on MSNBC:¶ “We’re in a new phase…in the global
terrorist threat where, because of effective use of social media, the Internet, by ISIL, al-Qaeda, we have to be concerned about the independent
actor who is here in the homeland who may strike with little or no warning…”¶ Finally, yesterday, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell
described the messaging efforts of jihadist groups generally and the self-declared Islamic State (IS) more specifically:¶ “Their
narrative is
pretty powerful: The West, the United States, the modern world, is a significant threat to their religion.
Their answer to that is to establish a caliphate. And they are being attacked by the U.S. and other Western nations, and by these apostate
regimes in the region. Because
they are being attacked they need support in two ways; people coming to fight
for them, and people coming to stand up and attack coalition nations in their home.”¶ In summary, the most likely—
though not most lethal—terror threats to Americans come from individuals living within the United States who
are partially motivated to undertake self-directed attacks based upon their perception that the United
States and the West are at war with the Muslim world.
Terror threats increasing
Cordesman 15 Anthony H. Cordesman, 5-22-15, The Defeat in Ramadi: A Time for Transparency, Integrity, and Change, Burke holds
the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
http://csis.org/publication/defeat-ramadi-time-transparency-integrity-and-change
The State Department background briefing is well worth reading in full, along with the other reports listed above that simply dodge and spin. It
makes a sharp and welcome contrast at a time virtually every indicator shows that the number of
terrorist movements and attacks is rising on a global basis; and that we are involved in “failed state
wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen that we are not winning and where our current efforts
seem too weak, and uncoordinated with our allies and partners to be effective.
Surveillance key to check the increasing terror threat.
Carafano 15 James Carafano, May 21, 2015, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Metadata Collection: Responsible Options for the Way
Forward, Dr. Carafono is Vice President for the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, and the E. W.
Richardson Fellow, Charles Stimson is Manager, National Security Law Program and Senior Legal Fellow, Dr. Steven Bucci is Director, Douglas
and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy, John Malcolm is Director, Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial
Studies, and the Ed Gilbertson and Sherry Lindberg Gilbertson Senior Legal Fellow, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/05/section215-of-the-patriot-act-and-metadata-collection-responsible-options-for-the-way-forward
Any debate about America’s counterterrorism capabilities must be conducted in the context of the actual terrorist threat the U.S. faces. Since
9/11, The Heritage Foundation has tracked Islamist terrorist plots and attacks, which now, after the recent shooting in Garland, Texas, total
68.[1] This figure, however, does not consider foiled plots of which the public is unaware.Recently, there
has been a dramatic
uptick in terrorism: The shooting in Garland is the sixth Islamist terrorist plot or attack in the past five months. Add to that number the
surge of Americans seeking to support or join ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates, and one fact becomes clear: The U.S. is facing the most
concentrated period of terrorist activity in the homeland since 9/11. Of course, it is no coincidence that
this spike in terrorism parallels the spread of the Islamic State and other radical groups across Syria, Iraq,
and other parts of the Middle East. More than 150 American passport holders have traveled to Syria, or attempted to travel there,
to join the fighting, along with more than 20,000 fighters from more than 90 countries.[2] Many of these individuals with American passports
are believed to have joined ISIS or the Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaeda in Syria. Both
the Nusra Front and ISIS espouse an
anti-Western Islamist ideology that calls for terrorist attacks against the United States. For example, in July
2012, the leader of ISIS, self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr Baghdadi, threatened to launch attacks against the U.S. homeland. Baghdadi warned
Americans, “You will soon witness how attacks will resound in the heart of your land, because our war with you has now started.”[3] Toward
this end, al-Qaeda formed a unit of veteran terrorists to recruit some of the Western foreign fighters in Syria and train them to conduct terrorist
attacks in their home countries. This unit, dubbed the Khorasan group by U.S. officials, is embedded in the Nusra Front and is particularly
interested in recruiting fighters who hold American passports. These terrorist organizations have undertaken a significant effort to reach out to
individuals across the world in order to radicalize and recruit them. In recent testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, FBI
Director James Comey stated that: The threats posed by foreign fighters, including those recruited from the U.S., traveling to join the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and from homegrown violent extremists are extremely dynamic. These threats remain the biggest priorities
and challenges for the FBI, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and our foreign, state, and local partners. ISIL is relentless and ruthless in its
pursuits to terrorize individuals in Syria and Iraq, including Westerners. We are concerned about the possibility of individuals in the U.S. being
radicalized and recruited via the Internet and social media to join ISIL in Syria and Iraq and then return to the U.S. to commit terrorist acts. ISIL’s
widespread reach through the Internet and social media is most concerning as the group has proven dangerously competent at employing such
tools for its nefarious strategy.[5] In the past several weeks, FBI Director Comey has increased the intensity of his warnings, stating that
“hundreds, maybe thousands” of individuals across the U.S. are being contacted by ISIS to attack the U.S. homeland.[6] Secretary of Homeland
Security Jeh Johnson has echoed these warnings, saying that lone-wolf terrorists inspired by ISIS could strike at any moment.”[7] The 2015
Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community states that: Attacks by lone actors are among the most difficult to warn
about because they offer few or no signatures. If ISIL were to substantially increase the priority it places on attacking the West rather than
fighting to maintain and expand territorial control, then the group’s access to radicalized Westerners who have fought in Syria and Iraq would
provide a pool of operatives who potentially have access to the United States and other Western countries. On the same note, the Director of
the National Counterterrorism Center also stated in his testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this February that there has
been a recent “uptick in terror attacks in the West.”
This increase in attacks “underscores the threat of emboldened
Homegrown Violent Extremists and, how the rapid succession of these attacks may motivate some to attempt to replicate these
tactics with little-to-no warning.” These statements and assessments, together with the explicit and public statements of intent by multiple
terrorist groups and the recent surge in terrorist plots and attacks against the U.S. homeland, demonstrate that the
threat of terrorism
is on the rise. Fortunately, the U.S. has improved its ability to foil these attacks, largely due to
intelligence capabilities that include but are not limited to the bulk telephone metadata program under Section 215 of the PATRIOT
Act.
Threat of terror attacks increasing
McCain 15 Senator Mccain, February 26, 2015, Full Committee Hearing on “Worldwide Threats”, http://www.armedservices.senate.gov/hearings/15-02-26-worldwide-threats
On the terrorism front, ISIL continues to dominate much of Syria and Iraq while spreading its dark and
vicious ideology in its effort to become the dominant Islamic extremist group in the world. At the same time,
the risk of attacks by foreign fighters returning from the battlefield or loan-wolf threats inspired by ISIL's
successes only increases the danger to the West, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Africa. Al Qaeda
and its affiliated groups continue to take advantage of ungoverned spaces to plan attacks against the
United States and Western interests.
Number of terror attacks increasing
Clapper 15 General Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, February 26, 2015, Full Committee Hearing on “Worldwide Threats”,
http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/15-02-26-worldwide-threats
Moving onto terrorism,
in 2013, just over 11,500 terrorist attacks worldwide killed approximately 22,000
people. Preliminary data for the first nine months of 2014 reflects nearly 13,000 attacks, which killed
31,000 people. When the final counting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in
the 45 years such data has been compiled.
Terror threat increasing
Clapper 15 General Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, February 26, 2015, Full Committee Hearing on “Worldwide Threats”,
http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/15-02-26-worldwide-threats
I'm drawing this data -- ISIL
conducting more attacks than any other terrorist group in the first nine months of
2014. And credit where credit's due, I'm drawing this data from the National Consortium of the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the
University of Maryland. The recent terrorist attacks in Europe emphasized the threat posed by small numbers of
extremists radicalized by the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. The global media attention and widespread
support in extremist circles for these attacks probably will inspire additional extremists to conduct
similar attacks. In ISIL, Al Qaida and Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and most recently, Al Shabaab are
calling on their supporters to conduct loan- wolf attacks against the United States and other Western
countries. Of the 13 attacks in the West since last May, 12 were conducted by individual extremists. Since the conflict began, more than
20,000 Sunni foreign fighters have travelled to Syria from more than 90 countries to fight the Assad
regime. Of that number, at least 13,600 have extremist ties. More than 3,400 Western fighters have go to Syria and Iraq. Hundreds
have returned home to Europe. About 180 Americans or so have been involved in various stages of travel to Syria. I should point out, this is those who've attempted
to go, didn't get there, those who got there and were killed, those who got there who fought and went to another country and -- and some number have come
back. A relatively small number have returned, and we've not identified any of them engaged in attack plotting Nevertheless,
the home-grown
violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to the homeland. Loan actors or (inaudible)
groups who act autonomously will -- will likely gravitate to simpler plots that don't require advanced skills,
outside training or communication with others. A small but persistent number of Sunni terrorist remain
intent on striking the U.S. and the West, some of whom still see commercial aviation as -- as an
appealing target.
Cyber attacks increasing
Clapper 15 General Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, February 26, 2015, Full Committee Hearing on “Worldwide Threats”,
http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/15-02-26-worldwide-threats
Again this year, I'll start with some cyber threats. Attacks
against us are increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication,
and severity of impact. Although we must be prepared for a catastrophic large scale strike, a so called -- cyber Armageddon, the reality
is that we've been living with a constant and expanding barrage of cyber attacks for some time. This
insidious trends, I believe, will continue. Cyber poses a very complex set of threats, because profitmotivated criminals, ideologically-motivated hackers or extremists, and variously capable nation states
like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are all potential adversaries who, if they choose, can do great
harm.CLAPPER: Additionally, the methods of attacks, the systems targeted and the victims are also expanding
in diversity and intensity on a daily basis. 2014 saw, for the first time, destructive cyber attacks carried
out on U.S. soil by nation-state entities, marked first by the Iranian attack against the Las Vegas Sands
Casino Corporation a year ago this month and the North Korean attack against Sony in November. While
both of these nations have lesser technical capabilities in comparison to Russia and China, these destructive attacks demonstrate
that Iran and North Korea are motivated and unpredictable cyber actors. Russia and China continue to
develop very sophisticated cyber programs. While I can't go into detail, the Russian cyber threat is more severe
than we have previously assessed, and Chinese economic espionage against U.S. companies remains a
major threat, despite detailed private-sector reports, scathing public indictments and stern U.S. (inaudible). With respect to non-nationstate entities, some ideologically motivated cyber actors expressing support for ISIL have demonstrated their capabilities by hacking several
social-media accounts. The
so- called cyber caliphate successfully hacked CENTCOM's Twitter account and
YouTube page in January and two weeks ago hacked Newsweek Magazine's Twitter handle. The most pervasive cyber threat to the
U.S. financial sector is from cyber criminals. Criminals were responsible for cyber intrusions in 2014 in the JPMorgan,
Home Depot, Target, Neiman Marcus, Anthem and other U.S. companies. And in the future, we'll
probably see cyber operations that change or manipulate electronic information to compromise its
integrity instead of simply deleting or disrupting access to it
ISIL’s influence is increasing in the Middle East.
Clapper 15 General Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, February 26, 2015, Full Committee Hearing on “Worldwide Threats”,
http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/15-02-26-worldwide-threats
Moving into the Mid East, ISIL
is increasing its influence outside of Iraq and Syria, seeking to expand its selfdeclared caliphate into the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and South Asia and planning terrorist attacks
against Western and Shia interests. ISIL's rise represents the greatest shift in the Sunni violent extremist
landscape since Al Qaida affiliates first began forming, and it is the first to assume at least some
characteristics of a nation state. Spillover from the Syrian conflict is raising the prospect of instability in
Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, sectarian conflict in mixed Shia-Sunni areas is growing and if
not blunted, will undermine progress against ISIL. Although Prime Abadi has begun to alter the etho-sectarian tone in Iraq,
resistance from his Shia political allies and persistent distrust among Iraqi leaders will limit progress toward a stable, inclusive political
environment. ISIL's
ability to conduct large-scale offensive operations in Iraq has been degraded by coalition
airstrikes, the provision of weapons and munitions by the U.S. and other allies, and stiffened defenses
by the Iraqi security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, Shia militants and tribal allies, not to mention the
Iranians. However, ISIL remains, as we've seen, a formidable and brutal threat.
Risk of major terror attack high now
Budowsky 2014 (Brent Budowsky 8/22/14, LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics, former
aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander, then chief deputy majority whip of the House, “ISIS poses nuclear 9/11 threat”, 2014,
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ISIS-poses-nuclear-9-11-th-by-Brent-Budowsky-ISI_Military_Nuclear_insanity_Threat-To-World-Peace140822-911.html)
After the latest grotesque atrocity by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the beheading of an American journalist, American and European
policymakers must clearly understand the near certainty that unless it is defeated and destroyed, ISIS
will launch a major terror
attack on American or European soil. Analysts estimate that ISIS has amassed a cash hoard of between $400 million and
$2 billion. It is highly probable that ISIS will attempt to use some of this money to obtain nuclear,
chemical, biological or other weapons of mass death on the international black market or from corrupt
officials in nations such as Russia, China, Pakistan or North Korea to use in attacks against New York, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin,
Rome, Brussels or other nations it considers infidel enemies. This danger is magnified by the fact that ISIS has recruited
nationals of the United States and Europe, who possess American and European passports and are physically
indistinguishable from local populations in America and Europe. It is extraordinary that the mass murdering
butchery of ISIS is so demented than even al Qaeda is offended. It is alarming that the CIA, which launched intelligence
operations even against the United States Senate, and the NSA, which launched massive and unprecedented eavesdropping operations, and
intelligence services of leading European nations were blind to the magnitude of the ISIS threat until the most barbaric terrorists in modern
history had taken over almost a third of Iraq and are on the brink of creating a terrorist super-state that dwarfs al Qaeda's efforts prior to 9/11.
I vehemently opposed the misguided Iraq War from the moment it was proposed by former President George W. Bush and have never been a
neoconservative, warmonger or super-hawk. But aggressive action against
ISIS is urgently needed. ISIS has stated its
intention to attack the United States and Europe to advance its evil, messianic and genocidal ideology and
ambitions. ISIS has the money to purchase the most deadly weapons in the world, and has recruited
American and European traitors with above-average capability to execute an attack. The odds that ISIS can
obtain nuclear, chemical, biological or other forms of mass destruction weapons are impossible to ascertain but
in a world of vast illegal arms trafficking, with so many corrupt officials in nations possessing arsenals of
destruction, the danger is real. The fact that WMD scares prior to the Iraq War ranged from mistaken to deceitful does not mean
that the WMD danger does not exist today. It does. I applaud the recent actions taken by President Obama. Obama's airstrikes saved tens of
thousands of Yazidis from genocide, took back the Mosul Dam from ISIS and saved countless Iraqis, Kurds and Syrians from slaughter. The
airstrikes inflicted material damage to ISIS. The diplomacy of Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry contributed mightily to the replacement
of a disastrous Iraqi government by a government can unite Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. The Obama-Kerry initiatives will lead to the creation
of a stable Afghan government and avoid the collapse that was possible after the recent controversial Afghan elections. These are real
successes. In the current political climate, Obama seems to get credit for nothing, but he deserves great credit for some important successes in
recent weeks. And yet the
danger of ISIS pulling off a nuclear, chemical, biological or other mass death 9/11style attack in a major American or European city is real. Even with dirty or primitive WMD weapons, the
casualty totals could be catastrophic. ISIS must be defeated and destroyed. This will not be achieved with "boots on
the ground" proxies from Iraqi or Kurd forces alone, though Kurdish forces should immediately receive strong military assistance. America
should not initiate another massive Iraq ground war. What is needed is a multinational special ops strike force made up of 10,000 troops from
NATO nations and possibly Arab League nations.
Link Extensions
Empirics prove limitless offensive cyber operations key to deter threats – the plan
destroys this necessity by placing limits on crucial deterrence capabilities.
Baker 2012(Stewart, first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the United States Department of Homeland Security under the Presidency of
George W. Bush, October 19, "Law and Cyberwar-The Lessons of History",
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_services/law_national_security/patriot_debates2/the_book_online/ch9/ch9_ess1.html)
So, why do today’s lawyers think that their limits on cyberwar will fare better than FDR’s limits on air war? It beats me. If anything, they have a
much harder task. Roosevelt could count on a shared European horror at the aerial destruction of cities. He used that to extract an explicit and
reciprocal understanding from both sides as the war was beginning. We have no such understanding, indeed no such shared horror. Quite the
contrary, for
some of our potential adversaries, cyber weapons are uniquely asymmetric—a horror for us, another
doesn’t take a high-tech infrastructure to maintain an army that is ready in a pinch
to live on grass. What’s more, cheating is easy and strategically profitable. American compliance will be enforced by
all those lawyers. Our adversaries can ignore the rules and say—hell, they are saying—”We’re not carrying out cyber attacks.
We’re victims, too. Maybe you’re the attacker. Or maybe it’s Anonymous. Where’s your proof?” Even if all
sides were genuinely committed to limiting cyberwar, as all sides were in 1939, we’ve seen that the logic of
airpower eventually drove all sides to the horror they had originally recoiled from. Each side felt that it
had observed the limits longer than the other. Each had lawyerly justifications for what it did, and neither understood or gave
credence to the other’s justifications. In that climate, all it took was a single error to break the legal limits irreparably.
And error was inevitable. Bombs dropped by desperate pilots under fire go astray. But so do cyber weapons. Stuxnet infected
thousands of networks as it searched blindly for Natanz. The infections lasted far longer than intended. Should we expect
fewer errors from code drafted in the heat of battle and flung at hazard toward the enemy? Of course not.
But the lesson for the lawyers and the diplomats is stark: Their effort to impose limits on cyberwar is almost certainly
doomed. No one can welcome this conclusion, at least not in the United States. We have advantages in traditional war that we lack in
day in the field for them. It
cyberwar. We are not used to the idea that launching even small wars on distant continents may cause death and suffering here at home. That
is what drives the lawyers. They hope to maintain the old world. But they’re driving down a dead end. If we
want to defend against
the horrors of cyberwar, we need first to face them, with the candor of a Stanley Baldwin. Then we need to charge
our military strategists, not our lawyers, with constructing a cyberwar strategy for the world we live in, not
the world we’d like to live in. That strategy needs both an offense and a defense. The offense must be
powerful enough to deter every adversary with something to lose in cyberspace, and so it must include
a way to identify our attacker with certainty. The defense, too, must be realistic, making successful cyber attacks more difficult
and less effective because we have built resilience and redundancy into our infrastructure. Once we have a strategy for winning
a cyberwar, we can ask the lawyers for their thoughts. We can’t do it the other way around.
Warrantless surveillance necessary to stop Al Qaeda
Yoo 14,John Yoo, Summer 2014, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law School; Visiting Scholar,
American Enterprise Institute, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, THE LEGALITY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY'S BULK DATA
SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2013/11/Yoo1.pdf, p. 903-4
It is al Qaeda's nature as a decentralized network that stresses the normal division between military and
intelligence surveillance and the warrant-based approach of the criminal justice system. The Constitution vests
the President with the executive power and designates him Commander-in-Chief. The Framers understood these powers to invest the executive
with the duty to protect the nation from foreign attack and the right to control the conduct of military hostilities. To exercise those powers
the President must have the ability to engage in electronic surveillance that gathers intelligence
on the enemy. Regular military intelligence need not follow standards of probable cause for a warrant or reasonableness for a search, just
as the use of force against the enemy does not have to comply with the Fourth Amendment. During war, military signals intelligence
might throw out a broad net to capture all communications within a certain area or by an enemy nation.
effectively,
Unlike the criminal justice system, which seeks to detain criminals,
protection of national security need not rest on
particularized suspicion of a specific individual.
Metadata collection needed to be effective
Yoo 14 ,John Yoo Summer 2014, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law School; Visiting Scholar,
American Enterprise Institute, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, THE LEGALITY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY'S BULK
DATASURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2013/11/Yoo1.pdf, p. 907-8
Like business records, phone call metadata falls within Section 215's definition of tangible items. Collection
of such metadata relates to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism. Several
investigations into al Qaeda plots remain open, as shown by the repeated indictments against bomb plotters in the last five years. The
examination of records also helps protect the nation against terrorist attacks. According to the NSA, only the
information contained in the billing records is collected; the content of calls is not. There can be no First Amendment violation if the content of
the calls remains untouched. A critic might argue that the terms of the search are too broad because ninety-nine percent of the calls are
unconnected to terrorism. But an intelligence search, as Judge Richard Posner has described it, "is a search for the needle in a haystack." Rather
than focus on foreign agents who are already known, counterterrorism
agencies must search for clues among millions
of potentially innocent connections, communications, and links. "The intelligence services," Posner writes,
"must cast a wide net with a fine mesh to catch the clues that may enable the next attack to be
prevented." For this reason, the FISC approved the NSA program in 2006 and has continued to renew it since.
Surveillance allows the detection of Al Qaeda.
Yoo 14, John Yoo, Summer 2014, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law School; Visiting Scholar,
American Enterprise Institute, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, THE LEGALITY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY'S BULK DATA
SURVEILLNCE PROGRAMS, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2013/11/Yoo1.pdf, p. 908-9
Members of the al Qaeda network can be detected, with good intelligence work or luck, by examining
phone and e-mail communications, as well as evidence of joint travel, shared assets, common histories or families, meetings, and
so on. As the time for an attack nears, "chatter" on this network will increase as operatives
communicate to coordinate plans, move and position assets, and conduct reconnaissance of targets.
When our intelligence agents successfully locate or capture an al Qaeda member, they must be able to move quickly to follow new information
to other operatives before news of the capture causes them to disappear. The
NSA database is particularly important
because it will point the way to al Qaeda agents within the United States, where they are closest to their
targets and able to inflict the most harm on civilians. The September 11 hijackers themselves provide an
example of the way that the NSA could use business record information to locate an al Qaeda cell. Links
suggested by commercially available data might have turned up ties between every single one of the al
Qaeda plotters and Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawar al Hazmi, the two hijackers known to the CIA to have been in the country in the
summer of 2001. Mihdhar and Hazmi had rented apartments in their own names and were listed in the San Diego phone book. Both
Mohammad Atta, the leader of the September 11 al Qaeda cell, and Marwan al-Shehi, who piloted one of the planes into the World Trade
Center, had lived there with them. Hijacker Majed Moqed used the same frequent flier number as Mihdhar; five
hijackers used the
same phone number as Atta when booking their flights; the remaining hijackers shared addresses or phone numbers with
one of those hijackers, Ahmed Alghamdi, who was in the United States in violation of his visa at the time. Our intelligence agents, in
fact, had strong leads that could conceivably have led them to all of the hijackers before 9/11 . CIA agents had
identified Mihdhar as a likely al Qaeda operative because he was spotted at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur and mentioned in Middle East
intercepts as part of an al Qaeda "cadre." Hazmi too was known as likely to be al Qaeda. But in neither case was there enough evidence for a
criminal arrest because they had not violated any American laws. If
our intelligence services had been able to track
immediately their cell phone calls and e-mail, it is possible that enough of the hijacking team could have been
rounded up to avert 9/11. Our task is much more difficult today, because we might not have even this slender information in hand
when the next al Qaeda plot moves toward execution.
Database needs to be wide to locate terrorist cells
Yoo 14, John Yoo, Summer 2014, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law School; Visiting Scholar,
American Enterprise Institute, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, THE LEGALITY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY'S BULK DATA
SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2013/11/Yoo1.pdf, p. 911-12
A critic, however, might argue that billions of innocent calling records are not "relevant" to a terrorism investigation. Even if terrorist
communications take place over the phone, that cannot justify the collection of all phone call records in the United States, the vast majority of
which have nothing to do with the grounds for the search. The FISC rejected this argument because, to
be useful, a database has to
be broad enough to find terrorist calls. "Because known and unknown international terrorist operatives
are using telephone communications, and because it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection of a
telephone company's metadata to determine those connections between known and unknown
international terrorist operatives as part of authorized investigations," the Court observed, "the production of
the information sought meets the standard for relevance under Section 215." Aggregating calling
records into a database, the court found, was necessary to find the terrorist communications and the links
between terrorists. It may not even be possible to detect the links unless such a database is created. If a
database is not comprehensive, in other words, then the government will only be able to glimpse incomplete patterns of terrorist activity, if it
can glimpse any at all.
Mass surveillance is critical to find actionable intelligence.
Yoo 13 John Yoo, 6/12/2013. Emanuel Heller professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a Visiting Scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, former official in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. “John Yoo: NSA activities shouldn't
be aired in public,” http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/06/12/nsa-surveillance-john-yoo-editorials-debates/2417377/.
But fear should not provoke a rush to harm our war against al-Qaeda. Surveillance
of enemy communications not only has a long
history in the annals of American arms, but it is also the most effective means for gaining actionable
intelligence on terrorists. President Obama has discarded superior tools: He has stopped the interrogation of al-Qaeda leaders, and his leak-loving
staff has blown the penetrations of al-Qaeda cells by intelligence agencies. By combining telephone call records (but not the content of calls)
and foreigners' e-mails abroad — neither of which is protected by the Fourth Amendment — the NSA
can at least create the data necessary to quickly identify and frustrate terrorist plans. Of course, the NSA should not
receive a blank check. But it is unnecessary, and even harmful, to air its activities in public. Al-Qaeda closely monitors our government affairs and reacts quickly. In
the 1990s, for example, Osama bin Laden stopped using his personal cellphone only 48 hours after the White House leaked that it was tapped. Instead of risking the
we should continue to follow the constitutional design. A time-tested system
has promoted legislative oversight of classified activities without losing the virtues of speed and secrecy
abroad. American intelligence agencies regularly disclose their most sensitive covert operations to
congressional leaders, who can exercise their power of the purse to stop bad ideas. The Framers
recognized that our elected representatives would need such secrecy to protect the national security,
which is why the Constitution allows for closed congressional proceedings. We should allow the system of representative
loss of intelligence sources and methods,
democracy to decide intelligence policy, rather than sacrifice a critical advantage to satisfy the whims of those who do not understand that we are still a nation at
war.
NSA surveillance of meta-data is critical --- PATRIOT Act authorities are key.
Yoo 2015 John Yoo, 5/15/2015. Emanuel Heller professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a Visiting
Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, former official in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The USA Freedom Act Would Take Us Back to the Pre-9/11 Security Status Quo,” National Review,
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/418462/usa-freedom-act-would-take-us-back-pre-911-security-status-quo-john-yoo.
I worry that the representatives who voted to pass the USA Freedom Act in the House do not understand its full import in terms of our national
security. The bill practically repeals Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but makes it appear as if those who voted for the bill advanced security in
some way. The result of the legislation’s enactment, however, would not be significantly different than if Section 215 were simply allowed to
expire. Even
before the Patriot Act, the government could get a warrant from a judge to get call metadata
from a phone company. The Freedom Act requires phone companies to keep the calling records, but of
course they do that already in order to bill customers. So the Freedom Act eliminates the advantages of Section 215 and practically restores the
system that existed before. It is politically superficial but also substantively destructive. As
we saw on 9/11, that previous system
failed. The reason why is that it slowed everything down (as would the Freedom Act). If our intelligence agencies
have a lead — say they capture a terrorist leader or intercept his calls — they will have to act quickly to
see what other phone numbers and e-mail addresses that the leader contacted to discover the broader
network. The other terrorists, of course, will be switching to other numbers and addresses as soon as they
suspect that one of their number has been compromised. Taking the time to (a) prepare a request for a
warrant; (b) get it approved by a judge; and then (c) search through multiple phone company databases,
will give the terrorists time to hide and cover their tracks. Speed is of the greatest essence exactly when
we are trying to find the links in the U.S., where the terrorists will be closest to their targets and our
defenses at their weakest. If this program had been in effect before 9/11, the government could have
quickly searched the databases to discover the links between the two hijackers known to the CIA to have
entered the U.S. That could have quickly led the government to the rest of the hijackers (just as those calling, e-mail, and financial records
allowed the FBI to reconstruct the 9/11 terror cells within a day or so after the attacks). Another problem is that having the
database dispersed among the different phone companies means our government cannot be sure that it
has searched thoroughly for all of the possible links. The value of these metadata searches is reduced if
the database is not as complete as possible. The databases will also be in private hands, where they
might easily be open to invasions of privacy and penetration by foreign intelligence services.
Intel is key to preventing WMD terrorism --- compromising secrecy risks attacks.
Yoo 04 John Yoo, 2004. Professor of Law @ UC-Berkeley, visiting scholar @ the American Enterprise Institute, served as a
deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Council at the U.S. Department of Justice between 2001 and 2003.
“War, Responsibility, and the Age of Terrorism,” UC-Berkeley Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series,
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=johnyoo.
the nature of warfare against such unconventional enemies may well be different from the set-piece
battlefield matches between nation-states. Gathering intelligence, from both electronic and human sources, about the
future plans of terrorist groups may be the only way to prevent September 11-style attacks from occurring again.
Covert action by the Central Intelligence Agency or unconventional measures by special forces may prove to be the most effective tool for
acting on that intelligence. Similarly, the least dangerous means for preventing rogue nations from acquiring
WMD may depend on secret intelligence gathering and covert action, rather than open military
intervention. A public revelation of the means of gathering intelligence, or the discussion of the nature of
covert actions taken to forestall the threat by terrorist organizations or rogue nations, could render the use of force ineffectual or
sources of information useless. Suppose, for example, that American intelligence agencies detected through intercepted phone calls that a terrorist group had built
headquarters and training facilities in Yemen. A public discussion in Congress about a resolution to use force against Yemeni territory and how Yemen was identified
could tip-off the group, allowing terrorists to disperse and to prevent further interception of their
communications
Third,
Complete elimination of terrorism impossible --- intel key to prevent attacks.
Yoo 05 John Yoo, 2005. Professor of Law @ UC-Berkeley, visiting scholar @ the American Enterprise Institute, served as a
deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Council at the U.S. Department of Justice between 2001 and 2003.
“Enemy Combatants and Judicial Competence,” in Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution, ed. Peter Berkowitz, 83-84,
http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/0817946225_69.pdf.
Add to these concerns the important military interest, only made more acute by the unconventional nature of the war with al Qaeda, of interrogating enemy
combatants for information about coming attacks. Unlike
previous wars, the current enemy is a stateless network of
religious extremists who do not obey the laws of war, who hide among peaceful populations, and who
seek to launch surprise attacks on civilian targets with the aim of causing massive casualties. They have no armed forces
to target, no territory to defend, no people to protect, and no fear of killing themselves in their attacks.
The front line is not solely a traditional battlefield, and the primary means of conducting the war includes the efforts of
military, law enforcement, and intelligence officers to stop attacks before they occur. Information is the
primary weapon in the conflict against this new kind of enemy, and intelligence gathered from captured
operatives is perhaps the most effective means of preventing future terrorist attacks upon U.S. territory.
Section 702 Links
National Intelligence Director James Clapper verifies Section 702 is key to cyber
surveillance efforts while under scrutiny. The plan not only wrecks cyber security but
also leaves the US terribly vulnerable to threats.
AFPS 13 (Department of Defense News: American Forces Press Service. “Clapper: U.S. Surveillance
Activities Are Lawful” http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=120244)
surveillance activities carried out by the
U.S. government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are lawful, James R. Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, said in a statement issued today.¶ Clapper’s statement reads as follows:¶ Over the
last week we have seen reckless disclosures of intelligence community measures used to keep
Americans safe. In a rush to publish, media outlets have not given the full context -- including the extent to which these
programs are overseen by all three branches of government -- to these effective tools.¶ In particular, the surveillance
activities published in The Guardian and The Washington Post are lawful and conducted under
authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress. Their purpose is
to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber
attacks against the United States and its allies.¶ Our ability to discuss these activities is limited by our need to protect
intelligence sources and methods. Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to
collect communications can obviously give our enemies a “playbook” of how to avoid detection.
Nonetheless, Section 702 has proven vital to keeping the nation and our allies safe. It continues to be
one of our most important tools for the protection of the nation’s security.¶ However, there are significant
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2013 – Despite what some media outlets are reporting,
misimpressions that have resulted from the recent articles. Not all the inaccuracies can be corrected without further revealing
classified information. I have, however, declassified for release the attached details about the recent unauthorized disclosures in the
hope that it will help dispel some of the myths and add necessary context to what has been published.¶ James R. Clapper, Director
of National Intelligence
Section 702 needed to fight terrorism.
Washington Post, June 20, 2013, Reprinted in South China Morning Post, US Defends Surveillance Tactics in War on Terrorism,
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1264602/us-defends-surveillance-tactics-war-terrorism
In November 2008, Abid Naseer, a Pakistani student living in Manchester, England, began to e-mail a Yahoo account ultimately traced to his home country. The
young man's e-mails appeared to be about four women - Nadia, Huma, Gulnaz and Fozia - and which one would make a "faithful and loving wife". British
investigators later determined that the four names were code for types of explosives. And they ascertained that a final April 2009 e-mail announcing a "marriage to
Nadia" between the 15th and the 20th was a signal that a terrorist attack was imminent, according to British court documents. It is unclear exactly how British
intelligence linked the Pakistani e-mail address to a senior al-Qaeda operative who communicated in a kind of code to his distant allies. But the intelligence helped
stop the plot in England, and the address made its way to the US National Security Agency (NSA). A few months later, the NSA was monitoring the Yahoo user in
Pakistan when a peculiar message arrived from a man named Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan American living in Colorado. He asked about "mixing of [flavour and ghee
oil] and I do not know the amount, plz right away." Soon after, on September 9, 2009, a second message arrived that echoed the code used in the British plot: "The
marriage is ready," Zazi wrote. The e-mails led the NSA to alert the FBI, which obtained a court order to place Zazi under more extensive surveillance. Officials
learned that he had visited Pakistan in 2008, the same time as one of the British plotters. In the end, the e-mails
and additional surveillance
foiled a plot by Zazi and two others to conduct suicide bombings in the New York subway system just days
after he sent the "marriage is ready" e-mail. In recent days, US intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as
congressional officials, have pointed to the authority that allowed them to target the Yahoo account Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) - as a critical tool in identifying and disrupting terrorist
plots in the US and abroad. But some critics of NSA surveillance suggested that the collection of data under a programme called Prism was not
essential to Zazi's capture because the British first obtained the critical e-mail address. Still, the case study provides a rare glimpse of how the broad surveillance
practices of the United States, often in concert with allies, are deployed. " The
702 programme has been enormously useful in a
large number of terrorist cases," said a US official who has access to classified records on NSA programmes. "It's beyond dispute
that it is highly effective. It operates exactly as anyone paying attention would have expected it to
operate based on floor debate and plain reading of law." Passage of Section 702 as an amendment to
FISA in 2008 gave the government the authority to request information from US telecommunications
companies on foreign targets located overseas without a court order for each individual case. The broad
authority is reviewed and renewed annually by the FISA court, although the law does not preclude making a specific request for surveillance. "It appears the NSA did
not need any of the expanded authorities conferred by Section 702 to monitor the communications at issue," said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan
Centre for Justice's Liberty and National Security Programme. "The government easily could have met this standard if it certified that the targets were al-Qaeda
terrorists in Pakistan." But US officials argue that, given
the flood of leads in today's interconnected world, the system
would get bogged down and they could miss plots if they had to go before the court every time they got
information about potential foreign suspects. The officials said they used material from multiple sources - allies, agents, informants and
other investigations - to provide rolling targeting information for the Prism program. They also said if the Yahoo address had not been included, Zazi might not have
been identified just days before the attacks were set to occur. In testimony before Congress on Tuesday, senior
intelligence and law
enforcement officials said that recently revealed surveillance programmes have disrupted more than 50
"potential terrorist events", including at least 10 plots with a connection in the US. The Zazi case was one of four that
officials used in recent days to defend the effectiveness of the surveillance programmes. One of the others was a planned attack on a Danish newspaper that
involved a Pakistani American, David Headley.
Section 702 is critical it’s essential to preventing terrorism
Wittes 14 Benjamin Wittes, Brookings, 2014, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. I co-founded and am
Editor in Chief of Lawfare, a website devoted to sober and serious discussion of “Hard National Security Choices.” I am the author or editor of
several books on subjects related to law and national security: Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantánamo (2011), Law and
the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (2008), and Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform (2009). I have written
extensively both on the AUMF and on NSA collection under various provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).3 The views I
am expressing here are my own, April 8, Prepared Statement, Is Al Qaeda Winning the Administration’s Counterterrorism Policy,”
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA18/20140408/102109/HHRG-113-FA18-Wstate-WittesB-20140408.pdf
President Obama has announced that he wants to end the AUMF conflict, raising profound questions both about the plausibility and timeframe of that objective
and about what legal instrument—if any—will replace the AUMF. Meanwhile, serial leaks have generated enormous political anxiety about NSA programs and
persistent calls for reform in the press, in the general public, among allies, and in this body. Section
702 will sunset in 2017 absent action
by Congress to renew this important collection authority.4 So major pillars of the legal architecture of America’s conflict with Al
Qaeda have been placed—in different ways and for very different reasons—on the table. This body thus cannot avoid the question of how much, if at all, it wants to
alter the most fundamental architecture of the conflict. In my view, as I will lay out, the critical task facing the Congress is different with respect to these two laws.
With respect to the AUMF, the Congress should legislate to clearly authorize, and establish proper oversight of, the conflict the United States is likely to continue
fighting after its withdrawal from Afghanistan. With
respect to Section 702, the task is simpler: to maintain the
intelligence community’s capacity to support both the broad national security objectives of the United
States and the conflict’s prosecution under whatever legal authorities may succeed the AUMF. As I said at the outset of this
statement, the question of intelligence collection under Section 702 of the FAA may seem connected to the AUMF’s future in only the most distant fashion. In fact,
the connection between intelligence collection authorities and the underlying regime authorizing the conflict itself is a critical one. Good
intelligence is
key to any armed conflict and good technical intelligence is a huge U.S. strength in the fight against Al
Qaeda. Yet ironically, the more one attempts to narrow the conflict, the more important technical intelligence becomes. The fewer boots on the ground we
have in Afghanistan, for example, the greater our reliance will become on technical collection. The more we rely on drone strikes, rather than large troop
movements, in areas where we lack large human networks, the more we rely on technical intelligence. Particularly if one imagines staying on offense against a
metastasizing Al Qaeda in the context of a withdrawal from Afghanistan and a narrowing—or a formal end—of the AUMF conflict, the
burden on
technical intelligence collection to keep us in the game will be huge even ignoring the many other
foreign intelligence and national security interests Section 702 surveillance supports. Section 702 is a
complicated statute, and it is only one part of a far more complicated, larger statutory arrangement. But broadly speaking, it permits
the NSA to acquire without an individualized warrant the communications of non-US persons reasonably
believed to be overseas when those communications are transiting the United States or stored in the
United States. Under these circumstances, the NSA can order production of such communications from telecommunications carriers and internet companies
under broad programmatic orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which reviews both targeting and minimization procedures under
which the collection then takes place. Oversight is thick, both within the executive branch, and in reporting requirements to the congressional intelligence
committees. Make
no mistake: Section 702 is a very big deal in America’s counterterrorism arsenal. It is far
more important than the much debated bulk metadata program, which involves a few hundred queries a year. Section
702 collection, by contrast, is vast, a hugely significant component not only of contemporary
counterterrorism but of foreign intelligence collection more generally. In 2012, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
wrote that “[T]he authorities provided [under section 702] have greatly increased the government’s ability
to collect information and act quickly against important foreign intelligence targets. . . . [The] failure to
reauthorize [section 702] would ‘result in a loss of significant intelligence and impede the ability of the
Intelligence Community to respond quickly to new threats and intelligence opportunities.’”8 The President’s
Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, after quoting this language, wrote that “Our own review is not inconsistent with this assessment. .
. . [W]e
are persuaded that section 702 does in fact play an important role in the nation’s effort to
prevent terrorist attacks across the globe.”9 The Washington Post has reported that 702 was in 2012 the
single most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief.10 Yet we have seen enormous anxiety
about Section 702 collection, along with its close cousin, collection overseas against non-US person
targets under Executive Order 12333. Sometimes, these anxieties have been rooted in the supposed effects of this collection on U.S.
persons.11 Sometimes, however, the complaints have stemmed from broader concerns about infringement of privacy worldwide. Europeans have expressed shock,
for example, that a U.S. spy agency would presume to collect against an allied foreign leader like German Chancellor Angela Merkel12—surveillance that now seems
forward-thinking and reasonable given later reports that Merkel has been on the phone frequently during the Crimea crisis with Vladimir Putin.13 Major news
organizations have considered it front-page news that NSA has pursued intelligence targets on online gaming platforms and smartphone apps,14 that NSA has
collected contact lists in large numbers around the world,15 even that foreign countries spy on one another, collect attorney-client communications involving U.S.
lawyers along the way, and may share that material with NSA subject to U.S. law and minimization requirements.16 Whether one considers these stories important
journalism or reckless blowing of valuable surveillance activities, they both reflect and further stoke a deep concern about the scope of U.S. surveillance practices.
And that concern is creating inexorable pressures for reforms we may regret in the counterterrorism space. The legal regime here is one that this body knowingly
and deliberatively created in an iterative set of interactions with the intelligence community and the courts. It requires no apology. Rather, it requires an active
defense. And while there are certainly areas in which the regime could benefit from reform, the big risk here is that overreaction and panic in the face of exposure
will lead to a burdening of the core signals intelligence capacity of the United States with legal processes designed to protect civil liberties domestically. This could
happen either because reform efforts go too far or because Congress fails to reauthorize 702 and thus applies the terms of core FISA—which require an
individualized warrant based on probable cause— to a wide swath of overseas collection. Broadly then, the legislative task with respect to Section 702 is something
of the opposite of the task with respect to the AUMF. To the extent that members of this committee continue to believe, as I do, in the essential integrity and value
of the existing legal authorities for intelligence collection and oversight, the task in the current political environment is to defend that architecture—publicly and
energetically—rather than to race to correct imagined deficiencies, or even real structural deficiencies that, however real they may be, bear little relation to the
outcomes that disquiet us.
Section 702 was successful in stopping Jamshid Muhtorov and Bakhtiyor Jumaev
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
Jamshid Muhtorov and Bakhtiyor Jumaev, two Uzbek men living in Denver and Philadelphia, respectively, allegedly provided
$300 and other support to the Islamic Jihad Union, an Uzbek terrorist group, in 2011 and 2012.71 The
U.S. government acknowledged its use of evidence derived from warrantless surveillance under Section
702 in a court filing in October 2013.72,73 This case did not involve any plot to conduct an attack inside the United States. Further, the amount
of money the two men allegedly provided to the Islamic Jihad Union was minimal. In addition to the cases the government has declassified, we have
identified three more cases in which a review of court documents and news reports suggests NSA
surveillance of some kind may have been used. However, it is not clear whether any of these three cases involved the NSA’s bulk
surveillance programs.
Section 702 was successful in Najibullah Zazi’s terrorist plot.
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
The plot by Najibullah Zazi, Zarein Ahmedzay, and Adis Medunjanin to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009
was prevented by a Section 702 NSA intercept. The bulk collection of telephone metadata did not play an appreciable role in the
prevention of the attack. There is no evidence that the NSA program used to help investigate the plot was critical for counterterrorism efforts, as the plot could
have been prevented through the use of traditional, targeted criminal or FISA warrants.
XO 12333 Links
Executive Order 12333 is the basis for the NSA intelligence gathering.
Farivar 2014 (Cyrus Farivar / Cyrus is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His first book,
The Internet of Elsewhere, was published in April 2011..New docs show how Reagan-era executive order unbounded NSA
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/new-docs-show-how-reagan-era-executive-order-unbounded-nsa/)
As Ars reported previously, "twelve
triple three" is a presidential order that spells out the National Security
Agency’s authority to conduct signals intelligence, among other things. EO 12333 was amended three
times under President George W. Bush. Famously, the NSA expanded its domestic surveillance operation
after the September 11 attacks without a direct order from the president, who later provided cover
under EO 12333. "These documents are a good first step to understanding how EO 12333 is being used," Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "We already know that it's used in a very similar manner to Section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is being used as part of collection techniques that collect
wholly domestic (American) e-mail. We also know [EO 12333 is] used for the NSA’s interception of
Internet traffic between Google's and Yahoo!'s data centers abroad, the collection of millions of e-mail
and instant message address books, the recording of the contents of every phone call made in at least
two countries, and the mass cell phone location-tracking program. The NSA—and the White House—must release more
material on EO 12333. The President has encouraged a public discussion on the NSA's signals intelligence activities. He must follow through with ensuring an open,
and honest, debate on EO 12333 activities." FISA only regulates a subset of NSA's signals intelligence activities. NSA conducts the majority of its SIGINT activities
solely pursuant to the authority provided by Executive Order (EO) 12333. Since
1981, EO 12333 has provided the President's
authoritative written instruction for the organization and operation of the United States Intelligence
Community (IC). An internal training document for a course taught with the NSA entitled "Overview of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Authorities" notes that:
Executive Order 12333 was issued by the President of the United States to provide for the effective
conduct of US intelligence activities and the protection of the rights of US persons. It is the primary
source of NSA's foreign intelligence-gathering authority. Executive Order 12333 governs foreign
intelligence activities across the Intelligence Community. Derivative documents such as DoD Regulation 5240.1-R, NSA/CSS Policy 123, and USSID SP0018 establish policies and procedures consistent with Executive Order 12333. Under Executive Order 12333, NSA collects,
processes, analyzes, produces, and disseminates signals intelligence information and data. These
activities are approved for foreign intelligence purposes, counterintelligence purposes, and for the
conduct of military operations.
NSA surveillance dependent upon Executive Order 12333.
Abdo 14 ( Alex Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 New Documents Shed Light on
One of the NSA's Most Powerful Tools https://www.aclu.org/blog/new-documents-shed-light-one-nsas-most-powerfultools?redirect=blog/national-security/new-documents-shed-light-one-nsas-most-powerful-tools)
In some ways, this is not surprising. After all, it
has been reported that some of the NSA's biggest spying programs rely
on the executive order, such as the NSA's interception of internet traffic between Google's and Yahoo!'s
data centers abroad, the collection of millions of email and instant-message address books, the
recording of the contents of every phone call made in at least two countries, and the mass cellphone
location-tracking program. In other ways, however, it is surprising. Congress's reform efforts have not addressed the
executive order, and the bulk of the government's disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations
have conspicuously ignored the NSA's extensive mandate under EO 12333.
Executive Order 12333 grants the most power to surveillance.
Tye 2014 (John Napier Tye served as section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights
and Labor from January 2011 to April 2014. He is now a legal director of Avaaz, a global advocacy organization. Meet Executive Order 12333:
The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans, The Washington Post, July 18, 2014 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/meetexecutive-order-12333-the-reagan-rule-that-lets-the-nsa-spy-on-americans/2014/07/18/93d2ac22-0b93-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html)
Public debate about the bulk collection of U.S. citizens’ data by the NSA has focused largely on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, through which the government obtains
court orders to compel American telecommunications companies to turn over phone data. But Section
215 is a small part of the picture
and does not include the universe of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons
authorized under Executive Order 12333. From 2011 until April of this year, I worked on global Internet freedom policy as a civil servant at
the State Department. In that capacity, I was cleared to receive top-secret and “sensitive compartmented” information. Based in part on classified facts that I am
prohibited by law from publishing,
I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and
storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215. Bulk data collection that
occurs inside the United States contains built-in protections for U.S. persons, defined as U.S. citizens,
permanent residents and companies. Such collection must be authorized by statute and is subject to
oversight from Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The statutes set a high bar for collecting the
content of communications by U.S. persons. For example, Section 215 permits the bulk collection only of U.S. telephone metadata — lists of incoming and outgoing
phone numbers — but not audio of the calls. Executive
Order 12333 contains no such protections for U.S. persons if the
collection occurs outside U.S. borders. Issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to authorize foreign
intelligence investigations, 12333 is not a statute and has never been subject to meaningful oversight
from Congress or any court. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said that the committee
has not been able to “sufficiently” oversee activities conducted under 12333. Unlike Section 215, the executive order authorizes collection
of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons cannot be
individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s
communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign
intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It
does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the
volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained. Executive Order 12333
contains nothing to prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all such communications — content as
well as metadata — provided that such collection occurs outside the United States in the course of a
lawful foreign intelligence investigation. No warrant or court approval is required, and such collection
never need be reported to Congress. None of the reforms that Obama announced earlier this year will
affect such collection. Without any legal barriers to such collection, U.S. persons must increasingly rely on the affected companies to implement
security measures to keep their communications private. The executive order does not require the NSA to notify or obtain
consent of a company before collecting its users’ data. The attorney general, rather than a court, must
approve “minimization procedures” for handling the data of U.S. persons that is collected under 12333,
to protect their rights. I do not know the details of those procedures. But the director of national intelligence recently declassified a document(United
States Signals Intelligence Directive 18) showing that U.S. agencies may retain such data for five years.
Executive Order 12333 is the primary authority for surveillance.
Watkins 2013 (Ali Watkins covers intelligence and national security for the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C. Previously, she
covered national security and regional politics for McClatchy Newspapers' D.C. bureau. She has a journalism degree from Philadelphia's Temple
University Most of NSA’s data collection authorized by order Ronald Reagan issued November 21 2013
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article24759289.html)
The National Security Agency’s collection of information on Americans’ cellphone and Internet usage
reaches far beyond the two programs that have received public attention in recent months , to a presidential order that is older than
the Internet itself. Approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Executive Order 12333 (referred to as
“twelve-triple-three”) still governs most of what the NSA does. It is a sweeping mandate that outlines
the duties and foreign intelligence collection for the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. It is not governed
by Congress, and critics say it has little privacy protection and many loopholes. What changes have been
made to it have come through guidelines set by the attorney general or other documents. Under its
provisions, agencies have the ability to function outside the confines of a warrant or court order, if
approved by the attorney general. Its Section 2.5 effectively gives the attorney general the right to authorize
intelligence agencies to operate outside the confines of judicial or congressional oversight, so long as it’s
in pursuit of foreign intelligence – including collecting information of Americans. “The Attorney General hereby is
delegated the power to approve the use for intelligence purposes, within the United States or against a United States person abroad, of any technique for which a
warrant would be required,” 12333 reads. Monitoring
the actual content of Americans’ communications still requires a
warrant under 12333, but metadata – the hidden information about a communication that tells where a
person is, who he’s communicating with, even the number of credit cards used in a transaction – can be
swept up without congressional or court approval. The impact of 12333 is enormous – and largely
unknown. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest that less than half of
the metadata the NSA has collected has been acquired under provisions of the USA Patriot Act and the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the two laws that have received the most attention for permitting NSA programs . Gen. Keith
Alexander, the NSA director, has ratified that impression, saying that the majority of NSA data is
collected “solely pursuant to the authorities provided by Executive Order 12333.”
Impact Extensions
A strategic nuclear terrorist attack could lead to an internal US collapse.
Michael 12 – (2012, George, PhD, Associate Professor of Counterproliferation and Deterrence Theory, USAF Counterproliferation Center,
Maxwell AFB, “Strategic Nuclear Terrorism and the Risk of State Decapitation,” Defence Studies Volume 12, Issue 1, 2012, taylor and francis)
In his book Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, John Mueller argues that even if a single nuclear device were detonated, though
catastrophic, it would not portend the demise of an entire city, much less the economy of a country, a government, or a civilization. Rather, Mueller believes that
America would be resilient, citing the example of Japan during World War II, which sustained an intense nationwide conventional bombing campaign along with two
nuclear attacks, yet whose civil society and government survived. Conceding that a nuclear attack could devastate a locale, Mueller still dismisses the notion that it
would extinguish the rest of the country –as he puts it –’Do farmers in Iowa cease plowing because an atomic bomb went off in an Eastern city? Do manufacturers
close down their assembly lines? Do all churches, businesses, governmental structures, community groups simply evaporate?’ 105 Arguably, though, Mueller’s
analysis is somewhat facile and gives short shrift to the possibility of strategic nuclear terrorism. For instance, a
nuclear device planted in a
certain place (near the Capitol Building in Washington DC) at a certain time (the President’s State of the Union Address) could decapitate
the US government. Although there is a plan of presidential succession, it might not be carried out smoothly.
Moreover, in this scenario if power were contested by different officials, would the rest of the country recognize their
authority? And without a functioning government, would the state governments, which depend so much
on the federal government, really be viable for very long? In time of crisis, Americans have come to assume that the federal government
will take the lead. If the federal leadership were decapitated, it might not be that easy to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Former Defense Secretary William Perry once speculated that it was more likely that a nuclear device would arrive in
Washington DC or New York City by way of a truck or freighter than a missile. 106 The federal government’s planning
scenario envisages a ten-kiloton nuclear device detonated in an urban area. 107 In a case study developed by the Homeland Security Council, a ten-kiloton nuclear
device was detonated near the White House. The study estimated that over 150,000 injuries would be incurred with a possible 70 percent mortality rate.
Furthermore, over 100,000 persons would require decontamination, which would overwhelm regional capabilities. In the aftermath, the study predicted that over
500,000 persons would attempt to evacuate the city, effectively closing both egress and ingress routes. 108 In a typical nuclear-fission weapon explosion, about half
of the energy goes into the blast. About a third of the energy goes into thermal effects. The remaining energy goes into prompt and residual radiation. Much of the
radiation lies in the mushroom cloud produced by the explosion. 109 In addition to the direct effects of the detonation, people would also be killed from indirect
blast effects, such as the collapse of buildings and fires caused from broken gas pipes, gasoline in cars, and so on. 110 Inasmuch as terrorists would not have the
capability to deliver a nuclear bomb by air, the detonation would almost certainly be at ground level thus limiting the blast radius and the resulting firestorm. 111
Nevertheless, a
ground burst weapon would loft far more radioactive debris into the atmosphere resulting in
greater contamination. At ground zero, that is, the point on the earth at which the detonation occurs, a
ten-kiloton blast would produce a fireball about 72 meters (236 feet) in diameter. 112 Prompt radiation
would kill approximately 95 percent of the people within a diameter of 2.4 kilometers (roughly one and
a half miles) within weeks. 113 A detonation of a ten-kiloton nuclear device on Pennsylvania Avenue in the area where the Robert F. Kennedy
Department of Justice Building is located would largely destroy a circle area about two miles (3.2 kilometers) in diameter which would encompass the
White House, the Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court Building. 114 Many of the people unfortunate to be in the area
would be killed.During the Cold War, the US government faced the prospect of a decapitating strike. Soviet ‘Yankee’-class submarines, which regularly operated 600
nautical miles from the East Coast of the United States, had the capability of destroying Washington DC, within eight to ten minutes of launching their nuclear
missiles. 115 However, an attempted decapitation strike by the Soviet Union would have been an act of irrational desperation insofar as an attack on Washington
would not have prevented a devastating series of retaliatory strikes from the US military. 116 To ensure second strike capability, both the United States and the
Soviet Union developed plans for the continuity of command and control of nuclear weapons in the event of a decapitation strike. 117 The
Continuity of
Government (COG) refers to a system of procedures that would allow the government to continue
operations in the event some catastrophic event. Although protocols of succession and the replacement of elected and appointed
officials were included by the framers in the Constitution, the need for COG plans took on a new sense of urgency in the nuclear era. A series of national security
directives dictate procedures for government agencies in the event of a crisis. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Directive 67, which requires federal
agencies to develop plans to ensure the continuance of operations, a chain of command, and delegation of authority. The full text of the directive remains classified.
118 The 25th amendment clarifies the procedures for the transfer of power relating to the incapacitation of the president. However, under
the
conditions of a nuclear attack and the ensuing societal disruption, a smooth transition may not be
possible. If the sitting elected president survives, then everyone should agree that he legitimately holds the reins of power. If, however, the president is dead or
missing, the lines of authority are less clear as evidenced on 30 March 1981, when John F. Hinckley Jr attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Soon
thereafter, Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced that he was in charge of the executive branch because Vice President George H.W. Bush was out of town
and President Reagan was incapacitated while undergoing surgery for his wound. In doing so, Haig overlooked that the Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and the
President pro tempore of the Senate Strom Thurmond preceded him in the line of succession respectively. Ensuring
the continuity of the command,
control, and communications of the military is vital as well. Christened as the National Command Authority (NCA), 119 the political and
military leaders who are designated as members of the chain of command for US forces must be able to survive a surprise attack in order to carry out retaliatory
attacks. 120 According to the Department of Defense Directive 5100.30 issued on 2 December 1971, the NCA consists
only of the president and
the secretary of defense or their deputized alternatives or successors. This could lead to confusion
insofar as there are twin lines of succession, one for the presidency and one for the command of US
military forces. 121 In order to avoid the prospect of decapitation, the US government has established plans to evacuate the NCA authorities from
Washington DC to a National Airborne Operations Center aircraft and to 96 hardened command bunkers in the Federal Relocation Arc, located about 50 miles or
more from the city. 122 The ‘underground White House’ located inside Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania is the home of the Alternative National Military
Command Center and is equipped to house the president and other members of the NCA. Another important relocation center –the Western Virginia Office of
Controlled Conflict Operations –was established in a man-made cavern within Mount Weather located about 50 miles northwest of Washington DC, just outside
Bluemont, Virginia. 123 Though commendable, these plans
might not be adequate to ensure a continuity of government in
the event of a surprise decapitating strike by a terrorist group. Certain trends in contemporary America
could make the issue of transition particularly contentious. One worrisome development is a seeming
polarization in the United States over matters such as political partisanship, national identity, and cultural
issues. Since the 1990s, the American party system has been increasingly characterized by an ideological
divide. This was reflected in the rift in the electoral map of the country after the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Generally speaking, ‘red’ states favor a
more conservative course for the nation, while ‘blue’ states prefer a more liberal orientation. The political center appears to be attenuating. As the political scientist
Alan Abramovitz found in his research, in 1984, 41 percent of the voters surveyed identified themselves at the midpoint of an ideological scale. By 2005, though, the
number that identified themselves at the center had dropped to 28 percent. 124
Historically, American political culture has favored
centrism and pragmatism over ideology. And though the distribution of wealth in the country is quite uneven compared to other Western
democracies as measured by the Gini Index, the middle class is still the class with which most Americans overwhelmingly identify. 125 The festering economic crisis,
though, could create a greater pool of the discontented, as evidenced by the Occupy Wall Street protests in the fall of 2011. In
a highly-polarized
America, establishing a consensus could be challenging in the aftermath of a severe crisis.
The impact is a global nuclear exchange
Ayson 10 (Robert, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand @ The Victoria University
of Wellington, July 2010, “After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 33 Issue 7)
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
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
and, most important . . . some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41
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.
A terrorist attack goes nuclear
Hellman 08 (Martin E. Hellman, emeritus prof of engineering @ Stanford, “Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence” SPRING 2008 THE BENT OF TAU BETA PI,
http://www.nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf)
The threat of nuclear terrorism looms much larger in the public’s mind than the threat of a full-scale nuclear war, yet this article focuses
primarily on the latter. An explanation is therefore in order before proceeding . A terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon would
be a catastrophe of immense proportions: “A 10-kiloton bomb detonated at Grand Central Station on a typical work day would likely kill
some half a million people, and inflict over a trillion dollars in direct economic damage. America and its way of life would be changed forever.” [Bunn 2003, pages
viii-ix]. The
likelihood of such an attack is also significant. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has estimated the
chance of a nuclear terrorist incident within the next decade to be roughly 50 percent [Bunn 2007, page 15]. David Albright, a
former weapons inspector in Iraq, estimates those odds at less than one percent, but notes, “We would never accept a situation where the chance of a major
nuclear accident like Chernobyl would be anywhere near 1% .... A nuclear terrorism attack is a low-probability event, but we can’t live in a world where it’s anything
but extremely low-probability.” [Hegland 2005]. In a
survey of 85 national security experts, Senator Richard Lugar found a median
estimate of 20 percent for the “probability of an attack involving a nuclear explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the
next 10 years,” with 79 percent of the respondents believing “it more likely to be carried out by
terrorists” than by a government [Lugar 2005, pp. 14-15]. I support increased efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism, but that is not
inconsistent with the approach of this article. Because terrorism is one of the potential trigger mechanisms for a full-scale nuclear
war, the risk analyses proposed herein will include estimating the risk of nuclear terrorism as one component of the overall risk. If that risk, the overall risk, or
both are found to be unacceptable, then the proposed remedies would be directed to reduce which- ever risk(s) warrant attention. Similar remarks apply to a
number of other threats (e.g., nuclear war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan). his article would be incomplete if it only dealt with the threat of nuclear
terrorism and neglected the threat of full- scale nuclear war. If both risks are unacceptable, an effort to reduce only the terrorist component would leave humanity
in great peril. In fact, society’s
almost total neglect of the threat of full-scale nuclear war makes studying that
risk all the more important. The cosT of World War iii The danger associated with nuclear deterrence depends on both the cost of a failure and the
failure rate.3 This section explores the cost of a failure of nuclear deterrence, and the next section is concerned with the failure rate. While other definitions are
possible, this article defines a failure of deterrence to mean a full-scale exchange of all nuclear weapons available to the U.S. and Russia, an event that will be
termed World War III. Approximately 20 million people died as a result of the first World War. World War II’s fatalities were double or triple that number—chaos
prevented a more precise deter- mination. In both cases humanity recovered, and the world today bears few scars that attest to the horror of those two wars. Many
people therefore implicitly believe that a third World War would be horrible but survivable, an extrapola- tion of the effects of the first two global wars. In that
view, World War III, while horrible, is something that humanity may just have to face and from which it will then have to recover. In contrast, some of those most
qualified to assess the situation hold a very different view. In a 1961 speech to a joint session of the Philippine Con- gress, General Douglas MacArthur, stated,
“Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. … If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No
longer does it
possess even the chance of the winner of a duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide.” Former
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ex- pressed a similar view: “If deterrence fails and conflict develops, the present U.S. and NATO strategy carries with it a
high risk that Western
civilization will be destroyed” [McNamara 1986, page 6]. More recently, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger,
and Sam Nunn4 echoed those concerns when they quoted President Reagan’s belief that nuclear weapons were “totally irrational, totally inhu- mane, good for
nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” [Shultz 2007] Official studies, while couched in less emotional terms, still convey the
horrendous toll that World War III would exact: “The
resulting deaths would be far beyond any precedent. Executive branch
calculations show a range of U.S. deaths from 35 to 77 percent (i.e., 79-160 million dead) … a change in targeting could kill somewhere between 20 million and 30
million additional people on each side .... These calculations reflect only deaths during the first 30 days. Additional millions would be injured, and many would
eventually die from lack of adequate medical care … millions of people might starve or freeze during the follow- ing winter, but it is not possible to estimate how
many. … further millions … might eventually die of latent radiation effects.” [OTA 1979, page 8] This OTA report also noted the possibility of serious ecological
damage [OTA 1979, page 9], a concern that as- sumed a new potentiality when the TTAPS report [TTAPS 1983] proposed that the ash and dust from so many nearly
simultaneous nuclear
explosions and their resultant fire- storms could usher in a nuclear winter that might erase homo
sapiens from the face of the earth, much as many scientists now believe the K-T Extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs resulted from an impact
winter caused by ash and dust from a large asteroid or comet striking Earth. The TTAPS report produced a heated debate, and there is still no scientific consensus on
whether a nuclear winter would follow a full-scale nuclear war. Recent work [Robock 2007, Toon 2007] suggests that even a
limited nuclear
exchange or one between newer nuclear-weapon states, such as India and Pakistan, could have devastating long-lasting climatic
consequences due to the large volumes of smoke that would be generated by fires in modern megacities. While it is uncertain how destructive World War
III would be, prudence dictates that we apply the same engi- neering conservatism that saved the Golden Gate Bridge from collapsing on its 50th anniversary and
assume that preventing
World War III is a necessity—not an option.
ISIS will shut down the U.S. national grid – it’ll independently kill 9 out of 10
Americans
Bedard 14 Bedard 9/3/14 – Paul, columnist at the Washington Examiner, “New ISIS threat: America's electric grid; blackout could kill 9 of
10” http://washingtonexaminer.com/new-isis-threat-americas-electric-grid-blackout-could-kill-9-of-10/article/2552766
Former top government
officials who have been warning Washington about the vulnerability of the nation’s largely
unprotected electric grid are raising new fears that troops from the jihadist Islamic State are poised to attack the
system, leading to a power crisis that could kill millions. “Inadequate grid security, a porous U.S.-Mexico
border, and fragile transmission systems make the electric grid a target for ISIS,” said Peter Pry, one of
the nation’s leading experts on the grid. Others joining Pry at a press conference later Wednesday to draw attention to the potential threat
said that if just a handful of the nation’s high voltage transformers were knocked out, blackouts would
occur across the country. “By one estimate, should the power go out and stay out for over a year, nine out of 10
Americans would likely perish,” said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. At the afternoon press
conference, Gaffney dubbed the potential crisis the "grid jihad." A lack of electricity would shut off water systems, impact city
transportation services and shutdown hospitals and other big facilities. Fresh and frozen foods also would be
impacted as would banks, financial institutions and utilities. Pry provided details of recent attacks on electricity systems and said
that ISIS could easily team with Mexican drug cartels to ravage America. He told Secrets, for example, that the Knights
Templar drug gang blacked out the electric grid of the Mexican state of Michoacan in 2013 to provide
cover for killing those fighting the drug trade. “The Knights Templars and other criminal gangs in Mexico will do
anything for money, and ISIS, the richest terrorist organization in history, has hundreds of millions of
dollars at its disposal,” said Pry. “ISIS could hire one of the Mexican cartels, or one of their criminal gangs already in the U.S.,
or activate jihadist terror cells already in the U.S., and inflict a multi-state blackout immediately, within
days or weeks. Perhaps even a nationwide blackout,” Pry explained to Secrets. “I am not saying it is likely they will do so. But given
the capabilities and objectives of ISIS and our obvious vulnerabilities, it would be foolish to ignore the threat to the grid, to regard
the threat as unlikely. Our planning should be based on imminent asymmetrical threats, and not assume that
another 9/11 large-scale attack is years away,” he added.
They want it – will choose a time and location where retaliation is most likely to
escalate
Ayson 10 (Robert, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand @ The Victoria University
of Wellington, July 2010, “After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 33 Issue 7)
But what if these considerations
of cost and benefit mattered less to a terrorist group in possession of a
nuclear weapon? As Quester writes: “Governments would, under many circumstances, have a strong incentive to preserve their adversary’s ability to
negotiate and surrender; terrorists, by contrast, might have a much stronger incentive to create general chaos, to
disrupt and destroy all of their target’s ability to control and moderate its responses.”50 What if a
terrorist group realized that it might just be able to spark a catalytic nuclear war? Might that group then
work to increase the likelihood of such a war, or to threaten to do so, as a way of either increasing its bargaining
power, prestige, or security or to bring about the apocalypse that some observers believe they really desire? Ferguson and Potter argue that
“apocalyptic groups . . . may believe that detonating a nuclear warhead would spark a broader nuclear
conflict, enabling them to hasten the end of the world.”51 To the extent that any terrorist group has already recognized that this
potential for inspiring catalysis may exist, could this also prove a major incentive for it to seek nuclear weapons in the first place? What then might be the situations
where a terrorist group could maximize the admittedly slim chances of setting off such a massive nuclear exchange? Once
in possession of a
useable nuclear weapon, such a group might be inclined to look for a time and place where relations
between two or more major nuclear powers were already tense. The catalytic potential could be
amplified if the two nuclear-armed countries (the original target of the terrorist detonation and the country with whom a wider nuclear
exchange could then begin) were involved in a serious crisis in which case there was a heightened state of alert and
even an expectation that some sort of attack by one on the other was likely or even imminent. In such a hot-headed environment, a
terrorist nuclear detonation might be even more easily misunderstood and misinterpreted, thus combining the
Cold War fears of both catalytic and accidental nuclear war. A terrorist group might exploit the situation further with a false
but enormously provocative claim that its nuclear attack had been supported by the state with which
the victim of the attack was already in a crisis situation. The loudest of denials by the state so identified might fall on deaf ears in a
period when fear and paranoia reigned52 : in fact, the victimized state again might simply refuse to believe that the attack could have come from a non-state actor
and would be busy looking for the “real” source of the attack.
Extinction---equivalent to full-scale nuclear war
Toon 07 Owen B. Toon 7, chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU-Boulder, et al., April 19, 2007, “Atmospheric
effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism,” online:
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf
To an increasing extent, people
are congregating in the world’s great urban centers, creating megacities with
populations exceeding 10 million individuals. At the same time, advanced technology has designed nuclear
explosives of such small size they can be easily transported in a car, small plane or boat to the heart of a city. We
demonstrate here that a single detonation in the 15 kiloton range can produce urban fatalities approaching one
million in some cases, and casualties exceeding one million. Thousands of small weapons still exist in the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, and
there are at least six other countries with substantial nuclear weapons inventories. In all, thirty-three countries control sufficient amounts of highly enriched
uranium or plutonium to assemble nuclear explosives. A conflict between any of these countries involving 50-100 weapons with yields of 15 kt has the potential to
create fatalities rivaling those of the Second World War. Moreover, even
a single surface nuclear explosion, or an air burst in rainy conditions,
in a city center is likely to cause the entire metropolitan area to be abandoned at least for decades owing to
infrastructure damage and radioactive contamination. As the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in Louisiana suggests, the economic consequences of
even a localized nuclear catastrophe would most likely have severe national and international economic
consequences. Striking effects result even from relatively small nuclear attacks because low yield detonations are most effective against city centers where
business and social activity as well as population are concentrated. Rogue nations and terrorists would be most likely to strike there.
Accordingly, an organized attack on the U.S. by a small nuclear state, or terrorists supported by such a state, could generate
casualties comparable to those once predicted for a full-scale nuclear “counterforce” exchange in a
superpower conflict. Remarkably, the estimated quantities of smoke generated by attacks totaling about one
megaton of nuclear explosives could lead to significant global climate perturbations (Robock et al., 2007). While we
did not extend our casualty and damage predictions to include potential medical, social or economic impacts following the initial explosions, such analyses have
been performed in the past for large-scale nuclear war scenarios (Harwell and Hutchinson, 1985). Such a study should be carried out as well for the present
scenarios and physical outcomes.
Causes global economic collapse.
Cirincione 07 – (2007, Joseph, President of the Ploughshares Fund, former vice president for national security and international policy
at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, former director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, “Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons,” p. xi)
Profound societal damage would also occur. Physicist Charles Ferguson and scholar William Potter explain in a 1004 study:
Consequences stemming from a terrorist-detonated nuclear weapon in an America city would emanate
beyond the immediate tens or hundreds of thousands of fatalities and the massive property and
financial damage. Americans who were not killed or injured by the explosion would live in fear that they could die from future nuclear
terrorist attacks. Such fear would erode public confidence in the government and could spark the downfall of
the administration in power. The tightly interconnected economies of the United States and the rest of
the world could sink into a depression as a result of a crude nuclear weapon destroying the heart of a
city. This threat stems not only from the 27,000 nuclear weap• ons held by eight or nine nations today but also from the possibility that new nations
or even terrorist groups will join this deadly club. Many therefore conclude that we must find a non-nuclear alternative to global security. Upon receiving
the 2005 Nobel Peace, Prize Mohamed EIBaradei, the dircc• tor general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said, "I have no doubt that. if we hope to
escape self-destruction, then nuclear weapons should have no place in our collective conscience. and no
role in our security.”7
Terrorists will strategically attack, forcing a nuclear exchange and escalation.
Morgan 09 (Dennis, full professor at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, “World on fire: two scenarios of the destruction of human
civilization and possible extinction of the human race,” Futures, November, Science Direct)
In a remarkable website on nuclear war, Carol Moore asks the question ‘‘Is Nuclear War Inevitable??’’ [10].4 In Section 1, Moore points out what most
terrorists obviously already know about the nuclear tensions between powerful countries. No doubt, they’ve figured out that the best way
to escalate these tensions into nuclear war is to set off a nuclear exchange. As Moore points out, all that militant
terrorists would have to do is get their hands on one small nuclear bomb and explode it on either
Moscow or Israel. Because of the Russian ‘‘dead hand’’ system, ‘‘where regional nuclear commanders would be given full
powers should Moscow be destroyed,’’ it is likely that any attack would be blamed on the United
States’’ [10]. Israeli leaders and Zionist supporters have, likewise, stated for years that if Israel were to suffer a
nuclear attack, whether from terrorists or a nation state, it would retaliate with the suicidal ‘‘Samson option’’
against all major Muslim cities in the Middle East. Furthermore, the Israeli Samson option would also
include attacks on Russia and even ‘‘anti-Semitic’’ European cities [10]. In that case, of course, Russia would
retaliate, and the U.S. would then retaliate against Russia. China would probably be involved as well, as
thousands, if not tens of thousands, of nuclear warheads, many of them much more powerful than
those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would rain upon most of the major cities in the Northern
Hemisphere. Afterwards, for years to come, massive radioactive clouds would drift throughout the Earth
in the nuclear fallout, bringing death or else radiation disease that would be genetically transmitted to future generations in a
nuclear winter that could last as long as a 100 years, taking a savage toll upon the environment and
fragile ecosphere as well. And what many people fail to realize is what a precarious, hair-trigger basis the nuclear web rests on. Any accident,
mistaken communication, false signal or ‘‘lone wolf’ act of sabotage or treason could, in a matter of a
few minutes, unleash the use of nuclear weapons, and once a weapon is used, then the likelihood of a
rapid escalation of nuclear attacks is quite high while the likelihood of a limited nuclear war is actually
less probable since each country would act under the ‘‘use them or lose them’’ strategy and psychology;
restraint by one power would be interpreted as a weakness by the other, which could be exploited as a
window of opportunity to ‘‘win’’ the war. In other words, once Pandora’s Box is opened, it will spread quickly,
as it will be the signal for permission for anyone to use them. Moore compares swift nuclear escalation to a room full of people
embarrassed to cough. Once one does, however, ‘‘everyone else feels free to do so. The bottom line is that as long as large nation states use internal and external
war to keep their disparate factions glued together and to satisfy elites’ needs for power and plunder, these nations will attempt to obtain, keep, and inevitably use
nuclear weapons. And as long as large nations oppress groups who seek self determination, some of those groups will look for any means to fight their oppressors’’
[10]. In other words, as
long as war and aggression are backed up by the implicit threat of nuclear arms, it is
only a matter of time before the escalation of violent conflict leads to the actual use of nuclear
weapons, and once even just one is used, it is very likely that many, if not all, will be used, leading to
horrific scenarios of global death and the destruction of much of human civilization while condemning a
mutant human remnant, if there is such a remnant, to a life of unimaginable misery and suffering in a
nuclear winter. In “Scenarios,” Moore summarizes the various ways a nuclear war could begin: Such a war could start through a
reaction to terrorist attacks, or through the need to protect against overwhelming military opposition, or through the use of small battle field
tactical nuclear weapons meant to destroy hardened targets. It might quickly move on to the use of strategic nuclear weapons
delivered by short-range or inter-continental missiles or long-range bombers. These could deliver high
altitude bursts whose electromagnetic pulse knocks out electrical circuits for hundreds of square miles.
Or they could deliver nuclear bombs to destroy nuclear and/or non-nuclear military facilities, nuclear
power plants, important industrial sites and cities. Or it could skip all those steps and start through the
accidental or reckless use of strategic weapons. [10] She then goes on to describe six scenarios for catastrophic nuclear exchanges
between various nations. Each scenario incorporates color-coded sections that illustrate four interrelated factors that will determine how a nuclear war will begin,
proceed and escalate. These factors are labeled as accidental, aggressive, pre-emptive, and retaliatory. As
for the accidental factor of nuclear
war, both the U.S. and Russia have “launch on warning” systems that send off rockets before
confirmation that a nuclear attack is underway; thus, especially during a time of tensions, a massive
nuclear war could take place within only 30 min after a warning—even if the warning is false. This
scenario has almost happened on several occasions in the past. It was only because of individual human
judgments, which disbelieved the false warnings, that nuclear war did not happen, but if the human
judgment had indeed interpreted the warnings according to protocol, an all-out nuclear war would
surely have taken place.
Turns the case- terrorism crushes civil liberties
Eland 03 Ivan Eland, Independent Institute Senior Fellow, 2003 [Mediterranean Quarterly, "Bush's Wars and the State of Civil Liberties,"
14.4, pg. 158-175]
Unfortunately, counterproductive U.S. government action in response to terrorism is not confined to
aggressive behavior overseas. In fact, the most pernicious effects of the escalating cycle of violence
between the terrorists and the U.S. government are not found overseas, although those are bad
enough, but at home. With each new round of terrorist attacks, the government takes away more of the
civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution by the nation's founders. When this occurs, the terrorists
have won—even if we capture or kill them all.
Affirmative
Uniqueness Answers
Al Qaeda will not attack the US
Bergen 13 September 2013, Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of
the National Security Program at the New America Foundation.)
between August 1998 and September 2001, al-Qaeda launched a significant attack on the
United States three times: first simultaneously bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, then bombing the USS Cole in October
2000 while it was anchored off the coast of Yemen, and finally attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.¶ Since then, alQaeda is zero for 12 in the United States.
It has been 12 years since 9/11 and there have been no major
attacks on American targets. To be sure, the United States has suffered some tragic terrorist attacks—including the shootings by Major Nidal Malik
In the 37 months
Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009; the attack on U.S. government facilities
in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012; and the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013—but these do
not represent a strategic attack by al-Qaeda or an affiliated group. They are tragedies but not catastrophes.
Domestic threat decreasing, the decrease in arrests prove.
Bergen 13 September 2013, Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of
the National Security Program at the New America Foundation.)
The number of jihadist extremists indicted in the United States has declined over the past few years,
according to New America Foundation data. As of July 2013, 44 people were indicted between 2011 and 2013 for connections to jihadist
terrorism.¶ In addition to those indicted, several extremists were killed before an indictment could be handed down. These include four men—
Mohamoud Hassan, Jamal Sheikh Bana, Burhan Hassan, and Troy Matthew Kastigar—who traveled to fight in Somalia and died there prior to
2011; Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen¶ in 2011; and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in April 2013 during a
police chase following the Boston Marathon bombings.¶ According to the New America Foundation data, the
number of individuals
indicted for plotting attacks within the United States—as opposed to being indicted for traveling to join
a terrorist group or sending money abroad to a terrorist group—also declined from 12 in 2011 to only
three in 2013.¶ Indictments per year, however, are not a perfect measure of the threat. Charges can vary from state to state, depending
on decisions regarding about what and who to prosecute. Additionally, the year in which an indictment is handed down is not necessarily the
most relevant year in an extremist’s activity. Despite these flaws, the
declining numbers of indictments provide reason to
believe the overall threat from domestic jihadist extremists may be decreasing.
International Support for domestic terrorism is low
Bergen 13 September 2013, Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of
the National Security Program at the New America Foundation.)
Since 2010,
the threat from homegrown extremists has trended away from association with any kind of
organized group. Recent attack plots do not show signs of direction from foreign terrorist organizations,
but instead are conducted by persons influenced by the ideology of violent jihad. None of the 21 homegrown extremists known to
have been involved in plots against the United States between 2011 and 2013 received training abroad.
Of these extremists, only Tamerlan Tsarnaev is known to have had contact with foreign militant operatives, but it remains is unclear to what extent this contact
the ability of
terrorist organizations to coordinate with extremists in the United States has been reduced by policing
efforts inside the country and counterterrorism operations abroad. Second, Internet use among jihadist extremists enables them to come into contact with
played a role in his attack.¶ This lack of coordination between domestic extremists and overseas groups is likely the result of two factors. First,
extremist communities abroad and be radicalized without face-to-face meetings. Of the 45 homegrown extremists who were indicted, convicted ¶ or killed between
2011 and 2013, 18 are known to have communicated with other extremists over the Internet or posted materials related to their radicalization online. ¶ One factor
in the radicalization of homegrown extremists in the United States is Anwar al-Awlaki’s propaganda. Because of Awlaki’s fluency in English and his talent for mixing
religious theory with contemporary issues, he produced propaganda that has resonated powerfully for some. At least 31 homegrown extremists have cited or
possessed Awlaki’s teachings and propaganda, according to a count by the New America Foundation. Awlaki is known to have directly communicated with four U.S.-
based militants including Major Hasan. Even after Awlaki’s death in a 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen, his influence lives on. Alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev was in possession of some of his writings.¶ In addition to lacking direction from abroad, the 2011
to 2013 attack plots were carried out by individuals and
pairs, rather than by groups of militants. Thirteen of the 21 extremists involved in U.S. attack plots acted individually. And only four pairs of plotters were involved in
domestic plots: Ahmed Ferhane and Mohamed Mamdouh, who plotted to bomb a Manhattan synagogue in May 2011; Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, who
planned to attack a Military Entrance Processing Center in Seattle in June 2011; Raeez and Shehreyar Qazi, who were arrested in 2012 for a plot to conduct an
attack in New York City; and Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the perpetrators of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. ¶ Community policying solves¶ The
threat from homegrown extremists to the U.S. homeland has been constrained in recent years by a variety of security measures. According to data collected by the¶
New America Foundation, family members of extremists and members of the wider Muslim American community provided useful information in the investigations
of about
a third of the homegrown jihadist extremists indicted or killed since 9/11.11 Non-community members provided useful reports of suspicious activity in
another 9 percent
of homegrown extremist cases, while almost half of all homegrown extremists were monitored by an informant or undercover agent. Only two
plots in the past three years escaped all the systemic checks that are now in place: Yonathan Melaku’s non-lethal drive-by shooting of military facilities in Northern
Virginia in 2011 and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
Al Qaeda not focused on attacking the US
Bergen 13 September 2013, Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of
the National Security Program at the New America Foundation.
These letters show that al-Qaeda’s
operational control over its affiliated organizations is limited. The Pakistani Taliban
continues to kill large numbers of Pakistani civilians and al- Shabaab formally announced its merger with al-Qaeda after bin Laden had died.55 Further, while
some affiliates still look to al-Qaeda for notional leadership and guidance, most of them do not appear
to have embraced al-Qaeda’s traditional focus on attacking the “far enemy,” the United States, choosing
instead to wage local power struggles.¶ The government has only released 17 of the thousands of documents that were found at bin Laden’s
compound, and any conclusions drawn from them at present are, at best, an incomplete picture of al-Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities, as well as bin Laden’s role
in them.
AQIM doesn’t threaten the West.
Bergen 13 (Peter, CNN national security analyst, “Should We Still Fear Al Qaeda,” http://newamerica.net/node/78699) Bergen Peter
Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation
North African group hasn't attacked in the West Much
has been written, for instance, in recent weeks about al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb (AQIM), al Qaeda's North African affiliate, a splinter group of which carried out the attack on the Algerian gas facility. But
according to Camille Tawil, who has authoritatively covered Islamist militant groups over the past two decades for the leading Arabic daily Al-Hayat
and has written three books about al Qaeda, AQIM doesn't threaten the West: "To my knowledge no known attacks or
aborted attacks in the West have been linked directly to AQIM." AQIM was formed seven years ago so
the group has had more than enough time to plot and carry out an attack in the West. By way of
comparison, it took two years of serious plotting for al Qaeda to plan the 9/11 attacks.
Boko Haram does not have the capability to attack the U.S.
Bergen 13 (Peter, CNN national security analyst, “Should We Still Fear Al Qaeda,” http://newamerica.net/node/78699) Bergen Peter
Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation.)
One such militant group is the Nigerian
Boko Haram, which bombed the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria in 2011 and has also attacked a wide
no known members
outside of West Africa," according to Virginia Comolli of the London-based International Institute for
Strategic Studies who tracks the group
range of Christian targets in the country. However, the group has shown "no capability to attack the West and also has
Arab Spring militant groups are not a threat.
Bergen 13 (Peter, CNN national security analyst, “Should We Still Fear Al Qaeda,” http://newamerica.net/node/78699) Bergen Peter
Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation
The chaotic
conditions of several of the countries of the "Arab Spring" are certainly something al Qaeda views as an
opportunity. Ayman al-Zawahiri the leader of the group, has issued 27 audio and video statements since the death of bin Laden, 10 of which have focused on
the Arab countries that have experienced the revolutions of the past two years. But
if history is a guide, the jihadist militants,
whether in Syria or elsewhere, are likely to repeat the mistakes and failures that their fellow militants
have experienced during the past decade in countries as disparate as Somalia, the Philippines, Yemen, Iraq, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and now,
Mali. That's because encoded in the DNA of al Qaeda and like-minded groups are the seeds of their own destruction because in power they rule like the Taliban, and
they also attack fellow Muslims who don't follow their dictates to the letter. This doesn't mesh very well with these organizations' claims that they are the
defenders of Muslims. These groups also have no real plans for the multiple political and economic problems that beset much of the Islamic world. And they won't
engage in normal politics such as elections believing them to be "un-Islamic." This is invariably a recipe for irrelevance or defeat. In
not one nation in
the Muslim world since 9/11 has a jihadist militant group seized control of a country. And al Qaeda and
its allies' record of effective attacks in the West has been non-existent since 2005. With threats like
these we can all sleep soundly at night.
Threats are all hype
Stewart 15, (Scott Stewart writer for the STRATFOR 5/14/2015. “Don't Take Terrorism Threats at Face Value,” Security Weekly,
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/dont-take-terrorism-threats-face-value.)
The Islamic State has demonstrated in the past year that it is quite adept in its use of social media as a
tool to raise money, recruit fighters and inspire grassroots jihadists to conduct attacks. This week, however, its
social media network was heavily focused on making threats. On May 11, Twitter users associated with the Islamic State unleashed two seemingly unrelated
¶
threat campaigns. One using the hashtag #LondonAttack, displayed photos of London and weapons (including AK-47 rifles and what appeared to be suicide bombs) and urged Muslims in the United Kingdom not to visit shopping
The Islamic State took credit for the botched May 3 attack
in Garland, Texas, saying it would carry out harder and "more bitter" attacks inside the United States.
Coinciding with the Islamic State's threats, FBI Director James Comey warned that his agency does not
have a handle on the grassroots terrorism problem in the United States. Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Jeh Johnson noted that the United States has entered "a new phase in the global
terrorist threat, where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment." Michael Morell, the former
Deputy Director of the CIA, added his voice by claiming that the Islamic State has the ability to conduct a
9/11-style attack today.¶ While these statements and warnings paint a bleak picture, a threat should never be taken at face value — when
placed into context, these claims aren't as dire as they seem.¶ Analyzing Threats¶ When analyzing a direct threat
from a person or organization it is important to understand that in most cases they come from a
position of weakness rather than power. The old saying "all bark and no bite" is based on this reality. This applies to personal threats as well as terrorrelated threats. Terrorism is frequently used by weak actors as a way of taking asymmetrical military
action against a superior opponent. Despite its battlefield successes against the Iraqi and Syrian governments and militant groups, the Islamic State is certainly far weaker militarily than
the United States and Europe.¶ An important part of threat evaluation is assessing if the party making the threat
possesses both the intention to conduct such an action and the capability to carry out that intent.
Indeed, many threats are made by groups or individuals who have neither intent nor capability. They are
made simply to create fear and panic or to influence the conduct or behavior of the target, as in the cases of a person
who sends a "white powder" letter to a government office or a student who phones in a bomb threat to his school to get out of taking a test.¶ Generally, if a person or group
possesses both the intent and capability to conduct an act of violence, they just do it. There is little need
to waste the time and effort to threaten what they are about to do. In fact, by telegraphing their intent they might provide their target with the
opportunity to avoid the attack. Professional terrorists often invest a lot of time and resources in a plot, especially a
spectacular transnational attack. Because of this, they take great pains to hide their operational activity
so that the target or authorities do not catch wind of it and employ countermeasures that would
prevent the successful execution of the scheme. Instead of telegraphing their attack, terrorist groups prefer to conduct the attack and exploit it after the fact, something
malls. The second campaign threatened to launch a cyber war against the United States and Europe. ¶
sometimes called the propaganda of the deed.¶ Certainly, people who possess the capability to fulfill the threat sometimes make threats. But normally in such cases the threat is made in a conditional manner. For example, the
United States threatened to invade Afghanistan unless the Taliban government handed over Osama bin Laden. The Islamic State, however, is not in that type of dominating position. If it dispatched a team or teams of professional
terrorist operatives to the United States and Europe to conduct terrorist attacks, the very last thing it would want to do is alert said countries to the presence of those teams and have them get rolled up. Trained terrorist operatives
Rather than reveal a network of sophisticated
Islamic State operatives poised to conduct devastating attacks on the United States and Europe, these
who have the ability to travel in the United States or Europe are far too valuable to jeopardize with a Twitter threat.¶
threats are meant to instill fear and strike terror into the hearts of one of their intended audiences: the
public at large. I say one of their audiences because these threats are not only aimed at the American and European public. They are also meant to send a message to radicalize and energize grassroots jihadists like
those who have conducted Islamic State-related attacks in the West.¶ Examining the Statements¶ First, it is important to understand the context of the statements made by FBI Director Comey, Department of Homeland Security
Secretary Johnson and former CIA Deputy Director Morell. ¶ Comey's statement about not having a complete handle on the grassroots terrorist threat is true. The very nature of such operatives makes them difficult for
.
governments to combat. However, the FBI has been very successful in interdicting grassroots plots in recent months In fact, I cannot recall so many grassroots operatives being arrested so closely together. However, one of the
factors driving Comey's recent remarks is his steadfast belief that technological developments, such as encryption, are creating "dark spaces" that the FBI does not have the ability to investigate. Comey contends that there is no
place in the physical world that the FBI cannot get a warrant to search, but technology has permitted criminals and terrorists to create virtual places where the FBI simply cannot penetrate even if they procure the proper search
warrants. Comey's recent statement is part of his campaign to convince the public and congress that the FBI needs the ability to investigate those places.¶ Secretary Johnson's statement about the new jihadist threat is also
nothing new. Indeed, I heard him make the same statement last November and took issue with it then. Leaderless resistance, the terrorist operational model that stresses the importance of lone wolf operatives, is simply not a new
problem in the United States. It has existed for decades and been actively promoted in the jihadist world since at least 2004. ¶ Michael Morell is on a book tour and attempting to sell as many books as possible. One way to
. If the Islamic State had the capability to launch a 9/11-style attack inside the
United States, or a similar spectacular terrorist attack, it would have already done so. Instead, the
Islamic State has been forced to rely on grassroots operatives to conduct less than spectacular attacks
on its behalf. Furthermore, the pre-9/11 paradigm has changed and there is simply no way an airline captain is going to relinquish control of his aircraft to be used as a guided cruise missile — nor would the
passengers permit it. Because of this, it is very hard to imagine the Islamic State conducting a 9/11-style attack.
accomplish that is to make eye-popping claims
Zero risk of nuclear terrorism – they are wrong about everything
Mueller 10 (John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University and author of Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from
Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, more qualed than your tool-authors, “Calming Our Nuclear Jitters”, Winter, http://www.issues.org/26.2/mueller.html)
A daunting task Politicians of all stripes preach to an anxious, appreciative, and very numerous choir when they, like President
Obama, proclaim atomic terrorism to be “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” It
is the problem that, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, currently keeps every senior leader
awake at night. This is hardly a new anxiety. In 1946, atomic bomb maker J. Robert Oppenheimer ominously warned that if three or four
men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could blow up New York. This was an early expression of a pattern of dramatic risk
inflation that has persisted throughout the nuclear age. In fact, although expanding fires and fallout might increase the effective
destructive radius, the blast of a Hiroshima-size device would “blow up” about 1% of the city’s area—a tragedy, of course, but not the same as one 100 times
greater.
In the early 1970s, nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor proclaimed the atomic terrorist problem to
be “immediate,” explaining at length “how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and
step by step make it into a bomb.” At the time he thought it was already too late to “prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now
and then,” or “in another ten or fifteen years, it will be too late.” Three decades after Taylor, we continue to wait for terrorists
to carry out their “easy” task. In contrast to these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited
only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration
of the possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous effort required is
scarcely likely to be successful. The most plausible route for terrorists, according to most experts, would
be to manufacture an atomic device themselves from purloined fissile material (plutonium or, more likely, highly
enriched uranium). This task, however, remains a daunting one, requiring that a considerable series of difficult
hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright armed theft of fissile material is exceedingly unlikely not only because of the resistance of
guards, but because chase would be immediate. A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders to smuggle out the required substances. However, this
requires the terrorists to pay off a host of greedy confederates, including brokers and money-transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them or, either out of
guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is useless. Insiders might also consider the possibility that once the heist was accomplished, the terrorists would,
as analyst Brian Jenkins none too delicately puts it, “have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their confederates .”
If terrorists
were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material, they would then probably
have to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and probably while being pursued by security
forces. Crossing international borders would be facilitated by following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they appear and are often
under the watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators . If border personnel became suspicious of the commodity being smuggled, some of them might find it
in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward money that would probably be offered by alarmed governments once the uranium
theft had been discovered. Once
outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists would need to set up a
large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb and then to populate it with a very select
team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, machinists, and administrators. The group would have to be assembled and
retained for the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence
from normal pursuits back home. Members of the bomb-building team would also have to be utterly devoted to the cause, of course, and they would have to be
willing to put their lives and certainly their careers at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would probably become the targets of an
intense worldwide dragnet operation. Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile
material.
But Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at
Switzerland‘s Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the task “could hardly be accomplished by a
subnational group.” They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches and general
ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to
redesign. They also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the
technical requirements in several fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of
nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a similar argument, pointing out that
uranium is “exceptionally difficult to machine” whereas “plutonium is one of the most complex metals
ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed.“
Stressing the “daunting problems associated with material purity, machining, and a host of other
issues,” Younger concludes, “to think that a terrorist group, working in isolation with an unreliable supply of
electricity and little access to tools and supplies” could fabricate a bomb “is farfetched at best.” Under the
best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take months or even a year or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in utter secrecy. In
addition, people in the area, including criminals, may observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians unlikely to be
If the effort to build a bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would
then have to be transported to and smuggled into the relevant target country where it would have to be
received by collaborators who are at once totally dedicated and technically proficient at handling,
maintaining, detonating, and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives. The financial costs of this
extensive and extended operation could easily become monumental. There would be expensive equipment to buy, smuggle,
and set up and people to pay or pay off. Some operatives might work for free out of utter dedication to the cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the
locals.
subversion of a considerable array of criminals and opportunists, each of whom has every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high as possible. Any
criminals competent and capable enough to be effective allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see boundless opportunities for extortion and
psychologically equipped by their profession to be willing to exploit them. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group
could, if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each case is “not impossible.” But although it may not be impossible to surmount each
individual step, the likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small. Table 1 attempts to catalogue the barriers that must
be overcome under the scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them, would-be atomic terrorists would effectively be
required to go though an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do, they will undoubtedly conclude that their prospects are daunting and accordingly
uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. It is possible to calculate the chances for success. Adopting
probability estimates that purposely
and heavily bias the case in the terrorists’ favor—for example, assuming the terrorists have a 50%
chance of overcoming each of the 20 obstacles—the chances that a concerted effort would be
successful comes out to be less than one in a million. If one assumes, somewhat more realistically, that
their chances at each barrier are one in three, the cumulative odds that they will be able to pull off the
deed drop to one in well over three billion. Other routes would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb are even more problematic. They
are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-minded nuclear state for delivery abroad because the risk would be high, even for a country led by
extremists, that the bomb (and its source) would be discovered even before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor would not
approve, including on the donor itself. Another concern would be that the terrorist group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence. The terrorist group might also
seek to steal or illicitly purchase a “loose nuke“ somewhere. However, it seems probable that none exist. All
governments have an intense
interest in controlling any weapons on their territory because of fears that they might become the
primary target. Moreover, as technology has developed, finished bombs have been out-fitted with
devices that trigger a non-nuclear explosion that destroys the bomb if it is tampered with. And there are other
security techniques: Bombs can be kept disassembled with the component parts stored in separate highsecurity vaults, and a process can be set up in which two people and multiple codes are required not
only to use the bomb but to store, maintain, and deploy it. As Younger points out, “only a few people in the
world have the knowledge to cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon.” There could be
dangers in the chaos that would emerge if a nuclear state were to utterly collapse; Pakistan is frequently
cited in this context and sometimes North Korea as well. However, even under such conditions, nuclear
weapons would probably remain under heavy guard by people who know that a purloined bomb might
be used in their own territory. They would still have locks and, in the case of Pakistan, the weapons
would be disassembled.
Terror threat assessments are biased
Zenko 14 (Michael Zenko, Douglas Dillon Fellow, Conflict prevention; U.S. national security policy; military planning and operations;
nuclear weapons policy “When Terrorism (That Never Happened) Made Headlines in Sochi,” Foreign Policy http://www.cfr.org/russianfederation/terrorism-never-happened-made-headlines-sochi/p32478)
In the lead-up to the Winter Olympics, a fear-mongering media merely listened to alarmist policymakers
and privileged the aspirational statements of marginalized terrorist groups. By irresponsibly providing little context for
such threatening language, the media conditioned citizens to assume that violent attacks against innocent people
were a near certainty. It all started on Jan. 19, when Vilayat Dagestan, an affiliate of insurgent group Ansar alSunna, released a video statement in which two Islamist militants announced an intention to carry out
jihadi attacks throughout Russia and promised a "present" for Russian President Vladimir Putin at the
Olympics. This video came three weeks after two suicide attacks at a train station and on a trolley bus -- 400 miles from the Olympic Village in Volgograd -- that
collectively killed 34 and injured up to 104. Congressional members, purportedly relying on classified briefings,
subsequently made the case that Sochi was not at all secure. Rep. Mike Rogers, chair of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, said "We can only hope that they'll find those individuals before they're able to
penetrate any of the rings. And I don't believe that the terrorists think they have … to have a terrorist attack on a particular venue. They just have to
have some disruptive event somewhere." Rep. Peter King warned: "I cannot give [U.S. athletes] 100 percent guarantee.
The fact is that these are going to be very much threatened Olympics." Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the House
Homeland Security Committee, even went so far as to say that canceling the games should have been considered,
saying, "I think there's a high degree of probability that something will detonate, something will go off."
The list of policymakers goes on. In short, they chose sound bites over a balanced communication of the
risks posed to Americans traveling to Sochi. News reports repeated and amplified this narrative by
warning about the proliferation of "black widows," women seeking revenge for husbands or family
members killed by security forces: "Urgent Search for 'Black Widow' Suicide Bomber, May Be Already in
Sochi" was one headline. During the six months leading up to the opening ceremony, the New York Times ran 72 articles about
the Olympics that mentioned the threat of terrorism. USA Today reported that most of the major
sponsors of the Winter Games had prepared "ads of compassion and support that could air following
any incidents of terrorism." Unsurprisingly, in a CNN/ORC poll conducted during the week prior to the
opening ceremony, 57 percent of Americans surveyed believed that a terrorist attack of some sort was
likely at the Olympics. Politicians and the media could have handled this more responsibly by
communicating not only the probability of a terrorist attack at Sochi, but by reporting the true extent of
terrorism throughout Russia. Historically, Russia has suffered greatly from terrorism. In the 20-year period between 1992 and 2012, the country
ranked seventh in the world for total terrorist attacks and related deaths, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to
Terrorism. However, this statistic does not reveal the whole story of terrorism in Russia or the threat posed in Sochi specifically. The group also reports that Russia
was not among the top 10 countries for total attacks in 2012. Moreover, the frequency of attacks decreased during the first half of 2013, and fewer than 50 percent
of these resulted in one or more fatalities. (Data is not yet available for all of 2013.) Since 1992, more than 70 percent of attacks have occurred in Chechnya,
Dagestan, and Ingushetia, and only eight attacks -- fewer than 0.5 percent -- have taken place in Krasnodar Krai, where Sochi is located. Moreover, while it is
estimated that Chechen groups carried out 17 percent of the attacks between 1992 and 2012, the remaining attacks were carried out by other active groups in
Russia. According to the Russian government, half of terrorist incidents in 2012 targeted local law enforcement and security forces, not civilians. Thus,
while
a terrorist attack is always a possibility in Russia -- as well as in the 80 other countries where terrorism is
present -- an attack against civilians in Sochi was always highly unlikely. Moreover, congressional leaders
could have pointed out that Chechen militant groups are losers. All three respected data sets that
evaluate the successes of terrorist organizations found that Chechen groups largely failed to achieve
their political or territorial objectives. What Vilayat Dagestan achieved by releasing a video was instant
credibility, and the sort of free promotional airtime that is invaluable. In 1975, terrorism scholar Brian
Jenkins observed, "Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." The media
obviously needs people watching or reading, no matter what the issue. Inflating the probability and
severity of terrorism is unfortunately a reliable way to achieve this. Thankfully, there were no terrorism incidents during the
Winter Olympics. But with the World Cup kicking off in 107 days in Brazil, the media has plenty of time to yet again worry about the worst outcomes and emphasize
the (implausible) potential threats to increase viewership.
Statistically impossible
Mueller 09 ( John Mueller, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center Professor of Political Science 30 April 2009
“THE ATOMIC TERRORIST?” http://www.icnnd.org/research/Mueller_Terrorism.pdf)
In an article on the prospects for atomic terrorism, Bill Keller
of The New York Times suggests that “the best reason for
thinking it won’t happen is that it hasn’t happened yet,” and that, he worries, “is terrible logic.”33
However, “logic” aside, there is another quite good reason for thinking it won’t happen: the task is
incredibly difficult. I have arrayed a lengthy set of obstacles confronting the would-be atomic terrorist.
Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if often
with great difficulty, surmount each obstacle—that doing so in each case is “not impossible.”34 But it is
vital to point out that, while it may be “not impossible” to surmount each individual step, the likelihood
that a group could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small. Even the very alarmed Matthew
Bunn and Anthony Wier contend that the atomic terrorists’ task “would clearly be among the most difficult types of attack to carry out” or “one of the most difficult
missions a terrorist group could hope to try.” But, stresses the CIA’s George Tenet, a terrorist atomic bomb is “possible” or “not beyond the realm of possibility.”35
Accordingly, it might be useful to take a stab at estimating just how “difficult” the atomic terrorists’ task, in aggregate, is—that is, how far from the fringe of the
“realm of possibility” it might be. Most discussions of atomic terrorism deal in a rather piecemeal fashion with the subject--focusing separately on individual tasks
such as procuring HEU or assembling a device or transporting it. However,
as the Gilmore Commission, a special advisory panel
to the President and Congress, stresses, setting off a nuclear device capable of producing mass
destruction presents not only “Herculean challenges,” but it requires that a whole series of steps be
accomplished: obtaining enough fissile material, designing a weapon “that will bring that mass together
in a tiny fraction of a second,” and figuring out some way to deliver the thing. And it emphasizes that
these merely constitute “the minimum requirements.” If each is not fully met, the result is not simply a
less powerful weapon, but one that can’t produce any significant nuclear yield at all or can’t be
delivered.36 Following this perspective, an approach that seems appropriate is to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome by a terrorist group in order to
carry out the task of producing, transporting, and then successfully detonating an improvised nuclear device. Table 1 attempts to do this, and it arrays some 20 of
these—all of which must be surmounted by the atomic aspirant. Actually, it would be quite possible to come up with a longer list: in the interests of keeping the
catalogue of hurdles down to a reasonable number, some of the entries are actually collections of tasks and could be divided into two or three or more. For
example, number 5 on the list requires that heisted highly-enriched uranium be neither a scam nor part of a sting nor of inadequate quality due to insider
incompetence; but this hurdle could as readily be rendered as three separate ones. In contemplating the task before them, would-be atomic terrorists effectively
must go though a exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do so, they are likely to find their prospects daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even
terminally dispiriting. Assigning and calculating probabilities The discussion thus far has followed a qualitative approach: synthesizing a considerable amount of
material to lay out the route a terrorist group must take to acquire and detonate an atomic bomb in the most likely scenario .
It seems to me that this
exercise by itself suggests the almost breathtaking enormity of the difficulties facing the would-be
atomic terrorist. This conclusion can be reinforced by a quantitative assessment. Assigning a probability
that terrorists will be able to overcome each barrier is, of course, a tricky business, and any such exercise should be
regarded as rather tentative and exploratory, or perhaps simply as illustrative—though it is done all the time in cost/benefit analysis. One might begin a
quantitative approach by adopting probability estimates that purposely, and heavily, bias the case in the
terrorists’ favor. In my view, this would take place if it is assumed that the terrorists have a fighting
chance of 50 percent of overcoming each of the 20 obstacles displayed in Table 1, though for many
barriers, probably almost all, the odds against them are surely much worse than that. Even with that
generous bias, the chances that a concerted effort would be successful comes out to be less than one in
a million, specifically 1,048,576. If one assumes, somewhat more realistically, that their chances at each barrier
are one in three, the cumulative odds they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in well over
three billion—specifically 3,486,784,401. What they would be at the (still entirely realistic) level of one in ten boggles the mind. Moreover, all this
focuses on the effort to deliver a single bomb. If the requirement were to deliver several, the odds
become, of course, even more prohibitive.
Link Answers
Data hasn’t revealed any information on new terrorists
Schwartz 15 Matthatias Schwartz, January 26, 2015, The New Yorker, “The Whole Haystack,”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/whole-haystack,
Almost every major terrorist attack on Western soil in the past fifteen years has been committed by
people who were already known to law enforcement. One of the gunmen in the attack on Charlie
Hebdo, in Paris, had been sent to prison for recruiting jihadist fighters. The other had reportedly studied
in Yemen with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, who was arrested and interrogated
by the F.B.I. in 2009. The leader of the 7/7 London suicide bombings, in 2005, had been observed by
British intelligence meeting with a suspected terrorist, though MI5 later said that the bombers were “not on our radar.” The men who
planned the Mumbai attacks, in 2008, were under electronic surveillance by the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, and one had been an informant for
the Drug Enforcement Administration. One of the brothers accused of bombing the Boston Marathon was the subject of an F.B.I. threat assessment and a warning
from Russian intelligence In
each of these cases, the authorities were not wanting for data. What they failed to do
was appreciate the significance of the data they already had. Nevertheless, since 9/11, the National Security Agency has sought to
acquire every possible scrap of digital information—what General Keith Alexander, the agency’s former head, has called “the whole haystack.” The size of the
haystack was revealed in June, 2013, by Edward Snowden. The
N.S.A. vacuums up Internet searches, social-media content,
and, most controversially, the records (known as metadata) of United States phone calls—who called
whom, for how long, and from where. The agency stores the metadata for five years, possibly longer.
Having data doesn’t necessarily mean action, 9/11 proves
Schwartz 15 Matthatias Schwartz, January 26, 2015, The New Yorker, “The Whole Haystack,” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/wholehaystack,
In retrospect, every
terrorist attack leaves a data trail that appears to be dotted with missed opportunities. In
the case of 9/11, there was Mihdhar’s landlord, the airport clerk who sold Mihdhar his one-way ticket
for cash, and the state trooper who pulled over another hijacker on September 9th. In August, 2001,
F.B.I. headquarters failed to issue a search warrant for one of the conspirators’ laptops, despite a
warning from the Minneapolis field office that he was “engaged in preparing to seize a Boeing 747-400
in commission of a terrorist act.” There was plenty of material in the haystack. The government had adequate tools to collect even more. The
problem was the tendency of intelligence agencies to hoard information, as well as the cognitive
difficulty of anticipating a spectacular and unprecedented attack. The 9/11 Commission called this a “failure of the
imagination.” Finding needles, the commission wrote in its report, is easy when you’re looking backward,
deceptively so. They quoted the historian Roberta Wohlstetter writing about Pearl Harbor: It is much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the
irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before
the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.
Surveillance doesn’t increase security
Schwartz 15 Matthatias Schwartz, January 26, 2015, The New Yorker, “The Whole Haystack,”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/whole-haystack,
Before the event, every bit of hay is potentially relevant. “The most dangerous adversaries will be the
ones who most successfully disguise their individual transactions to appear normal, reasonable, and
legitimate,” Ted Senator, a data scientist who worked on an early post-9/11 program called Total Information Awareness, said, in 2002. Since then,
intelligence officials have often referred to “lone-wolf terrorists,” “cells,” and, as Alexander has put it, the “terrorist who
walks among us,” as though Al Qaeda were a fifth column, capable of camouflaging itself within civil society .
Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. case officer who works with the Soufan Group, a security company, told me that this image is wrong. “We knew about these
networks,” he said, speaking of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Mass surveillance, he continued, “gives a false sense of security. It
sounds great when you say you’re monitoring every phone call in the United States. You can put that in
a PowerPoint. But, actually, you have no idea what’s going on.”
Less data leads to effective data, the aff is key to solve terrorism
Schwartz 2015 (Mattathias Schwartz is a staff writer for The New Yorker The Whole Haystack Jan 26
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/whole-haystack)
Before the event, every bit of hay is potentially relevant. “The most dangerous adversaries will be the
ones who most successfully disguise their individual transactions to appear normal, reasonable, and
legitimate,” Ted Senator, a data scientist who worked on an early post-9/11 program called Total Information Awareness, said, in 2002. Since then,
intelligence officials have often referred to “lone-wolf terrorists,” “cells,” and, as Alexander has put it, the “terrorist who walks among us,” as
though Al Qaeda were a fifth column, capable of camouflaging itself within civil society. Patrick Skinner, a former
C.I.A. case officer who works with the Soufan Group, a security company, told me that this image is wrong. “ We knew about these networks,” he
said, speaking of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Mass surveillance, he continued, “gives a false sense of security. It sounds
great when you say you’re monitoring every phone call in the United States. You can put that in a
PowerPoint. But, actually, you have no idea what’s going on.” By flooding the system with false
positives, big-data approaches to counterterrorism might actually make it harder to identify real
terrorists before they act. Two years before the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers alleged to have
committed the attack, was assessed by the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. They determined that he was not a threat. This was one of about a thousand
assessments that the Boston J.T.T.F. conducted that year, a number that had nearly doubled in the previous two years, according to the Boston F.B.I. As of 2013, the
Justice Department has trained nearly three hundred thousand law-enforcement officers in how to file “suspicious-activity reports.” In
2010, a central
database held about three thousand of these reports; by 2012 it had grown to almost twenty-eight
thousand. “The bigger haystack makes it harder to find the needle,” Sensenbrenner told me. Thomas Drake, a former N.S.A.
executive and whistle-blower who has become one of the agency’s most vocal critics, told me, “If you target everything, there’s no target.”
Drake favors what he calls “a traditional law-enforcement” approach to terrorism, gathering more
intelligence on a smaller set of targets. Decisions about which targets matter, he said, should be driven
by human expertise, not by a database.
Paris proves, too much information is a bad thing.
Volz 15 Dustin Volz, January 21, 2015, National Journal, “Snowden: France’s ‘Intrusive’ Surveillance Failed to Stop Paris Attacks,”
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/snowden-france-s-intrusive-surveillance-laws-failed-to-stop-paris-attacks-20150121
Edward Snowden is pointing to the recent terrorist attacks in France as evidence that government masssurveillance programs don't work because they are "burying people under too much data." "When we look at the
Paris attacks specifically, we see that France passed one of the most intrusive, expansive surveillance laws in all of
Europe last year, and it didn't stop the attack," the fugitive leaker said in an interview with NOS, a Dutch news organization, released
Wednesday. "And this is consistent with what we've seen in every country."
NSA programs don’t stop terrorism, no proof of it working.
Bergen 13 Bergen, et al, September 2013, Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of
the National Security Program at the New America Foundation
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the
National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting phone-records metadata
from Americans for many years and that it had secured
the right to access overseas Internet traffic and content from every U.S. Internet service.317 This
sparked a debate between those who saw an overly expansive government fishing expedition that infringed Americans’ privacy and those who pointed out that the
NSA programs were carefully managed to protect the rights of American citizens. Beyond the privacy issues that the NSA programs raise: How successful have these
programs been in interrupting terrorist plots?
So far the evidence on the public record suggests that the programs have
been of far less utility than recent U.S. government claims about their ability to disrupt terrorist plots.¶
Sometime in late 2007, Basaaly Saeed Moalin, a cabdriver living in San Diego, began a series of phone conversations with Aden Hashi Ayrow, one of the leaders
of al-Shabaab.He had no idea the NSA was listening in. In one of those 3 phone calls, Ayrow urged Moalin to send money to al-Shabaab, telling him that he urgently
needed several thousand dollars. At one point, Ayrow told Moalin that it was “time to finance the jihad” and at another: “You are running late with the stuff. Send
some and something will happen.” Over several months in 2008, Moalin transferred thousands of dollars to al-Shabaab. He even told Ayrow that he
could use his
house in Mogadishu, and “after you bury your stuff deep in the ground, you would, then, plant the trees on top.”320 U.S.
prosecutors later
asserted that Moalin was offering his house to al-Shabaab as a place to hide weapons, and earlier this year, he was
convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Shabaab and of money laundering for the terrorist organization.321 However , there is nothing
on the public record to suggest he was planning an attack in the United States. Another terrorist
financier detected by NSA surveillance
was Khalid Ouazzani, a Moroccan native and naturalized American living in Kansas City,
Missouri. Sometime in 2008, Ouazzani swore an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda and sent around $23,000 to the group before he was arrested two years later.322 In
June 2013, at a hearing for the House Select Committee on Intelligence on the NSA surveillance programs, FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce
testified that
Ouazzani also had some kind of a “nascent” plan to attack the New York Stock Exchange. Ouazzani’s
attorney denied that claim and court documents in his case do not mention any such plan. At the same
hearing, Joyce and other top government officials pointed to these two cases as examples of the kinds of
terrorist conspiracies NSA surveillance has disrupted
in recent years, but they gave no new public
information
to substantiate a claim made by General Keith Alexander, NSA’s director, a week earlier that “dozens of terrorist events” had been
averted both in the United States and abroad.324 Alexander said he would provide members of the House Intelligence Committee with additional information
about the some 50 other terrorist plots that had been averted as a result of NSA surveillance, but this would be behind closed doors as the details of these plots
remain classified. Speaking at Black Hat, an information-security conference, a month later, General Alexander provided more specific numbers, saying that NSA
surveillance had prevented 54 terrorist-related activities worldwide, including 13 terrorist activities within the United States. The
public record
suggests that few of these plots involved attacks within the United States, because traditional law
enforcement methods have overwhelmingly played the most significant role in foiling terrorist attacks.
According to a survey by the New America Foundation, jihadist extremists based in the United States
have mounted 47 plots to conduct attacks within the United States since 2001.326 Of those plots, nine
involved an actual terrorist act that was not prevented by any type of government action, such as the
2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas. Of the remaining 38 plots, the public record shows that at least
33 were uncovered by using standard policing practices such as informants, undercover officers, and tips
to law enforcement. At the House Intelligence Committee hearing, the FBI’s Sean Joyce also pointed to the 2009 plots by Najibullah Zazi as well as David
Coleman Headley’s plan to attack a Danish newspaper as attacks that were also disrupted by NSA monitoring. As Joyce explained, the plot by Zazi to attack the New
York subway system around the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was “the first core al-Qaeda plot since 9/11” that was directed from Pakistan inside the
United States.327 There is no doubt that it was a serious plot, but if it was the only such plot on U.S. soil that the government averted as
a result of the NSA’s
surveillance monitoring, the public
will have to decide whether it justifies the large-scale government surveillance programs—no matter how carefully they are run.
NSA Telephone tracking has the potential for abuse, and there is no record it has been
effective against terrorism.
Bergen 13 Peter Bergen, 9-10, 13, http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf
Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation
BERGEN: Well, one way of answering that is -- I've -- talking about the NSA, obviously there's a debate, I mean, the vote was very close in House -- in -- in Congress,
on this issue. And one of the -- one of the points we make in the report is, as far as we can tell from the public record, only one case -- what is controversial in the
United States is, the telephone metadata; Americans care less about overseas e-mail traffic. As far as we can tell, only
one case of the 212 cases
since 9/11 came out of the telephone program, and it's a rather trivial case. It was a guy in San Diego
who was sending money to Al-Shabaab, a few thousand dollars -- the Somalia al-Qaeda affiliate. Now,
you know, sending money to Al-Shabaab is not something one -- one would want to encourage, but if
the price of finding this one case is the government having access to all your phone records for the past
five years, no matter how carefully they manage that program, who's to say that some future
administration, five years down the road, doesn't have quite the same view of the way the -- the data
should be handled. So, I mean, that -- that would be question one, is are we in a situation -- I mean, I was astonished by this New York Times story where,
you know, essentially every -- any program you use in the United States on a computer has a mandated back door into it that the NSA can basically can get into. Is
not -- it
seems a sort of fundamentally kind of un-American concept, that basically everything that you -- and obviously, the
people involved in this are well- intentioned. So I think we're doing a lot of the right things. We've had a long time over the last 12 years to get our counterterrorism
policy right. We make some recommendations in the report, but I don't think there's some huge sort of magic wand that needs to be waved over the situation, but
personally, and like a lot of other Americans, I am concerned about what seems to be this huge kind of grab of executive power on the issue of our private
communications. Which,
by the way, it would be one thing if you could say, "Hey, all these NSA -- every
terrorism case that we've found in this country was because of NSA surveillance." As we say in the
report, in fact, almost every case that is made is based on the typical things that make any criminal case:
a suspicious activity report in 9 percent of these cases, a tip from a family or community member in 33
percent of these cases, an undercover cop or -- or an informer in about half of these cases. That's how
these cases are made.
Capitol attacks were prevented by preexisting measures, not surveillance.
Hattem 15 Julian Hattem, January 20, 2015, The Hill, “GOP Faces PATRIOT Act Choice,” http://thehill.com/policy/defense/229990-gopheaded-for-battle-over-the-patriot-act
“I’m going to say this one more time because you’re going to hear about it for months and months to come as we attempt to reauthorize the
FISA program,” he added. “Our government does not spy on Americans, unless they are Americans who are doing things that frankly tip off our
law enforcement officials to an imminent threat.” Critics
of the spy agency were quick to question Boehner’s take on
the Capitol plot. The FBI said it relied on Twitter messages and an undercover source to gather
information about the suspect, Christopher Cornell — not wiretaps or call records. “[T]here is every
reason to be extremely skeptical of the implication that the [Section] 215 database, or indeed, any novel
FISA authorities, played an essential role in the investigation of Cornell,” Julian Sanchez, a senior
research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in a blog post on Friday.
Section 215 has played a minimal role in stopping terrorist plots.
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
However, our review
of the government’s claims about the role that NSA “bulk” surveillance of phone and
email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that
these claims are overblown and even misleading.* An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by
al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism
since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from
local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations
in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was
minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American telephone metadata, which includes the
telephone numbers that originate and receive calls, as well as the time and date of those calls but not
their content, under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in,
at most, 1.8 percent of these cases. NSA programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702
of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined, and NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority played a role in
1.3 percent of the cases we examined.
NSA Surveillance played a minor role in terror plots
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
However,
our review of the government’s claims about the role that NSA “bulk” surveillance of phone and
email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that
these claims are overblown and even misleading.* An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by
al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism
since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from
local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations
in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was
minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American telephone metadata, which includes the telephone numbers that originate and receive calls, as
well as the time and date of those calls but not their content, under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in, at most, 1.8
percent of these cases. NSA programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act
played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined, and NSA
surveillance under an unidentified authority played a
role in 1.3 percent of the cases we examined.
Mass surveillance kills law enforcement coop with US-Arab Americans – that’s key to
check terror.
Risen 14 (Internally quoting Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Tom Risen is a reporter for
U.S. News & World Report. “Racial Profiling Reported in NSA, FBI Surveillance” - U.S. News & World Report - July 9, 2014 http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/07/09/racial-profiling-reported-in-nsa-fbi-surveillance)
The National
Security Agency and the FBI have reportedly been overzealous trying to prevent terrorist attacks to
the point that anti-Islamic racism in those agencies led to the surveillance of prominent MuslimAmericans, revealing a culture of racial profiling and broad latitude for spying on U.S. citizens. An NSA
document leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to reporter Glenn Greenwald shows 202 Americans targeted
among the approximately 7,485 email addresses monitored between 2002 and 2008, Greenwald’s news service The Intercept reports . To monitor
Americans, government agencies must first make the case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
that there is probable cause that the targets are terrorist agents, foreign spies or “are or may be”
abetting sabotage, espionage or terrorism. Despite this filter The Intercept identified five MuslimAmericans with high public profile including civil rights leaders, academics, lawyers and a political
candidate. Racial profiling of Muslims by security officers has been a controversy since the terrorist
attacks of 2001 spiked fears about al-Qaida trainees preparing more attacks. The New York Police
Department has disbanded its unit that mapped New York’s Muslim communities that designated
surveillance of mosques as “terrorism enterprise investigations” after pressure from the Justice
Department about aggressive monitoring by police. A 2005 FBI memo about surveillance procedures featured in The Intercept story
uses a fake name “Mohammed Raghead” for the agency staff exercise. This latest report about email surveillance of successful
Muslim-Americans is akin to “McCarthyism” that fed paranoia about communist spies during the Cold
War, says Reza Aslan, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. “The notion that these five
upstanding American citizens, all of them prominent public individuals, represent a threat to the U.S. for
no other reason than their religion is an embarrassment to the FBI and an affront to the constitution,”
Aslan says. There is a risk of radicalization among citizens Americans, evidenced by some who have gone to fight jihads in Syria and Somalia, but mass
shootings carried out by U.S. citizens of various racial backgrounds occurs much more often, says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the
Brookings Institution. Since
1982, there have been at least 70 mass shootings across the U.S. “We have seen
very little domestic terrorism in the U.S.,” Felbab-Brown says. This lack of terrorism is due in part to the
willingness of the Islamic community to cooperate with law enforcement to identify possible radical
threats, out of gratitude that the U.S. is a stable, secure country compared with the Middle East, she
says. “That could go sour if law enforcement becomes too aggressive, too extreme,” she says.
Empirically false – 215 program once temporarily ENDED. That didn’t cause the disad –
neither will the Aff.
Globe and Mail 15 (Globe editorial – “The end of US ‘bulk telephony collection,’ and the lessons for Canada” - The Globe and Mail Jun. 14, 2015 - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/the-end-of-us-bulk-telephony-collection-and-the-lessons-forcanada/article24948261/)
For a few days, there was a happily yawning gap in the U.S. National Security Agency’s ability to surveil
American citizens. Congress could not agree on how – or whether – to renew the section of the foolishly
named Patriot Act that had allowed the government to scoop up and hold all the metadata (identifying both callers and addressees) of all cellphone calls
in the U.S. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would then grant or, at least sometimes, not grant, access to the actual contents of the conversations – in
other words, a search warrant. The upshot – under the new U.S.A. Freedom Act (officially, the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring
Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015”) – is that phone companies, not the NSA and the FBI, will record and store all the metadata for all phone calls.
Those agencies will no longer be able to get at that kind of data at will, indiscriminately. The security agencies will have to apply to the FISC court for metadata, too.
That’s progress, though FISC may be a bit of a rubber stamp. There is,
by the way, no sign that terrorists attacked the United
States in the unsurveilled interval between the Patriot Act section and the Freedom Act.
Surveillance makes counter-terror tools ineffective
Corrigan 2015 (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
www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2015/01/mass_surveillance_against_terrorism_gathering_intelligence_on_all_is_st
atisically.html)
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
security services more difficult and the rest of us less secure.
surveillance makes the job of the
Section 702 Answers
Section 702 hardly played a role in stopping terrorist plots
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
However, our
review of the government’s claims about the role that NSA “bulk” surveillance of phone and
email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that
these claims are overblown and even misleading.* An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by
al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism
since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from
local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations
in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was
minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American telephone metadata, which includes the telephone numbers that originate and receive calls, as
well as the time and date of those calls but not their content, under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in, at most, 1.8
percent of these cases. NSA
programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States
under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we
examined, and NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority played a role in 1.3 percent of the cases we examined.
Section 702 played a minimal role in stopping David Coleman Headley.
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
David Coleman Headley plotted to attack the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen in 2009. The
newspaper had become the focus of controversy after publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed . The U.S. government has claimed
that it used NSA surveillance under Section 702 to identify Headley as a threat and prevent the
attack.26,27 Tahawwur Rana, a Chicago businessman who allowed Headley to use his travel agency as a front, was found guilty of providing support to Headley’s
activities after Headley gave extensive testimony against him at trial. However, the NSA’s bulk surveillance programs likely played
only a secondary role, if any, to British intelligence in discovering Headley’s plotting. In June 2009, Headley was
planning to meet with two British extremists who were already under surveillance in the United Kingdom. Headley, who played a key role in planning the 2008
terrorist attacks in Mumbai, confirmed that he had met these two extremists in Britain when he was later interrogated by Indian authorities following his arrest in
October 2009.28 According to reports by ProPublica, this meeting between Headley and the British extremists sparked the investigation into Headley, and the
NSA’s role was merely following up and identifying the individual in question as Headley.29 Moreover, the
government had received multiple tips over the years from individuals who knew Headley, including two
of his wives, that he was likely a terrorist. So, even if the NSA played some kind of role in building the
case against Headley, his case represents a colossal failure of the counterterrorism apparatus, which
despite receiving multiple tips, failed to catch Headley, even after he assisted with the 2008 Mumbai
attacks.30 The main lesson from the Headley case should be the need for better information-sharing
between law enforcement and intelligence agencies – not the development of a sprawling collection
system.
Section 702 played little to no role in stopping Najibullah Zazi.
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
This case involved a foiled plot by Colorado resident Najibullah Zazi and two co-conspirators in New York, Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis
Medunjanin, to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009 . The government has claimed the case as an NSA success.31 Yet, the
Zazi case was initiated not by the NSA but by British intelligence, according to a senior U.S.
counterterrorism official with direct knowledge of the case whom we consulted. Also, although the NSA
was involved in intercepting Zazi’s email to an al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, this was an instance
where the same result could have been obtained through traditional targeted investigative methods. The
email address Zazi communicated with was known to belong to an al-Qaeda figure for at least five
months prior to the NSA’s interception of Zazi’s email, due to a British intelligence operation in April 2009.32 The British shared their findings with
U.S. intelligence, which then chose to use the NSA surveillance program to monitor the email address. The knowledge that the email address was that of an alQaeda associate would have been
The NSA may have opted to use the Section 702
authority, but the case, as currently explained in the public record, does not provide evidence for the
need for bulk surveillance authorities. It is also worth noting that the contribution from the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata under Section 215
sufficient to obtain a traditional, targeted criminal or FISA warrant for the email’s contents.33
was minimal, at best, in this case. The FBI identified a phone number included in Zazi’s email and ran it against the NSA’s phone metadata collected under Section 215 authority.34 The query
This brings into
question how the government measures the “contribution” of the NSA to terrorism cases and whether
the “contributions” cited by officials reflect important and unique contributions to those cases by the
NSA
provided a previously unknown second phone number belonging to Adis Medunjanin, one of Zazi’s co-conspirators, who was already a suspect in the plot.
Section 702 didn’t play much of a role in Khalid Quazzani
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
Khalid Ouazzani, a Kansas City small business owner, and his two co-conspirators, Sabirhan Hasanoff, a New York accountant, and Wesam ElHanafi, a New
York computer engineer, provided tens of thousands of dollars to al-Qaeda figures over a number of years. One
of Ouazzani’s co-conspirators also cased the New York Stock Exchange for a potential attack and
produced a report for their handlers, though the plot was more notional than operational. The U.S.
government has cited surveillance conducted under Section 702 as the cause of its investigation.35 While
little evidence is available to contest the government’s assertion that the NSA under Section 702 played
a role in this investigation, the seriousness of the threat is debatable. Even the government noted in a sentencing
memorandum that the casing of the New York Stock Exchange by one of the defendants resulted in only a one-page report that was “rudimentary and of limited
use.”36 During an interrogation, one of their contacts overseas (whose name was redacted in court documents) denied that there was “any real intention to plan or
coordinate such an operation.”37 The
plot was not a serious threat, though the contact these defendants had with foreign terrorists, which led
them to provide a total of about $67,000 and supplies to their contacts abroad, was certainly worrisome
The role Section 702 played in thwarting terrorist plots has been exaggerated by the
government.
Bergen 14 (Peter Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation, where David
Sterman and Emily Schneider are research assistants and Bailey Cahall is a research associate, New America Foundation, January 2014, Do
NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
http://pierreghz.legtux.org/streisand/autoblogs/frglobalvoicesonlineorg_0e319138ab63237c2d2aeff84b4cb506d936eab8/media/e1982452.Be
rgen_NAF_NSA20Surveillance_1_0.pdf)
When the Snowden leaks first broke, the
government declassified some of the details of four terrorism cases to make
its defense of the NSA bulk surveillance programs. One was the Moalin case discussed in the previous
section. The three others, involving surveillance under Section 702, are discussed below. (More detail about all of these cases
can be found in the Appendix.) An examination of the terrorism cases that the government has cited to defend the
NSA programs suggests that bulk surveillance’s importance to those cases has been exaggerated.
Impact Answers
There is zero risk of catastrophe, future attacks will only be small scale.
Bergen, 08—Peter, Bergen Peter Bergen is the director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation; “WMD
Terrorist Fears Are Overblown” http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/05/bergen.wmd/
Not really. Terrorists have already used weapons of mass destruction in the past decade in attacks around the world, and they have proven to be something of a
dud. In the fall of 2001, the anthrax attacks in the United States that targeted politicians and journalists caused considerable panic but did not lead to many deaths.
Five people were killed. The alleged author of that attack, Bruce E. Ivins, was one
of the leading biological weapons researchers in
the United States. Even this brilliant scientist could only "weaponize" anthrax to the point that it killed a
handful of people. Imagine then how difficult it would be for the average terrorist, or even the aboveaverage terrorist, to replicate such efforts. Similarly, the bizarre Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which
recruited leading scientists and had hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, embarked on a largescale WMD program in the early 1990s in which cult members experimented with anthrax and invested in land in Australia to mine uranium. In the end,
Aum found biological and nuclear attacks too complex to organize and settled instead on a chemical weapons operation,
setting off sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 12 commuters. It is hard to imagine a place better suited to killing a lot of people than the jam-packed
Tokyo subway, yet the death toll turned out to be small in Aum's chemical weapons assault. More recently, in 2006 and 2007 al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate laced several
of its bombs with chlorine. Those attacks sickened hundreds of Iraqis, but victims who died in the assaults did so more from the blast of the bombs than because of
inhaling chlorine. Al Qaeda stopped using chlorine in its bombs in Iraq more than a year ago. There is a semantic problem in any discussion of WMDs because the
ominous term ''Weapons of Mass Destruction'' is something of a misnomer. In the popular imagination, chemical, biological and nuclear devices are all weapons of
mass destruction. In fact, there is only one weapon of mass destruction that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands and that is a nuclear device. So the real question
is: Can terrorists deploy nuclear weapons any time in the next five years or even further in the future? To do so, terrorists
would have one of four
options: to buy, steal, develop or be given a nuclear weapon. But none of those scenarios are remotely
realistic outside the world of Hollywood. To understand how complex it is to develop a nuclear weapon, it is worth recalling that Saddam Hussein put
tens of millions of dollars into his nuclear program with no success. Iran, which has had a nuclear
program for almost two decades, is still years away from developing a nuclear bomb. Terrorist groups
simply don't have the massive resources of states, and so the notion that they could develop their own, even crude, nuclear weapons is
fanciful. Well, what about terrorists being given nukes? Preventing this was one of the underlying rationales of the push to topple Hussein in 2003. This does not
pass the laugh test. Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the leading U.S. terrorism experts in a book published this year, "Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?," points out that
there are two reasons this is quite unlikely. First, governments
are not about to hand over their crown jewels to
organizations that are "not entirely under state control and whose reliability is not certain." Second, "giving them a
nuclear weapon almost certainly exposes the state sponsor to retaliation." For the same reason that states won't give
nukes to terrorists, they also won't sell them either, which leaves the option of stealing a nuclear weapon. But that is similarly unlikely because nucleararmed governments, including Pakistan, are pretty careful about the security measures they place around their
most valued weapons. None of this of course is to suggest that al Qaeda is not interested in deploying nuclear devices. Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders
have repeatedly bloviated about the necessity of nuking the West and have even implied that they have the capability to do so. This is nonsense. Yes, in the mid1990s when Al Qaeda was based in Sudan, members of the group tried to buy highly enriched uranium suitable for a nuke, but the deal did not go through. And it is
certainly the case that a year or so before 9/11, bin Laden was meeting with veterans of Pakistan's nuclear program to discuss how al Qaeda might get into the
nuclear weapons business. But all of this was aspirational, not operational. There
is not a shred of evidence that any of this got
beyond the talking stage. In 2002, former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright undertook a careful study of al Qaeda's nuclear research program
and concluded it was virtually impossible for al Qaeda to have acquired any type of nuclear weapon. However, there is plenty of evidence that the group has
experimented with crude chemical and biological weapons, and also attempted to acquire radioactive materials suitable for a "dirty" bomb, a device that marries
conventional explosives to radioactive materials. But even if al Qaeda successfully deployed a crude chemical, biological or radiological weapon these would not be
weapons of mass destruction that killed thousands. Instead, these would be weapons of mass disruption, whose principal effect would be panic -- not mass
casualties. So if not WMDs, what will terrorists use in their attacks over the next five years? Small-bore chemical, biological and radiological attacks are all quite
probable, but those attacks would kill scores, not thousands. What we are likely to see again and again are the tried and tested tactics that terrorists have used for
decades: # The first vehicle bomb blew up on Wall Street in 1920 detonated by an Italian-American anarchist. Since then, the car/truck bomb has been reliably
deployed by terrorists thousands of times. # Assassinations, such as the one that killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, sparking one of the bloodiest wars
in history. # Hijackings, such as those that inaugurated the worst terrorist attack in history on 9/11.
No WMD terrorism empirically the threat is overblown
Mueller 11. (John Mueller, Professor and Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security
Studies and Department of Political Science, “The Truth About al Qaeda”, 8/2/2011, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68012/johnmueller/the-truth-about-al-qaeda?page=show)
The chief lesson of 9/11 should have been that small bands of terrorists, using simple methods, can exploit loopholes in existing security systems. But instead, many
preferred to engage in massive extrapolation: If
19 men could hijack four airplanes simultaneously, the thinking went,
then surely al Qaeda would soon make an atomic bomb. As a misguided Turkish proverb holds, "If your enemy be an ant, imagine
him to be an elephant." The new information unearthed in Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, suggests that the United States has been doing so
for a full decade. Whatever
al Qaeda's threatening rhetoric and occasional nuclear fantasies, its potential as a
menace, particularly as an atomic one, has been much inflated. The public has now endured a decade of
dire warnings about the imminence of a terrorist atomic attack. In 2004, the former CIA spook Michael
Scheuer proclaimed on television's 60 Minutes that it was "probably a near thing," and in 2007, the
physicist Richard Garwin assessed the likelihood of a nuclear explosion in an American or a European
city by terrorism or other means in the next ten years to be 87 percent. By 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates mused
that what keeps every senior government leader awake at night is "the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear."
Few, it seems, found much solace in the fact that an al Qaeda computer seized in Afghanistan in 2001
indicated that the group's budget for research on weapons of mass destruction (almost all of it focused
on primitive chemical weapons work) was some $2,000 to $4,000. In the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, officials now
have more al Qaeda computers, which reportedly contain a wealth of information about the workings of the organization in the intervening decade. A multiagency task force has completed its assessment, and according to first reports, it has found that al
Qaeda members have primarily been engaged in dodging drone strikes and complaining about how
cash-strapped they are. Some reports suggest they've also been looking at quite a bit of pornography. The full story is not out yet,
but it seems breathtakingly unlikely that the miserable little group has had the time or inclination, let
alone the money, to set up and staff a uranium-seizing operation, as well as a fancy, super-high-tech
facility to fabricate a bomb. It is a process that requires trusting corrupted foreign collaborators and other criminals, obtaining and transporting
highly guarded material, setting up a machine shop staffed with top scientists and technicians, and rolling the heavy, cumbersome, and untested finished product
into position to be detonated by a skilled crew, all the while attracting no attention from outsiders. The
documents also reveal that after
fleeing Afghanistan, bin Laden maintained what one member of the task force calls an "obsession" with
attacking the United States again, even though 9/11 was in many ways a disaster for the group. It led to
a worldwide loss of support, a major attack on it and on its Taliban hosts, and a decade of furious and
dedicated harassment. And indeed, bin Laden did repeatedly and publicly threaten an attack on the United States. He assured Americans in 2002 that
"the youth of Islam are preparing things that will fill your hearts with fear"; and in 2006, he declared that his group had been able "to breach your security
measures" and that "operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished." Al Qaeda's animated spokesman, Adam
Gadahn, proclaimed in 2004 that "the streets of America shall run red with blood" and that "the next wave of attacks may come at any moment." The obsessive
desire notwithstanding, such fulminations have clearly lacked substance. Although hundreds of millions of people enter the United States legally every year, and
countless others illegally, no true al Qaeda cell has been found in the country since 9/11 and exceedingly few people have been uncovered who even have any sort
of "link" to the organization. The closest effort at an al Qaeda operation within the country was a decidedly nonnuclear one by an Afghan-American, Najibullah Zazi,
in 2009. Outraged at the U.S.-led war on his home country, Zazi attempted to join the Taliban but was persuaded by al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan to set off some
bombs in the United States instead. Under surveillance from the start, he was soon arrested, and, however "radicalized," he has been talking to investigators ever
since, turning traitor to his former colleagues. Whatever training Zazi received was inadequate; he repeatedly and desperately sought further instruction from his
overseas instructors by phone. At one point, he purchased bomb material with a stolen credit card, guaranteeing that the purchase would attract attention and that
security video recordings would be scrutinized. Apparently, his handlers were so strapped that they could not even advance him a bit of cash to purchase some
hydrogen peroxide for making a bomb. For al Qaeda, then, the operation was a failure in every way -- except for the ego boost it got by inspiring the usual dire litany
about the group's supposedly existential challenge to the United States, to the civilized world, to the modern state system. Indeed,
no Muslim
extremist has succeeded in detonating even a simple bomb in the United States in the last ten years,
and except for the attacks on the London Underground in 2005, neither has any in the United Kingdom.
It seems wildly unlikely that al Qaeda is remotely ready to go nuclear. Outside of war zones, the amount
of killing carried out by al Qaeda and al Qaeda linkees, maybes, and wannabes throughout the entire
world since 9/11 stands at perhaps a few hundred per year. That's a few hundred too many, of course,
but it scarcely presents an existential, or elephantine, threat. And the likelihood that an American will be
killed by a terrorist of any ilk stands at one in 3.5 million per year, even with 9/11 included. That
probability will remain unchanged unless terrorists are able to increase their capabilities massively -and obtaining nuclear weapons would allow them to do so. Although al Qaeda may have dreamed from
time to time about getting such weapons, no other terrorist group has even gone so far as to indulge in
such dreams, with the exception of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which leased the mineral rights to an Australian sheep ranch that sat on uranium
deposits, purchased some semi-relevant equipment, and tried to buy a finished bomb from the Russians. That experience, however, cannot be very encouraging to
the would-be atomic terrorist. Even though it was flush with funds and undistracted by drone attacks (or even by much surveillance), Aum Shinrikyo abandoned its
atomic efforts in frustration very early on. It then moved to biological weapons, another complete failure that inspired its leader to suggest that fears expressed in
the United States of a biological attack were actually a ruse to tempt terrorist groups to pursue the weapons. The group did finally manage to release some sarin gas
in a Tokyo subway that killed 13 and led to the group's terminal shutdown, as well as to 16 years (and counting) of pronouncements that WMD terrorism is the
wave of the future. No elephants there, either.
No terror impact
Mueller and Stewart 12 (John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart 12, Senior Research Scientist at the Mershon Center for
International Security Studies and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science, both at Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow at
the Cato Institute AND Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Professor and Director at the Centre for Infrastructure Performance
and Reliability at the University of Newcastle, "The Terrorism Delusion," Summer, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 1,
politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller//absisfin.pdf)
In 2009, the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a lengthy report on protecting the
homeland. Key to achieving such an objective should be a careful assessment of the character, capacities, and desires of potential terrorists targeting that
homeland. Although the report contains a section dealing with what its authors call “the nature of the terrorist
adversary,” the section devotes only two sentences to assessing that nature: “The number and high
profile of international and domestic terrorist attacks and disrupted plots during the last two decades
underscore the determination and persistence of terrorist organizations. Terrorists have proven to be
relentless, patient, opportunistic, and flexible, learning from experience and modifying tactics and
targets to exploit perceived vulnerabilities and avoid observed strengths.”8¶ This description may apply to
some terrorists somewhere, including at least a few of those involved in the September 11 attacks. Yet,
it scarcely describes the vast majority of those individuals picked up on terrorism charges in the United
States since those attacks. The inability of the DHS to consider this fact even parenthetically in its
fleeting discussion is not only amazing but perhaps delusional in its single-minded preoccupation with
the extreme.¶ In sharp contrast, the authors of the case studies, with remarkably few exceptions, describe their
subjects with such words as incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, inadequate,
unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational, and foolish.9 And in
nearly all of the cases where an operative from the police or from the Federal Bureau of Investigation was at work (almost half of the total), the most appropriate
descriptor would be “gullible.”¶ In all, as Shikha Dalmia has put it, would-be
terrorists need to be “radicalized enough to die for
their cause; Westernized enough to move around without raising red flags; ingenious enough to exploit
loopholes in the security apparatus; meticulous enough to attend to the myriad logistical details that
could torpedo the operation; self-sufficient enough to make all the preparations without enlisting
outsiders who might give them away; disciplined enough to maintain complete secrecy; and—above
all—psychologically tough enough to keep functioning at a high level without cracking in the face of
their own impending death.”10 The case studies examined in this article certainly do not abound with people with such characteristics. ¶ In the
eleven years since the September 11 attacks, no terrorist has been able to detonate even a primitive
bomb in the United States, and except for the four explosions in the London transportation system in
2005, neither has any in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the only method by which Islamist terrorists have
managed to kill anyone in the United States since September 11 has been with gunfire—inflicting a total of
perhaps sixteen deaths over the period (cases 4, 26, 32).11 This limited capacity is impressive because, at one time, smallscale terrorists in the United States were quite successful in setting off bombs. Noting that the scale of the September
11 attacks has “tended to obliterate America’s memory of pre-9/11 terrorism,” Brian Jenkins reminds us (and we clearly do need reminding) that the 1970s
witnessed sixty to seventy terrorist incidents, mostly bombings, on U.S. soil every year.12 ¶ The situation seems scarcely different in Europe and other Western
locales. Michael Kenney, who has interviewed dozens of government officials and intelligence agents and analyzed court documents, has found that, in sharp
contrast with the boilerplate characterizations favored by the DHS and with the imperatives listed by Dalmia ,
Islamist militants in those
locations are operationally unsophisticated, short on know-how, prone to making mistakes, poor at
planning, and limited in their capacity to learn.13 Another study documents the difficulties of network
coordination that continually threaten the terrorists’ operational unity, trust, cohesion, and ability to act
collectively.14¶ In addition, although some of the plotters in the cases targeting the United States
harbored visions of toppling large buildings, destroying airports, setting off dirty bombs, or bringing
down the Brooklyn Bridge (cases 2, 8, 12, 19, 23, 30, 42), all were nothing more than wild fantasies, far beyond the
plotters’ capacities however much they may have been encouraged in some instances by FBI operatives.
Indeed, in many of the cases, target selection is effectively a random process, lacking guile and careful
planning. Often, it seems, targets have been chosen almost capriciously and simply for their
convenience. For example, a would-be bomber targeted a mall in Rockford, Illinois, because it was nearby (case 21). Terrorist plotters in Los Angeles in 2005
drew up a list of targets that were all within a 20-mile radius of their shared apartment, some of which did not even exist (case 15). In Norway, a neo-Nazi terrorist
on his way to bomb a synagogue took a tram going the wrong way and dynamited a mosque instead.15
No lone wolf terror attacks
Harwood 15 (Matthew, Senior Writer and Editor for the ACLU and Holds an M.Litt in International Security Studies from U of St.
Andrews in Scotland, 2/6, Foreign Policy in Focus, "Crying Lone Wolf")
You could multiply such statements many times over. There’s
only one problem with the rising crescendo of alarm about
lone wolves: most of it simply isn’t true.¶ There’s nothing new about the “threat” and the concept is
notoriously unreliable, as well as selectively used. (These days, “lone wolf” has largely become a stand-in for “Islamic terrorist,” though
the category itself is not bound to any specific ideological type .) Worst of all, its recent highlighting paves the way for the
heightening of abusive and counterproductive police and national security practices, including the
infiltration of minority and activist communities and elaborate sting operations that ensnare the
vulnerable. In addition, the categorization of such solitary individuals as terrorists supposedly driven by
ideology — left or right, secular or religious — often obscures multiple other factors that may actually
cause them to engage in violence.¶ Like all violent crime, individual terrorism represents a genuine risk, just an
exceedingly rare and minimal one. It’s not the sort of thing that the government should be able to build
whole new, intrusive surveillance programs on or use as an excuse for sending in agents to infiltrate
communities.¶ National programs now being set up to combat lone-wolf terrorism have a way of wildly
exaggerating its prevalence and dangers — and in the end are only likely to exacerbate the problem. For
Americans to concede more of their civil liberties in return for “security” against lone wolves wouldn’t
be a trade; it would be fraud.¶ Anatomy of the Wolf¶ The “literature” on both terrorism and the lone wolf should
be approached with a healthy degree of skepticism. To this day, there is little consensus on what exactly terrorism is; the same is true
of the lone-wolf variety.
Many barriers to WMD terrorism
Hoffman 14 (Bruce Hoffman is a contributing editor to The National Interest, a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating
Terrorism Center, and a professor and director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University., March-April, 2014, Low-Tech
Terrorism, National Interest, http://nationalinterest.org/article/low-tech-terrorism-9935)
Fortunately, the report’s most breathless prediction concerning the likelihood of terrorist use of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has not come to pass. But this is not for want of terrorists trying to
obtain such capabilities. Indeed, prior to the October 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda had embarked upon an ambitious quest to
acquire and develop an array of such weapons that, had it been successful, would have altered to an unimaginable extent our most basic conceptions about
national security and rendered moot debates over whether terrorism posed a potentially existential threat. But just how effective have terrorist efforts to acquire
and use weapons of mass destruction actually been? The
September 11, 2001, attacks were widely noted for their reliance
on relatively low-tech weaponry—the conversion, in effect, of airplanes into missiles by using raw
physical muscle and box cutters to hijack them. Since then, efforts to gain access to WMD have been
unceasing. But examining those efforts results in some surprising conclusions. While there is no cause
for complacency, they do suggest that terrorists face some inherent constraints that will be difficult for
them to overcome. It is easier to proclaim the threat of mass terror than to perpetrate it.
No risk of nuclear terrorism
Mearsheimer 14 (John Mearsheimer, IR Prof at UChicago, National Interest, January 2, 2014, "America Unhinged",
http://nationalinterest.org/article/america-unhinged-9639?page=show)
Am I overlooking the obvious threat that strikes fear into the hearts of so many Americans, which is terrorism? Not at all. Sure,
the United States has
a terrorism problem. But it is a minor threat. There is no question we fell victim to a spectacular attack
on September 11, but it did not cripple the United States in any meaningful way and another attack of
that magnitude is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. Indeed, there has not been a single instance
over the past twelve years of a terrorist organization exploding a primitive bomb on American soil, much
less striking a major blow. Terrorism—most of it arising from domestic groups—was a much bigger
problem in the United States during the 1970s than it has been since the Twin Towers were toppled.
What about the possibility that a terrorist group might obtain a nuclear weapon? Such an occurrence
would be a game changer, but the chances of that happening are virtually nil. No nuclear-armed state is
going to supply terrorists with a nuclear weapon because it would have no control over how the
recipients might use that weapon. Political turmoil in a nuclear-armed state could in theory allow
terrorists to grab a loose nuclear weapon, but the United States already has detailed plans to deal with
that highly unlikely contingency. Terrorists might also try to acquire fissile material and build their own
bomb. But that scenario is extremely unlikely as well: there are significant obstacles to getting enough
material and even bigger obstacles to building a bomb and then delivering it. More generally, virtually
every country has a profound interest in making sure no terrorist group acquires a nuclear weapon,
because they cannot be sure they will not be the target of a nuclear attack, either by the terrorists or
another country the terrorists strike. Nuclear terrorism, in short, is not a serious threat. And to the extent that we
should worry about it, the main remedy is to encourage and help other states to place nuclear materials in highly secure custody.