SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Explanation .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Glossary ................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
1ac ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 6
1AC – Plan............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
1AC - Solvency........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 8
Advantages........................................................................................................................................................................................... 10
1AC – Secrecy Advantage ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 11
1AC – Democracy Advantage ............................................................................................................................................................................... 17
1AC – Rights Advantage ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
1AC – Internet Freedom ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 26
Extensions ............................................................................................................................................................................. 31
Inherency ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 32
FYI – FISA Section 702 ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 33
Inherency Module .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 34
Solvency............................................................................................................................................................................................... 36
Solvency – SSRA Requires Warrant ..................................................................................................................................................................... 37
AT: FISA Court Rubberstamps ............................................................................................................................................................................. 38
Secrecy Advantage............................................................................................................................................................................... 39
Secrecy → Chills Leaks (Long) ............................................................................................................................................................................. 40
Secrecy → Bad Decisionmaking (Long) ............................................................................................................................................................... 42
Secrecy → Drones ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 44
Secrecy → Too Much XO Power/SOP .................................................................................................................................................................. 45
AT: Leaks Hurt National Security ......................................................................................................................................................................... 46
Journalists Key ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 48
Democracy Advantage ......................................................................................................................................................................... 49
Surveillance Chills Activism ................................................................................................................................................................................. 50
Surveillance → Tyranny ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 52
Internet Freedom Key to Spread Democracy ......................................................................................................................................................... 54
Answer to: “the aff doesn’t fix democracy” ........................................................................................................................................................... 56
Democracy Spreads ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 57
Democracy Solves Everything ............................................................................................................................................................................... 58
Democracy Prevents Wars ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 60
Democracy Prevents Terrorism ............................................................................................................................................................................. 62
Rights Advantage ................................................................................................................................................................................. 63
Right To Communication Impact .................................................................................................................................. 64
AT: Doesn't Solve Racism ............................................................................................................................................. 65
Internet Freedom Advantage ................................................................................................................................................................ 66
NSA hurts our credibility ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 67
NSA Link............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 69
Answers to: Internet isn’t free & open ................................................................................................................................................................... 71
Hurts the Internet ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 73
Bad for Economy ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 74
1
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Explanation
I. What does the aff do.
The affirmative argues that the government should NOT have the right to spy on citizens without a warrant. In particular,
the mass data storage sweeps are illegal. Currently the NSA will collect internet and phone data on huge chunks of
citizens – even if there is no belief that a crime has or will be committed.
That should no longer be allowed. If the government is going to look into someone’s electronic lives then the government
should have a warrant. The best explanation is by reading the two solvency cards Buttar & Clabough [on the 1AC –
Solvency] page. Please read through those.
II. How to use the file
The 1ac speech should read the 1AC-plan and the 1AC-Solvency pages. Additionally, the 1ac should read the advantage
or two that the aff team finds the most interesting, strategic, fun. So, a typical 1ac would be the Plan, 2 advantages, and
solvency.
The Extensions section can be used in a couple of ways –
-use it to add evidence/cards to the 1ac advantages. You should be reading the best version of each advantage.
-use it to answer 1nc arguments made against the case. You can read additional cards to answer negative arguments that
aren’t well answered by the 1ac evidence you choose to read.
-use it to answer disads and other arguments that the negative reads.
III. Different Advantages
The four advantage give the aff some flexibility about how they choose to read the 1ac. Each lab will probably discuss
and decide how they read the 1ac. But, this allows the debates to be about the core of the topic, but also flexible enough
to not get stale.
Secrecy Advantage – the government’s mass surveillance chills investigations into what it is doing. Citizens and
journalists and even employees of the government are unwilling to look because they fear they will be caught. That
‘deters’ people from bringing issues up to the public. Leaks are a way to keep the government in check and make sure
that we don’t start wars, conflicts, or just generally make unwise decisions without it being made public. The Drone
program is a specific example of a set of decisions that are being made without public involvement. Removing the fear of
investigations would make the drone program more accountable and save lives.
Democracy Advantage – the internet as a spot of surveillance keeps people from using it to communicate openly and
free. Open communication [first amendment and all] is a bedrock of a functioning democracy. Mass surveillance is what
makes tyranny [rule by one over the many] possible as people can be policed and prevented from acting. Democracy is
really good. The 1ac says that democracies make the world more peaceful and that democracy itself is an inherent human
good.
Rights Advantage – mass surveillance results in self censorship and denies people the right to open communication.
Open communication is a fundamental human right. Rights are good.
Internet Freedom Advantage – There is a global push for governments to control the internet. The US is losing
credibility to convince people to leave the internet open and free. An open and free internet is good because it creates a
social space for humans to come together to solve all the world’s problems. As an example, if the world is going to solve
an issue like global climate change it will require people talking about it, coming together, and figuring out what works
best. The only way that can happen now is the internet.
2
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Glossary
Civil society
The elements such as freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, etc, that make up a democratic society
Drone strike
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), also known as drones, are aircraft either controlled by ‘pilots’ from the ground or
increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. While there are dozens of different types of drones,
they basically fall into two categories: those that are used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes and those that are
armed with missiles and bombs.
The use of drones has grown quickly in recent years because unlike manned aircraft they can stay aloft for many hours
(Zephyr a British drone under development has just broken the world record by flying for over 82 hours nonstop); they are
much cheaper than military aircraft and they are flown remotely so there is no danger to the flight crew.
Dystopian fantasy
An imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives. The condition of life is extremely bad, as
from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prescribes procedures for requesting judicial authorization for
electronic surveillance and physical search of persons engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United
States on behalf of a foreign power.
Requests are adjudicated by a special eleven member court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or FISA
Court.
FISA Amendments Act of 2008
The act provides critically important authority for the U.S. Intelligence Community to acquire foreign intelligence
information by targeting foreign persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States. It ensures that the
Intelligence Community has the flexibility and agility it needs to identify and respond to terrorist and other foreign threats
to our security.
Global norms
Global norms are defined as broadly accepted principles and guidelines of appropriate conduct for governments
and all relevant stakeholders
Mass surveillance
Is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population. The surveillance is often carried out by
governments or governmental organizations, but may also be carried out by corporations, either on behalf of governments
or at their own initiative.
Metadata
Surveillance metadata is usually associated with electronic communication channels, such as phone, email and social
media. Data is collected through wiretapping and other electronic surveillance methods, including government Trojans,
wiretap Trojans and keyloggers. Simply put, metadata is the digital information that accompanies electronic
communication. When you make a mobile phone call, your provider records the time, date, location, and duration of this
call, largely for billing purposes.
Militarization
Is the process by which a society organizes itself for military conflict and violence. It is related to militarism, which is an
ideology that reflects the level of militarization of a state.
3
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
National Security Agency (NSA)
An intelligence organization of the United States government, responsible for global monitoring, collection, and
processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes – a discipline known as
Signals intelligence (SIGINT). NSA is concurrently charged with protection of U.S. government communications and
information systems against penetration and network warfare.[8][9] Although many of NSA's programs rely on "passive"
electronic collection, the agency is authorized to accomplish its mission through active clandestine means,[10] among
which are physically bugging electronic systems[11] and allegedly engaging in sabotage through subversive
software.[12][13] Moreover, NSA maintains physical presence in a large number of countries across the globe, where its
Special Collection Service (SCS) inserts eavesdropping devices in difficult-to-reach places. SCS collection tactics
allegedly encompass "close surveillance, burglary, wiretapping, breaking and entering".[14][15]
Patriot Act
Law passed shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States giving law enforcement agencies
increased, broad powers to bring terrorists to justice.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act
The NSA used Section 215 of the Patriot Act as the basis for collecting phone records of Americans who were not
necessarily under official investigation. It was also used to track financial data and to obtain companies' internet business
records. The extent of the mass surveillance program was revealed nearly two years ago by NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden
Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act
Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of
persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States, but is limited to targeting non-U.S. persons. Once
authorized, such acquisitions may last for periods of up to one year.
Under subsection 702(b) of the FISA Amendments Act, such an acquisition is also subject to several limitations.
Specifically, an acquisition:
May not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States;
May not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such
acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States;
May not intentionally target a U.S. person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States;
May not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time
of the acquisition to be located in the United States;
Must be conducted in a manner consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[9]
Surveillance State Repeal Act
The bill would completely repeal the PATRIOT Act as well as the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which permits the NSA
to collect Internet communications — a program exposed by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward
Snowden. The bill would reform the court that oversees the nation’s spying powers, enhance protections for
whistleblowers, and stop the government from forcing technology companies to create easy access into their devices.
Targeted surveillance
Targeted surveillance is surveillance directed at particular individuals and can involve the use of specific powers by
authorized public agencies. Targeted surveillance can be carried out overtly or covertly, and can involve human agents.
Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), targeted covert surveillance is "directed" if it is carried
out for a specific investigation or operation. By comparison, if it is carried out on designated premises or on a vehicle, it is
"intrusive" surveillance. Targeting methods include the interception of communications, the use of communications
"traffic" data, visual surveillance devices, and devices that sense movement, objects or persons.
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects
of public and private life wherever possible.
4
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Tyranny
Cruel and oppressive government or rule.
Utilitarianism
A system of ethics according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action should be judged by its consequences. The
goal of utilitarian ethics is to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Warrant
Most often, the term warrant refers to a specific type of authorization; a writ issued by a competent officer, usually a judge
or magistrate, which permits an otherwise illegal act that would violate individual rights and affords the person executing
the writ protection from damages if the act is performed.
Whistleblower
A whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistle blower)[1] is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is
deemed illegal, dishonest, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public.[2] The information of
alleged wrongdoing can be classified in many ways: violation of company policy/rules, law, regulation, or threat to public
interest/national security, as well as fraud, and corruption.[3] Those who become whistleblowers can choose to bring
information or allegations to surface either internally or externally. Internally, a whistleblower can bring his/her
accusations to attention to other people within the accused organization. Externally, a whistleblower can bring allegations
to light by contacting a third party outside of an accused organization. He/She can reach out to the media, government,
law enforcement, or those who are concerned. whistleblowers also face stiff reprisal/retaliation from those whom are
accused or alleged of wrongdoing. Third party groups like Wikileaks and others offer protection to whistleblowers, but
that protection can only go so far. Whistleblowers face legal action, criminal charges, social stigma, and termination from
any position, office, or job. Two other classifications of whistleblowing are private and public. The classifications relate to
the type of organizations someone chooses to whistle-blow on: private sector, or public sector. Both can have different
results that depend on many factors. However, whistleblowing in the public sector organization is more likely to result in
federal felony charges and jail-time. A whistleblower who chooses to accuse a private sector organization or agency is
more likely to face termination and legal and civil charges.
5
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1ac
6
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Plan
Plan: The United States federal government should curtail the authority to do non-targeted
domestic mass surveillance by enacting the Surveillance State Repeal Act.
7
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC - Solvency
Solvency
The Surveillance State Repeal Act would only allow for targeted surveillance while removing the
legal justifications for mass surveillance.
Buttar, 15
(Shahid, executive director, leads the Bill of Rights Defense Committee in its efforts to restore civil liberties, constitutional rights, and rule of law principles
undermined by law enforcement and intelligence agencies within the United States. 4-18-15. http://www.occupy.com/article/can-surveillance-state-repeal-act-shiftcourse-spying)
Eager to reset the debate and anchor it in long overdue transparency, a bipartisan block of representatives have
introduced a bill to restore civil liberties, privacy, and freedom of thought. The Surveillance State Repeal Act, HR
1466, would do this by repealing the twin pillars of the NSA dragnet: the PATRIOT Act (not only the three expiring
provisions) and the 2008 FISA amendments. On multiple occasions, executive officials have lied under oath to congressional oversight committees
about the scope of domestic surveillance. Yet the very same officials still appear in oversight hearings as if they maintained any credibility. It took whistleblowers
resigning their careers to prove that senior government officials’ blithe assurances to Congress were in fact self-serving lies. Some members of Congress paid attention:
the authors of the PATRIOT Act moved to curtail their own legislative opus, and have encouraged their colleagues not to reauthorize the expiring provisions unless they
are first curtailed.
HR 1466 (the SSRA) represents a profound challenge by members of Congress from across the political spectrum
fed up with the national security establishment and its continuing assault on our Constitution.
By repealing the twin pillars of the surveillance dragnet, the SSRA would essentially shift the burden of proof,
forcing intelligence agencies like the NSA and FBI to justify the expansion of their powers from a constitutional
baseline, rather then the illegitimate status quo.
Most policymakers forget the 9/11 commission’s most crucial finding: the intelligence community's failures that enabled the 9/11 attacks were not failures of limited
data collection, but rather failures of data sharing and analysis.
Over the last 15 years, Congress has allowed the agencies to expand their collection capacities, solving an
imaginary problem while creating a host of real threats to U.S. national security far worse than any act of rogue
violence: the specter of state omniscience, immune from oversight and accountability, and thus vulnerable to politicization. This was among the fears
of which President Eisenhower warned us in his last speech as President.
Meanwhile, the SSRA would preserve what the PATRIOT Act’s authors have said they meant to authorize:
targeted investigations of particular people suspected by authorities to present potential threats.
HR 1466 would also advance transparency, both by protecting conscientious whistleblowers from the corrupt retaliation of agencies and careerists, and by giving judges
on the secret FISA court access to technical expertise they have been denied.
the bill would directly address disturbing government duplicity, prohibiting agencies from hacking
encryption hardware and software, and from using an executive order authorizing foreign surveillance as a basis
to monitor Americans.
Finally,
Only the plan goes far enough
Clabough, 15 (Raven, writer for The New American, M.A. University of Albany. “House Members Target Patriot Act with "Surveillance State Repeal Act,” 331-15. http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/20560-house-members-target-patriot-act-with-surveillance-state-repeal-act)
U.S. Representatives Mark Pocan (D-Wis., photo on left) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who are seeking to repeal the PATRIOT Act in its
entirety and combat any legal provisions that amount to American spying, unveiled their Surveillance State Repeal Act on Tuesday.
“This isn’t just tinkering around the edges,” Pocan said during a Capitol Hill briefing on the legislation. “This is a
meaningful overhaul of the system, getting rid of essentially all parameters of the PATRIOT Act.”
“The PATRIOT Act contains many provisions that violate the Fourth Amendment and have led to a dramatic
expansion of our domestic surveillance state,” added Massie (R-Ky.), who co-authored the legislation with Pocan. “Our Founding Fathers fought
and died to stop the kind of warrantless spying and searches that the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act authorize. It is long past time to repeal the
PATRIOT Act and reassert the constitutional rights of all Americans.”
The House bill would completely repeal the PATRIOT Act, passed in the days following the 9/11 attacks, as well as the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which permits
the NSA to collect Internet communications — a program exposed by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Likewise, the bill would reform the court that oversees the nation’s spying powers, enhance protections for
whistleblowers, and stop the government from forcing technology companies to create easy access into their
devices.
8
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
“The warrantless collection of millions of personal communications from innocent Americans is a direct violation of our constitutional right to privacy,” declared
Congressman Pocan, adding, “Revelations about the NSA’s programs reveal the extraordinary extent to which the program has invaded Americans’ privacy. I reject the
notion that we must sacrifice liberty for security. We can live in a secure nation which also upholds a strong commitment to civil liberties.”
Massie stated, “Really, what we need are new whistleblower protections so that the next Edward Snowden doesn’t have to go to Russia or Hong Kong or whatever the
case may be just for disclosing this."
According to The Hill, the bill is not likely to gain much traction, as leaders in Congress “have been worried that even much milder reforms to the nation’s spying laws
would tragically handicap the nation’s ability to fight terrorists.”
A 2013 Surveillance State Repeal Act never picked up any momentum, and even bills with smaller ambitions have
failed to gain passage. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced the USA Freedom Act in 2014, which sought to
curtail the amount of mass surveillance that could be performed by the NSA and other groups.
As predicted, however, the bill was dramatically watered down during the consensus process. The White House signaled its
“strong support” for the bill only after privacy protections and transparency provisions were substantially weakened.
Privacy advocates who once supported the USA Freedom Act were dismayed by its transformation into a
consensus bill, which no longer prevented the NSA or FBI from warrantlessly sifting through international
communications databases.
Some critics even argued that the USA Freedom Act in its final form would have expanded NSA authorities
because of its vague wording about what constituted a “connection” between call records.
9
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Advantages
10
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Secrecy Advantage
SECRECY ADVANTAGE
Mass surveillance chills investigative journalism due to fear of NSA retaliation
Human Rights Watch, 14 (“With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy,”
July. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/usnsa0714_ForUPload_0.pdf)
Every national security reporter I know would say that the atmosphere in which professional reporters seek
insight into policy failures [and] bad military decisions is just much tougher and much chillier. — Steve Coll, staff writer for
The New Yorker and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, February 14, 2014
Numerous US-based journalists covering intelligence, national security, and law enforcement describe the current
reporting landscape as, in some respects, the most difficult they have ever faced. “This is the worst I’ve seen in terms of the
government’s efforts to control information,” acknowledged Jonathan Landay, a veteran national security and intelligence correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.68
“It’s a terrible time to be covering government,” agreed Tom Gjelten, who has worked with National Public Radio for over 30 years.69 According to Kathleen Carroll,
senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press, “We say this every time there’s a new occupant in the White House, and it’s true every time: each is
Journalists are struggling harder than ever before to protect their sources, and sources are
more reluctant to speak. This environment makes reporting both slower and less fruitful. Journalists interviewed for this
report described the difficulty of obtaining sources and covering sensitive topics in an atmosphere of uncertainty
about the range and effect of the government’s power over them. Both surveillance and leak investigations loomed
large in this context—especially to the extent that there may be a relationship between the two. More specifically, many journalists see the government’s
more secretive than the last.”70
power as menacing because they know little about when various government agencies share among themselves information collected through surveillance, and when
they deploy that information in leak investigations.71 “[Government officials have been] very squishy about what they have and [what they] will do with it,” observed
James Asher, Washington Bureau Chief for McClatchy Co., the third largest newspaper group in the country.72 One Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for a newspaper
noted that even a decrease in leak prosecutions is unlikely to help, “unless we [also] get clear lines about what is collectable and usable.”73 Others agreed. “I’m pretty
worried that NSA information will make its way into leak investigations,” said one investigative journalist for a major outlet.74 A reporter who covers national defense
expressed concern about the possibility of a “porous wall” between the NSA and the Department of Justice, the latter of which receives referrals connected to leak
investigations.75 Jonathan
Landay wondered whether the government might analyze metadata records to identify his
contacts. A national security reporter summarized the situation as follows: “Do we trust [the intelligence] portion
of the government’s knowledge to be walled off from leak investigations? That’s not a good place to be.”77 While most
journalists said that their difficulties began a few years ago, particularly with the increase in leak prosecutions, our interviews confirmed that for
many journalists largescale surveillance by the US government contributes substantially to the new challenges they
encounter. The government’s large-scale collection of metadata and communications makes it significantly more
difficult for them to protect themselves and their sources, to confirm details for their stories, and ultimately to
inform the public. In the 1970s, many journalists spoke with sources by phone, and the government already had the technological capacity to tap those
calls if it so chose. But traditional forms of wiretapping or physical surveillance were time consuming and resource
intensive. Today, so many more transactions are handled electronically that there exists a tangible, easy-tostore,
easy-to-access record of a much larger proportion of any given person’s life: banking transactions, internet
browsing, driving habits (though EZ Pass records, license plate cameras, and GPS systems), cell phone location and activity, emailing
patterns, and more. Metadata can reveal intimate details about people, such as religious affiliations, medical diagnoses, and the existence of private
relationships. Meanwhile, as more transactions have become digitalized, the government has acquired a much greater
technical capacity to gather, store, analyze, and sift through electronic data. Even with rapidly evolving techniques for conducting
research and contacting sources, journalists expressed concern that widespread government surveillance constrains their
ability to investigate and report on matters of public concern, and ultimately undermines democratic processes by
hindering open, informed debate.
11
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Secrecy Advantage
And, mass surveillance deters potential whistleblowers
Human Rights Watch, 14 (“With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy,”
July. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/usnsa0714_ForUPload_0.pdf)
many journalists said that the government’s increased
capacity to engage in surveillance— and the knowledge that it is doing so on an unprecedented scale—has made
their concerns about how to protect sources much more acute and real. In fact, some believed that surveillance may be a
direct cause of the spike in leak investigations. “It used to be that leak investigations didn’t get far because it was
too hard to uncover the source, but with digital tools it's just much easier, and sources know that.” observed Bart Gellman.98 Peter
Yet, beyond the leak investigations and administrative efforts to prevent leaks,
Maass, a senior writer at The Intercept, concurred: “Leak investigations are a lot easier because you leave a data trail calling, swiping in and out of buildings, [and]
walking down a street with cameras. It’s a lot easier for people to know where you’re going and how long you’re there.”99 Charlie Savage raised a similar point:
“[E]lectronic trails mak[e] it easier to figure out who’s talking to reporters. That has made it realistic [to investigate leaks] in a way that it wasn’t before.”100 Peter
Finn, the National Security Editor at the Washington Post, expressed concern that “the government’s ability to find the source will only get better.”101 A national
the Snowden revelations show that “[w]hat we’re doing is not good enough.
I used to think that the most careful people were not at risk, [that they] could protect sources and keep them from
being known. Now we know that isn’t the case.”102 He added, “That’s what Snowden meant for me. There’s a record of everywhere I’ve walked,
security reporter made the link even clearer, stating that
everywhere I’ve been.”103 Peter Maass voiced a similar concern: “[The landscape] got worse significantly after the Snowden documents came into circulation. If you
Journalists repeatedly told us that
surveillance had made sources much more fearful of talking. The Snowden revelations have “brought home a sense
of the staggering power of the government,” magnifying the fear created by the increasing number of leak investigations.105 Accordingly,
sources are “afraid of the entire weight of the federal government coming down on them.” 106 Jane Mayer, an
award-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, noted, “[t]he added layer of fear makes it so much harder. I can’t
count the number of people afraid of the legal implications [of speaking to me].”107 One journalist in Washington, DC, noted, “I
suspected the government had the capability to do mass surveillance, you found out it was certainly true.”104
think many sources assume I’m spied on. [I’m] not sure they’re right but I can’t do anything about their presumption.”108 As a result, she said, some remaining sources
have started visiting her house to speak with her because they are too fearful to come to her office.109 One national security reporter estimated that intelligence
reporters have the most skittish sources, followed by journalists covering the Department of Justice and terrorism, followed by those on a military and national security
As a result, journalists report struggling to confirm even unclassified details for stories, and have seen
trusted, long-standing sources pulling back. “I had a source whom I’ve known for years whom I wanted to talk to about a particular subject and this
person said, ‘It’s not classified but I can’t talk about it because if they find out they’ll kill me’ [figuratively speaking].”111 Several others have reported
the sudden disappearance of formerly reliable sources, or the reluctance of sources to discuss seemingly innocuous
and unclassified matters.112 One decorated intelligence and national security journalist indicated that even retired sources are increasingly
reluctant to speak.113 Though firing or revocation of security clearances no longer worries them, they fear prosecution, and “now [they] have to worry that
beat.110
their communications can be reached on a basis far short of probable cause.”114 Though losing developed sources has proved frustrating to numerous journalists with
a number suggested that the largest challenge they face is reaching new sources. “Sources don’t just
materialize,” noted Peter Finn. “They often are developed.”115 That requires building trust, which can be a slow
and difficult process. Adding to the challenge of developing sources that are already skittish is the fact that
surveillance makes it very difficult for journalists to communicate with them securely. Calling or emailing can
leave a trail between the journalist and the source; and it can be difficult to get casual contacts to take more
elaborate security measures to communicate. “[H]ow do you even get going?” asked Bart Gellman, referring to the
challenge of making first contact with a new would-be source without leaving a trace. “By the time you're both
ready to talk about more delicate subjects, you’ve left such a trail that even if you start using burner phones or anonymous email
accounts you’re already linked.”
whom we spoke,
12
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Secrecy Advantage
Whistleblowers check government corruption and abuse – decline in whistleblowers risks
national security mistakes and wars
Benkler, 14 (Yochai, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard
University. A Public Accountability Defense for National Security Leakers and Whistleblowers 8(2) Harv. Rev. L. & Policy, July 2014
http://benkler.org/Benkler_Whistleblowerdefense_Prepub.pdf)
Criminal liability for leaking
and publishing classified materials is usually discussed in terms of a conflict between high-level
security and democracy. Here, I propose that the high-level abstraction obscures the fact that “national
security” is, first and foremost, a system of organizations and institutions, subject to all the imperfections and
failures of all other organizations. Considering that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (“SSCI”) excoriated
the CIA for groupthink failures in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, and again for its failures and dissembling in
conducting its torture interrogation program, it would be naïve beyond credulity to believe that the CIA, NSA, FBI, and
Pentagon are immune to the failure dynamics that pervade every other large organization, from state bureaucracies to
telecommunications providers, from automobile manufacturers to universities. When organizations that have such vast powers over life and
death as well as human and civil rights, the risks of error, incompetence, and malfeasance are immeasurably
greater than they are for these other, more workaday organizations. The Maginot Line did not make France more secure from Germany and neither torture nor the
invasion of Iraq, with its enormous human, economic, and strategic costs, made America safer from terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, or rogue regimes. A
mechanism for identifying and disrupting the organizational dynamics that lead to such strategic errors is
necessary for any system of government, and in a democracy that mechanism is the principle of civilian control: fundamental questions of
war and peace require public understanding and public decision.
Secrecy insulates self-reinforcing internal organizational dynamics from external correction. In countering this tendency, not
values:
all leaks are of the same fabric. “War story”-type leaks that make an administration look good or are aimed to shape public opinion in favor of an already-adopted
strategy or to manipulate support for one agency over another, trial balloons, and so forth, are legion.23 While these offer the public color and texture from inside the
leaks, however, provide a
critical mechanism for piercing the national security system’s echo-chamber, countering self-reinforcing
information cascades, groupthink, and cognitive biases that necessarily pervade any closed communications
system. It is this type of leak, which exposes and challenges core systemic behaviors, that has increased in this past
decade, as it did in the early 1970s. These leaks are primarily driven by conscience, and demand accountability for systemic error, incompetence, or malfeasance.
Their critical checking function derives from the fact that conscience is uncorrelated with well-behaved
organizational processes. Like an electric fuse, accountability leaks, as we might call them, blow when the internal
dynamics of the system reach the breaking point of an individual with knowledge, but without authority. They are
therefore hard to predict, and function like surprise inspections that keep a system honest. By doing so, these leaks serve both
democracy and security.
This failsafe view of whistleblowing is hardly unique to national security. American law in general embraces
whistleblowing as a critical mechanism to address the kinds of destructive organizational dynamics that lead to error, incompetence, and abuse. In
healthcare, financial, food and drug, or consumer product industries; in state and federal agencies, throughout the
government and are valuable to the press, they do not offer a productive counterweight to internal systemic failures and errors. Some
organizational ecosystem, whistleblowers are protected from retaliation and often provided with financial incentives to expose wrongs they have seen and subject the
organizations in which they work to public or official scrutiny.25 Whistleblowing
is seen as a central pillar to address government
corruption and failure throughout the world. Unless one believes that the national security establishment has a
magical exemption from the dynamics that lead all other large scale organizations to error, then whistleblowing
must be available as a critical arrow in the quiver of any democracy that seeks to contain the tragic consequences
that follow when national security organizations make significant errors or engage in illegality or systemic abuse.
13
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Secrecy Advantage
Ending state secrecy is key- The government uses lack of public knowledge on drone strikes to
continue the program. The plan increases public awareness on drones which ultimately ends the
program.
Satia, 15 (Priya, professor of history, Stanford University. “Why We Need Persistent Questioning About Civilian Deaths by Drones” 4-30-15.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/priya-satia/why-we-need-persistent-questioning-about-civilian-deaths-by-drones_b_7177264.html)
Before Nepal and Baltimore seized headlines, news
that a CIA drone strike mistakenly killed an innocent American hostage in
January momentarily energized our meager debate on drones. Critics pressed drones' dangerous secrecy and
fallibility and the political backlash they produce in the Muslim world. The administration reached for platitudes about the sad
inevitability of mistakes in the "fog of war." Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a 2013 study of drones
predicted, "even this episode will have no effect" on public debate -- and our easy distraction since Friday has proven him right.
Critics point to strong bipartisan support for drones as the reason for this inertia. But persistent questioning is all the more urgent because
studies show that this apparent support arises out of a fundamental, deliberately propagated misunderstanding
about how drones are used. According to a 2013 study, while most Americans approve drone strikes targeting high-level
terrorist targets, they disapprove that recourse when there is the possibility of civilian deaths. In short, most
Americans would disapprove the current use of drones if it were ever properly aired.
High-ranking military and diplomatic officials I have spoken to indicate that the problem is not military
commitment to the drone strategy but our civilian leadership's commitment to it. Within the Air Force especially, skepticism
about the tactic arises from the way CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command's independent, secret use of drones fatally compromises Air Force use of them.
I toured Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where the USAF drones are remotely piloted. I was pressed afterwards
not to disclose the circumstances of the tour. I do not have much faith in the reasoning behind keeping them secret,
but some deluded sense of honor ties my tongue, redoubled by my sensitivity as a South-Asian-American to
suspicions of my patriotism after I was warned that describing the circumstances would somehow endanger the security of our service men and women
(although arguably disclosure in the name of democracy is patriotic duty, too). Such are the liabilities of being a hyphenated American with
ancestral ties to the geography being bombed. My son, whose name happens to have an Arabic root, was put on a Homeland Security no-fly list
despite being self-evidently three years old. These are real-life worries, and so I compromise. More significantly, that I did visit the base but was
censored from writing about it suggests the military is playing a double-game, inviting public oversight on its own terms to
safely air its doubts about the drone strategy while its siege mentality prevents a full and clear airing of them as
part of real public debate. While criticism remains episodic and marginal, the men and women who run operations at Creech are in thrall to Orientalist
notions about the "culture" of people in the AfPak region. Thus, for example, some believe Afghani men are indifferent to the death of women and children without
considering that Americans might appear similarly indifferent to Afghanis given our own evident tolerance of civilian deaths there. Orientalist notions about the
terrain's otherworldliness are also in play, situating it somewhere beyond the pale of civilization where al Qaeda finds sanctuary and thus where drone use can be
countenanced in a way it would not be tolerated elsewhere. Indeed, romantic descriptions of a fantastically remote, thickly-forested valley surrounded by snow-capped
peaks ran through the New York Times coverage of the American hostage's death in the Shawal Valley. I have written extensively about how our military inherited
these views from the British who first attempted to police the region from the air after World War I. They are crucial to drone operators' ability to press the trigger,
keeping the region permanently unreal and alien, an eternal frontier-zone where civilization ends and something else, ungovernable, begins. As much as defenders of
drone strikes tout the hours of close surveillance that give remote pilots a kind of intimacy with their victims, in fact, one-way surveillance of that kind is not aimed at
producing empathy but greater confidence in the target's presumptive otherness. Creech's motto is "Home of the Hunters," and the first hunter-killer drone is called the
"Predator." Every good hunter must know its prey's habits well, but we would never mistake that intimate knowledge for empathy. The
ugly truth is that our
official policy is to count all dead as militants -- that is how we dispensed with the matter of civilian casualties until
last week's inconvenient news of the deaths of an American hostage and Italian aid worker. The cause of this absurd policy is not lack of civilian
oversight of the military but lack of democratic oversight of our civilian leadership. The day after the New York Times remarked
the folly of drone tactics revealed by the death of an innocent American, the paper fawned over the program's decimation of al Qaeda leadership -- feebly in the end, for
the article had to admit that al Qaeda has declined primarily because would-be militants prefer ISIS, hardly a development our drone strategists should be proud of. It
is time for us, as Americans, to exercise our responsibility as citizens and take control of the debate. Our leadership
does not want journalists demanding revelatory tours of Creech. Journalists and citizens, demand a tour. At the very least, demand an account
of and an apology for every civilian death. Drones routinely terrorize and kill civilians. Is this American culture?
Drones strikes kill thousands of people and causes major psychological trauma to survivors
Purkiss, 15 (Jessica, freelance reporter working from the West Bank. “US drone strikes have traumatised a generation of Yemenis and will push them towards
militancy” 4-20-15. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/americas/18143-us-drone-strikes-have-traumatised-a-generation-of-yemenis-and-will-push-themtowards-militancy)
14
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
A year ago today, Hussein Ahmed Saleh Abu Bakr, a labourer, was travelling to work in Al-Bayda, central Yemen, with 11
colleagues including family members when a drone struck the car. When the attack was over, Hussein emerged from where he had taken
cover to look for the other passengers and found his father, 65, slumped in the road with shrapnel injuries to his head and chest. The bodies of the other passengers were
Four of the passengers were killed:
Sanad Nasser Hussein Al-Khushm, Abdullah Nasser Abu Bakr Al-Khushm, Yasser Ali Abed Rabbo Al-Azzani and
Ahmed Saleh Abu Bakr."Why? Why did they kill my son Sanad and my cousin Ahmed Saleh Abu Bakr? My son and my cousin did not belong to any
organisation," said Hussein Nasser Abu Bakr Al-Khushm to researchers of a report released by the Open Society Justice Initiative. The attack was part of
the US's targeted killing programme, a tactic which was employed in combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq
and is a core part of "counterterrorism" efforts in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. US Secretary of State John Kerry said at a BBC
scattered around the area, with some injuries so severe, Hussein was only able to identify them from their clothing.
forum in 2013: "The only people that we fire a drone at [sic] are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level after a great deal of vetting that takes a long period of
the report entitled "Death by Drone: Civilian harm caused by US targeted
found no evidence that the passengers in the car were linked to any terrorist organisation. It seems
that they were "collateral damage" in a targeted attack on the car driving in front of them. Collateral damage in
US drone attacks have claimed many innocent lives. For example, in Yemen strikes targeting 17 named men killed
273 people, at least seven of them children, according to the Guardian. These attacks have explicit support from the Yemeni government and
time. We don't just fire a drone at somebody and think they're a terrorist." However,
killings in Yemen",
President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who took over power following former President Ali Abdullah Saleh's 33-year reign ended amid widespread protests during the
Arab Spring, praised US drone strikes in Yemen and stated that he personally approved every drone strike taking place in the country. These
attacks have
stayed largely out of mainstream news, except in December 2013 when a drone attack hit the wedding procession
of Abdullah Mabkhut Al-Amri and Warda Al-Sorimi killing 12 of the guests. The Yemeni government gave the families $101,000
and 101 rifles in compensation. The US did not publically launch an investigation or provide compensation. Although the wedding attack led to Yemen's Parliament
A lack of justice is however typical in such
cases. Jen Gibson, an attorney at Reprieve who represents drone victims said: "For many innocent people in places like Yemen and
Pakistan, drones are judge, jury and executioner all in one." She added: "The true extent of the US drone programme
is shrouded in secrecy, and when the families of the victims seek redress for the terrible injustice of losing their loved ones – often
women and children – there is zero accountability." According to Reprieve, the US has used drones to execute without trial some
4,700 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – all countries against whom it has not declared war.
Contrary to the claims by Yemen and the US that the strikes help contain Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's (AQAB) activities, clinical and forensic
psychiatrist Peter Schaapveld expressed fear in an interview to Channel 4 that the drones were pushing the youth into the hands of militant organisations.
After conducting research in Yemen, he warned of a "psychological emergency" in towns impacted by drones, with 99
per cent of Yemenis he spoke to suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He described the children he assessed as
passing an almost unanimous but nonbinding resolution to prohibit the US from continuing drone strikes.
"hollowed-out shells of children" who are being "traumatised and re-traumatised"
American drone usage causes a global arms race – that risks global wars
Xiaolin, 13 (Duan, PhD student in Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National university of Singapore. Research interests include small wars, foreign and
public policy analysis. “The Rise of the Drones” 11-2-13. http://thediplomat.com/2013/11/the-rise-of-the-drones/?allpages=yes)
In a broader sense, America’s
use of drones may create more strategic dilemmas for regional and global peace and
stability: specifically proliferation and a possible arms race involving drones that could leave the world more prone
to conflict. Drones are usually deployed and sent to turbulent areas for intelligence collection and targeted assassinations. They rely heavily on remote control and
information links. Small technical errors can result in the rapid proliferation of modern weapons and technology. Case in
point: In December 2011, Iran hijacked a U.S. Stealth RQ-170 by spoofing its GPS signal. Iranian Revolutionary
Guards then reversed-engineered it, decoded the data and software, and produced a copy. Now, Iran has around
17 drones, including six armed UAVs in use. Its Shahed-129 is capable of attacking air and land targets, which “marks a significant technological advance.”
America’s use of drones has also prompted many other countries to develop their own or buy drones from the
international market, including Britain, Israel, India, Russia, South African and China. Indeed, China is particularly ambitious,
having sold Wing Loong UAVs to a number of countries. It is now developing its stealth drone “Li Jian” (Sharp Sword), which makes it the third country capable of
producing such weapons, after America’s X-47 and France’s nEUROn.
Countries that don’t have drones may feel threatened and less secure, and seek similar or other asymmetrical means to maintain the
balance of power. This could lead to an arms race. What’s more, as the adage says, to the man with a hammer everything
looks like a nail. Leaders and field commanders may become overconfident in their technology, making them more
assertive than prudence would normally dictate.
Security experts worry that drones, usually fielded in geopolitically dangerous areas of the world, may contribute
to the outbreak of more small wars and conflict escalation. In the Middle East, Iran and Israel are adversaries armed with advanced drones.
15
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Israel is now more likely to use drones in strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. If that happens, Iran will
certainly retaliate, probably using drones, too. In East Asia, China has used drones to monitor the disputed
Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, and Japan has indicated that it plans to do the same. Tokyo has
said it may shoot down Chinese drones, prompting a warning by Beijing that this would mean war with China.
Taiwan, South Korea, India and a number of ASEAN countries are seeking to buy Global Hawk drones from the
U.S., potentially escalating tensions in the South China Sea.
While the U.S. today enjoys the advantages of drones in its fight against terrorism, the White House needs to consider the strategic
implications: proliferation, possible arms races, and the irresponsible use of UAVs in regional disputes and
conflicts. As a global leader, the U.S. should cooperate with the UN and other international organizations to
monitor and regulate the use of drones. Irresponsible use should be taken very seriously, and condemned by the international community.
16
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Democracy Advantage
The NSA’s militarization of the internet threatens democracy and enables totalitarianism
Valeri, 13 (Andy, M.A. Interdisplinary Studies, adjunct at the School of Advertising Art, founder of UnCommon Sense TVMedia. “Communication, Human
Rights, and The Threat of Weapons of Mass Surveillance: Why Communication Rights Are Essential To the Protection and Advancement of Human Rights in the 21st
Century.” Paper presented at the conference on The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy University of Dayton, October
3-5, 2013. http://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=human_rights)
We’re all familiar with Lord Acton’s famous axiom about the corrupting effects of power, particularly that of absolute power. In light of that, what
are the
ramifications for the future of human rights and our right to communicate - to say nothing of the fate of global society on a whole –
due to these increasing levels of access and control over the global information environment that we are witnessing
today, all consolidated among a small cadre of private and state agencies? It is a situation which demands that we redefine power and force relations in society, for if
we do not, “the universality of the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control" (Assange et al., p. 6). This
situation is untenable for any society hoping to assert democratic legitimacy in its governance, for no state can
rightfully claim a monopoly on both violence and information and communication, and still proclaim itself to be
democratically representative. A monopoly on the ability to access and impart information, one imposed by the
coercive force of state power, makes the ability to form actual, legitimately participatory, democratically-based
culture impossible (Goodman, May 29, 2013). And it is this capacity for public participation and accountability in a society, which is essential to the defense
and promotion of human rights (M. Ensalaco, Politics of Human Rights POL 333 lecture, January 15, 2009). Social theorist and technologist Vinay Gupta (2013) has
pointed out how the
Internet, once a promising opportunity for connecting people, creating new businesses, and expanding our capacity
for culture, has today become a surveillance trap. This certainly wasn’t the intention of its inventors, many of whom envisioned it as a way to attain
more “freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected” (Berners-Lee, 2011), not less. In fact, the very architecture of the Internet is predicated
upon such decentralization of power and authority over its operation (Wu, 2010, pp. 197- 202). Yet, in spite of its initial promise in further democratizing the dynamics
of power, we cannot be too overly surprised by some of the recent developments unfolding surrounding its use (or abuse, depending on your perspective). Tools of
liberation also serve as tools for power to push back. We saw this in Egypt, as the social media platforms which were used to organize protests against the Mubarak
regime were the same ones used by the regime to track down and arrest the very same protestors (Gallagher, 2011). As Zeynep Tufekci (Ulrike Reinhard, 2012) has
pointed out, the use of new communication technologies may cause initial disruptions to power, but power always responds. For instance, the advent of the printing
the development of the
Internet has served to open up practically every dimension of society in a way never before experienced – including
to the means for total control… “The dream of being connected is suddenly dystopic. The virtual commons is more closed than the real one ever was.
press gravely wounded the Catholic Church, but the Church adapted and survived (Ulrike Reinhard, 2012). And now today,
And it is becoming clearer and clearer that open source technology will not be enough to us. Our social networks have been infiltrated… Totalitarian states around the
globe are waking up to the fact that if you really want to stay one step ahead, you don’t suppress communication, instead you empower communication with gadgets
we’re all walking around with personal surveillance devices in our pockets,
smartphones which we voluntarily fill with every single detail of our lives” (“A New Generation of Whistleblowers,” 2013). Such
developments pose an existential threat to the future of human communication, and to our declared right to engage
in it “without interference,” to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless
of frontiers” (Article 19, UDHR). The Corrosive Effects of Surveillance on Society and Its Threat To Human Rights French sociologist Jacques Ellul, in his
and free Wi-Fi and listen in. And now
classic work The Technological Society (1964), illustrated the way in which modern mass society becomes dependent upon the very technological processes which
Today, the shared instruments used by human beings around the world to communicate
with one another - the means by which we create culture, engage and maintain personal relationships, participate in civic affairs, maintain our society, and fulfill
our humanity - is being corrupted in ways which threaten the future of democratic civilization. Just as mass production was the
defining backdrop for the struggle surrounding labor rights, mass surveillance is rapidly becoming the defining framework for those of communication rights. Under
the auspices of fighting a seemingly perpetual war against an ever-present threat of ‘terrorism,’ the Internet has
become the active terrain of war, and is considered a battleground, part of the “operational domain” of the
military (Alexander, 2011). And battlegrounds are the least hospitable of environments for the provision and the
protection of human rights and the rule of law (Human Rights and Conflicts, n.d.). The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA),
with no legal mandate, and beyond the bounds of American constitutional and international human rights law, has
made it its own explicit policy to collect and monitor every single form of electronic communication on the planet
(Nakashima & Warrick, 2013). Or, as in the words of NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, to “collect it all” (Nakashima & Warrick,
2013), mirroring the official motto of the Stasi, the infamous secret police force of the former East Germany - “To
Know Everything.” William Binney, an NSA whistleblower who was the research head of its Signals Intelligence
Division and one of the principle architects of these surveillance systems, has warned that their existence creates the
capacity for a “turnkey totalitarianism,” the likes of which we have never seen before (Bamford, 2012).
simultaneously work to undermine it.
17
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Democracy Advantage
Mass surveillance enables tyranny
Lempert, 13 (Richard, Visiting Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Foundation and the University of Michigan’s Eric Stein Distinguished University
Professor of Law and Sociology emeritus. “PRISM and Boundless Informant: Is NSA Surveillance a Threat?” 6-13-13. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/upfront/posts/2013/06/13-prism-boundless-informant-nsa-surveillance-lempert)
Through its PRISM and Boundless Informant efforts, NSA is working to protect the nation, apparently with some success.
The 99.9% of us who pose no threat of terrorism and do not inadvertently consort with possible terrorists should not worry that the government will track our phone or
internet exchanges or that our privacy will be otherwise infringed. This
does not mean, however, that the NSA programs and the
capacities they reveal are of no concern. They should be regarded as canaries in the coal mine; they provide early warning of dangers we may be
confronting. These capacities, along with increasingly ubiquitous surveillance cameras, photo recognition software, the ongoing development of rapid recognition DNA
analysis, drones that can spy or kill and DNA, fingerprint, photo and other searchable digital databases together create what I have called the infrastructure of tyranny.
These technologies potentially enable small groups of people to control and restrict the freedom of far larger
numbers. We think this could not happen here, and I do not claim it is imminent, but recent trends in politics and
social life suggest that if the fear was ever groundless, it no longer is. Not only are our politics deeply and too often viciously divided, but
divisions seem to be stoked by extremists who personally profit from their ability to arouse emotions and by small
numbers of extremely wealthy individuals who spend freely to advance their views of the good society. Moreover, our
political parties and Congress itself sometimes seem more interested in thwarting the opposition or scoring points with their most committed supporters than with
cooperating and compromising to promote the national interest. Concerns raised by these developments are exacerbated by an increased tendency within Congress to
ignore more or less neutral procedural commitments and understandings that have allowed effective governance despite sometimes deep differences in political goals.
In addition, we live in a time of increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility. The experience of other
countries from the French Revolution on suggests that when inequality becomes too great and a small group of “haves” is seen
as capturing too large a share of the pie, protests begin that even if peaceful at the start are prone to erupt into violence. Even
before violence from below erupts, and almost always afterwards, we have seen those on top muster their resources
to suppress dissent and to preserve their positions of power, using violence of their own if need be.
Historically the masses tend, sooner or later, to prevail, but in PRISM, Boundless Informant and other new technologies
we are developing a set of tools that make it more likely that an elite core will be able to disrupt nascent revolt and
maintain its preferred position by increased surveillance and even selective killing. Although it is not likely, it is not
unimaginable that a future administration could, with substantial popular support, use a genuine crisis as an excuse to
postpone a scheduled election, could put down subsequent protests with violence and could create a situation in
which it maintained itself in power using the infrastructure we are creating to protect us from crime and terrorism.
Even if the possibility is small it cannot be too much diminished. Doing this is likely to involve combating inequality, strengthening democratic institutions and
perhaps abandoning the volunteer army, matters too far afield to be further discussed here.
Even if it seems fanciful to fear that American democracy could one day be imperiled by technologies and activities developed to fight crime and terrorism, it is not
foreign governments can, and to some degree are, using these technologies to enable
powerful elites to control people who desire more freedom or might seek to replace them in power. Moreover the lines
demarcating those in control may relegate people of certain religions, gender, or gender preferences or ethnic
heritage to permanent positions of economic disadvantage and powerlessness.
farfetched to recognize the degree to which
Tyranny is possible – claims to the contrary take a short view of history and ignore that
dissidents are already targeted by the government
Dotcom, 13 (Kim, German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur, founder of Megaupload. “Prism: concerns over government tyranny are legitimate”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/13/prism-utah-data-center-surveillance)
Snowden’s leak of classified US government information acquired during his work for the National Security Agency (NSA)
confirms that the US government is gathering and archiving online data and metadata on a massive scale. The data is
stored at NSA data centers, where zettabytes of cloud storage are available to authorities. Snowden’s revelations have again framed the debate
over the balance between our privacy rights and our need for security.
Some proponents of Prism assert that it is an essential tool against terrorism. They claim that only data belonging to foreigners (that is, non-US residents) is retained,
and that content is not reviewed as a matter of course, only algorithmically analysed for suspicious patterns. They point out that a search warrant is still required from a
secret court set up under the US. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) may be spun up so that content – accumulated over years of daily internet spooling –
may be extracted and analysed, laying bare a suspect’s entire virtual life.
18
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Democracy Advantage
Those safeguards have limited value. According to congressional reporting, the FISA court received 1,789 applications for authority to conduct electronic
surveillance in 2012, but not one application was denied. We cannot debate whether the FISA court is a rubber stamp, because its proceedings are secret. Further, any
assurance to US citizens that the NSA will not gather and archive their data is suspect. The “Five Eyes” alliance between the intelligence agencies of the US, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and the UK effectively permits those governments to circumvent the prohibition against gathering data on their own citizens by sharing
information across the Five Eyes intelligence community. The UK for example can spy on Americans and make that information available to the US government on its
massive spy cloud – one that the NSA operates and the Five Eyes share.
Prior to 9/11, the operative presumption in developed nations favoured privacy, but the security narrative has
since reversed the presumption, eroding our privacy rights in favour of government control over our personal
information. However, government is an instrument – sometimes a crude one – susceptible to abuse, as demonstrated by recent
admissions that the US Internal Revenue Service has targeted specific groups based on ideology. When we empower the
state, we empower those that hold sway over the state, and the state is subject to influence from a multitude of quarters.
I have personally been a victim of such abuses. The US government has indicted me, shut down my cloud storage company Megaupload and seized all of my assets
because it claims I was complicit in copyright infringement by some of the people who used the Megaupload service. I have emphasised that I am being prosecuted not
because the charges against me have some sound basis in US copyright law, but because the US justice department has been instrumentalised by certain private interests
that have a financial stake in neutralising my business. That trend represents a danger not just to me, but to all of us.
Recent polls
in the US suggest that the public is not much preoccupied with the fact that our data is being retained, so
long as our own political party is in control of the government. That kind of fickle comfort is small-minded. The
point we should derive from Snowden’s revelations – a point originally expressed in March 2013 by William Binney, a former senior NSA
crypto-mathematician – is that the NSA’s Utah Data Center will amount to a “turnkey” system that, in the wrong hands,
could transform the country into a totalitarian state virtually overnight. Every person who values personal freedom, human rights and
the rule of law must recoil against such a possibility, regardless of their political preference. Others take a more cavalier approach, such as former Google CEO Eric
Schmidt in 2009: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”
We should heed warnings from Snowden because the prospect of an Orwellian society outweighs whatever security benefits we derive from Prism or Five Eyes.
Viewed through the long lens of human history, concerns over government tyranny are always legitimate. It is
those concerns that underpin the constitutions of most developed countries, and inform international principles of
human rights and the rule of law. Prism and its related practices should be discontinued immediately, and the Utah Data Center should be leased to
cloud storage companies with encryption capabilities.
Democracy prevents wars – the less democratic the world is the more global wars will occur
LAPPIN 09 PhD candidate at the Centre for Peace Research and Strategic Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven
in Belgium under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Luc Reychler
Richard Lappin, What Democracy? Exploring the Absent Centre of Post-Conflict Democracy Assistance, Journal of Peace, Conflict and Development, Issue 14, July
2009, http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/JPCD_ExploringAbsentCentrePostConflictDemocracyAssistance.pdf
Security
The relationship between democracy and security has been expounded on both the international and national levels and
the connection has been embraced at the highest strata of peacebuilding. In 2000, for example, UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan declared: ―There are many good reasons for promoting democracy, not least – in the eyes of the United Nations – is that,
when sustained over time, it is a highly effective means of preventing conflict, both within and between states.‖ 6 It is on
the international level that the primacy of democracy to post-conflict peacebuilding has received its strongest support with
reference made typically to the so-called ‗democratic peace theory.‘ This theory derives from one of the most striking results to emerge
from empirical research on war and peace and posits that dyads of democratic states are considerably less likely to fight
one another than dyads made up of non-democracies, or a combination of a democracy and a non-democracy. 7
Although research into this proposition has grown exponentially since the mid 1980s, the basis of the theory can be traced back to Immanuel Kant‘s 1795 essay,
‗Perpetual Peace.‘ Kant contended that in democracies, those who pay for wars – that is, the public – are the ones who make the
decisions, and are therefore understandably more cautious about commencing a war as they are the ones who ultimately have to foot the
costs through both blood (fatalities) and treasure (taxes).8
More recent explanations of the theory include arguments that democratic countries have internalised values of peaceful
bargaining and conflict resolution which are externalised into their international relations, 9 that substantial trade links
between democracies make war an economically crippling proposition, 10 and that democratic leaders avoid fighting wars
because they fear it will damage their chances of staying in power. 11
19
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Democracy Advantage
Although the democratic peace theory has periodically been contested on the grounds of statistical significance,12 what
qualifies as a democracy, 13 and what qualifies as an international conflict, 14 it has proved remarkably robust over the decades. Several
contemporary scholars, such as Tony Smith, maintain that ―a democratic society operating under a market economy has a
strong predisposition to peace‖ 15 , whilst many internationally peer-reviewed articles declare in their introductions
that the majority of research now accepts the democratic peace theory as an empirical reality. 16 As Jack Levy
writes, ―the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything to an empirical law in international
relations.‖ 17 Thus, in order to achieve a more peaceful international system, acceptance of the democratic peace theory
suggests that the more democratic states that exist, the lower the chances of international violence. 18 This is a factor that should
not be underestimated in postconflict environments, and one only has to look at the ‗spill-over‘ of internal conflicts in places such as Liberia, Sudan and Rwanda to
understand the necessity of promoting regional peace zones if security is to prove sustainable.
Moreover, the reasoning behind the democratic peace theory has also influenced the assertion that democratic government
is superior to other forms of government in positively managing internal security. Rudolph Rummel has demonstrated that
democracies are significantly less likely to experience domestic disturbances such as revolutions, guerrilla warfare and
civil war. 19
Rummel claims this is because:
Social conflicts that might become violent are resolved through voting, negotiation, compromise, and mediation. The
success of these procedures is enhanced and supported by the restraints on decision makers of competitive elections, the crosspressures resulting from the natural pluralism of democratic… societies, and the development of a domestic culture and norms that emphasise rational debate,
toleration, negotiation of differences, conciliation, and conflict resolution. 20
The notion that democracy can bring domestic peace to a post-conflict state is supported by several other important
writers. Samuel Huntington asserts that democracies ―are not often politically violent‖ due to constitutional commitments
which guarantee at least a minimal protection of civil and political liberties. 21 William Zartman argues that democracy
―transfers conflict from the violent to the political arena‖, by providing mechanisms to channel dissent and opposition
peacefully, thus reducing the incentive to use violence. 22
This is endorsed by Hans Spanger and Jonas Wolff who emphasise that the openness and freedoms in democracies to express
discontent and to protest circumvents the need for widespread violence. Moreover, the very articulation of discontent through
the freedom of speech and freedom of press can act as an early warning system for the state to identify issues that may
become overly divisive and to respond accordingly. 23 Judith Large and Timothy Sisk, amongst many, have emphasised how
democracies extend the protection of rights to minority groups, 24 which, according to Ted Gurr, ―inhibits communal rebellion‖
25 .
Democratic freedom is the ultimate good – insures value to life, and allows people to rule
themselves – insures no famine, or genocide will go unquestioned. It is the ultimate good
RUMMEL 09 Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii
[Rudy (R.J.) Rummel, Democracy, Democratic peace, freedom, globalization, This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 4:02 pm,
http://democraticpeace.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/why-freedom/]
In the world today, billions of human beings are
still subject to impoverishment, exposure, starvation, disease, torture, rape, beatings, forced
violence, and war. These billions live in fear for their lives, and for those of their loved
ones. They have no human rights, no liberties. These people are only pieces on a playing board for the armed thugs and gangs that oppress their nations,
labor, genocide, mass murder, executions, deportations, political
raping them, looting them, exploiting them, and murdering them. We hide the identity of the gangs—we sanctify them—with the benign concept of “government,” as in
the “government” of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany.
The gangs that control these so-called governments oppress whole nations under cover of international law. They are like a gang
that captures a group of hikers and then does with them what it wills, robbing all, torturing and murdering some because gang members don’t like them or they are
“disobedient,” and raping others. Nonetheless, the thugs that rule nations “govern” by the right of sovereignty: the community of nations
explicitly grants them the right by international law to govern a nation when they show that they effectively control the national government, and this right carries with
it the promise that other nations will not intervene in their internal affairs.
International law now recognizes that if these gangs go to extremes, such as massive ethnic cleansing or genocide, then
the international community has a countervailing right to stop them. However, this area of international law is still developing, and in the
current examples of Cuba, Burma, Iran, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria, among others, the thugs still largely have their way with
their victims. This is unconscionable. The people of these countries, and all people everywhere have the right to freedom of speech,
20
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
religion, organization, and a fair trial, among other rights, and one overarching right to be free subsumes all these civil and
political rights. This right overrules sovereignty, which is granted according to tradition based on a system of international treaties, not natural law.
Freedom, by contrast, is not something others grant. It is a right due every human being.
For too many intellectuals, however, it is not enough to point out that a people have a right to be free. They will counter by
arguing that freedom is desirable, but first people must be made equal, given food to eat, work, and health care. Freedom must
be limited as a means to good ends, such as the public welfare, prosperity, peace, ethnic unity, or national honor. Sometimes the intellectuals who go
about creating such justifications for denying people their freedom are so persuasive that even reasonable people
will accept their convoluted arguments. Need I mention the works of Marx and Lenin, for example, who provided “scientific” excuses
for the tyranny of such thugs as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot?
To many compassionate people, such intellectuals, arguing that freedom must be sacrificed for a better life, have had the best of the
argument and the moral high ground. These intellectuals have tried to show that freedom empowers greed, barbaric competition, inefficiency, inequality,
the debasement of morals, the weakening of ethnic or racial identity, and so on.
To be defensive about freedom in the face of such justifications is morally wrong-headed. No moral code or civil law allows that a
gang leader and his followers can murder, torture, and repress some at will as long as the thugs provide others with a good life. But even were it accepted that under the
cover of government authority, a ruler can murder and repress his people so long as it promotes human betterment, the burden of proof is on those who
argue that therefore those people will be better off
There is no such proof. Quite the opposite: in the twentieth century, we have had the most costly and extensive tests of
such arguments, involving billions of people. The Nazis, Italian fascists under Mussolini, Japanese militarists, and Chinese
Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek have tested fascist promises of a better life. Likewise, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have tested the utopian
promises of communism, to mention the most prominent communist experiments; and Burma, Iraq, and Syria, among others, also have tested state socialism. All
these vast social experiments have failed, utterly and miserably, and they have done so at the vast human cost that has included global social upheaval,
the displacement of millions, the impoverishment of billions, and the death of tens of millions from famine, extreme internal violence, and the most destructive wars—
not to mention the many hundreds of millions murdered outright.
These social experiments have involved the mass murder of 262,000,000 Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Poles, North Koreans, Cubans,
Vietnamese, and others, such that were their souls to comprise a land of the dead it would be among the world’s top three in population
In sharp contrast, there are the arguments for freedom. Not only is a right certified in international law (e.g., the various human rights
multinational conventions), but a supreme moral good in itself. The very fact of a people’s freedom creates a better life for all.
Free people create a wealthy and prosperous society
When people are free to go about their own business, they put their ingenuity and creativity in the service of all. They search for ways to satisfy the needs, desires, and
wants of others. The true utopia lies not in some state-sponsored tyranny, but the free market in goods, ideas, and services, whose operating principle is that success
depends on satisfying others. Moreover, it is not by chance that:
No democratically free people have suffered from mass famine
It is extraordinary, how little known this is. There are plenty of hunger projects and plans to increase food aid for the starving millions, all of which is good enough in
the short run. A starving person will die before the people can kick out their rulers or make them reform their policies. Yet simply feeding the starving today is not
enough. They also have to be fed tomorrow and every day thereafter. However, free these people from their rulers’ commands over their farming,
and soon they will be able to feed themselves and others as well. There is an adage that applies to this: “Give a starving person a fish to eat and
you feed him only for one day; teach him how to fish, and he feeds himself forever.” Yet teaching is no good alone, if people are not free to apply their new
knowledge—yes, teach them how to fish, but also promote the freedom they need to do so
Surprisingly, the incredible economic productivity and wealth produced by a free people and their freedom from famines are not the only moral goods of freedom, nor,
perhaps, even the most important moral goods. When people are free, they comprise a spontaneous society the characteristics of which strongly inhibit society-wide
political violence. Freedom greatly reduces the possibility of revolutions, civil war, rebellions, guerrilla warfare, coups, violent riots, and the like. Most of the violence
within nations occurs where thugs rule with absolute power. There is a continuum here:
The more power the rulers have, and the less free their people, the more internal violence these people will suffer
Surely that which protects people against internal violence, that which so saves human lives, is a moral good. And this is
freedom
Then there is mass democide, the most destructive means of ending human lives of any form of violence. Except in the case of
the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, few people know how murderous the dictators of this world have been, and could be . Virtually
unknown are the shocking tens of millions murdered by Stalin and Mao, and the other millions wiped out by Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, and their kind. Just
omitting foreigners, who are most often murdered during a war, such thugs murdered about 161,000,000 of their own people from 1900 to 1987. Adding foreigners and
including the whole twentieth century raises the toll they have killed to nearly the incredible aforementioned 262,000,000.
Even now, in the twenty-first century, these mass murders still go on in Burma, Sudan, North Korea, and the Congo (DR), just to mention the
most glaring examples.
What is true about freedom and internal violence is also so for this mass democide:
The more freedom a people have, the less likely their rulers will murder them. The more power the thugs have, the more
likely they are to murder their people
Could there be a greater moral good than to end or minimize such mass murder? This is what freedom does and for this it is, emphatically, a moral good .
21
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Rights Advantage
The Internet Age requires a rethinking of traditional notions of human rights – control over the
internet is now synonymous with the ability to wield power
Valeri, 13 (Andy, M.A. Interdisplinary Studies, adjunct at the School of Advertising Art, founder of UnCommon Sense TVMedia. “Communication, Human
Rights, and The Threat of Weapons of Mass Surveillance: Why Communication Rights Are Essential To the Protection and Advancement of Human Rights in the 21st
Century.” Paper presented at the conference on The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy University of Dayton, October
3-5, 2013. http://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=human_rights)
The evolution and progression of human rights
principles and practices throughout history have been defined by - and have very often defined - the conditions and
circumstances of the eras within which they develop. For example, new standards of civil and political rights arose as Enlightenment-inspired
Communication Rights: The Primary Human Rights Struggle of The Information Age
ideals took root in the latter years of the Agrarian Age, finding their globally transformative expression as the animating principles which drove the American and
French Revolutions of the late 18th Century (and nearly triggering a similar such revolution in Britain at the time, as well). It
was the conditions and
effects of the Industrial Revolution which moved labor rights squarely to the center of the ongoing struggle for
human rights. From abolitionism to the rise of unions and beyond, these rights even became the foundational basis for the development of entire ideological
movements (for example, socialism and communism), ones whose political ramifications continue to have global significance to this day. And now in today’s
“Information Age,” one defined by the revolutionary expansion of digital media technologies and networked
communication systems, we find communication rights, and the associated information rights ingrained within
them, thrust into a similar position of preeminent importance. This is because any meaningful protection and
exercise of rights within a society are eventually dependent upon power, and in today’s modern mass mediated
society, communication and information are where the central nexus of power lies. If the work of human rights is to be
fundamentally about empowerment rather than charity (thus underlying the very premise of the concept of rights as opposed to privileges), then it must act in
accordance with this essential truth. For the human rights community to ignore this is to seriously risk marginalizing the value and effectiveness of its work. It should
be made clear, however, that this rising primacy of communication rights does not replace the essential importance of many of the other rights which came to
prominence in earlier times. Rather, they serve to build upon them. Like the composition of a mountain, these new stratum of rights provide further evolutionary
formation of both our understanding and practice of human rights, as they continue to evolve through the ages, and through the world’s histories and cultural notions of
There is no issue that more defines the
ongoing struggle for communication rights and their preeminent importance to the future of human rights, than
that over access and control of the Internet. Its presence has become ubiquitous throughout society, and in many
respects essential, serving as the primary foundation for the digital communication revolution underway today.
Whether this revolution represents the most important shift in the course of human history is a debatable point, and
one best left to academics for another time. What is incontrovertible is that it is the most important shift happening now, with
the Internet serving as the axial point for practically all human knowledge and activity within society today.
Relationships are being shaped and defined through it. Society itself has become embedded into it. Almost nothing
happens outside some form of contact with it. It is the device by which practically all communication transpires,
the matrix upon which we engage in trade, create culture, and participate in civic affairs. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who
the common good (Ishay, 2004/2008). The Internet – Ground Zero In The Battle For Communication Rights
invented the computer protocol that made the Web as we know it possible, envisioned its very structure as one built specifically upon egalitarian ideals, its purpose to
provide “electronic human rights,” its principles founded upon the Magna Carta and U.S. Constitution, and other such rights-expanding documents (Berners-Lee, 2011).
Ambassador Philip L. Verveer, U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, sees the Internet as the vehicle by which we are able to
manifest our “human right to communicate [our] ideas [and] to secure information” (USA and Europe, 2011). According to Berners-Lee (2011), the
Web is now more critical to democracy and free speech than any other medium, providing a communications
channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. It’s been said that the Internet has led the
greatest period of political education among the greatest number of people ever (Goodman, May 29, 2013). For whenever a new
form of communication is introduced, one that increases people’s ability to share ideas and information about how the world works, and is beyond the reach of
centralized control, the state of humanity notably improves (Goodman, May 29, 2013). According to new media sociologist Zeynep Tufekci (Ulrike Reinhard, 2012), it
power can no longer readily
operate through tactics of divide and conquer simply by preventing people from talking to each other. What we
are witnessing today is an entirely new phenomenon, as the aggregate of all intellectual knowledge from
throughout human history is being placed upon the Internet, resulting in a merging of global civilization with the
Internet itself (Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn & Zimmerman, 2012). This is why efforts by states and private corporations to
wield dominate influence and control over the Internet’s infrastructure, and the information that passes over it,
has such profound implications for the future of our society and the protection of our rights within it. Information
after all, is power, and the Internet is the modern conduit both to it and of it. These communication networks are
not only at the center of power structures, they are the tools for actually creating them and controlling them. As
Berners-Lee (2011) warned, control over the Internet “is the sort of power that if you give it to a corrupt
is because of the Internet that we are moving away from a world where rule is based upon gatekeeping and censorship, and
22
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Rights Advantage
government, you give them the ability to stay in power forever.” This is why the Internet, as the consolidator of
what is often referred to as “big data,” has become the goldmine to be controlled and exploited for political and
economic political advantage. It’s where real power and wealth resides today. It’s why a social networking site like
Facebook becomes valued at over 100 billion dollars (Watson, 2012). It’s why numerous African countries are
being provided whole internet infrastructures from the Chinese, including fiber optic cable and backbone switches,
yet aren’t being asked to pay for them in money, but rather in data (Assange et al., p. 49). It is why the U.S.
government spends tens of billions every year to track, copy, and store every piece of electronic communication
from the hundreds of millions - potentially even billions – of people’s communications that it is increasingly able to
access (Andrews & Lindeman, 2013).
Mass surveillance produces self-censorship and breaks down all social relations of trust. This is
not a dystopian fantasy: East Germany, Uzbekistan, and Soviet Czechoslovakia demonstrate the
threat to human dignity and authenticity
Valeri, 13 (Andy, M.A. Interdisplinary Studies, adjunct at the School of Advertising Art, founder of UnCommon Sense TVMedia. “Communication, Human
Rights, and The Threat of Weapons of Mass Surveillance: Why Communication Rights Are Essential To the Protection and Advancement of Human Rights in the 21st
Century.” Paper presented at the conference on The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy University of Dayton, October
3-5, 2013. http://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=human_rights)
The rapidly expanding and indiscriminate use of these weapons of mass surveillance is destroying the intrinsic
capacity for human beings to communicate and to share information in ways commiserate with our fundamental
human rights to privacy, information, and communication. It threatens our ability to maintain our personal
dignity and authenticity as human beings, by degrading our right and ability to define and control the meaning
and purpose of the lives we live, and the relationships we engage with among each other. It turns our humanity
against us, perverting and prostituting our every expressed thought or desire, declared affirmation or repudiation,
into potential grounds for criminal investigation, commercial exploitation, or political intimidation. The NSA is
making every phone conversation, every email, every webpage viewed, every purchase made, into a secret
government document (Nakashima & Warrick, 2013). Facebook is transforming every personal statement into a public proclamation (Kee, 2013). Regardless
of the self-serving announcements made by the creator of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, that privacy is no longer a “social norm” (Johnson, 2010), “share with friends” is
not taken by the users of social media to mean “share with friends, corporations, and the state.” Facebook is also endeavoring to make people’s ostensibly private wall
posts on it available to media corporations for potential use in their programming, without even the knowledge or permission of the poster (Kee, 2013). Such forms of
“surfacing” (to use the company’s euphemism for this practice) strips people of their inherent right of agency over their own communicative process, agency over who
the recipient of that communication is and its intended meaning. 2 Zuckerberg and his confederates among the information technology field may feel that people are
This calls to
mind the repetitive refrain often heard from defenders of these surveillance practices, that “if you don’t have
anything to hide, you don’t have anything to worry about.” However, one doesn’t leave one’s doors unlocked, or
computer programs without passwords simply because one “doesn’t have anything to hide.” As Vinay Gupta has astutely
much more accepting of “sharing” and exposure in today’s technological environment (Johnson, 2010), but sharing is one thing, taking quite another.
observed, privacy may be dead to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, but try telling that to lawyers, doctors and accountants… “Our society cannot function without
professional confidentiality, and having foreign powers be presumed to intercept all communications is simply the end of these professions as we have known them.
There’s no trusted advisor to consult with when it’s all ending up in the Utah data center to be consulted in future
decades under administrations with unknown political agendas” (Gupta, 2013). Perhaps even more disconcerting are
the demonstrable effects that persistent surveillance has on the psychological well being of individuals and
societies. Studies have detailed the many distorting impacts that it has on how we think and act (Parramore, 2013). Some have shown that the
electronic monitoring of employees increases the levels of tension, anxiety, anger, depression, even boredom and
fatigue among workers (Smith, Carayon, Sanders, Lim & LeGrande, 1992). East German society has never fully recovered from
the corrupting effects of the voyeuristic interference by the state in the social relationships of its people (Jacob & Tyrell,
2010). Internet research in places like Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan have shown how the presence of surveillance on
the Web corrodes the meaning and relevancy of people’s communication, particularly as it relates to matters of
civic participation (Kendzior, 2012). These studies show that, regardless of the amount of official censorship present, the
shifting of “social norms” in respect to privacy expectations has a marked impact on our willingness “to confide, to
criticize, to make mistakes, to change our minds” (Kendzior, 2012). The detrimental societal effects of this kind selfcensorship were well-documented by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1974) in her groundbreaking research on what she
23
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Rights Advantage
termed “the spiral of silence.” We see its effects in the “perception falsification” that takes place when people fail
to express their real thoughts or preferences out of fear of failing to conform to social or political norms (Ars
Electronica, 2011). Czech writer, dissident, and later president Václav Havel, argued that the credibility of the entire
structure of society itself is eroded by its reliance upon rituals and norms “untested by public discussion and
controversy” (Keane, 2000). When it comes to the destructive effects wrought by mass surveillance, there is probably no more brutal example than that of
Ceausescu’s Rumania, where truly every action observable would be reported to the secret police (Duque, 2011) . In such a society, deliberate
deception becomes the key to survival, a trait which quickly bleeds into all other human relations; personal, family,
commercial, etc. The true cost of surveillance thus becomes the destruction of society itself (Duque, 2011).
The protection of rights outweighs the small risk of terrorism. The threat of terrorism should be
understood as a built-in cost to living in a free society
Wallace, 07 (David Foster, correspondent w/r/t John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000, mastermind behind the incredibly potent DMZ, commencement
speaker at Kenyon College. “Just Asking,” November 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-asking/306288/)
Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we
chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs,
“sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to
terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to
make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal
safety and comfort? In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable
precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic
republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth
protecting? Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic
highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high
price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200
years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of
sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious? In the absence of
such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American
idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the
Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our
persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate
because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even
want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?
Human rights are an Apriori issue. They guarantee the baseline conditions for living a decent
human life. You should be highly skeptical of any attempts to discard them in favor of utilitarian
calculation.
Donnelly, 85 (Jack,
College of the Holy Cross, The Concept of Human Rights, 1985, p. 55-58)
Basic moral and political rights are not just weighting factors in utilitarian calculations that deal with an
undifferentiated 'happiness'. Rather, they are demands and constraints of a different order, grounded in an essentially
substantive judgement of the conditions necessary for human development and flourishing. They also provide
means - rights - for realising human potentials. The neutrality of utilitarianism, its efforts to assure that everyone
counts 'equally,' results in no-one counting as a person; as Robert E. Goodin puts it, people drop out of utilitarian
calculations, which are instead about disembodied preferences (1981:95; compare Dworkin 1977:94-100,232-8, 274 ff.). In Aristotelian
terms, utilitarianism errs in basing its judgements on 'numerical' rather than 'proportional' equality. For our purposes, such differences should be highlighted. Therefore,
let us consider utilitarianism, whether act or rule, as an alternative to rights in general, and thus human rights as well. In particular, we can consider utility and human
24
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Rights Advantage
rights as competing strategies for limiting the range of legitimate state action. Once again, Bentham provides a useful focus for our discussion. While Bentham insists
on the importance of limiting the range of legitimate state action (1838:11, 495, VIII, .557 ff.), he also insists that (natural) rights do not set those limits. In fact, he
argues that construed as limits on the state, natural rights 'must ever be, - the rights of anarchy', justifying insurrection whenever a single right is violated (1838:11, 522,
For Bentham, natural rights are absolute rights, and thus inappropriate to the real world of political
action. In fact, though, no major human rights theorist argues that they are absolute. For example, Locke holds that the right to
496, 501, 506).
revolution is reserved by society, not the individual (1967: para. 243). Therefore, individual violations of human rights per se do not justify revolution. Furthermore,
Locke supports revolution only in cases of gross, persistent and systematic violations of natural rights (1967:paras 204, 207, 225), as does Paine. The very idea of
absolute rights is absurd from a human rights perspective, since logically there can be at most one absolute right, unless we (unreasonably) assume thatrights never
come into conflict. A more modest claim would be that human rights are 'absolute' in the sense that they override all principles and practices except other human rights.
Even this doctrine, however, is rejected by most if not all major human rights theorists and documents. For example, Article I of the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man, after declaring that 'men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights', adds that 'civil distinctions, therefore, can befounded only on
public utility', thus recognising restrictions on thecontinued complete equality of rights. Similarly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 29) permits such
limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just
requirements of morality,public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes a similar
general limiting proviso (Article 4) as well as particular limitations on most of the enumerated rights. Rights ordinarily 'trump' other
considerations, but the mere presence of a right - even a basic human right - does not absolutely and automatically
determine the proper course of action, all things considered. In certain exceptional circumstances, needs, utility,
interests or righteousness may override rights. The duties correlative to rights, and even the trumping force ofrights, are prima facie only. But
other principles also have prima facie moral force. Sometimes this will be sufficient to overcome even the special entrenched priority of rights. The obligations arising
from such rights therefore ought not to be discharged, all things considered. In such cases, we can speak of the right being 'infringed', since the (prima facie) obligation
But if even basic human
rights can be justifiably infringed, aren't rights ultimately subservient to utility? If recalcitrant political realities sometimes require
correlative to the rightis not discharged, but it would be seriously misleading to say that ithad been 'violated' (Thomson 1976, 1977).
subordinating natural rights, aren't we simply suggesting that human rights are merely utopian aspirations inappropriate to a world in which dirty hands are often a
requirementof political action - and thus where utility is the only reasonableguide? Such a response misconstrues the relationship between rights and utility and the
ways in which rights are overridden. Consider a very simple case, involving minor rights that on their face would seem to be easily overridden. If A promises to drive B
and C to the movies but later changes his mind, in deciding whether to keep his promise and discharge his rights-based obligations). A must consider morethan the
relative utilities of both courses of action for all the partiesaffected; in most cases, he ought to drive them to the movies even ifthat would reduce overall utility. At the
very least he must ask themto excuse him from his obligation, this requirement (as well as thepower to excuse) being a reflection of the right-holder's control overthe
rights relationship. Utility alone usually will not override even minor rights; we require more than a simple calculation of utility to justify infringing rights. The special
priority of rights/titles, as we have seen, implies that the quality, not just the quantity, of the countervailing forces(utilities) must be taken into consideration. For
example, if, whenthe promised time comes, A wants instead to go get drunk with someother friends, simply not showing up to drive B and C to the movieswill not be
justifiable even if that would maximise utility; the desirefor a drunken binge is not a consideration that ordinarily willjustifiably override rights. But if A accompanies
an accident victimto the hospital, even if A is only one of several passers-by whostopped to offer help, and his action proves to be of no real benefitto the victim,
usually this will be a sufficient excuse, even if utilitywould be maximised by A going to the movies. Therefore, evenrecasting rights as weighted interests (which would
seem to be theobvious utilitarian 'fix' to capture the special priority of rights) stillmisses the point, because it remains essentially quantitative. Rights even tend to
override an accumulation of comparable or parallel interests. Suppose that sacrificing a single innocent person with a rare blood factor could completely and
permanently cure ten equally innocent victims of a disease that produces a sure, slow and agonising death. Each of the eleven has the 'same' right to life.Circumstances
require, however, that a decision be made as to whowill live and who will die. The natural rights theorist would almostcertainly choose to protect the rights of the one
individual - andsuch a conclusion, when faced with the scapegoat problem, is one ofthe greatest virtues of a natural rights doctrine to its advocates. Thisconclusion rests
on a qualitative judgement that establishes theright, combined with the further judgement that it is not society'srole to infringe such rights simply to foster utility, a
judgementarising from the special moral priority of rights. Politically, such considerations are clearest in the case of extremely unpopular minorities. For example,
plausible arguments can be made that considerations of utility would justify persecution of selected religious minorities (e.g. Jews for centuries in the West,Mormons in
nineteenth-century America, Jehovah's Witnesses incontemporary Malawi), even giving special weight to the interests ofmembers of these minorities and considering
the precedents set by such persecutions. None the less, human rights demand that anessentially qualitative judgement be made that such persecutions are incompatible
with a truly human life and cannot be allowed - andsuch judgements go a long way to explaining the relative appeal ofhuman rights theories. But suppose that the
sacrifice of one innocent person would savenot ten but a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million people.All things considered, trading one innocent life for a
million, even ifthe victim resists most forcefully, would seem to be not merelyjustifiable but demanded. Exactly how do we balance rights (in thesense of 'having a
Ultimately the defender of
human rights is forced back to human nature, the source of natural or human rights. For a natural rights theorist
there are certain attributes, potentialities and holdings that are essential to the maintenance of a life worthy of a
human being.These are given the special protection of natural rights; any 'utility' that might be served by their
infringement or violation would be indefensible, literally inhuman - except in genuinely extraordinary
circumstances, the possibility of which cannot be denied, but the probability of which should not be overestimated.
Extraordinary circumstances do force us to admit that, at somepoint, however rare, the force of utilitarian
considerations builds up until quantity is transformed into quality. The human rights theorist, however, insists on
the extreme rarity of such cases. Furthermore,exotic cases should not be permitted to obscure the fundamental difference in emphasis (and in the
right'), wrongs (in the sense of 'what is right') andinterests? Do the numbers count? If so, why, and in what way? Ifnot, why not?
resulting judgements in virtuallyall cases) between utility and (human) rights. Nor should they be allowed to obscure the fact that on balance the flaws in rights-based
theories and practicesseem less severe, and without a doubt lessnumerous, than those of utility-based political strategies.
25
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Internet Freedom
U.S. mass surveillance is the root cause of eroding global norms supporting internet freedom.
The plan changes that.
Washington Post, 14 (Citing a Freedom House report. “In the ‘global struggle for Internet freedom,’ the Internet is losing, report finds” 12-4-14.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/04/in-the-global-struggle-for-internet-freedom-the-internet-is-losing-report-finds/)
The year 2014 marks the moment that the world turned its attention to writing laws to govern what happens on the
Internet. And that has not been a great thing, according to an annual report from the U.S.-based pro-democracy
think tank Freedom House.
Traditionally, countries eager to crack down on their online critics largely resorted to blocking Web sites and filtering Internet content, with the occasional offline
harassment of dissidents. But that has changed, in part because online activists have gotten better at figuring out ways around those restrictions; Freedom House points
to Greatfire, a service that takes content blocked in mainland China and hosts it on big, global platforms, like Amazon's servers, that the Chinese government finds both
politically and technologically difficult to block.
In the wake of these tactics, repressive regimes have begun opting for a "technically uncensored Internet," Freedom House finds, but one
that is increasingly controlled by national laws about what can and can't be done online. In 36 of the 65 countries
surveyed around the world the state of Internet freedom declined in 2014, according to the report.
Russia, for example, passed a law that allows the country's prosecutor general to block "extremist" Web sites
without any judicial oversight. Kazakstan passed a similar law. Vietnam passed decrees cracking down on any
critiques of the state on social media sites. Nigeria passed a law requiring that Internet cafes keep logs of the
customers who come into their shops and use their computers.
There's a bigger worry at work, too, Freedom House says: the potential for a "snowball effect." More and more
countries, the thinking goes, will adopt these sorts of restrictive laws. And the more that such laws are put in place,
the more they fall within the range of acceptable global norms.
Also shifting those norms? According to Freedom House, "Some states are using the revelations of widespread surveillance by the
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as an excuse to augment their own monitoring capabilities, frequently with
little or no oversight, and often aimed at the political opposition and human rights activists."
Mass surveillance undermines U.S. attempts to promote global internet freedom – it discredits
local civil society and justifies restrictive internet policy
Kehl et. al, 14 (Danielle Kehl is a Policy Analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI). Kevin Bankston is the Policy Director at OTI, Robyn
Greene is a Policy Counsel at OTI, and Robert Morgus is a Research Associate at OTI.“Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom &
Cybersecurity” July 2014. https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf)
The effects of the NSA disclosures on the Internet Freedom agenda go beyond the realm of Internet governance.
The loss of the United States as a model on Internet Freedom issues has made it harder for local civil society
groups around the world—including the groups that the State Department’s Internet Freedom programs typically support203—to advocate for
Internet Freedom within their own governments.204 The Committee to Protect Journalists, for example, reports
that in Pakistan, “where freedom of expression is largely perceived as a Western notion, the Snowden revelations
have had a damaging effect. The deeply polarized narrative has become starker as the corridors of power push
back on attempts to curb government surveillance.”205 For some of these groups, in fact, even the appearance of collaboration
with or support from the U.S. government can diminish credibility, making it harder for them to achieve local
goals that align with U.S. foreign policy interests.206 The gap in trust is particularly significant for individuals and organizations that receive
funding from the U.S. government for free expression activities or circumvention tools. Technology supported by or exported from the United States is, in some cases,
Moreover,
revelations of what the NSA has been doing in the past decade are eroding the moral high ground that the United
States has often relied upon when putting public pressure on authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran
to change their behavior. In 2014, Reporters Without Borders added the United States to its “Enemies of the
Internet” list for the first time, explicitly linking the inclusion to NSA surveillance. “The main player in [the United States’] vast
inherently suspect due to the revelations about the NSA’s surveillance dragnet and the agency’s attempts to covertly influence product development.
surveillance operation is the highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA) which, in the light of Snowden’s revelations, has come to symbolize the abuses by the
The damaged perception of the United States208 as a leader on Internet
Freedom and its diminished ability to legitimately criticize other countries for censorship and surveillance opens
world’s intelligence agencies,” noted the 2014 report.207
26
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Internet Freedom
the door for foreign leaders to justify—and even expand— their own efforts.209 For example, the Egyptian
government recently announced plans to monitor social media for potential terrorist activity, prompting backlash
from a number of advocates for free expression and privacy.210 When a spokesman for the Egyptian Interior
Ministry, Abdel Fatah Uthman, appeared on television to explain the policy, one justification that he offered in
response to privacy concerns was that “the US listens in to phone calls, and supervises anyone who could threaten
its national security.”211 This type of rhetoric makes it difficult for the U.S. to effectively criticize such a policy.
Similarly, India’s comparatively mild response to allegations of NSA surveillance have been seen by some critics
“as a reflection of India’s own aspirations in the world of surveillance,” a further indication that U.S. spying may
now make it easier for foreign governments to quietly defend their own behavior.212 It is even more difficult for the United States
to credibly indict Chinese hackers for breaking into U.S. government and commercial targets without fear of retribution in light of the NSA revelations.213 These
challenges reflect an overall decline in U.S. soft power on free expression issues.
U.S. leadership shapes global internet norms – pro-freedom rhetoric must be paired with
concrete policy changes
Gross, 13 (David, U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy at the State Department from 2001-2009.
“Walking the Talk: The
Role of U.S. Leadership in the Wake of WCIT,” 1-17-13. http://www.bna.com/walking-the-talk-the-role-of-u-s-leadership-in-the-wake-of-wcit-by-david-a-gross/)
During the past month, more has been written about December's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), hosted by the United Nation's
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Dubai, than about any previous international telecoms treaty conference. And for good reason. Despite the fact that
the nominal focus of the conference was to bring up-to-date a 1988 telecommunications treaty regarding traditional international telecoms services, countries such as
Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others sought to use the gathering to establish new international rules through the ITU governing the internet. Although many believe
that WCIT failed because 55 countries—including the United States, virtually all of Europe, and other internet-leading countries such as Kenya and India—did not sign
the revised treaty, in reality WCIT was an important early chapter in the critical global process of determining the internet's political and policy future—and in turn, its
technical and economic future.
It is important to recognize that the internet's political and policy future will be shaped by American leadership—
not just through traditional U.S. rhetoric about competition, private sector leadership, and “multi-stakeholder” decisionmaking, but by
America's ability to “walk the talk” by showing unequivocally that the ideals we preach internationally are fully
reflected in what we do at home.
American policymakers recognize that what we do domestically is watched and analyzed with great care by much
of the rest of the world. For example, before the WCIT negotiations began in Dubai, Congress unanimously passed
resolutions on internet governance that stated that “the United States should continue to preserve and advance the multi-stakeholder governance model
under which the Internet has thrived as well as resist the imposition of an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) mandated international settlement regime on
the Internet.” Declaring,
among other things, that “it is essential that the Internet remain stable, secure, and free from
government control.”
Congress's Clear Message Was Heard
This action was important not only because of the substance of Congress's statements, but also because the world understood just how extraordinary it is for our
I heard
from many foreign officials that they knew that the United States would not sign the revised treaty with its
Internet-related provisions because Congress had sent a clear and unequivocal message that such an agreement
was unacceptable to the American people.
Looking ahead, we must recognize the obvious—internet policy issues affect virtually everyone in the world, and
U.S. leadership depends on the power of its forward looking arguments, not just the historical fact that the United
States gave the world a transformational technology. Although establishing global internet policy will be long, complex and challenging, we
Congress to act with unanimity, especially in an era when Congress has immense difficulty reaching consensus on almost anything. At the end of WCIT,
are fortunate that we have a well-established road map to follow.
No Room for Hypocrisy
We can continue to lead the world toward greater prosperity and the socially transformational benefits long
associated with the internet. But if we fail to match our words with action; if we insist that others avoid an
approach that imposes regulations and laws that limit the internet's capacity to advance freedom, openness and
creativity, micromanages markets, or limits competition and investment, but do otherwise at home, then the world
will quickly recognize our hypocrisy.
27
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Internet Freedom
Repressed internet dooms innovation – that is vital to solving the world’s collective problems
Genachowski 13
[Chair-FCC, 4/16, "The Plot to Block Internet Freedom", http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/16/plot_block_internet_freedom?page=full]
The Internet has created an extraordinary new democratic forum for people around the world to express their opinions. It is revolutionizing global access to information:
Today, more than 1 billion people worldwide have access to the Internet, and at current growth rates, 5 billion people -- about 70 percent of the world's population -will be connected in five years. But this growth trajectory is not inevitable, and threats are mounting to the global spread of an open and truly
"worldwide" web. The expansion of the open Internet must be allowed to continue: The mobile and social media
revolutions are critical not only for democratic institutions' ability to solve the collective problems of a shrinking world,
but also to a dynamic and innovative global economy that depends on financial transparency and the free flow of
information. The threats to the open Internet were on stark display at last December's World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, where the
United States fought attempts by a number of countries -- including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia -- to give a U.N. organization, the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), new regulatory authority over the Internet. Ultimately, over the objection of the United States and many others, 89 countries voted to
approve a treaty that could strengthen the power of governments to control online content and deter broadband deployment. In Dubai, two deeply worrisome trends
came to a head. First, we see that the Arab Spring and similar events have awakened nondemocratic governments to the danger that the
Internet poses to their regimes. In Dubai, they pushed for a treaty that would give the ITU's imprimatur to governments'
blocking or favoring of online content under the guise of preventing spam and increasing network security. Authoritarian
countries' real goal is to legitimize content regulation, opening the door for governments to block any content they do not
like, such as political speech. Second, the basic commercial model underlying the open Internet is also under threat . In
particular, some proposals, like the one made last year by major European network operators, would change the ground rules for payments for transferring Internet
content. One species of these proposals is called "sender pays" or "sending party pays." Since the beginning of the Internet, content creators -- individuals, news outlets,
search engines, social media sites -- have been able to make their content available to Internet users without paying a fee to Internet service providers. A sender-pays
rule would change that, empowering governments to require Internet content creators to pay a fee to connect with an end user in that country. Sender pays may look
merely like a commercial issue, a different way to divide the pie. And proponents of sender pays and similar changes claim they would benefit Internet deployment and
Internet users. But the opposite is true: If a country imposed a payment requirement, content creators would be less likely to serve that country. The loss of content
would make the Internet less attractive and would lessen demand for the deployment of Internet infrastructure in that country. Repeat the process in a few more
countries, and the growth of global connectivity -- as well as its attendant benefits for democracy -- would slow dramatically.
So too would the benefits accruing to the global economy. Without continuing improvements in transparency and information sharing, the
innovation that springs from new commercial ideas and creative breakthroughs is sure to be severely inhibited. To their
credit, American Internet service providers have joined with the broader U.S. technology industry, civil society, and
others in opposing these changes. Together, we were able to win the battle in Dubai over sender pays, but we have not yet
won the war. Issues affecting global Internet openness, broadband deployment, and free speech will return in upcoming
international forums, including an important meeting in Geneva in May, the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum. The massive investment in wired
and wireless broadband infrastructure in the United States demonstrates that preserving an open Internet is completely compatible with broadband deployment.
According to a recent UBS report, annual wireless capital investment in the United States increased 40 percent from 2009 to 2012, while investment in the rest of the
world has barely inched upward. And according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, more fiber-optic cable was laid in the United States in 2011
and 2012 than in any year since 2000, and 15 percent more than in Europe. All Internet users lose something when some countries are cut off from the World Wide
Web. Each person who is unable to connect to the Internet diminishes our own access to information. We become less able to understand the world and formulate
policies to respond to our shrinking planet. Conversely, we gain a richer understanding of global events as more people connect around the world, and those societies
nurturing nascent democracy movements become more familiar with America's traditions of free speech and pluralism. That's why we believe that the Internet should
remain free of gatekeepers and that no entity -- public or private -- should be able to pick and choose the information web users can receive. That is a principle the
United States adopted in the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 Open Internet Order. And it's why we are deeply concerned about arguments by some in the
United States that broadband providers should be able to block, edit, or favor Internet traffic that travels over their networks, or adopt economic models similar to
international sender pays. We must preserve the Internet as the most open and robust platform for the free exchange of
information ever devised. Keeping the Internet open is perhaps the most important free speech issue of our time.
28
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
1AC – Internet Freedom
We need a free and open internet – it solves all the world’s problems
Eagleman 10 [David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for
Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law and author of Sum (Canongate). Nov. 9, 2010, “ Six
ways the internet will save civilization,”
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/12/start/apocalypse-no]
Many great civilisations have fallen, leaving nothing but cracked ruins and scattered genetics. Usually this results from:
natural disasters, resource depletion, economic meltdown, disease, poor information flow and corruption . But
we’re luckier than our predecessors because we command a technology that no one else possessed: a rapid
communication network that finds its highest expression in the internet. I propose that there are six ways in which
the net has vastly reduced the threat of societal collapse. Epidemics can be deflected by telepresence One of our
more dire prospects for collapse is an infectious-disease epidemic. Viral and bacterial epidemics precipitated the fall of
the Golden Age of Athens, the Roman Empire and most of the empires of the Native Americans. The internet can be
our key to survival because the ability to work telepresently can inhibit microbial transmission by reducing
human-to-human contact. In the face of an otherwise devastating epidemic, businesses can keep supply chains running
with the maximum number of employees working from home. This can reduce host density below the tipping point
required for an epidemic. If we are well prepared when an epidemic arrives, we can fluidly shift into a selfquarantined society in which microbes fail due to host scarcity. Whatever the social ills of isolation, they are worse for
the microbes than for us. The internet will predict natural disasters We are witnessing the downfall of slow central
control in the media: news stories are increasingly becoming user-generated nets of up-to-the-minute information.
During the recent California wildfires, locals went to the TV stations to learn whether their neighbourhoods were in
danger. But the news stations appeared most concerned with the fate of celebrity mansions, so Californians changed their
tack: they uploaded geotagged mobile-phone pictures, updated Facebook statuses and tweeted. The balance tipped: the
internet carried news about the fire more quickly and accurately than any news station could. In this grass-roots,
decentralised scheme, there were embedded reporters on every block, and the news shockwave kept ahead of the fire. This
head start could provide the extra hours that save us. If the Pompeiians had had the internet in 79AD, they could have
easily marched 10km to safety, well ahead of the pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius. If the Indian Ocean had the
Pacific’s networked tsunami-warning system, South-East Asia would look quite different today. Discoveries are
retained and shared Historically, critical information has required constant rediscovery. Collections of learning -from the library at Alexandria to the entire Minoan civilisation -- have fallen to the bonfires of invaders or the wrecking
ball of natural disaster. Knowledge is hard won but easily lost. And information that survives often does not spread.
Consider smallpox inoculation: this was under way in India, China and Africa centuries before it made its way to
Europe. By the time the idea reached North America, native civilisations who needed it had already collapsed. The
net solved the problem. New discoveries catch on immediately; information spreads widely. In this way, societies can
optimally ratchet up, using the latest bricks of knowledge in their fortification against risk. Tyranny is mitigated
Censorship of ideas was a familiar spectre in the last century, with state-approved news outlets ruling the press, airwaves
and copying machines in the USSR, Romania, Cuba, China, Iraq and elsewhere. In many cases, such as Lysenko’s
agricultural despotism in the USSR, it directly contributed to the collapse of the nation. Historically, a more
successful strategy has been to confront free speech with free speech -- and the internet allows this in a natural
way. It democratises the flow of information by offering access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of
every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Some posts are full of doctoring and dishonesty whereas others strive
for independence and impartiality -- but all are available to us to sift through. Given the attempts by some governments to
build firewalls, it’s clear that this benefit of the net requires constant vigilance. Human capital is vastly increased
Crowdsourcing brings people together to solve problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the world’s population is
involved. We need expand human capital. Most of the world not have access to the education afforded a small minority.
For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who has educational opportunities, uncountable others do not.
This squandering of talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of problem solvers. The net opens
the gates education to anyone with a computer. A motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the world’s
knowledge -- from the webs of Wikipedia to the curriculum of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The new human capital will
serve us well when we confront existential threats we’ve never imagined before. Energy expenditure is reduced
29
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Societal collapse can often be understood in terms of an energy budget: when energy spend outweighs energy return,
collapse ensues. This has taken the form of deforestation or soil erosion; currently, the worry involves fossil-fuel
depletion. The internet addresses the energy problem with a natural ease. Consider the massive energy savings
inherent in the shift from paper to electrons -- as seen in the transition from the post to email. Ecommerce reduces the
need to drive long distances to purchase products. Delivery trucks are more eco-friendly than individuals driving
around, not least because of tight packaging and optimisation algorithms for driving routes. Of course, there are energy
costs to the banks of computers that underpin the internet -- but these costs are less than the wood, coal and oil that would
be expended for the same quantity of information flow. The tangle of events that triggers societal collapse can be
complex, and there are several threats the net does not address. But vast, networked communication can be an
antidote to several of the most deadly diseases threatening civilisation. The next time your coworker laments internet
addiction, the banality of tweeting or the decline of face-to-face conversation, you may want to suggest that the net may
just be the technology that saves us.
30
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Extensions
31
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Inherency
32
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
FYI – FISA Section 702
The NSA has tapped directly into the backbone of the internet under Section 702 of the FISA
Amendments Act, giving it access to millions of Americans' communications
Toomey, 15 (Patrick, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project. “The NSA Has Taken Over the Internet Backbone. We're Suing to Get it Back,” 3-10-15.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/nsa-has-taken-over-internet-backbone-were-suing-get-it-back)
Every time you email someone overseas, the NSA copies and searches your message. It makes no difference if you
or the person you're communicating with has done anything wrong. If the NSA believes your message could contain information
relating to the foreign affairs of the United States – because of whom you're talking to, or whom you're talking about – it may hold on to it for as long as three years and
sometimes much longer.
A new ACLU lawsuit filed today challenges this dragnet spying, called "upstream" surveillance, on behalf of Wikimedia and a broad coalition of educational, human
rights, legal, and media organizations whose work depends on the privacy of their communications. The plaintiffs include Amnesty International USA, the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and The Nation magazine, and many other organizations whose work is critical to the functioning of our democracy.
The surveillance affects virtually every American who
uses the Internet to connect with people overseas – and many who do little more than email their friends or family
or browse the web. And it should be disturbing to all of us, because free expression and intellectual inquiry will
wither away if the NSA is looking over our shoulders while we're online.
But the effect of the surveillance we're challenging goes far beyond these organizations.
The world first learned of the existence of upstream surveillance from whistleblower Edward Snowden's spying revelations in June 2013. Since then, official disclosures
and media reports have shown that the NSA is routinely seizing and copying the communications of millions of ordinary Americans while they are traveling over the
NSA conducts this surveillance by tapping directly into the Internet backbone inside the United States –
the network of high-capacity cables and switches that carry vast numbers of Americans' communications with
each other and with the rest of the world. Once the NSA copies the communications, it searches the contents of almost all international text-based
Internet. The
communications – and many domestic ones as well – for search terms relating to its "targets." In short, the NSA has cast a massive dragnet over Americans'
international communications.
Inside the United States, upstream surveillance is conducted under a controversial spying law called the FISA
Amendments Act, which allows the NSA to target the communications of foreigners abroad and to intercept
Americans' communications with those foreign targets. The main problem with the law is that it doesn't limit
which foreigners can be targeted. The NSA's targets may include journalists, academics, government officials, tech
workers, scientists, and other innocent people who are not connected even remotely with terrorism or suspected of
any wrongdoing. The agency sweeps up Americans' communications with all of those targets.
And, as our lawsuit explains, the NSA is exceeding even the authority granted by the FISA Amendments Act. Rather than limit itself to monitoring Americans'
communications with the foreign targets, the NSA is spying on everyone, trying to find out who might be talking or reading about those targets.
As a result, countless innocent people will be caught up in the NSA's massive net. For instance, a high school student in
the
U.S. working on a term paper might visit a foreign website to read a news story or download research materials. If those
documents happen to contain an email address targeted by the NSA – like this news report does – chances are the
communications will be intercepted and stored for further scrutiny. The same would be true if an overseas friend,
colleague, or contact sent the student a copy of that news story in an email message.
As former NSA Director Michael Hayden recently put it, "[L]et me be really clear. NSA doesn't just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who
are communicating information."
That doesn't sound like much of a limitation on the NSA's spying – and it's not. Like many Americans, the plaintiffs in our lawsuit communicate with scores of people
researchers at Human Rights Watch depend on foreign journalists,
lawyers, political dissidents, and witnesses to human rights abuses for information crucial to their advocacy and
reporting back home. Wikimedia communicates with millions of people abroad, many of whom read or contribute
to Wikipedia, one of the largest repositories of human knowledge on earth. We know, thanks to Edward Snowden, that the NSA is
interested in what some of those users are reading.
The fact that upstream surveillance is supposedly focused on international communications is hardly a saving grace. Americans spend more and more
of their lives communicating over the Internet – and more and more of those communications are global in nature,
whether we realize it or not. An email from a woman in Philadelphia to her mother in Phoenix might be routed through
Canada without either one knowing it. Similarly, companies like Microsoft and Google often store backup copies of
their U.S. customers' emails on servers overseas, again with hardly anyone the wiser. The NSA is peeking inside virtually all of
these.
overseas who the NSA likely finds "interesting." For instance,
33
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Inherency Module
Mass surveillance is justified by multiple laws –
Human Rights Watch, 14
(“With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy,” July.
https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/usnsa0714_ForUPload_0.pdf)
Legal Authorities Governing Surveillance
The US government conducts different types of surveillance in different contexts. For example, federal law enforcement agents
might seek a warrant from a judge to conduct targeted surveillance of a particular person suspected of a crime.21 The surveillance programs at issue in this report are
generally introduced in the name of national security or intelligence rather than criminal law enforcement. Instead of trying to piece together facts about events that
have already occurred, they aim to inform the government broadly and—in theory—help prevent future events like terrorist attacks. The programs disclosed by
Snowden operate on a much larger scale than more traditional surveillance methods used for law enforcement purposes—collecting hundreds, thousands, or millions of
Large-scale
surveillance by the US government proceeds under a variety of legal authorities. The main authorities known to the
public as of July 2014 are Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (PATRIOT Act), Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA), and Executive Order 12333. In addition to these tools, the FBI also has the power to collect significant amounts of
records at a time. By its nature, large-scale surveillance often implicates the interests of many people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.
information relevant to national security investigations— without judicial oversight and sometimes in large quantities—using National Security Letters (NSLs).23
Surveillance under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act
The phone call metadata program revealed by the Guardian in June 2013 operates under Section 215 of the
PATRIOT Act (Section 215), which allows for the collection of “tangible things” or business records that are
“relevant” to an authorized investigation.24 A major point of controversy concerning Section 215 is that the FISA Court has clearly adopted a weak
standard for relevance (and seemingly not in line with Congress’s intent) if it has concluded that Verizon should turn over metadata of all domestic calls on a rolling
basis.
Surveillance under Section 702 of FISA
Section 702 of FISA (Section 702) is a provision of federal law, created by the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), that permits the
Executive Branch to issue year-long warrants for collecting the content of international communications and other data
of persons reasonably believed to be outside the US, specifically to acquire broadly-defined foreign intelligence information. The FISA Court periodically
approves the government’s “minimization procedures,” as well as ”targeting procedures” designed to ensure
surveillance is targeted at non-US persons outside the US, but it does not issue specific warrants nor approve
specific targets of surveillance.25 Subject to minimization, the government can collect and use the international communications or internationally-shared
data of Americans under Section 702. The government relies on Section 702 to collect communications from US service
providers as well as to monitor fiber optic cables as they enter the United States, and both forms of surveillance
involve the collection of US persons’ communications.26 The targeting and minimization procedures that have been made public so far provide
almost no protections for non-US persons under these programs.27
Surveillance under Executive Order 12333
remains the primary
executive order addressing US intelligence activities, especially those undertaken abroad. Like the minimization procedures
Executive Order 12333 took effect when President Reagan signed it in 1981.28 It has been updated from time to time, but it
discussed above, Executive Order 12333 also provides some protections for US persons,29 requiring (when it comes to US persons) that the intelligence community
“use the least intrusive techniques feasible.”30 Yet the US government is reported to be conducting large-scale surveillance under
12333, such as “secretly breaking into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers
around the world.”31 It appears, then, that the government has the power to collect large amounts of information
even on US persons through the executive order.
The government uses surveillance to monitor everyone – not just individuals suspected of crimes.
They collect data on everyone.
Assange et. al, 12
(Julian, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. Andy Muller-Maguhn, specialist on computers, telecommunications, and surveillance. Jacob Appelbaum, computer security
researcher. Jeremie Zimmerman, co-founder and spokesperson for the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. Conversation in the book “Cypherpunks: Freedom
and the Future of the Internet,” chapter titled “The Militarization of Cyberspace”)
34
SSRA Affirmative
JULIAN [Assange]: Andy, for years you’ve designed cryptographic telephones. What
DKC-ENDI 2015
sort of mass surveillance is occurring in relation to
telecommunications? Tell me what is the state of the art as far as the government intelligence/ bulk-surveillance industry is concerned? ANDY [MullerMaguhn]: Mass storage— meaning storing all telecommunication, all voice calls, all traffic data, any way groups
consume the Short Message Service (SMS), but also internet connections, in some situations at least limited to email.
If you compare the military budget to the cost of surveillance and the cost of cyber warriors, normal weapon systems cost a lot of money. Cyber warriors or mass
storage
gets cheaper every year. Actually, we made some calculations in the Chaos Computer Club: you get decent voice-quality storage of all
German telephone calls in a year for about 30 million euros including administrative overheads, so the pure storage is about 8 million euros.
surveillance are super-cheap compared to just one aircraft. One military aircraft costs you between… JULIAN: Around a hundred million. ANDY: And
42 JULIAN: And there are even companies like VASTech in South Africa that are selling these systems for $ 10 million per year. 43 “We’ll intercept all your calls,
we’ll store all your intercepted calls en masse.” But there
has been a shift in the last few years from intercepting everything going
across from one country to another and picking out the particular people you want to spy on and assigning them to
human beings, to now intercepting everything and storing everything permanently. ANDY: To explain it roughly
historically, in the old days someone was a target because of his diplomatic position, because of the company he
worked for, because he was suspected of doing something or he was in contact with people who actually did
something, and then you applied surveillance measures on him. These days it’s deemed much more efficient to say,
“We’ll take everything and we can sort it out later.” So they do have long-term storage, and the main way of describing the
industry’s two chapters is the “tactical” approach and the “strategic” approach. Tactical means, “Right now, in
this meeting, we need to bug the place, we need to get someone in with a microphone, an array jacket, or have GSM (Global System for Mobile
communications) surveillance systems, in a car, deployed, able to intercept what people are saying right away without needing to interfere with the network operator,
The strategic approach is to do it by default, just
record everything, and sort it out later using analytic systems. JULIAN: So, strategic interception is take everything
that a telecommunication satellite is relaying, take everything across a fiber optic cable. ANDY: Because you never
know when someone is a suspect. JACOB [Appelbaum]: There’s a thing called the NSA AT& T case in the United States— the second case: Hepting v.
AT& T. In Folsom, California, Mark Klein, a former technician for the giant telecommunications company AT& T, exposed that
the NSA, the US National Security Agency, was capturing all of the data that they could get AT& T to give them.
They just took it all wholesale— data as well as voice calls— so every time I picked up the phone or connected to
the internet in San Francisco during the time period that Mark Klein has exposed, we know that the NSA on US soil against US citizens
was getting it all. 44 I’m pretty sure they have used that intercept data in the investigations that they’ve been doing against people in the United States, which
get a police search warrant or anything like that, no legal procedure required, just do it.”
raises all kinds of interesting constitutional issues because they get to keep it forever. JÉRÉMIE [Zimmerman]: We also have this example of Eagle, the system sold by
the French company Amesys that was sold to Gaddafi’s Libya, and on the commercial document it was written, “Nationwide interception mechanism.” It’s a big box
Ten years ago this was seen to be a fantasy, this
was seen to be something only paranoid people believed in, but the costs of mass interception have now decreased to
that you put somewhere and you just listen to all your people’s communications. 45 JULIAN:
the point where even a country like Libya with relatively few resources was doing it with French technology. In fact most countries are already there in terms of the
actual interception. It’s the efficiency of understanding and responding to what’s being intercepted and stored that’s going to be the next big leap. Now in many
countries we have strategic interception of all traffic in and out of the country, but engaging in subsequent actions, like automatically blocking bank accounts, or
deploying police, or marginalizing particular groups, or emancipating others, is still something we are on the cusp of. Siemens is selling a platform for intelligence
agencies that does actually produce automated actions. So when target A is within a certain number of meters of target B according to their mobile intercept records,
and target A receives an email mentioning something— a keyword— then an action is triggered. It’s on the way. FIGHTING TOTAL SURVEILLANCE WITH THE
So now it’s a fact that technology enables total surveillance of every communication. Then there is
We could admit that for what you call tactical surveillance there are some
legitimate uses— investigators investigating bad guys and networks of bad guys and so on may need, under the
supervision of the judicial authority, to be able to use such tools— but the question is where to draw the line for
this judicial supervision, where to draw the line for the control that the citizens can have over the use of those technologies. This is a policy issue.
LAWS OF MAN JÉRÉMIE:
the other side of that coin, which is what we do with it.
When we get to those policy issues you have politicians that are asked to just sign something and don’t understand the underlying technology, and I think that we as
citizens have a role, not only to explain how the technology functions at large, including to politicians, but also to wade in to the political debates that surround the use
of those technologies. I know that in Germany there was a massive movement against generalized data retention that led to the overturn of the Data Retention law in
front of the constitutional court. 46 There is a debate going on in the EU about revising the Data Retention Directive.
35
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Solvency
36
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Solvency – SSRA Requires Warrant
SSRA still allows for targeted surveillance – it ends mass surveillance by requiring a warrant to
intercept Americans' communications
Kibbe, 15 (Matt, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, previously worked as Chief of Staff to U.S. Representative Dan Miller (R-FL), Senior Economist at the
Republican National Committee, Director of Federal Budget Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Managing Editor of Market Process. 3-24-15. “Letter in
Support of the Surveillance State Repeal Act” http://www.freedomworks.org/content/letter-support-surveillance-state-repeal-act)
The Surveillance State Repeal Act would repeal the misguided USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of
2008. The PATRIOT Act, passed in the panicked aftermath of the tragic September 11th attacks, gives the federal government an
unprecedented amount of power to monitor the private communications of U.S. citizens without a warrant. The
FISA Amendments Act of 2008 expanded the wiretapping program to grant the government more power. Both laws clearly
violate our 4th Amendment right against unreasonable searches.
The Surveillance State Repeal Act would prohibit the government from collecting information on U.S. citizens
obtained through private communications without a warrant. It would mandate that the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) regularly monitor domestic surveillance programs for compliance with the law and
issue an annual report. A section of the bill explicitly forbids the government from mandating that electronic
manufacturers install “back door” spy software into their products. This is a legitimate concern due to a recently
released security report finding government spying software on hard drives in personal computers in the United
States.
It’s important to note that the Surveillance State Repeal Act saves anti-terrorism tools that are useful to law enforcement. It
retains the ability for government surveillance capabilities against targeted individuals, regardless of the type of
communications methods or devices being used. It would also protect intelligence collection practices involving foreign targets for the purpose of investigating weapons
of mass destruction.
37
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
AT: FISA Court Rubberstamps
SSRA strengthens the FISA court's ability to reign in the NSA – it requires a warrant for
surveillance against U.S. persons, strengthens oversight, and provides protections for
whistleblowers
U.S. Congress, 14 (“Summary: H.R.2818 — 113th Congress” https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/2818)
Surveillance State Repeal Act - Repeals the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (thereby
restoring or reviving provisions amended or repealed by such Acts as if such Acts had not been enacted), except with respect to reports to Congress regarding court
orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and the acquisition of intelligence information concerning an entity not substantially composed
of U.S. persons that is engaged in the international proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Extends from 7 to 10 years the maximum term of FISA judges. Makes such judges eligible for redesignation.
Permits FISA courts to appoint special masters to advise on technical issues raised during proceedings.
Requires orders approving certain electronic surveillance to direct that, upon request of the applicant, any person or entity must furnish all information, facilities, or
technical assistance necessary to accomplish such surveillance in a manner to protect its secrecy and produce a minimum of interference with the services that such
carrier, landlord, custodian, or other person is providing the target of such surveillance (thereby retaining the ability to conduct surveillance on such targets regardless of
the type of communications methods or devices being used by the subject of the surveillance).
Prohibits information relating to a U.S. person from being acquired pursuant to FISA without a valid warrant
based on probable cause.
Prohibits the federal government from requiring manufacturers of electronic devices and related software to build
in mechanisms allowing the federal government to bypass encryption or privacy technology.
Directs the Comptroller General (GAO) to report annually on the federal government's compliance with FISA.
Permits an employee of or contractor to an element of the intelligence community with knowledge of FISAauthorized programs and activities to submit a covered complaint to the Comptroller General, to the House or
Senate intelligence committees, or in accordance with a process under the National Security Act of 1947 with
respect to reports made to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. Defines a "covered complaint" as
a complaint or information concerning FISA-authorized programs and activities that an employee or contractor
reasonably believes is evidence of: (1) a violation of any law, rule, or regulation; or (2) gross mismanagement, a
gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety. Subjects
an officer or employee of an element of the intelligence community to administrative sanctions, including
termination, for taking retaliatory action against an employee or contractor who seeks to disclose, or who discloses,
such information.
38
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Secrecy Advantage
39
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Secrecy → Chills Leaks (Long)
Government retaliation for leaks is real, scary, and supercharged by mass surveillance
Human Rights Watch, 14 (“With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy,”
July. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/usnsa0714_ForUPload_0.pdf)
Losing Sources One of the most common concerns journalists expressed to us was that their sources were drying up.78
According to James Asher, “[Before] you’d start pulling the curtain back and more people would come forward. Many fewer people are coming forward now.”79
Journalists expressed diverse views as to when and why reporting conditions began to deteriorate. Some pointed to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the
subsequent expansion in the amount of information considered sensitive for national security purposes.80 Others emphasized a cluster of stories that appeared in the
The most common
explanation, however, was a combination of increased surveillance and the Obama Administration’s push to
minimize unauthorized leaks to the press (both by limiting government employees’ contact with journalists, such as through the Insider Threat
Program, and by ramping up prosecutions of allegedly unauthorized leaks, as described above).82 That trend generates fear among both sources
and journalists about the consequences of communicating with one another—even about innocuous, unclassified
subjects.83 Even sources who are not sharing classified information risk losing their security clearances and ability to work. Steve Engelberg, the editor-in-chief of
media in 2005, including the first reports of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs and confirmation of black sites in Poland.81
ProPublica, described the security clearance that a source holds as their “driver’s license in the intelligence community.”84 According to him, “[It’s] easy to lose it, at
which point you can’t work.”85 As a result, loss of a security clearance is a “big sanction.”86 Scott Horton, who writes on national security for Harper’s Magazine, sees
Reveal details about
government activity and you may lose almost everything: your clearance, your position, and your pension. You
may have to hire an attorney, and you may have your reputation destroyed in the press by their own counter-leaks,
making it impossible to get a new job.87 Yet while loss of one’s security clearance, job, or pension can be serious enough, the risk of
prosecution for leaking has never been higher.88 “It is not lost on us, or on our sources, that there have been eight criminal cases
against sources [under the current administration] versus three before [under all previous administrations
combined],” observed Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times.89 That spike sends a message, even when prosecutions do not
the risks to sources as a very real and tangible threat to their willingness to speak to reporters and to ensure effective reporting:
end in convictions. “I understand why they do it,” noted another Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.90 “Even the cases that blow up in [the government’s] face have the
Stephen Kim, who faced a leak prosecution, described the costs of the process: This
has been a huge blow for me and for my entire family. I had to give up a job that I had liked. It also destroyed my
marriage. My family had to spend all of the money they had saved up and even sell their house to pay my legal fees.
I hardly have any remaining assets.92 Although Kim eventually pleaded guilty to unauthorized disclosure of classified information, his description of
intended effect.”91 In February of 2014,
the harm to himself and his family represents the setbacks anyone prosecuted might face, irrespective of the ultimate disposition of the case. Thomas Drake, who was
also prosecuted by the Obama administration for leaking information to the press, reported similar costs.93 The government dropped all of its major counts against
Drake right before his trial was scheduled to begin, in exchange for a guilty plea to a minor misdemeanor, triggering harsh criticism from the judge for putting Drake
through “four years of hell.”94 While sources’ employers sometimes have legitimate reasons for discouraging conversations about certain matters with the press, the
stakes and the consequences have increased substantially in recent years, making conversations about declassified or innocuous subjects not worth the risk. One
journalist described a source who was eventually fired when his or her employer found signs of the source’s initial contact with journalists a year earlier, even though
the source had not leaked classified information.95 At the same time, the fact that senior government officials themselves routinely appear to authorize “leaks” of
classified information has bred cynicism about the government’s claims that these prosecutions are merely about enforcing the law. “Of course, leaks that help the
government are sanctioned,” observed Brian Ross, chief investigative correspondent for ABC News.96 Bart Gellman, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and the
winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes, argued that official, sanctioned leaks reveal much more classified information than unofficial ones.97 Yet, beyond the leak
many journalists said that the government’s increased capacity to engage
in surveillance— and the knowledge that it is doing so on an unprecedented scale—has made their concerns about
how to protect sources much more acute and real. In fact, some believed that surveillance may be a direct cause of
the spike in leak investigations. “It used to be that leak investigations didn’t get far because it was too hard to
uncover the source, but with digital tools it's just much easier, and sources know that.” observed Bart Gellman.98 Peter Maass, a senior
investigations and administrative efforts to prevent leaks,
writer at The Intercept, concurred: “Leak investigations are a lot easier because you leave a data trail calling, swiping in and out of buildings, [and] walking down a
street with cameras. It’s a lot easier for people to know where you’re going and how long you’re there.”99 Charlie Savage raised a similar point: “[E]lectronic trails
mak[e] it easier to figure out who’s talking to reporters. That has made it realistic [to investigate leaks] in a way that it wasn’t before.”100 Peter Finn, the National
Security Editor at the Washington Post, expressed concern that “the government’s ability to find the source will only get better.”101 A national security reporter made
the Snowden revelations show that “[w]hat we’re doing is not good enough. I used to think
that the most careful people were not at risk, [that they] could protect sources and keep them from being known.
Now we know that isn’t the case.”102 He added, “That’s what Snowden meant for me. There’s a record of everywhere I’ve walked, everywhere I’ve
the link even clearer, stating that
been.”103 Peter Maass voiced a similar concern: “[The landscape] got worse significantly after the Snowden documents came into circulation. If you suspected the
Journalists repeatedly told us that surveillance
had made sources much more fearful of talking. The Snowden revelations have “brought home a sense of the
staggering power of the government,” magnifying the fear created by the increasing number of leak investigations.105 Accordingly, sources
are “afraid of the entire weight of the federal government coming down on them.”106 Jane Mayer, an awardwinning staff writer for The New Yorker, noted, “[t]he added layer of fear makes it so much harder. I can’t count
government had the capability to do mass surveillance, you found out it was certainly true.”104
40
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
the number of people afraid of the legal implications [of speaking to me].”107 One journalist in Washington, DC, noted, “I think many
sources assume I’m spied on. [I’m] not sure they’re right but I can’t do anything about their presumption.”108 As a result, she said, some remaining sources have
started visiting her house to speak with her because they are too fearful to come to her office.109 One national security reporter estimated that intelligence reporters
have the most skittish sources, followed by journalists covering the Department of Justice and terrorism, followed by those on a military and national security beat.110
As a result, journalists report struggling to confirm even unclassified details for stories, and have seen trusted,
long-standing sources pulling back. “I had a source whom I’ve known for years whom I wanted to talk to about a particular subject and this person said,
‘It’s not classified but I can’t talk about it because if they find out they’ll kill me’ [figuratively speaking].”111 Several others have reported the
sudden disappearance of formerly reliable sources, or the reluctance of sources to discuss seemingly innocuous and
unclassified matters.112 One decorated intelligence and national security journalist indicated that even retired sources are increasingly
reluctant to speak.113 Though firing or revocation of security clearances no longer worries them, they fear prosecution, and “now [they] have to worry that
their communications can be reached on a basis far short of probable cause.”114 Though losing developed sources has proved frustrating to numerous journalists with
a number suggested that the largest challenge they face is reaching new sources. “Sources don’t just
materialize,” noted Peter Finn. “They often are developed.”115 That requires building trust, which can be a slow
and difficult process. Adding to the challenge of developing sources that are already skittish is the fact that
surveillance makes it very difficult for journalists to communicate with them securely. Calling or emailing can
leave a trail between the journalist and the source; and it can be difficult to get casual contacts to take more
elaborate security measures to communicate. “[H]ow do you even get going?” asked Bart Gellman, referring to the
challenge of making first contact with a new would-be source without leaving a trace. “By the time you're both
ready to talk about more delicate subjects, you’ve left such a trail that even if you start using burner phones or anonymous email
accounts you’re already linked.”
whom we spoke,
41
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Secrecy → Bad Decisionmaking (Long)
Secrecy makes all government decision-making worse and risks miscalculated pre-emptive war
Holmes, 07 (Stephen, faculty co-director at the Center on Law and Security and the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at the NYU School of Law.“SECRECY
AND GOVERNMENT: America Faces the Future” 4-12-07. http://www.lawandsecurity.org/Portals/0/Documents/SecrecyPrivacy.pdf)
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1998 book, Secrecy: The American Experience, focuses on the pathological effects of secrecy. What I would like to do is discuss Senator
Moynihan’s claims in light of the experience of the past six years. In the book, he says that secrecy has had an observable effect on government decision-making in the
degree of government secrecy is necessary but the “culture of secrecy,” as he calls it,
can do grave damage to national security. He does have plentiful discussions of the comic aspects of over-redacting. He mentions that a passage
20th century. His basic thesis is that some
from Dwight Eisenhower’s published memoirs was redacted out of memoirs written by a former CIA officer. So there is a good deal of silliness. But it is not all silly.
One thing that I am not going to talk about at length, but which would be worth further discussion, is Moynihan’s claim that excessive secrecy has a terribly harmful
effect on democracy. When citizens see the government deceiving them, lying to them, and blacking out what is going on, this foments a kind of irrational culture of
Moynihan’s main claim is cognitive. It has to do with how the danger of
false certainty thrives behind the veil of secrecy, and how highly insulated policy makers, who are not kept alert
and informed by individuals with different points of view, and whose errors are carefully shrouded from criticism
and scrutiny, are extremely unlikely to design intelligent policies. The point here is not about civil liberties but about destroying the forms
of public scrutiny that can force a government to give plausible reasons for its actions. A government that is not
forced to do so regularly is likely soon to have only confused reasons, or perhaps no reasons, for its conduct. It will
rumor and conspiracy-thinking that is very damaging. But
begin to rely unduly on untested hunches. If the factual premises of its decisions to use lethal force are not tested by some kind of adversarial process, it is unlikely that
the consequences for national security will be favorable. Moynihan was not thinking about the current administration of course, but his claim has an eerie relevance.
the U.S. government has frequently failed to assess its enemy accurately and to deal rationally with
the threats facing it, and one of the principal causes of that inaccurate assessment is excessive secrecy. He is not saying
The basic one is this:
that secrecy is unnecessary. Pat Lang’s comments this morning about the necessity of secrecy are very close to Moynihan’s. Vice President Dick Cheney said that he
could not get “unvarnished advice” about American energy policy unless the American energy companies who talk to him are anonymous. That sounds self-serving,
and it obviously is, but there is a core of truth in his comment. Confidentiality does have its functions. There is such a thing as excessive, paralyzing oversight, and total
transparency is not realistic – as Michael Sheehan mentioned, the plans for D-Day had to remain secret. So it is, all told, a matter of balance. Moynihan’s claim is that
denying the public, the Congress, and the press the right to examine and criticize the government has the potential to severely damage national security. Among other
things, it can destroy presidents. The effect of secrecy on a president was one of Moynihan’s interests, including Richard Nixon’s obsession with leaks and paranoia
about breached secrecy, even on unimportant matters. Just a few weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that The New York Times could publish the Pentagon Papers,
secrecy
is the last refuge of incompetence. That is meant to be a nonpartisan concept. The background idea is that people behave differently when
they are observed as opposed to when they are unobserved. Let’s put it this way – we do not invariably behave more honorably or prudently when we are
Nixon formed the “plumbers” in a fit of selfdestruction and obsession with secrecy. Moynihan cites from a congressional committee in the ’60s, saying that
unobserved. This does not mean that transparency is going to solve all problems or make us all honorable. All that I think we need – and this is Moynihan’s premise –
for a nonpartisan discussion of this issue is to admit that in some cases covert actions may be utterly idiotic. All we need for a discussion is to say that the publication by
investigative journalists of information that the current administration desperately wants to keep hidden can sometimes increase national security. As long as you can
say that, then there can be a discussion of where to draw the line, how to do it, and what form it should take. But it takes away the mystique of secrecy and the assertion
that there is never a justification for breaching the current administration’s claim that what it wants to keep secret is being kept secret for purposes of protecting the
I am going to talk about four points that Moynihan makes. I expect that those here who have more government experience, and those
The four points have to do with cognition, psychology,
turf wars, and partisanship. The first point concerns bureaucracy, and what Moynihan calls “organizational aggrandizement.”
Bureaucracies get into ruts which they have trouble getting out of. Secrecy exacerbates their tendency to apply old
and obsolete solutions, even to new problems. Moynihan cites Max Weber, and Weber’s point was that the German Beamtentum was responsible
nation.
who have been observing government, can modify, deny, or confirm these claims.
for Germany’s terrible failure in World War I because it got in the way of pursuing the war. If the political system were more lively, more partisan, if it had an influence
and had been able to jog them out of their rut, Germany would have been in a better position. This is an important way to think about secrecy because it contradicts the
current administration’s claim that executive discretion that is unobserved, unchecked by legislative and judicial authority, is more flexible – the claim that, in order to
obtain the requisite flexibility to deal with a threat, the executive needs to act in secrecy. What we actually see is that the more the administration acts in secrecy, the
more it is stuck in a rut. It has lashed itself to a failed policy and cannot correct itself. That suggests the Bavarian point, which is that openness has something to do with
correcting errors. An adversarial system, in which agencies are forced to admit when they have made mistakes, is more likely to occur where there is a divided
A pampered and unchecked executive can become catastrophically disconnected from
reality because it is not hearing and will refuse to listen to bad news. It is insulated. There is an echo chamber effect. Moynihan
discusses this under the title “A Culture of Secrecy.” Second, bureaucrats treat secrets as if they were private property. Noah Feldman
government, as Mike Sheehan said.
said that this morning. A secret is what you tell one person at a time. Moynihan adds that a secret is what you tell one person at a time for consideration, for an
exchange. Bureaucrats
gather secrets. They say, “The secret is an asset. I need to get something for the secret I have. I
will hold onto it until I can trade it for something I need.” The consequences of that are multiple. The first consequence is that
decision-makers are making decisions in the absence of knowledge they need. That would be the primary cognitive consequence.
Mercenary or lunatic informants can insert fallacious information into a system that does not have any checks or a way of weeding out this disinformation. Deliberate
disinformation is almost invited once you are told that no one is going to double-check it, no one is going to look at it, no one is going to know the source. The source is
not being screened. So those sources who do not want to be screened are going to be coming forward out of the woodwork. Moynihan says that secret information is
about as reliable as corridor gossip. That is not always true, but it has enough truth to be worth thinking about. Schemes hatched in secrecy are frequently addled, he
42
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
says. Secrecy permits, for example, the decision to intervene militarily in a country about which we know nothing
without considering the potential downsides of such intervention. Because there are people who, if they were
outside the system, would say, “Look, if you do that ....” Moynihan was thinking of Cuba. There was public knowledge that Castro was very
popular but the secret decision to invade the Bay of Pigs was done without any kind of obligatory consultations or listening to those outside who might have had
something to say about it. By focusing particularly on public liberty (meaning the liberty to examine your government), Moynihan manages to twist and make us
it does not
make sense to say that we are going to be more secure if we can prevent our government’s mistakes from ever
being revealed, that we are more secure if we can prevent the government from being criticized. More psychologically, Moynihan and others
(including Georg Simmel, who wrote wonderful essays on secrecy) have written about the overestimation of the importance of secret
information – the psychology, the spell of secrecy, the allure of secrecy , the ability to say, “I have a secret you do not know about. It makes me feel important.”
Dana Priest mentioned this too. There is an overestimation of the catastrophic consequences of disclosure, the sense that “the
secret makes me feel so important. If everyone had it, I would feel less important. So, therefore, it must be a very vital piece of information.”
rethink the contrast, or polarity, between liberty and security. It might make sense to say we have to reduce private liberty to have more security. But
Moynihan’s claim is that we overestimate the value of secrets and downplay the importance of information that is public. This is the Bay of Pigs example again, where
he says, almost, that if the Princeton study showing how popular Castro was had been kept secret it would have taken it into account. But it was public, so they ignored
95 percent of the information we need is in
the public record. What we need is not disclosure of secrets but analysis. In the national security area, Malcolm Gladwell’s distinction
it, because you overvalue information that is secret. He cites George F. Kennan at length, saying that
between puzzle and mystery is a good one. A puzzle is something where you have all the pieces of information except for one. If you find the one thing, then everything
makes sense. But usually we are in a different situation, more like a mystery, in which you have all the information. You need to interpret it. You need to analyze it.
You need to understand it. Stealing a secret is much less likely to get you where you want to be than understanding the situation, which requires investment – not in
It was announced that India was
going to go for an atomic bomb. That was in the public record but the U.S. administration did not read it. They
only looked at their secret information, so they did not predict it. They also overestimated Soviet strength. That is one of Moynihan’s
main claims. The overestimation was caused, he said, by too much secrecy, by not being open enough to those outside the government. Third, incoherence
within the executive branch is another product of the culture of noncooperation among bureaucrats, of information
stealing secrets, but in analysis. Moynihan talks here about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s election brochures in India.
hoarding and so on. Congress and the press get tips from dissidents within the executive branch. We have heard that and it could be the military or others. So
keeping secrets from Congress and the press requires the executive branch to keep secrets from itself. That can
have terrible consequences if the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Moynihan talks about the dispersal of
secrecy centers within the government. There is a very important idea that you have different clumps of secrets. Executive agencies, each with their
own agenda – maybe each competing for a part of the action – are not cooperating. We know a lot about this; they cannot
cooperate in a master plan. This is part of what the fog and the haze of secrecy is about. The most dramatic part of this, which speaks to the question of the unitary
executive, is the number of cases in which the president is not informed by executive agencies of essential information. Moynihan focused on the Venona decryptions –
the fact that in 1946, after the war, the military cracked the Soviet code and decided not to tell Harry Truman. Truman did
not know, and he was listening to criticism by conservatives of the Democrats saying, “You are just sheltering communism.” He thought they were just partisan attacks.
The military and the intelligence agency had the information and didn’t tell him. So what does “executive responsibility” mean in a system where executive agencies do
Finally, I want to say a few words about partisanship.
We have talked a little about selective classification and selective leaking for partisan reasons. I have a good example of how
not tell the president essential information? That is an important factor to think through.
partisanship plays into this from Moynihan’s book. In 1965, a representative from the 13th Congressional District in Illinois “introduced legislation to establish a
presumption that, with only narrow exceptions, executive-branch documents should be available to the public and that judicial review should be available as a check on
agency decisions to withhold information.” You should not invoke executive privilege to deny the release of documents. That was Representative Donald Rumsfeld
who claimed this. So partisanship is important in making determinations about secrecy. I tend to sympathize with what I thought Noah
Feldman was suggesting this morning, that the blurring is almost inevitable. In some way, at certain points, it seems cynical and contemptible. Incumbents
in power will say, “Revealing a secret that would embarrass us is actually damaging to national security, because it would embolden our enemies to know how
incompetent we are.” That sounds fairly absurd but there is something to this. It is a very complicated area and requires a little more thought. I’d like to make one final
point. In a way, it is elaborating on what Mike Sheehan said earlier. The problem is not simply secrecy and the solution is not transparency. The problem is the lack of
any form of adversarial process. The problem is an insulated clique making decisions without having to make a case, without having to expose the factual premises of
their decisionmaking to any kind of test. That test can be relatively sheltered. It could be a select committee on intelligence in Congress. It does not have to be public,
but it cannot be a test before a body of lapdogs who are simply doing what you tell them to do. Those who are judging you, and to whom you are accountable, have to
have some kind of independent source of information. I think that way of casting the issue shows that the solutions for this are finding some place between the secret
In the war on terror, in facing a threat which we have never faced before, it is inevitable that our
government is going to make mistakes. So the idea of handing power to a small group of people who are never
criticized, who never admit their mistakes, seems to be the worst possible arrangement that we could think of.
and the transparent.
43
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Secrecy → Drones
Secrecy allows the government to misrepresent drone strikes and obscure their true costs –
exposing them would roll back the program
Ackerman, 15 (Spencer, national security editor for Guardian US. A former senior writer for Wired, he won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Digital
Reporting. 4-25-15. “Inside Obama's drone panopticon: a secret machine with no accountability” http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/25/us-drone-programsecrecy-scrutiny-signature-strikes)
Of all the reactions to the deaths of two hostages from a missile fired from a US drone, Congressman Adam Schiff
provided the deepest insight into the logic underpinning the endless, secret US campaign of global killing.
“To demand a higher standard of proof than they had here could be the end of these types of counter-terrorism
operations,” said Schiff, a California Democrat and one of the most senior legislators overseeing those operations.
The standard of proof in the January strike in tribal Pakistan was outlined by the White House press secretary in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s admission about the
deaths. An agency that went formally unnamed – likely the CIA, though the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) also conducts drone strikes –
identified what Josh Earnest called an “al-Qaida compound” and marked the building, rather than particular terrorists, for destruction.
the realities of what are commonly known as “signature strikes” are belatedly
and partially on display. Signature strikes, a key aspect for years of what the administration likes to call its “targeted killing” program, permit
the CIA and JSOC to kill without requiring them to know who they kill.
Thanks to Obama’s rare admission on Thursday,
The “signatures” at issue are indicators that intelligence analysts associate with terrorist behavior – in practice, a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged, traveling in
convoys or carrying weapons. In 2012, an unnamed senior official memorably quipped that the CIA considers “three guys doing jumping jacks” a signature of terrorist
training.
Civilian deaths in signature strikes, accordingly, are not accidental. They are, as Schiff framed it, more like a cost of doing business – only the real cost is shielded from
the public.
An apparatus of official secrecy, built over decades and zealously enforced by Obama, prevents meaningful open
scrutiny of the strikes. No one outside the administration knows how many drone strikes are signature strikes.
There is no requirement that the CIA or JSOC account for their strikes, nor to provide an estimate of how many
people they kill, nor even how they define legally critical terms like “combatant”, terrorist “affiliate” or “leader”.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing an obstinate administration to compel disclosure of some of
the most basic information there is about a program that has killed thousands of people.
The National Security Agency has a complementary term to describe the effects of its mass surveillance on the world’s emails, texts, phone records, webcams, gaming
and all other forms of communication: “incidental collection”. Incidental collection is all of the untold trillions of communications data NSA and its partners hoover up
that have nothing to do with terrorism or espionage. That collection may not be, strictly speaking, intentional – those communications are not NSA’s “targets” – but it is
neither accidental nor, by the logic of bulk surveillance, avoidable.
Similarly, civilian deaths in signature strikes do not operate quite like the “collateral damage” familiar from earlier wars. It is one thing for US bombs and missiles to
miss their targets or to hit facilities that, at the time of the strike, no longer have their targets in them. It is another for them to hit targets absent prior confirmation that
the target is an enemy as a matter of policy.
“It is a different kind of use of the drone, and it raises issues that are important,” said Glenn Carle, a former CIA interrogator, who added that he is not categorically
opposed to drone strikes.
“I know how the institution [the CIA] functions. For all the errors I’ve spoken about, people are as responsible and serious as humans can be.”
Yet
44
the secrecy around the strikes permits self-interested officials to misrepresent them.
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Secrecy → Too Much XO Power/SOP
Secrecy undermines legislative and judicial power and empowers the executive to commit human
rights abuses
German and Stanley, 11 (Mike, fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program; 16-year veteran of the FBI, where
he served as a special agent in domestic terrorism. Jay, Senior Policy Analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Drastic Measures Required:
“CONGRESS NEEDS TO OVERHAUL U.S. SECRECY LAWS AND INCREASE OVERSIGHT OF THE SECRET SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT”
https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/secrecyreport_20110727.pdf)
2. Secrecy
undermines constitutional checks and balances
Our nation’s Founders feared the corrupting influence of power in the hands of an absolute monarch, so they deliberately limited and distributed
governmental authority among the three separate branches of government, giving each the tools to check abuse by
the others. Yet the modern executive’s claimed authority to exclusively and unilaterally decide what information is
classified and what is not is upsetting the Constitution’s delicate balance, depriving Congress and the courts of the
ability to examine executive branch activities and fulfill their constitutional obligations to rein in abuse.96 Congress’s
and the courts’ failure to assert their independence as co-equal branches of government in examining, challenging and, when necessary, overriding the executive’s
This breakdown of checks and balances has been disastrous for our
national security policy and the rule of law. Over the last several years the executive branch secretly and
unilaterally initiated extra-judicial detention programs and cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation methods
that violated both international treaties and domestic law.97 It engaged in “extraordinary renditions” —international kidnappings—
in violation of international law and the domestic laws of our allied nations.98 It conducted warrantless wiretapping within the United States in violation
national security secrecy claims contribute to the problem.
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.99 Under a shroud of secrecy the executive ignored laws duly passed by
Congress and thwarted congressional oversight through non-disclosure, or by intentionally providing incomplete and misleading testimony to the intelligence
committees.100 The
few members of Congress who were briefed on these controversial programs felt so handcuffed by
restrictions on what they could do with the highly classified information they received, they thought their only
recourse was to file secret letters of concern or protest.101 Representative Jane Harman, who as a former Ranking Member of the House
Intelligence Committee regularly received classified briefings from executive agencies, described the current practice of congressional notification: …as far as notes go,
you - I suppose one could take some notes but they would have to be carried around in a classified bag, which I don’t personally own . You can’t talk to
anybody about what you’ve learned, so there’s no ability to use committee staff, for example, to do research on
some of the issues that are raised in these briefings. And the whole environment is not conducive to the kind of collaborative give and take that
would make for much more successful oversight.102 Notice from the executive branch regarding covert actions and other intelligence activities is of little value if
Meanwhile, the courts
are also being neutralized as a check on illegal executive branch activities. Victims of these secret programs have
been denied the opportunity to challenge the government’s misconduct in U.S. courts through the government’s
over-broad use of state secrets privilege claims, which is clearly designed not to protect sensitive evidence but to avoid judicial rulings that the
congressional leaders cannot share the information they obtain with colleagues and the public as they pursue legislative reforms.103
challenged activities are illegal.104 The Obama administration continues this practice, denying justice and eliminating the courts as an effective check against executive
Our constitutional system is crippled when excessive secrecy deprives Congress and the courts of the
information necessary to fulfill their oversight responsibilities.
lawbreaking.105
45
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
AT: Leaks Hurt National Security
Catastrophic leaks are fantasy – real leaks don't seriously hurt security
Benkler, 14 (Yochai, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard
University. A Public Accountability Defense for National Security Leakers and Whistleblowers 8(2) Harv. Rev. L. & Policy, July 2014
http://benkler.org/Benkler_Whistleblowerdefense_Prepub.pdf)
Even if we understand that the national security establishment can make mistakes, there
remains the argument that secrecy is vital to
security; that the price of transparency is too high. The argument gains force from the fact that understanding how security is enhanced by secrecy is intuitively
trivial. A military unit is on its way to execute an attack on an enemy, and someone tips off the enemy who escapes or
ambushes the troops. This is classic “transports on the way” secrecy that could be subject to prior restraint under the Pentagon Papers case.62 Only one case of
leaking to the press has ever involved a risk of this type: the case of Morton Seligman, who leaked decoded
Japanese naval dispatches in the midst of World War II, and whose publication after Midway could have disclosed
that the United States had broken Japanese naval codes.63 This is the threat most legitimately interjected against
leaks, but in all but that one World War II case, it has been pat hyperbole in criticisms of press leaks. Private
Manning’s disclosures to Wikileaks, for example, were denounced as likely to cause deaths, a claim that the
Pentagon was not willing to repeat when asked for a formal assessment by the Senate Armed Services
Committee.64 Claims of secrecy of this sort normally assert power in the relationship between the national security
system and the public opinion system.
Openness is on-balance better for national security – it makes bureaucracies more flexible and
accountable
Benkler, 14 (Yochai, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard
University. A Public Accountability Defense for National Security Leakers and Whistleblowers 8(2) Harv. Rev. L. & Policy, July 2014
http://benkler.org/Benkler_Whistleblowerdefense_Prepub.pdf)
Understanding how secrecy can undermine security requires more work. A brief diversion into computer security will help. Computer security is among the most
complex systems-security challenges we face today. Yet the standard understanding, popularized through the term “no security through obscurity,”65 is that secrecy is
an imperfect and often self-defeating source of security. One of the most basic “general information security principles” is: “Open Design—System security should not
depend on the secrecy of the implementation or its components,”66 a principle recognized since the early days of computer security.67 This doesn't mean that secrecy
offers no security, but that “the fewer secrets a system has, the more secure it is.”68 Secrecy involves three distinct
weaknesses. First, secrets are hard to keep. The more a system depends on secrecy as opposed to robust design, and
the more its characteristics must be known to more people so they can work with it, the more susceptible it is to
failure because it leans too heavily on that relatively weak link. Second, when secrets cover many facets of what
makes a security system work, they tend to be interdependent and hard to change without changing the whole
system. This makes security systems “brittle.” They break when the secret is disclosed. A system with few secrets and few dependencies can
change the information revealed to negate the revelation . If a password is revealed, it can be changed. If the core design is weak and
its defense depends on secrecy, once the secret is out, the system is vulnerable. Ask Darth Vader. The third problem with
secrecy is its most important for our purposes: secrets undermine error correction. No system is perfect. None is perfectly designed
in the first place, and systems, particularly complex systems that interact with an uncertain and changing environment, become less perfect as time passes: conditions
Error detection, resilience, healing, and experimentation
with alternative solutions are critical to a well-functioning system. Secrecy severely limits the range and diversity
of sources of insight for diagnosis and solution. The point about error detection has broader implications for the relationship between the national
security system and public opinion. Open, democratic societies are not weaker for their openness; they are stronger for it.
There are certainly inconvenient truths; backroom deals that have to be done, diplomatic channels that must be kept open. Public
opinion can be fickle, leaders must sometimes take a longer view than present public sentiment will allow, and perfect transparency can be no
panacea unless one imagines a utopia in which all members of the public are rational, wellinformed, and patient. So yes, there are always troop movements that
must be kept secret and much, much more. But there is also ambition and narrow-mindedness, interest, groupthink, and the yesman mentality of the bureaucratic mindset. What has made open societies successful is their ability to learn,
experiment, and adapt in a persistently uncertain and changing environment. On a much grander scale than computer security,
secrecy undermines the most basic features by which open societies learn, question, and adapt; these are the very
foundations of security in democratic society, and are congruent with, rather than in conflict with, the foundations
change, threats change, and unanticipated interactions among components emerge.
46
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
of liberty in these societies. It would be a mistake to imagine that the Counter Intelligence Program (“COINTELPRO”), the
secret domestic spying program that the FBI ran against domestic dissenters (including leaders and activists in the civil rights and antiwar movements 71) made
America stronger and more secure at a cost to freedom and democracy. COINTELPRO made Americans less
secure and less free, and less able to engage in the kind of criticism that helps us learn to distinguish between real,
core threats to the lives and wellbeing of Americans and manufactured threats tailored to fit the views of those who
sought to disrupt dissent.
47
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Journalists Key
Investigative journalism is crucial to hold governments accountable – mass surveillance chills it
Gellman, 07 (Barton,
fellow at the Center on Law and Security and the special projects
reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post. “SECRECY AND GOVERNMENT: America Faces the Future” 4-12-07.
http://www.lawandsecurity.org/Portals/0/Documents/SecrecyPrivacy.pdf)
My personal view is that the press has no formal institutional entitlement. Functionally, public
exposure and discussion are what is important.
In order to hold the government accountable, one has to know, in broad terms, what it is doing. The importance of privacy
is well-understood by the government for its own purposes. In terms of its deliberations, in terms of who is advising the energy task force, and in terms of a long list of
information that Congress would like in exercising oversight responsibilities, the executive branch is prepared to say that it would be difficult to get full, unvarnished
Government officials have
no legitimate right to personal privacy in their public capacities. That is, the privacy interest is not theirs as
individuals. Any valid argument here is about the best way to serve the public interest. I agree that there is a plausible argument, and sometimes rather an
important one, that deliberations require some privacy. On the other hand, choosing their elected officials and holding them to account
clearly require people to understand something about what the government is doing. Since Congress and the
courts, for many complicated reasons, are sometimes disinclined to or ineffective at extracting that information
and making it public, reporters fill that role. We have to have confidential sources because in some cases people
will lose their jobs or face other sorts of retribution for talking to us. Cell phones and e-mail are very convenient, and I do not think any
of us have figured out an effective way to avoid any exposure. Sources of mine have told me they had been interviewed by leak
investigators. Based on the questions they were asked, they were fairly confident that their own phone records had
been obtained. They gave me a heads-up about it because it would mean that my records might have been obtained or that, at least where the records crossed, my
contacts might be known. It is a conundrum. The boundary preventing intrusion into the reportorial process, which has evolved
in the several decades since Watergate, is shifting in a way that is not particularly helpful to public debate.
opinions from anyone who knows that his or her advice will be publicly aired. This is all in the pursuit of the public business.
48
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Democracy Advantage
49
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Surveillance Chills Activism
Mass surveillance deters activism
Lerner, 14 (Mark, spokesperson for Constitutional Alliance, a non-profit alliance of individual citizens, state and national groups, and state lawmakers that
opposes state surveillance. “The Chilling Effect of Domestic Spying” 8-5-14. http://americanpolicy.org/2014/08/05/the-chilling-effect-of-domestic-spying/)
the Snowden revelations have revealed to a large degree the domestic surveillance taking place,
the public knows more about what OUR government is doing. The bad news is the chilling effect creating a surveillance state has on a
representative form of government. The chilling effect can be simply defined as the way in which people alter or
modify their behavior to conform to political and social norms as a result of knowing or believing they are being
observed. The observation can be from physical surveillance, telephone meta data being collected, emails being intercepted and read, search engine requests being
The good news is now that
maintained, text messages being read and stored, financial transactions being monitored and much more. This paper will examine the chilling effect and provide some
empirical data (links within this article) to show the chilling effect is real. Denial is no longer an option. For years, even decades it has been reported by people inside
and outside our government that agencies and departments within our federal government have been spying on citizens and further collecting data (Personal Identifiable
Information) associated with the domestic spying taking place. Many of us who discussed the spying taking place were called conspiracy theorists, tin foil hat wearers,
or black helicopter paranoid people: Today we are called realists. The
Snowden revelations are unique because of the depth and scope
of the revelations and because Snowden had the official documents to back up his assertions. Previously people including
former NSA analysts such as William Binney, Thomas Drake, Russell Tice and Kirk Wiebe had come forward asserting that our government was spying on citizens.
Too many in the government, the media, and the public dismissed the allegations of these men because it was “easy” to do so rather than believe the worst about our
government, or actually having to do something about domestic spying. To be fair the NSA has not been the only ones accused of domestic spying. The FBI, DHS, and
the CIA have also been proven to having done their own domestic spying; in the case of the FBI going back over seventy years. I support the need for our intelligence
community, law enforcement, and our military. Unfortunately in much the same way the “Stockholm Syndrome” results in a person who has been kidnapped falling
victim to the goals and aspirations of the kidnappers, the “rank and file” of those responsible for protecting us and our freedom have fallen victim to corrupt leadership
in our intelligence and law enforcement communities. The culture of corruption is just as infectious as any chemical or biological weapon of mass destruction.
Congress has its share of the blame for the domestic spying that has and even to this day is taking place. After all it is congress that has the responsibility of oversight
over agencies and departments of the federal government. All too often congress has failed to do what it has been tasked with doing; performing oversight. In fact, not
too long ago congress gave retroactive immunity to telecom companies for the roles telecom companies played in illegally collecting information for the NSA at the
request of former President Bush. When it comes down to it, there is plenty of “blame” to go around. Some are guilty: All are responsible including the public for not
demanding better of our elected and appointed officials.
Whether a Democrat or Republican occupied the White House or regardless of which party controlled the Senate and/or the House of Representatives, domestic spying
took place and is still taking place. Domestic spying is not a “Right” or “Left” issue. Domestic spying is an equal opportunity offender.
Typically I would provide dozens of links in an article to substantiate what I am writing. In the case of the chilling effect I am only going to provide three links. The
three links provide undeniable evidence that the chilling effect is real and how the chilling effect is affecting our country http://gigaom.com/2013/08/20/through-aprism-darkly-fear-of-nsa-surveillance-is- having-a-chilling-effect-on-the-open-web/ and https://www.commondreams.org/ headline/2013/11/12-5 and finally http://
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=2412564
The chilling effect is quantifiable based on empirical data.
People were polled and research has been done. The public including lawmakers, young people, journalists and
other “writers” have all too various degrees become subject to the chilling effect. Political scientists, attorneys, law
professors, psychologists, sociologists have all weighed in on the chilling effect. I have read dozens of papers and
other material accounting for thousands of pages about the “Chilling Effect”.
Depending on who is doing the research and the writing, it is fair and reasonable to assert that as much as 50% of
people or more alter their behavior to conform to political and social norms as a direct result of the surveillance
state that has been created in the United States. Up to 33% of journalists and other writers have admitted to
changing what they write or say, or seriously considered changing what they write or say because they believe they
are being “watched”.
What does all this mean to “activists” who are attempting to get the “general public” engaged in a whole host of
issues from Common Core, Real ID, smart meters, immigration, national debt, healthcare, foreign policy and yes,
even including domestic surveillance among other issues? What it means is the chilling effect will make it much more difficult
to engage the general public much less educate and motivate the general public to “take a stand” and have their
voices heard.
In addition to the surveillance state we must not forget that state and federal government has said domestic terrorism is the
biggest threat to our country. Veterans, anti-abortion advocates, anti-war activists, third party supporters,
environmentalists, 2nd Amendment supporters, states’ rights proponents, and many other groups of people have
all been named as “potential domestic terrorists” by state and federal government agencies and departments. Once
again it is not a “Left/Right” issue. People and groups on both sides of the political spectrum are “suspects.” The
The bottom line is the chilling effect is not some psycho mumble jumble.
presumption of innocence is no longer a consideration. This broad profiling of people and groups only exasperates the “Chilling Effect” domestic spying has.
50
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
People are less likely to be involved with the government because of surveillance fears
Electronic Frontier Foundation, 13 (Non-profit advocacy organization defending online civil liberties. “EFF Files 22 Firsthand Accounts of How
NSA Surveillance Chilled the Right to Association” 11-6-13. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-files-22-firsthand-accounts-how-nsa-surveillance-chilled-rightassociation)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has provided a federal judge with testimony from 22 separate advocacy
organizations detailing how the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass telephone records collection program has
impeded the groups' work, discouraged their members and reduced the numbers of people seeking their help via
hotlines. The declarations accompanied a motion for partial summary judgment filed late Wednesday, in which EFF asks the court to declare the surveillance illegal
on two levels—the law does not authorize the program, and the Constitution forbids it.
In First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, EFF represents a diverse array of environmentalists,
gun-rights activists, religious groups,
human-rights workers, drug-policy advocates and others that share one major commonality: they each depend on
the First Amendment's guarantee of free association. EFF argues that if the government vacuums up the records of
every phone call—who made the call, who received the call, when and how long the parties spoke—then people will be afraid to join or
engage with organizations that may have dissenting views on political issues of the day. The US government acknowledged the
existence of the telephone records collection program this summer, after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a copy of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
order authorizing the mass collection of Verizon telephone records.
"The plaintiffs, like countless other associations across the country, have suffered real and concrete harm because
they have lost the ability to assure their constituents that the fact of their telephone communications between them
will be kept confidential from the federal government," EFF Senior Staff Attorney David Greene said. "This has caused
constituents to reduce their calling. This is exactly the type of chilling effect on the freedom of association that the
First Amendment forbids."
Fear of surveillance stops activismPasternack, 14 (Alex, Editor-At-Large of VICE. “In Our Google Searches, Researchers See a
Post-Snowden Chilling Effect,” 5-5-14. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nsa-chilling-effect)
According to a new study of Google search trends, searches for terms deemed to be sensitive to government or
privacy concerns have dropped "significantly" in the months since Edward Snowden's revelations in July.
"It seemed very possible that we would see no effect," MIT economist Catherine Tucker and digital privacy advocate Alex
Marthews write. "However, we do in fact see an overall roughly 2.2 percentage point fall in search traffic on 'high
government trouble'-rated search terms."
Tucker and Marthews asked nearly 6,000 people to rate the sensitivity of a pile of keywords—including those on the DHS social media watchword list—based on
whether the word would "get them into trouble" or "embarrass" them with their family, their close friends, or with the US government.
Marthews, the head of the the Cambridge-based digital advocacy group Digital Fourth, had predicted an effect on search behavior. Tucker, a professor at MIT's Sloan
School of Management who specializes in data issues, had not expected to see an effect.
But by analyzing Google's publicly-available search data, they noticed a general pattern: even as searches for less sensitive words appeared to rise, searches for the most
suspicious words fell.
"This is the first academic empirical evidence of a chilling effect on users’ willingness to enter search terms that
raters thought would get you into trouble with the US government," Tucker wrote in an email.
Researchers found a rise in search terms with "low" government sensitivity and a decline in terms with "high" sensitivity.
51
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Surveillance → Tyranny
Mass surveillance creates the conditions for future tyranny – the state just has to “turn the key”
on data collected on millions of Americans. Environmental crisis, growing economic inequality,
and mass protest movements render this likely
Paglen, 13 (Trevor,
Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley, artist and author. Has written several books on state secrecy, including the CIA's extraordinary
rendition program. “Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State” 6-23-13. http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-the-construction-of-aterror-state/?gllry=opn)
By exposing NSA programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, Edward Snowden has revealed that we are not moving
toward a surveillance state: we live in the heart of one. The 30-year-old whistleblower told The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the
NSA’s data collection created the possibility of a “turnkey tyranny,” whereby a malevolent future government
could create an authoritarian state with the flick of a switch. The truth is actually worse. Within the context of current
economic, political and environmental trends, the existence of a surveillance state doesn’t just create a theoretical
possibility of tyranny with the turn of a key—it virtually guarantees it.
For more than a decade, we’ve seen the rise of what we might call a “Terror State,” of which the NSA’s surveillance capabilities represent just one part. Its rise occurs
at a historical moment when state agencies and programs designed to enable social mobility, provide economic security and enhance civic life have been targeted for
significant cuts. The last three decades, in fact, have seen serious and consistent attacks on social security, food assistance programs, unemployment benefits and
education and health programs. As the social safety net has shrunk, the prison system has grown. The
United States now imprisons its own
citizens at a higher rate than any other country in the world.
While civic parts of the state have been in retreat, institutions of the Terror State have grown dramatically. In the name of an amorphous and never-ending “war on
terror,” the Department of Homeland Security was created, while institutions such as the CIA, FBI and NSA, and darker parts of the military like the Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC) have expanded considerably in size and political influence. The
world has become a battlefield—a stage for
extralegal renditions, indefinite detentions without trial, drone assassination programs and cyberwarfare. We have
entered an era of secret laws, classified interpretations of laws and the retroactive “legalization” of classified programs that were clearly illegal when they began.
Funding for the secret parts of the state comes from a “black budget” hidden from Congress—not to mention the people—that now tops $100 billion annually. Finally,
to ensure that only government-approved “leaks” appear in the media, the Terror State has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, leakers and journalists. All
Politicians claim that the
Terror State is necessary to defend democratic institutions from the threat of terrorism. But there is a deep irony
to this rhetoric. Terrorism does not pose, has never posed and never will pose an existential threat to the United
States. Terrorists will never have the capacity to “take away our freedom.” Terrorist outfits have no armies with which to invade, and no
means to impose martial law. They do not have their hands on supra-national power levers like the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund. They cannot force nations into brutal austerity programs and other forms of economic subjugation. But
while terrorism cannot pose an existential threat to the United States, the institutions of a Terror State absolutely
can. Indeed, their continued expansion poses a serious threat to principles of democracy and equality.
At its most spectacular, terrorism works by instilling so much fear in a society that the society begins to collapse on itself.
The effects of persistent mass surveillance provide one example of such disintegration. Most obviously, surveillance
represents a searing breach of personal privacy, as became clear when NSA analysts passed around phone-sex
recordings of overseas troops and their stateside spouses. And while surveillance inhibits the exercise of civil liberties for all, it
inevitably targets racial, religious and political minorities. Witness the Department of Homeland Security’s
surveillance of Occupy activists, the NYPD’s monitoring of Muslim Americans, the FBI’s ruthless entrapment of
young Muslim men and the use of anti-terror statutes against environmental activists. Moreover, mass surveillance
also has a deep effect on culture, encouraging conformity to a narrow range of “acceptable” ideas by frightening people
of these state programs and capacities would have been considered aberrant only a short time ago. Now, they are the norm.
away from non-mainstream thought. If the government keeps a record of every library book you read, you might be disinclined to check out The Anarchist Cookbook
the
next few decades will be decades of crisis. Left unchecked, systemic instability caused by growing economic
inequality and impending environmental disaster will produce widespread insecurity. On the economic side, we are
facing an increasingly acute crisis of capitalism and a growing disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots,” both
nationally and globally. For several decades, the vast majority of economic gains have gone to the wealthiest segments of society, while the middle and working
today; tomorrow you might think twice before borrowing Lenin’s Imperialism. Looking past whatever threats may or may not exist from overseas terrorists,
classes have seen incomes stagnate and decline. Paul Krugman has dubbed this phenomenon the “Great Divergence.” A few statistics are telling: between 1992 and
2007, the income of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States rose by 392 percent. Their tax rate fell by 37 percent. Since 1979, productivity has risen by more than
80 percent, but the median worker’s wage has only gone up by 10 percent. This is not an accident. The evisceration of the American middle and working class has
everything to do with an all-out assault on unions; the rewriting of the laws governing bankruptcy, student loans, credit card debt, predatory lending and financial
trading; and the transfer of public wealth to private hands through deregulation, privatization and reduced taxes on the wealthy. The Great Divergence is, to put it
All the while, we are on a collision
course with nature. Mega-storms, tornadoes, wildfires, floods and erratic weather patterns are gradually becoming
52
bluntly, the effect of a class war waged by the rich against the rest of society, and there are no signs of it letting up.
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
the rule rather than the exception. There are no signs of any serious efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions at levels anywhere near those required to
avert the worst climate-change scenarios. According to the most robust climate models, global carbon emissions between now
and mid-century must be kept below 565 gigatons to meet the Copenhagen Accord’s target of limiting global warming to a two-degree Celsius
increase. Meanwhile, as Bill McKibben has noted, the world’s energy companies currently hold in reserve 2,795
gigatons of carbon, which they plan to release in the coming decades. Clearly, they have bet that world
governments will fail to significantly regulate greenhouse emissions. The plan is to keep burning fossil fuels, no matter the environmental
consequences. While right-wing politicians write off climate change as a global conspiracy among scientists, the Pentagon has identified it as a significant threat to
national security. After a decade of studies and war games involving climate-change scenarios, the Department of Defense’s 2010 Quadrennial Review (the main public
document outlining American military doctrine) explains that “climate-related changes are already being observed in every region of the world,” and that they “could
have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments.
Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or
exacerbate mass migration.” Nationally and internationally, the effects of climate change will be felt unevenly. Whether it’s rising water levels or
skyrocketing prices for foods due to irregular weather, the effects of a tumultuous climate will disproportionately impact society’s most precarious populations. Thus,
the effects of climate change will exacerbate already existing trends toward greater economic inequality, leading to
widespread humanitarian crises and social unrest. The coming decades will bring Occupy-like protests on everlarger scales as high unemployment and economic strife, particularly among youth, becomes a “new normal.”
Moreover, the effects of climate change will produce new populations of displaced people and refugees. Economic and environmental insecurity represent the future for
vast swaths of the world’s population. One way or another, governments
will be forced to respond. As future governments face these
intensifying crises, the decline of the state’s civic capacities virtually guarantees that they will meet any unrest with
the authoritarian levers of the Terror State. It won’t matter whether a “liberal” or “conservative” government is
in place; faced with an immediate crisis, the state will use whatever means are available to end said crisis. When
the most robust levers available are tools of mass surveillance and coercion, then those tools will be used. What’s more,
laws like the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides for the indefinite detention of American citizens, indicate that military and intelligence programs
originally crafted for combating overseas terrorists will be applied domestically.
The larger, longer-term scandal of Snowden’s revelations is that, together with other political trends, the NSA’s
programs do not merely provide the capacity for “turnkey tyranny”—they render any other future all but
impossible.
53
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Internet Freedom Key to Spread Democracy
Global internet freedom policies will determine whether internet access empowers or undermines
authoritarian states - restrictive internet policy dooms democratic movements
MacKinnon, 12 (Rebecca, Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. She is the author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide
Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012). She is also the co-founder of Global Voices Online, a global citizen media network. “Internet Activism? Let’s Look at the
Specifics” 5-11-12. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/05/11/rebecca-mackinnon/internet-activism-lets-look-specifics)
Berin Szoka is right to argue that
while the Internet brings new dimensions and power to activism, we must not be naïve
about the power of networked technologies. It is important to unpack the factors behind successful—and
unsuccessful—online activism. Examples of both abound. Internet connectivity and widespread social media adoption do
not on their own guarantee activism’s success. The Internet is not some sort of automatic “freedom juice.”
Success or failure of digital activism depends on a plethora of variables—economic, cultural, religious, commercial, political, personal, and accidents of history. In his
seminal book The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam , Philip N. Howard, a professor at the University
concludes that while the Internet and mobile technologies
do not cause change, change is unlikely to happen without sufficient mobile and Internet penetration.[1] Indeed, the
two Arab countries in which dictators were deposed without civil war in 2011 were Tunisia and Egypt—both of
which have relatively high rates of Internet penetration and social media use compared to many other parts of the
Middle East and North Africa. However, as I discuss at some length in my book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet
of Washington and expert on technology and political change in the Islamic world,
Freedom, the revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt did not spring immaculately from Twitter and Facebook. Movements for political change in these countries developed
and matured over the course of a decade; then when the right moment came activists were in a position to take advantage of them. Activists experimented with
networked technologies, honed their messages over time, built support networks, and generally worked to use Internet and mobile platforms to their maximum
advantage. They also spent a decade building offline relationships both nationally and regionally and honing offline protest skills. The revolutions’ successes in Tunisia
and Egypt, as Szoka rightly points out, had much to do with widespread economic grievances and anger over state corruption.
Another factor was the relative lack of sectarian divisions in Egypt and Tunisia as compared to other countries in the region. This contrasts sharply with Bahrain which
also boasts deep Internet penetration and widespread social media usage, but whose society is torn asunder by a deep sectarian divide between majority Shiites and
Sunni political elites. This divide has enabled the ruling Al Khalifa family to suppress dissent violently and with impunity—aided by other geopolitical factors including
support from neighboring Saudi Arabia, which considers Sunni activism on its doorstep to be a dangerous sign of Iranian political meddling. Then there is the presence
in Bahrain of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, a geopolitical rather than a technological reality that makes rapid political change in Bahrain all the less likely. In Syria, Internet
penetration was much more shallow and online communities much weaker to begin with. This combined with a sharp sectarian divide has meant that while activists
have been able to use the Internet to get information out to the world about the Assad regime’s atrocities against its own people, conventional geopolitics—not new
media—will be the decisive factor in deciding when and how Assad will fall from power.
Success or failure of digital activism in authoritarian states also depends on the regime’s technological capacity,
skill, foresight, and planning. As I describe in detail in the third chapter of my book, the Chinese government took the Internet seriously as both a political
threat and economic opportunity from the moment it began to allow commercial Internet services in the mid-1990s. The Chinese government built the world’s most
sophisticated system of filtering and blocking for overseas websites, including most famously most Google-owned services, Facebook, and Twitter. At the same time,
the government encouraged the development of a robust domestic Internet and telecommunications industry so that Chinese technology users can enjoy an abundant
variety of domestically run social media platforms, online information services, Internet and mobile platforms, and devices produced by Chinese companies. By
imposing strong political and legal liability on Internet intermediaries, the government forced companies—many financed by Western capital—not only to foot the bill
for much of the regime’s censorship and surveillance needs, but to do much of the actual work.
Online activism still does occur in China, but due to multiple layers of censorship and surveillance, activism’s
successes have for the most part been local, presenting minimal threat to the power of the central government and
Communist Party. Users of the Chinese Twitter-like social networking platform Weibo have ruined the careers of local and provincial officials by exposing
their corruption. Chinese “netizens,” as they like to call themselves, have also called attention to specific errors or incompetencies of specific parts of the bureaucracy,
which the central government has then moved to fix—which in many ways boosts the central government’s power and credibility as compared to local governments or
To date, activists who have tried to use social media to build national
movements for systemic political change have consistently gone to jail or been placed under house arrest, their
supporters and friends often harassed and threatened with loss of jobs and educational opportunities even if they
have not technically committed any crime by Chinese law. The case of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng may or may not serve as a
specific ministers seeking to develop independent power bases.
watershed moment for Chinese activism—it remains too early to tell. But if it does, the reasons for digital activism’s success in China will have as much to do with
offline domestic and international factors as with anything technological: a leadership crisis at the top of the Communist Party precipitated by the downfall of the
power-hungry Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai; plus specific developments not only in the U.S.–China diplomatic relationship but also U.S. domestic partisan
politics, which Chen’s supporters have taken skillful advantage of, using social media of course.
To complicate matters further, the
Internet itself—its technical architecture as well as the regulatory constraints shaping
what people in different places can and cannot do with it—is a variable. We cannot treat the Internet as constant—
either across geographical space or across time—in our calculations about the success of online activism. In
Thailand, for example, the relative weakness of online activism is the result in no small part of heavy liability
placed by national laws on Internet intermediaries. Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act holds Internet service providers and website operators
legally responsible for the activities of their users. This, combined with an antiquated lèse majesté law banning insulting comments about the king, has resulted in the
arrest of people involved with running activist and opposition websites and made it difficult for online activism to achieve critical mass.[2] In Azerbaijan, a
54
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
blanket surveillance system imposed by the government on Internet and mobile network operators is combined in
a politically insidious manner with media manipulation, arrests, and intimidation of online activists. This has, in the
words of Internet scholars Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior, who recently concluded a multi-year study of the Azerbaijani Internet, “successfully dissuaded frequent
Internet users from supporting protest and average Internet users from using social media for political purposes.”[3]
Thus while the Internet often empowers activism, it is also used in many parts of the world as an insidious
extension of state power—sometimes with the direct collaboration of companies seeking market access; sometimes much more indirectly due to the fact that
Internet and mobile companies are conduits and repositories of vast amounts of citizens’ personal data, and also make commercial decisions that have a profound
impact on people’s digital lives and identities.
Back home in the United States, this is precisely why recent political movements against legislation like SOPA and CISPA that Szoka describes are so important. SOPA
would not only have built a “great firewall of America” but would have imposed liability on Internet intermediaries in a manner that was ripe for political as well as
commercial abuse. CISPA, in the name of securing America’s networks, will also legalize and institutionalize mechanisms of government access to citizens’ private
communications that lack accountability, inviting abuse against which citizens will have no meaningful recourse as the legislation is currently written.
Whether the Internet remains conducive to political activism, or with liberal democracy for that matter, is by no
means guaranteed. We face a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist:
Activism is urgently required—nationally and globally—to ensure that the Internet remains compatible with
activism.
Credible U.S. internet leadership is crucial to promote global democracy
Fontaine, 14 (Richard, President of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He served as a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow at CNAS from 20092012 and previously as foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain for more than five years. He has also worked at the State Department, the National Security
Council and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden Era,” September 2014.
http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/CNAS_BringingLibertyOnline_Fontaine.pdf)
The scrambled Internet freedom narrative and its complicated consequences are
discouraging, not least because the need for an active online freedom agenda has never been more pressing. It is
today estimated that roughly half of Internet users worldwide experience online censorship in some form.41 Freedom
A Snapshot of Internet Freedom Today
House observes a deterioration in global Internet freedom over the three consecutive years it has issued reports; its 2013 volume notes that Internet freedom declined in
more than half of the 60 countries it assessed. Broad surveillance, new legislation controlling online content and the arrest of
Internet users are all on the increase; over the course of a single year, some 24 countries passed new laws or
regulations that threaten online freedom of speech.42 A glance at the past 12 months reveals a disturbing trend. In Turkey, for example,
after its high court overturned a ban on Twitter, the government began demanding that the company quickly implement orders to block specific users. Ankara also
blocked YouTube after a surreptitious recording of the country’s foreign minister surfaced, and it has dramatically increased its takedown requests to both
Twitter and Google.43 Russia has begun directly censoring the Internet with a growing blacklist of websites, and under a
new law its government can block websites that encourage people to participate in unauthorized protests.44
Chinese social media censorship has become so pervasive that it constitutes, according to one study, “the largest selective
suppression of human communication in the history of the world.”45 China has also begun assisting foreign countries, including Iran and
Zambia, in their efforts to monitor and censor the Internet.46 Vietnam has enacted a new law making it illegal to distribute digital
content that opposes the government.47 Venezuela has blocked access to certain websites and limited Internet access in parts of the country.48 A
robust, energetic American Internet freedom agenda is most needed at the very moment that that agenda has come
under the greatest attack. Reenergizing the Agenda Precisely because the Internet is today such a contested space, it is
vitally important that the United States be actively involved in promoting online freedom. America’s Internet
freedom efforts accord with the country’s longstanding tradition of promoting human rights, including freedoms
of expression, association and assembly. And it represents a bet: that access to an open Internet can foster elements
of democracy in autocratic states by empowering those who are pressing for liberal change at home. While the
outcome of that bet remains uncertain, there should be no doubt about which side the United States has chosen.
55
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Answer to: “the aff doesn’t fix democracy”
Democracy works even if it isn’t perfect – must keep trying to make it better
HAMBURG 95 DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is President Emeritus at
Carnegie Corporation.
[David A. Hamburg, Foreword to ‘A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict,’ December 1995,
http://legacy.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm]
From an early stage in democracy building, a wide understanding of the possibilities for nonviolent conflict resolution and
the practical value of mutual accommodation among different sectors and peoples within a state is important . At every step,
from articulation of fundamental principles to implementation of operational details, there is a need to educate for democracy. Indeed, modern telecommunications may
make it feasible to have a worldwide democratic network under highly respected auspices--perhaps a mix of governmental and nongovernmental supporters. Through
such a network, in a short time it might be possible to enhance the level of understanding throughout the world of what is involved in democracy and its potential
benefits for all, especially its capacity for nonviolent conflict resolution. People need to see that cooperation can often lead to greater benefits in the long run and to
recognize superordinate goals of compelling value to all concerned that can be achieved only by cooperation.
Regrettably, the high ideals that characterize democracy are not readily translated into practice. Indeed, democracy is an
evolving, changing, adapting, updating process--always less than ideal, yet always shaped by high aspirations, with norms of
decency becoming stronger as the years go by. Nevertheless, new democracies can learn a great deal from the experience of old democracies and need
not require centuries to make a reasonable first approximation of democratic ideals in practice. Even a very crude approximation would be a
considerable improvement over the experience of many countries to date.
The building of democratic institutions would be one of the greatest conflict prevention measures that could be taken,
especially if one thinks in terms of both political and economic democratic structures. The international community of
established democracies must address the translation of this aspiration into the reality of emerging democracies. So
fortunate a community, with so much relevant experience in coping with the problems of modern societies, is morally obligated to smooth the
path to democratization around the world in a systematic, deliberate, long-term, high-priority way.
The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict is concerned with building preventive capacities, so that people can live together peacefully over the long
term. The building of democratic institutions is certainly one crucial, albeit complicated and frustratingly slow, component of this challenge. Historically, there is little
precedent for well-organized international efforts to help substantially with this process of democratization--yet there is enough experience to know that it is not
impossible.
If democracy is viewed as an optional preoccupation of self-righteous democratizers--or even as an intrusive activity of sugar-coated neo-imperialists--then all this is
much ado about nothing (or worse). But if we view democracy as a powerful and constructive mechanism for resolving the
ubiquitous ongoing conflicts of our highly contentious human species, then the challenge becomes vital, and the
opportunity precious. That is why this essay is so important.
56
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Democracy Spreads
Democracies spread – 4 theories why. The stronger a democracy the more it will spread
LEESON & DEAN 09 1 George Mason University 2 West Virginia University
[Peter T. Leeson, Andrea M. Dean, The Democratic Domino Theory: An Empirical Investigation, American Journal of Political Science, Volume 53, Issue 3, pages
533–551, July 2009]
Potential Mechanisms of Democratic Dominoes
Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett (2006) identify four potential mechanisms, or channels, through which democracy may
spread between countries. Although these authors are not specifically concerned with a geography-based domino idea as we are, the mechanisms they identify
are all plausible candidates for geographic democratic contagion. The first such channel is simple Tiebout competition. Although the transactions
costs of migration are nontrivial between nations and can be very high in countries that strictly limit mobility, competition between governments can create strong
incentives for geographic neighbors to increase democratic constraints, leading prodemocracy changes to spread throughout geographic regions. If a country
strengthens its democracy, for instance by institutionalizing greater constraints on executive authority, it is likely to attract additional foreign
business and direct investment as agents seek the most secure locations to undertake economic activity.3 The firms and citizens
that find this move the least costly are those in neighboring nations that share a border with the democratizing country. Their movement or potential movement can
pressure neighboring countries to undertake similar democracy-oriented reforms to avoid losing their tax base. If these nations’ neighbors in turn democratize to avoid
losing their tax base to their democratizing neighbors, and so on, the resulting competition can lead to a contagion effect that creates greater democracy throughout a
region of neighboring countries.
A second potential mechanism of democracy's spread between geographic neighbors is through the diffusion of prodemocracy ideas via
a
demonstration effect, or what Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett call “learning.” Neighboring countries can observe the activities of the countries
around them and import successful ideas at a lower cost than if they had to look further abroad to find them. If one country employs
democracy-enhancing ideas, its geographic neighbors may become more likely to adopt them as well. Once these countries have adopted democracy-enhancing ideas,
their neighbors become more likely to adopt them, and so on. This process may cause a cascade of more democracy whereby increases in democracy in one country
spread to countries around it. This “democracy demonstration effect” could also operate in conjunction with a migration-style mechanism along the lines discussed
above. Democracy advocates in one country, for example, may penetrate the borders of neighboring countries that are less democratic, carrying their ideas with them as
well as providing the impetus for domestic prodemocratic reform.
A third potential channel of democracy's geographic spread is through economic communities or zones. As Pevehouse (2002a, 2002b) points
out, economic communities such as NAFTA and the EU often harmonize not only their members’ economic policies, but also their members’ political arrangements, in
some cases requiring members to satisfy certain institutional requirements as a condition of membership. In many cases admission to these communities confers
benefits on members in the form of cross-country subsidization, protection alliances, and so forth. These benefits raise the value of joining economic zones, creating an
incentive for nonmember nations to increase their level of democracy if, for example, membership requires institutional constraints that directly or indirectly serve to
limit the executive's authority. Since economic communities are often geographically based, their presence may in this way
produce spreading democracy throughout a region of neighboring countries.
The final potential mechanism of democratic contagion that Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett highlight is what they call “emulation.” According to
this idea, some “big player” countries, such as the United States, lead in terms of political institutions (and policies), which other
countries then follow. If the United States strengthens its democracy in some fashion, other countries may do so as well. Like the other channels considered
above, this channel need not be a geographic mechanism of spreading democracy. If, for instance, Argentina follows prodemocracy reform in the United States,
democracy may spread but not between geographic neighbors. However, within various geographic regions there may be local “big players”—regional leader
countries—that neighboring nations tend to look to in guiding their behavior. In this way emulation may also be a geographic channel for democratic dominoes between
neighboring countries.
These are only a few of the imaginable mechanisms through which democratic dominoes might be set in motion. Surely
others could be proposed. Further, while in principle some of these channels, such as emulation, may be capable of spreading either increases or decreases in democracy
geographically, others, such as Tiebout competition, may only be capable of spreading increases in democracy geographically. Although these channels are
conceptually distinct, separating them empirically is a different matter. Our interest is in identifying if there is in fact any significant
empirical evidence for democratic dominoes regardless of their source and, if there is, establishing how “hard” they fall. It is not our goal, nor does our empirical
strategy allow us, to identify which, if any, of the specific potential channels of democracy's geographic spread have or have not been at work at various points in
history. Although it does not do so in a spatial econometric framework and is not focused only on democracy, some existing research has found evidence for various
kinds of “policy diffusion” via each of the channels pointed to above (see, for instance, Elkins, Guzman, and Simmons 2006; Gleditsch and Ward 2006; Lee and Strang
2006; Swank 2006). Future work should attempt to pinpoint the operation of these and other specific mechanisms explicitly in the context of the spatial framework this
article employs.
57
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Democracy Solves Everything
Democracy solves all the worlds problems – checks back Russia, China, terrorism, regional
conflicts. Spreading it produces immediate benefits
DIAMOND 95 Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Professor of political science and sociology, coordinates the democracy program of the Center on Democracy,
Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)
[Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives, A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly
Conflict Carnegie Corporation of New York, December 1995, http://legacy.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm]
POTENTIAL THREATS TO GLOBAL ORDER AND NATIONAL SECURITY
On any list of the most important potential threats to world order and national security in the coming decade, these six should
figure prominently: a hostile, expansionist Russia; a hostile, expansionist China; the spread of fundamentalist Islamic, antiWestern regimes; the spread of political terrorism from all sources; sharply increased immigration pressures; and ethnic
conflict that escalates into large-scale violence, civil war, refugee flows, state collapse, and general anarchy. Some of these potential threats interact in
significant ways with one another, but they all share a common underlying connection. In each instance, the development of
democracy is an important prophylactic, and in some cases the only long- term protection, against disaster.
A HOSTILE, EXPANSIONIST RUSSIA
Chief among the threats to the security of Europe, the United States, and Japan would be the reversion of Russia--with its still very
substantial nuclear, scientific, and military prowess--to a hostile posture toward the West. Today, the Russian state (insofar as it continues
to exist) appears perched on the precipice of capture by ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, neo-imperialist forces seeking a new era of pogroms,
conquest, and "greatness." These forces feed on the weakness of democratic institutions, the divisions among democratic forces, and the generally dismal economic and
political state of the country under civilian, constitutional rule. Numerous observers speak of "Weimar Russia." As in Germany in the 1920s, the only alternative
to a triumph of fascism (or some related "ism" deeply hostile to freedom and to the West) is the development of an effective democratic order. Now,
as then, this project must struggle against great historical and political odds, and it seems feasible only with international economic aid and support for democratic
forces and institutions.
A HOSTILE, EXPANSIONIST CHINA
In China, the threat to the West emanates from success rather than failure and is less amenable to explicit international assistance and inducement. Still, a
China
moving toward democracy--gradually constructing a real constitutional order, with established ground rules for political competition and succession and
civilian control over the military--seems a much better prospect to be a responsible player on the regional and international stage .
Unfair trade practices, naval power projection, territorial expansion, subversion of neighboring regimes, and bullying of democratic forces in Hong Kong and Taiwan
are all more likely the more China resists political liberalization. So is a political succession crisis that could disrupt incremental patterns of reform and induce
competing power players to take risks internationally to advance their power positions at home. A China that is building an effective rule of law
seems a much better prospect to respect international trading rules that mandate protection for intellectual property and forbid the use of prison
labor. And on these matters of legal, electoral, and institutional development, international actors can help.
THE SPREAD OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM
Increasingly, Europeans and Americans worry about the threat from fundamentalist Islam. But fundamentalist
movements do not mobilize righteous
anger and absolute commitment in a vacuum. They feed on the utter failure of decadent political systems to meet the most
elementary expectations for material progress and social justice. Some say the West must choose between corrupt, repressive regimes that are at least secular and proWestern and Islamic fundamentalist regimes that will be no less repressive, but anti-Western. That is a false choice in Egypt today, as it was in Iran or Algeria-at least until their societies became so polarized as to virtually obliterate the liberal center. It
is precisely the corruption, arrogance, oppression, and gross
ruling regimes like the current one in Egypt that stimulate the Islamic fundamentalist alternative. Though force may
be needed--and legitimate--to meet an armed challenge, history teaches that decadent regimes cannot hang on forever through force alone. In the long run, the
only reliable bulwark against revolution or anarchy is good governance--and that requires far-reaching political reform. In Egypt and some
inefficacy of
other Arab countries, such reform would entail a gradual program of political liberalization that counters corruption, reduces state interference in the economy, responds
to social needs, and gives space for moderate forces in civil society to build public support and understanding for further liberalizing reforms. In Pakistan and Turkey, it
would mean making democracy work: stamping out corruption, reforming the economy, mobilizing state resources efficiently to address social needs,
devolving power, guaranteeing the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and--not least-- reasserting civilian control over the military. In either case, the
fundamentalist challenge can be met only by moving (at varying speeds) toward, not away from, democracy.
POLITICAL TERRORISM
Terrorism and immigration pressures also commonly have their origins in political exclusion, social injustice, and bad, abusive, or
tyrannical governance. Overwhelmingly, the sponsors of international terrorism are among the world's most authoritarian
regimes: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan. And locally within countries, the agents of terrorism tend to be either the fanatics of
antidemocratic, ideological movements or aggrieved ethnic and regional minorities who have felt themselves socially marginalized and
politically excluded and insecure: Sri Lanka's Tamils, Turkey's Kurds, India's Sikhs and Kashmiris. To be sure, democracies must vigorously mobilize their legitimate
58
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
more fundamental and enduring assault on international
terrorism requires political change to bring down zealous, paranoiac dictatorships and to allow aggrieved groups in all countries
to pursue their interests through open, peaceful, and constitutional means.
As for immigration, it is true that people everywhere are drawn to prosperous, open, dynamic societies like those of the United States,
instruments of law enforcement to counter this growing threat to their security. But a
Canada, and Western Europe. But the sources of large (and rapid) immigration flows to the West increasingly tend to be countries in the grip of civil war, political
turmoil, economic disarray, and poor governance: Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Central America, Algeria. And in Mexico, authoritarianism, corruption, and social injustice
have held back human development in ways that have spawned the largest sustained flow of immigrants to any Western country--a flow that threatens to become a
floodtide if the Zedillo government cannot rebuild Mexico's economy and societal consensus around authentic democatic reform. In other cases--Ethiopia, Sudan,
Nigeria, Afghanistan--immigration to the West has been modest only because of the greater logistical and political difficulties. However, in impoverished areas of
Africa and Asia more remote from the West, disarray is felt in the flows of refugees across borders, hardly a benign development for world order. Of course, population
growth also heavily drives these pressures. But a common factor underlying all of these crisis-ridden emigration points is the absence
of democracy. And, strikingly, populations grow faster in authoritarian than democratic regimes.4
ETHNIC CONFLICT
Apologists for authoritarian rule--as in Kenya and Indonesia--are wont to argue that multiparty electoral competition breeds ethnic rivalry and
polarization, while strong central control keeps the lid on conflict. But when multiple ethnic and national identities are forcibly
suppressed, the lid may violently pop when the regime falls apart. The fate of Yugoslavia, or of Rwanda, dramatically refutes the canard that authoritarian
rule is a better means for containing ethnic conflict. Indeed, so does the recent experience of Kenya, where ethnic hatred, land grabs, and violence have been
deliberately fostered by the regime of President Daniel arap Moi in a desperate bid to divide the people and thereby cling to power.
Overwhelmingly, theory and evidence show that the path to peaceful management of ethnic pluralism lies not through
suppressing ethnic identities and superimposing the hegemony of one group over others. Eventually, such a formula is bound to crumble or be
challenged violently. Rather, sustained interethnic moderation and peace follow from the frank recognition of plural identities ,
legal protection for group and individual rights, devolution of power to various localities and regions, and political institutions that encourage bargaining and
accommodation at the center. Such institutional provisions and protections are not only significantly more likely under
democracy, they are only possible with some considerable degree of democracy.5
OTHER THREATS
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression
tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made
common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear,
chemical, and biological
weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly
endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness
or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness.
59
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Democracy Prevents Wars
Spreading Democracy checks wars & minimizes the impact – 3 reasons [1. democratic people
don’t fight each other, 2. fight shorter wars, 3. Democracies fight less bloody wars]
RUMMEL 09 Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii
[Rudy (R.J.) Rummel, Democracy, Democratic peace, freedom, globalization, This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 4:02 pm,
http://democraticpeace.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/why-freedom/]
There is still more to say about freedom’s value. While we now know that the world’s ruling thugs generally kill several times more of their subjects than do wars, it is
war on which moralists and pacifists generally focus their hatred, and devote their resources to ending or moderating. This singular concentration is understandable,
given the horror and human costs, and the vital political significance of war. Yet, it should be clear by now that war is a symptom of freedom’s
denial, and that freedom is the cure. First:
Democratically free people do not make war on each other
Why? The diverse groups, cross-national bonds, social links, and shared values of democratic peoples sew them together; and
shared liberal values dispose them toward peaceful negotiation and compromise with each other. It is as though the people of
democratic nations were one society
This truth that democracies do not make war on each other provides a solution for eliminating war from the world:
globalize democratic freedom
Second :
The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the wars between them; the greater
their freedom, the less likely such wars become
And third :
The more freedom the people of a nation have, the less bloody and destructive their wars.
What this means is that we do not have to wait for all, or almost all nations to become liberal democracies to reduce the
severity of war. As we promote freedom, as the people of more and more nations gain greater human rights and political liberties, as those people without
any freedom become partly free, we will decrease the bloodiness of the world’s wars. In short: Increasing freedom in the world
decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must
be a moral good. And this is freedom
In conclusion, then, we have wondrous human freedom as a moral force for the good, as President Bush well recognizes.
Freedom produces social justice,
creates wealth and prosperity, minimizes violence, saves human lives, and is a solution to war. In two words, it creates human security.
Moreover, and most important:
People should not be free only because it is good for them. They should be free because it is their right as human beings.
Democracy create deterrence – stop conflict by changing calculations of leaders
TERRY 07
Colonel, USMC Retired
[James P. Terry, Foreword, Democracy and Deterrence: foundations for an Enduring World Peace by Dr. Walter Gary Sharp Sr. Air University press, p. ix – x]
The causes of armed conflict have historically been viewed in primarily sociological terms, with political. religious, economic. and military factors sharing primacy.
Few have examined the causes of warfare in the context of a deterrence model or. specically, the deterrence factors inherent
in the checks and balances of a democratic state and the absence of such factors in the nondemocratic state. More significantly.
none before Prof. John Norton Moore has argued the value of democratic principles in deterrence and conflict avoidance.
In this important book. Dr. Gary Sharp analyzes the concepts In Moore's semlnal work The War Puzzle (2005). whIch describes Moore’s incentive theory of war
avoidance. Sharp carefully diss sects Moore’s deterrence model and examines those incentives that discourage
nondemocratic governments from pursuing viol eent conflicts. Arguing that existing democracies must make an active
effort to foster thie political environment in which new democracies can develop. Sharp discusses the elements critical to
promoting democratization and thus strengthening system wide deterrence at the state and international levels.
Sharp also examines the incentives for conflict avoidance (intern aal checks and balances) inherent in the demdocratic state and their relationship to war avoidance. In
examining current demnocracies and comparing them statistically to nondemocratic sates, sharp calculates an aggregated index value of democracy based upon res
ppeceed databases that rank the jurisdictions of the world on pol iiicaal rights. civil liberties, media independence. religious freedom. economic freedom, and human
development. Demonstrating through his analysis that demnocracies are inherently more peaceful because of the internal
checks and balances on the aggressive use of force. Sharp similarly demonstrates how nondemocracies require external
checks and balances to preclude aggression.
60
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
United
States and other democratic nations must embrace as they attempt to reverse a course or history in which 38.5 million war
deaths were recorded in the twentieth century alone. By demonstrating how democracy, economic freedom. and the rule of law
provide essential mechanisms to deter leaders from precipitous decisions concerning the use of force. Sharp has provided an
Sharp's analysis and validation of Moore's incentive theory or war avoidance is critical to an understanding of those foreign policy strategies that the
Invaluable service to the statesman and international lawyer alike.
Democracy checks aggression
SHARP 07 senior associate deputy general counselor for intelligence at the US DOD.
Democracy and Deterrence: foundations for an Enduring World Peace by Dr. Walter Gary Sharp Sr. Air University press. P. conclusion
Wars and their attendant human misery begin in the minds of national leaders whose power is unchecked by incentives
and deterrence mechanisms. Because such restraints are inherent in democratic forms of government, war is comparatively
rare where human freedom, economic freedom, and the rule of law thrive. The spread of democracy in the twenty-first century is therefore of
utmost importance in advancing human welfare. Actively encouraging the expansion of freedom is the responsibility or democratic nations.
Democracy is, as Bush stated in his first inaugural address, a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations. Our democratic faith is more than the creed of our
county, it is the inborn hope or our humanity. an ideal we carry but do not own. a trust we bear and pass along... . If our country does not lead the cause of freedom. It
will not be led.”
Though democracy is indeed taking root in many nations, the free world cannot rest. For all the progress made in the
democratization of the former Soviet bloc and in other parts or the world, a recent Freedom House study reports that
democracy and good governance are threatened or unattainable in many places. Russia can no longer be considered a democracy at all” by
most standards. and democratic development in smaller countries such as Thailand and Bangladesh has been derailed.12 These disturbing developments underscore the
significance of the war avoidance strategies outlined in this study: encourage the spread or democracy and the rule of law while establishing positive and negative
Incentive and deterrence mechanisms to restrain those who govern nondemocratic nations.
61
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Democracy Prevents Terrorism
Overall democracy reduces the risk of terrorism – conclusive despite risks
LI 05 Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University
[Quan Li, Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?, The Journal of Conflict Resolution49. 2 (Apr 2005): 278-297]
CONCLUSION
Two main arguments in the democracy-terrorism literature expect contradictory effects of democracy on transnational terrorism. Previous empirical work, however, has
relied on using some aggregate indicator of regime type, failing to separate the positive and negative effects of democracy.
In this article, I investigate the various mechanisms by which democracy affects transnational terrorism. New theoretical mechanisms are advanced that either
complement or encompass existing arguments. First, democratic participation reduces transnational terrorism in ways in addition to
those conceived in the literature. It increases satisfaction and political efficacy of citizens, reduces their grievances,
thwarts terrorist recruitment, and raises public tolerance of counterterrorist policies. Second, the institutional constraints
over government play a fundamental role in shaping the positive relationship between democracy and transnational
terrorism. Institutional checks and balances create political deadlock, increase the frustration of marginal groups, impose on the democratic government the tough
task of protecting the general citizenry against terrorist attacks, and weaken the government's ability to fight terrorism. The effect of civil liberties on
terrorism popularized in the literature is more complex than commonly recognized. Finally, heterogeneous democratic systems have
different implications for transnational terrorist activities.
Effects of different aspects of democracy on transnational terrorism are assessed in a multivariate analysis for a sample of about
119 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that democratic participation reduces transnational terrorist incidents in a country. Government constraints, subsuming
the effect of press freedom, increase the number of terrorist incidents in a country. The proportional representation system experiences fewer transnational terrorist
incidents than either the majoritarian or the mixed system. Overall, democracy is demonstrated to encourage and reduce transnational
terrorist incidents, albeit via different causal mechanisms.
The findings suggest several important policy implications for the war on terrorism. Democracy does not have a
singularly positive effect on terrorism as is often claimed and found. By improving citizen satisfaction, electoral participation, and
political efficacy, democratic governments can reduce the number of terrorist incidents within their borders.
Limiting civil liberties does not lead to the expected decline in terrorist attacks, as is sometimes argued. Restricting the freedom of press, movement,
and association does not decrease the number of transnational terrorist incidents. Strategic terrorists simply select
alternative modes to engage in violence, as argued by Enders and Sandier (2002).
62
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Rights Advantage
63
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Right To Communication Impact
There can be no compromise on a right to communication – settling for “steps in the right
direction” legitimizes the surveillance state – the only acceptable position is abolitionism
Valeri, 13 (Andy, M.A. Interdisplinary Studies, adjunct at the School of Advertising Art, founder of UnCommon Sense TVMedia. “Communication, Human
Rights, and The Threat of Weapons of Mass Surveillance: Why Communication Rights Are Essential To the Protection and Advancement of Human Rights in the 21st
Century.” Paper presented at the conference on The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy University of Dayton, October
3-5, 2013. http://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=human_rights)
By aligning the efforts of those working to provide the means to communicate with those working to establish the right to communicate, a
powerful global
movement can be created. It will be one with the potential to drive forward a vision towards changing society’s
relationship to how information and communication are controlled and distributed, a goal no more ambitious or
impractical than that of the Abolitionist’s in changing the fundamental dynamics of the ownership and control of
labor throughout the world. Today, working to sustain the means for more democratic access to the media and information, without establishing the right
to that access, is akin to working for the regulation of slavery, rather than the banishment of its practice. Like the earlier abolitionist campaigns, an
effective communication rights movement must seek to avoid compromising its strategic purpose in the name of
achieving tactical gain. After all, the Abolitionists understood that any success in regulating the spread of slavery
was actually a setback in their effort to end it, for it provided de facto recognition for its legitimacy to exist in the
first place. In a similar fashion, those participating in the lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement
were doing so not because they wanted a sandwich, but rather to assert their very right to be there, and to have
equal access to the same dignity and opportunity as all citizens. By the same token, will those working for a more inclusive,
democraticallyaccountable media system make the same demands upon an AT&T or a Time Warner, or any governing power, in respect to people’s rights to express, to
communicate, to inform and to be informed? Will those working for human rights and a more socially just world, no longer be satisfied with simply having access to the
means for documenting crimes and abuses, but begin to question why it is often so difficult and dangerous to expose this information to the broader public, at least in a
In coming to a deeper understanding of the issue
of communication, the human rights community must begin to face some fundamental questions about how our
information networks are designed, who owns and operates them, what constrictions are placed upon their use,
who can use them and for what, who can secretly surveil that use, etc. Will it accept the current status, attempting
to align its own principles towards working within the current system of ownership and control? Or will it
challenge it, like the Abolitionists did in regards to the ownership of human labor and its fruits? Eventually, the
questions come down to ones of sovereignty. Who controls our ability to participate and interact in our modern,
mass mediated, networked world? Who decides who gets heard, who gets seen, what gets said, who gets to know
what, and when do they get to know it? For whoever or whatever wields ownership and control over information
in an “information society,” controls that society. These questions dovetail straight into an entire ecology of communication and informationway that might actually entail meaningful, effective change towards addressing such injustices?
based issues - net neutrality, press freedom, the nature of copyright and Creative Commons licenses, the use of airwaves spectrum, the funding of community media, the
integrity of online encryption - all of these and more become acts in a much larger play, battles in a much bigger campaign - that of securing the inalienable right of
human beings to communicate. Such an effort necessitates the transcending of any silo mentalities which may be present in respect to each of these worthy issues, and
organizing them within the framework of a single, overarching strategic cause, one whose attainment will profoundly advance the conditions and enablement of all of
We are at a crucial point in the evolution of our communication infrastructure, as the
implementation of the technologies and policies currently taking place are going to shape our public sphere for
decades to come. At the heart of all of this is the struggle over the shaping of that the Internet, a struggle as
important as that over the political systems of nations, because its fate will determine what kinds of avenues of
participation people will have in the future (Ulrike Reinhard, 2012). As Zeynep Tufekci has pointed out, in only a few years time the
state of the Internet will be assumed to be the way it is simply because “that’s just the way it is,” when in fact it will
only take the shape that it does, and serve the interests that it serves, through a process of tremendous struggle
(Ulrike Reinhard, 2012). This struggle is underway right now, as is evidenced by the efforts of private corporations to control and monetize the content on it (Hurley,
them. Concluding Observations
2013), or by the NSA’s sabotaging of it in trying to access literally everything that passes through it (Healey, 2013), or sometimes a combination of both (Stoll, 2013).
Yet, whether it is the Chinese government looking to shape it to monopolize political control, or Verizon attempting to monopolize it for economic exploitation (Gustin,
2013), the central challenges remain. Will the primary infrastructure for human communication and all of our collective knowledge be treated as the domain of private
interests? Or will it be the central locus of our 21st century commons, in recognition of the fundamental need that humans have for its access and use?
64
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
AT: Doesn't Solve Racism
Broad legal authority enables the NSA to engage in racist surveillance – the plan reigns that in
Lennard, 14 (Natasha, reporter with Salon and VICE. “The NSA’s Racist Targeting of Individuals Is as Troubling as Indiscriminate Surveillance”
https://news.vice.com/article/the-nsas-racist-targeting-of-individuals-is-as-troubling-as-indiscriminate-surveillance)
Revelations of the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance programs have highlighted how millions of ordinary internet and phone users — that is, noncriminal targets — have had their communications data swept up by a vast, indiscriminate dragnet. This has occasioned justifiable outrage, but the reaction has
overshadowed discussion of how the NSA targets actual individuals — a process that, it turns out, can be quite discriminatory.
As I noted last week, if our national security state’s dangerously loose determination of what constitutes an “imminent threat” is any indication, we should be as
troubled by the NSA’s targeting of particular people as we are by its non-targeted spying. The latest disclosure from The Intercept clearly illustrates why.
the NSA has been spying on five distinguished Muslim-Americans under a
law — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — that is meant to target international terrorists or foreign
agents. The inclusion of the email accounts of these five people in a spreadsheet listing the targeted accounts of more than 7,000 others belies the NSA’s claim that
According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden,
it’s in the business of marking only terrorist suspects.
Here are the agency’s suspected “terrorists”: Faisal Gill, who was appointed to (and thoroughly vetted by) the
Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush; Asim Ghafoor, an attorney who has defended
clients suspected of terrorism; Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of public policy and
international development at Rutgers University; Agha Saeed, founder and chairman of the American Muslim
Alliance and a former political science professor at California State University; and Nihad Awad, the executive
director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
This is anti-Muslim discrimination pure and simple. While the NSA’s broad data collection is disturbingly total and unspecific, its
targeted spying is evidently racist. Another leaked document punctuates this point with a dull, disgusting thud: a 2005 training document explaining how
to “properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance” offers a sample memo that uses “Mohammed Raghead” as the name of a fictitious terrorism suspect.
Your NSA at work, ladies and gentlemen!
As the existence of this document makes clear, legality is a tortured issue at the heart national security misdeeds. NSA
agents are trained to ensure that
their surveillance practices fall within the letter of the law — and the law here is at fault, shaped not by a spirit of
justice but by surveillance-state paranoia. The Intercept report does not skirt around this point:
Indeed, the government’s ability to monitor such high-profile Muslim-Americans — with or without warrants —
suggests that the most alarming and invasive aspects of the NSA’s surveillance occur not because the agency
breaks the law, but because it is able to exploit the law’s permissive contours. “The scandal is what Congress has
made legal,” says Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU deputy legal director. “The claim that the intelligence agencies are complying with the
laws is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to the breadth of the laws themselves.”
This latest Snowden leak adds a new dimension to the troubling stream of NSA revelations, illuminating an even more insidious aspect of the government’s surveillance
practices. We know that through dragnet data hoarding programs like PRISM we are all always-already potential suspects. We are all watched. But who falls under the
NSA microscope? Who gets to be the needles in the haystack, the targeting of which provides the official justification of total surveillance? Who gets to be
“Mohammed Raghead”?
Well, that’s top-secret government business. Don’t worry, though — it’s legal.
65
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Internet Freedom Advantage
66
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
NSA hurts our credibility
It’s specifically wrecked our global negotiating position on Internet freedom.
Adam Bender, 7/23/2013. “Has PRISM surveillance undermined Internet freedom advocates?” Computer World,
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/521619/has_prism_surveillance_undermined_internet_freedom_advocates_/.
The US surveillance program PRISM has severely threatened the continued freedom of Internet advocates, according to
Internet Society (ISOC) regional bureau director for Asia-Pacific, Rajnesh Singh.
Recent reports have revealed the NSA, under a program called PRISM, is collecting metadata about US phone calls, which includes information
about a call—including time, duration and location—but not the content of the call itself. Also, the NSA is collecting data on Internet traffic from
major Internet companies including Google and Microsoft.
“What’s happened with PRISM and the fallout we’ve seen is probably the greatest threat we have seen to the Internet
in recent times,” Singh said at an ISOC-AU event last night in Sydney.
Singh, who said he was speaking for himself and not necessarily ISOC as a whole, claimed that the spying program has undermined
the positions of Internet advocates in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, which historically
have been “bastions of Internet freedom”.
“What’s happened with PRISM is these four or five countries are suddenly the enemy within,” he said. “The argument [for
Internet freedom] doesn’t hold water any more and that’s really made work difficult for us.”
At last year’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) treaty talks, countries including Russia,
China and Iran made proposals to regulate Internet content that could have had “very bad implications for the Internet going
forward”, Singh said.
Many of the proposals were defeated through talks leading up to the treaty, he said. “But what happened of course was that the
countries at the forefront were Australia, US, UK [and] Canada.”
After news about PRISM broke, a delegate from another country who had supported the four countries in walking out on
the treaty told Singh that they now regretted the decision.
According to Singh, the delegate said, “My government is sorry that we didn’t sign the [WCIT treaty] because now we realise
what the real agenda was for the US and Australia and the UK and Canada. It wasn’t to protect the Internet; it was to
protect their own surveillance interests.”
Undermines our leverage for international negotiations --- countries turning to Russia and
China.
Megan Gates, 7/29/2014. “NSA's Actions Threaten U.S. Economy and Internet Security, New Report Suggests,” Security Management,
http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/nsas-actions-threaten-us-economy-and-internet-security-new-report-suggests-0013601.
The report’s authors also suggested that the NSA disclosures have “undermined American credibility” when it comes to the
Internet Freedom Agenda. In 2010, the United States began promoting a policy of an open and free Internet, but the
recent disclosures about the NSA have “led many to question the legitimacy of these efforts in the past year.”
“Concrete evidence of U.S. surveillance hardened the positions of authoritarian governments pushing for greater
national control over the Internet and revived proposals from both Russia and Brazil for multilateral management of
technical standards and domain names, whether through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) or other
avenues,” according to the report. Many developing nations are now declining to work with the United States and are
instead embracing assistance from Russia, China, and the ITU when it comes to Internet availability and control for
their citizens.
Seriously harmed our leverage in international debates.
Danielle Kehl et al, July 2014. Policy Analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI); Kevin Bankston is the Policy Director at
OTI; Robyn Greene is a Policy Counsel at OTI; and Robert Morgus is a Research Associate at OTI. “Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the
Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity,” http://oti.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf.
Mandatory data localization proposals are just one of a number of ways that foreign governments have reacted to NSA surveillance in
manner that threatens U.S. foreign policy interests, particularly with regard to Internet Freedom. There has been a quiet
67
a
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
tension between how the U.S. approaches freedom of expression online in its foreign policy and its domestic laws ever
since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton effectively launched the Internet Freedom agenda in January 2010 . 170 But the NSA
disclosures shined a bright spotlight on the contradiction: the U.S. government promotes free expression abroad and aims to prevent repressive
governments from monitoring and censoring their citizens while simultaneously supporting domestic laws that authorize surveillance and bulk data
collection. As cybersecurity expert and Internet governance scholar Ron Deibert wrote a few days after the first revelations:
“There are unintended consequences of the NSA scandal that will undermine U.S. foreign policy interests – in particular,
the ‘Internet Freedom’ agenda espoused by the U.S. State Department and its allies.” 171 Deibert accurately predicted that the news would
trigger reactions from both policymakers and ordinary citizens abroad, who would begin to question their dependence on American technologies and
the hidden motivations behind the United States’ promotion of Internet Freedom. In some countries, the scandal would be used as an
excuse to revive dormant debates about dropping American companies from official contracts, score political points at the
expense of the United States, and even justify local monitoring and surveillance. Deibert’s speculation has so far proven quite prescient.
As we will describe in this section, the ongoing revelations have done significant damage to the credibility of the U.S.
Internet Freedom agenda and further jeopardized the United States’ position in the global Internet governance
debates.
68
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
NSA Link
Pressure to nationalize is coming & real – NSA fears are driving it
Goldstein, Writer for the Atlantic, 2014
[Gordon M. Goldstein, The End of the Internet?, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/the-end-of-theinternet/372301/]
If the long history of international commerce tells us anything, it is this: free trade is neither a natural nor an inevitable
condition. Typically, trade has flourished when a single, dominant country has provided the security and will to sustain it. In
the absence of a strong liberal ethos, promoted and enforced by a global leader, states seem drawn, as if by some spell, toward a
variety of machinations (tariffs, quotas, arcane product requirements) that provide immediate advantages to a few domestic companies or
industries—and that lead to collective immiseration over time.
The U.S. has played a special role in the development of the Internet. The Department of Defense fostered ARPANET, the precursor to the
Internet. As the network evolved, American companies were quick to exploit its growth, gaining a first-mover advantage that has in many cases grown into global
dominance. A vast proportion of the world’s Web traffic passes through American servers.
Laura DeNardis, a scholar of Internet governance at American University, argues that the Internet’s character is inherently commercial and private today. “The Internet
is a collection of independent systems,” she writes, “operated by mostly private companies,” including large telecommunications providers like AT&T and giant content
companies such as Google and Facebook. All of these players make the Internet function through private economic agreements governing the transmission of data
among their respective networks. While the U.S. government plays a role—the world’s central repository for domain names, for instance, is a private
nonprofit organization created at the United States’ urging in 1998, and operating under a contract administered by the Department of Commerce—it has
applied a
light touch. And why wouldn’t it? The Web’s growth has been broadly congenial to American interests, and a large boon
to the American economy.
That brings us to Edward Snowden and the U.S. National Security Agency. Snowden’s disclosures of the NSA’s surveillance of international Web traffic
have provoked worldwide outrage and a growing counterreaction. Brazil and the European Union recently announced plans to lay a $185 million undersea fiber-optic
communications cable between them to thwart U.S. surveillance. In February, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the European Union to create its own
regional Internet, walled off from the United States. “We’ll talk to France about how we can maintain a high level of data protection,” Merkel said. “Above all, we’ll
talk about European providers that offer security for our citizens, so that one shouldn’t have to send e-mails and other information across the Atlantic.”
Merkel’s exploration of a closed, pan-European cloud-computing network is simply the latest example of what the analyst Daniel Castro of the Information Technology
and Innovation Foundation calls “data nationalism,” a phenomenon gathering momentum whereby countries require that certain types of information be stored on
servers within a state’s physical borders. The nations that have already implemented a patchwork of data-localization requirements range from Australia, France, South
Korea, and India to Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Vietnam, according to Anupam Chander and Uyen P. Le, two legal scholars at the University of California at
Davis. “Anxieties over surveillance … are justifying governmental measures that break apart the World Wide Web,” they wrote in a recent white paper. As a result,
“the era of a global Internet may be passing.”
Security concerns have catalyzed data-nationalization efforts , yet Castro, Chander, and Le all question the benefits, arguing that the security
of data depends not on their location but on the sophistication of the defenses built around them. Another motive appears to be in play: the Web’s
fragmentation would enable local Internet businesses in France or Malaysia to carve out roles for themselves, at the expense of
globally dominant companies, based disproportionately in the United States. Castro estimates that the U.S. cloud-computing industry alone could lose $22
billion to $35 billion in revenue by 2016.
The Snowden affair has brought to a boil geopolitical tensions that were already simmering. Autocracies, of course, have
long regulated the flow of Internet data, with China being the most famous example. But today such states are being joined by countries
across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe in calling for dramatic changes in the way the Web operates, even beyond the question of where data are stored.
NSA fears spur internet balkanization efforts – fear the U.S.
Ray, Security Analyst at 21CT, 2014
[Tim ray, The Balkanization of the Internet, http://www.21ct.com/blog/the-revolution-will-not-be-tweeted-thebalkanization-of-the-internet-part-2/]
NSA SURVEILLANCE STIRS THE POT (AND PROVIDES COVER)
While countries are struggling with their own versions of this scenario and with how
to spin this frightening picture of the new Balkanized
Internet, they were handed a great gift: Edward Snowden’s tales of NSA’s global surveillance operations.
Suddenly, there’s a common enemy: America. Globally adventurous, the Americans (it seems) are also watching everyone they can, sometimes
without permission. Snowden’s revelations alone will not be enough to force through the kinds of national controls we’re talking about, but they are a great
start, a unifying force.
69
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
is moving forward with nationalizing its email services as well as
plans to store all data within the country’s borders. The idea there is the same as the example above: take essential services in-country in
order to prevent the U.S. from spying on them and (as a side effect) control them too. These proposals seem to be
receiving some popular support; many see it as akin to nationalizing their oil, or another resource. Taking local control of
formerly global services is the beginning of Balkanization for countries that choose that path.
Sound farfetched? Maybe. Are there other answers? Perhaps. Brazil
70
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Answers to: Internet isn’t free & open
Surveillance is the business model of the Internet – the NSA is just jumping on board with the
data Google, Facebook, and phone companies collect independently
Schneier, 13 (Bruce, cryptographer and computer security specialist, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard Law School. “Stalker Economy Is Here To Stay,” November
2013. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/20/opinion/schneier-stalker-economy/index.html)
Google recently announced that it would start including individual users' names and photos in some ads. This means that if you rate
some product positively, your friends may see ads for that product with your name and photo attached -- without your knowledge or consent.
Meanwhile, Facebook is eliminating a feature that allowed people to retain some portions of their anonymity on its website.
These changes come on the heels of Google's move to explore replacing tracking cookies with something that users have even less control
over. Microsoft is doing something similar by developing its own tracking technology.
More generally, lots of companies are evading the "Do Not Track" rules, meant to give users a say in whether companies track them. Turns
out the whole "Do Not Track" legislation has been a sham.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that big technology companies are tracking us on the Internet even more aggressively than before.
If these features don't sound particularly beneficial to you, it's because you're not the customer of any of these companies. You're the
product, and you're being improved for their actual customers: their advertisers.
This is nothing new. For years, these sites and others have systematically improved their "product" by reducing user privacy. This
excellent infographic, for example, illustrates how Facebook has done so over the years.
The "Do Not Track" law serves as a sterling example of how bad things are. When it was proposed, it was supposed to give users the right to
demand that Internet companies not track them. Internet companies fought hard against the law, and when it was passed, they fought to
ensure that it didn't have any benefit to users. Right now, complying is entirely voluntary, meaning that no Internet company has to follow the
law. If a company does, because it wants the PR benefit of seeming to take user privacy seriously, it can still track its users.
Really: if you tell a "Do Not Track"-enabled company that you don't want to be tracked, it will stop showing you personalized ads. But your
activity will be tracked -- and your personal information collected, sold and used -- just like everyone else's. It's best to think of it as a "track
me in secret" law.
Of course, people don't think of it that way. Most people aren't fully aware of how much of their data is collected by these sites. And, as
the "Do Not Track" story illustrates, Internet companies are doing their best to keep it that way.
The result is a world where our most intimate personal details are collected and stored. I used to say that Google has a more intimate
picture of what I'm thinking of than my wife does. But that's not far enough: Google has a more intimate picture than I do. The
company knows exactly what I am thinking about, how much I am thinking about it, and when I stop thinking about it: all from my
Google searches. And it remembers all of that forever.
As the Edward Snowden revelations continue to expose the full extent of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping on the Internet, it
has become increasingly obvious how much of that has been enabled by the corporate world's existing eavesdropping on the Internet.
The public/private surveillance partnership is fraying, but it's largely alive and well. The NSA didn't build its eavesdropping system from
scratch; it got itself a copy of what the corporate world was already collecting.
There are a lot of reasons why Internet surveillance is so prevalent and pervasive.
One, users like free things, and don't realize how much value they're giving away to get it. We know that "free" is a special price that
confuses peoples' thinking.
Google's 2013 third quarter revenue was nearly $15 billion with profit just under $3 billion. That profit is the difference between how much
our privacy is worth and the cost of the services we receive in exchange for it.
Two, Internet companies deliberately make privacy not salient. When you log onto Facebook, you don't think about how much personal
information you're revealing to the company; you're chatting with your friends. When you wake up in the morning, you don't think
about how you're going to allow a bunch of companies to track you throughout the day; you just put your cell phone in your pocket.
And three, the Internet's winner-takes-all market means that privacy-preserving alternatives have trouble getting off the ground. How many of
you know that there is a Google alternative called DuckDuckGo that doesn't track you? Or that you can use cut-out sites to anonymize your
Google queries? I have opted out of Facebook, and I know it affects my social life.
There are two types of changes that need to happen in order to fix this. First, there's the market change. We need to become actual customers
of these sites so we can use purchasing power to force them to take our privacy seriously. But that's not enough. Because of the market
failures surrounding privacy, a second change is needed. We need government regulations that protect our privacy by limiting what these
sites can do with our data.
Surveillance is the business model of the Internet -- Al Gore recently called it a "stalker economy." All major websites run on
advertising, and the more personal and targeted that advertising is, the more revenue the site gets for it. As long as we users remain
the product, there is minimal incentive for these companies to provide any real privacy.
71
SSRA Affirmative
72
DKC-ENDI 2015
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Hurts the Internet
Balkanization would destroy the internet – crushes trade & economic growth
McDowell, Commission of the FCC, 2012
[Robert M. McDowell, The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204792404577229074023195322]
Merely saying "no" to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition. A more successful strategy would be for
proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity within every nation to encourage a dialogue among all interested parties, including governments and the ITU, to broaden
the multi-stakeholder umbrella with the goal of reaching consensus to address reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous
benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model.
Upending this model with a new regulatory treaty is likely to partition the Internet as some countries would inevitably choose to opt out.
A balkanized Internet would be devastating to global free trade and national sovereignty. It would impair Internet
growth most severely in the developing world but also globally as technologists are forced to seek bureaucratic permission
to innovate and invest. This would also undermine the proliferation of new cross-border technologies, such as cloud computing.
A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global
network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make engineering and economic
decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but
especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global
regulatory body.
Any attempts to expand intergovernmental powers over the Internet—no matter how incremental or seemingly innocuous—should be
turned back. Modernization and reform can be constructive, but not if the end result is a new global bureaucracy that departs from the multi-stakeholder model.
Enlightened nations should draw a line in the sand against new regulations while welcoming reform that could include a nonregulatory role
for the ITU.
State control destroys the value of the internet
Alford, Senior Program Officer, Internet Freedom, Freedom House, 2014
[Gigi Alford, State Partitioning of the Internet Harms Users Everywhere, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/freedomhouse/state-partitioning-of-the_b_5843162.html]
For as long as the global internet has withstood attempts by states to subjugate its cables, servers, and protocols, the virtual world has been a refuge for users who are
deprived of their fundamental freedoms offline. This boon of technology is what led UN experts to declare the internet “an indispensable tool for realizing a range of
human rights” and to debate whether access to such an engine of human progress constitutes a right in itself.
However, since Edward Snowden disclosed documents on secret U.S. and British data-collection programs, the internet has faced
intensified challenges from all sides—some genuine and others opportunistic—that could lead states to partition the digital commons
into national and regional demesnes.
An internet that is fragmented by political, legal, and technical boundaries would throttle the animating purpose of the
International Bill of Human Rights, while an indivisible and global internet is able to facilitate such goals. As states fully fathom the
internet’s disruptive power and rush to impose choke points in the name of national sovereignty, the digital world
increasingly mirrors the analog world’s human rights deficiencies, which it once transcended. The virtual refuge is being dismantled, and for
individuals on the wrong side of the new borders, it has been replaced with separate and unequal “splinternets.”
Such digital apartheid flies in the face of the universality of human rights, and it contradicts international jurisprudence
that rejects separate-but-equal regimes. As the UN Human Rights Council has affirmed, “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected
online.”
Champions of a unified internet are putting forth strong economic and geopolitical arguments to counter these challenges—including earlier this month at the ninth
annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Istanbul, Turkey, and next month at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) plenipotentiary meeting in Busan,
South Korea. But stakeholders often miss the bigger picture when they overlook the human rights case against a “Westphalian web” model of internet governance.
73
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
Bad for Economy
Nationalized internet would collapse global growth
McDowell, FCC Chair, 2012
[5/31/31, Comm'r. McDowell's Congressional Testimony, http://www.fcc.gov/document/commr-mcdowellscongressional-testimony-5-31-2012]
It is a pleasure and an honor to testify beside my friend, Ambassador Phil Verveer. First, please allow me to dispense quickly and emphatically any doubts about the
bipartisan resolve of the United States’ to resist efforts to expand the International Telecommunication Union’s (“ITU”) authority over Internet matters. Some ITU
officials have dismissed our concern over this issue as mere “election year politics.” Nothing could be further from the truth as evidenced by Ambassador Verveer’s
testimony today as well as recent statements from the White House, Executive Branch agencies, Democratic and Republican Members of Congress and my friend and
colleague, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. We are unified on the substantive arguments and have always been so. Second, it is important to define the
challenge before us. The threats are real and not imagined, although they admittedly sound like works of fiction at times.
For many years now, scores of countries led by China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many others, have pushed for, as
then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said almost a year ago, “international control of the Internet” through the ITU.1 I have tried to find a
more concise way to express this issue, but I can’t seem to improve upon now-President Putin’s crystallization of the effort that has been afoot for quite some time.
More importantly, I think we should take President Putin very seriously. 1 Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Working Day, GOV’T OF THE
RUSSIAN FED’N, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/15601/ (June 15, 2011) (last visited May 14, 2012). Six months separate us from the renegotiation of the 1988
treaty that led to insulating the Internet from economic and technical regulation. What proponents of Internet freedom do or don’t do between
now and then will determine the fate of the Net, affect global economic growth and determine whether political liberty
can proliferate. During the treaty negotiations, the most lethal threat to Internet freedom may not come from a full frontal assault, but
through insidious and seemingly innocuous expansions of intergovernmental powers. This subterranean effort is already under way.
While influential ITU Member States have put forth proposals calling for overt legal expansions of United Nations’ or ITU authority over the Net, ITU officials have
publicly declared that the ITU does not intend to regulate Internet governance while also saying that any regulations should be of the “light-touch” variety.2 But which
is it? It is not possible to insulate the Internet from new rules while also establishing a new “light touch” regulatory regime. Either a new legal paradigm will emerge in
December or it won’t. The choice is binary. Additionally, as a threshold matter, it is curious that ITU officials have been opining on the outcome of the treaty
negotiation. The ITU’s Member States determine the fate of any new rules, not ITU leadership and staff. I remain hopeful that the diplomatic process will not be
subverted in this regard. As a matter of process and substance, patient and persistent incrementalism is the Net’s most dangerous enemy and it is the hallmark of many
countries that are pushing the proregulation agenda. Specifically, some ITU officials and Member States have been discussing an alleged worldwide phone numbering
“crisis.” It seems that the world may be running out of phone numbers, over which the ITU does have some jurisdiction. 2 Speech by ITU Secretary-General Touré, The
Challenges of Extending the Benefits of Mobile (May 1, 2012),http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/index.aspx?lang=en (last visited May 29, 2012). 2
Today, many phone numbers are used for voice over Internet protocol services such as Skype or Google Voice. To function properly, the software supporting these
services translate traditional phone numbers into IP addresses. The Russian Federation has proposed that the ITU be given jurisdiction over IP addresses to remedy the
phone number shortage.3 What is left unsaid, however, is that potential ITU jurisdiction over IP addresses would enable it to regulate Internet services and devices with
abandon. IP addresses are a fundamental and essential component to the inner workings of the Net. Taking their administration away from the bottomup, nongovernmental, multi-stakeholder model and placing it into the hands of international bureaucrats would be a grave mistake. Other efforts to expand the ITU’s reach into
the Internet are seemingly small but are tectonic in scope. Take for example the Arab States’ submission from February that would change the rules’ definition of
“telecommunications” to include “processing” or computer functions.4 This change would essentially swallow the Internet’s functions with only a tiny edit to existing
rules.5 When ITU leadership claims that no Member States have proposed absorbing Internet governance into the ITU or other intergovernmental entities, the Arab
States’ submission demonstrates that nothing could be further from the truth. An infinite number of avenues exist to 3 Further Directions for Revision of the ITRs,
Russian Federation, CWG-WCIT12 Contribution 40, at 3 (2011), http://www.itu.int/md/T09-CWG.WCIT12-C-0040/en (last visited May 29, 2012) (“To oblige ITU to
allocate/distribute some part of IPv6 addresses (as same way/principle as for telephone numbering, simultaneously existing of many operators/numbers distributors
inside unified numbers space for both fixed and mobile phone services) and determination of necessary requirements.”). 4 Proposed Revisions, Arab States, CWGWCIT12 Contribution 67, at 3 (2012), http://www.itu.int/md/T09CWG.WCIT12-C-0067/en (last visited May 29, 2012). 5 And Iran argues that the current definition
already includes the Internet. Contribution from Iran, The Islamic Republic of Iran, CWG-WCIT12 Contribution 48, Attachment 2 (2011), http://www.itu.int/md/T09CWG.WCIT12C-0048/en (last visited May 29, 2012). 3 accomplish the same goal and it is camouflaged subterfuge that proponents of Internet freedom should watch
for most vigilantly. Other examples come from China. China would like to see the creation of a system whereby Internet users are registered using their IP addresses. In
fact, last year, China teamed up with Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to propose to the UN General Assembly that it create an “International Code of Conduct for
Information Security” to mandate “international norms and rules standardizing the behavior of countries concerning information and cyberspace.”6 Does anyone here
today believe that these countries’ proposals would encourage the continued proliferation of an open and freedom-enhancing Internet? Or would such constructs make it
easier for authoritarian regimes to identify and silence political dissidents? These proposals may not technically be part of the WCIT negotiations, but they give a sense
of where some of the ITU’s Member States would like to go. Still other proposals that have been made personally to me by foreign government officials include the
creation of an international universal service fund of sorts whereby foreign – usually state-owned – telecom companies would use international mandates to charge
certain Web destinations on a “per-click” basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe. Google, iTunes, Facebook and Netflix are mentioned
most often as prime sources of funding. In short, the U.S. and like-minded proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity across the
globe should resist efforts to expand the powers of intergovernmental bodies over the Internet 6 Letter dated 12 September 2011
from the Permanent Representatives of China, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, Item 93 of
the provisional agenda - Developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security, 66th Session of the United Nations
General Assembly, Annex (Sep. 14, 2011), http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1800/sources/2012_UN_Russia_and_China_Code_o_Conduct.pdf (last visited May
such a scenario would be
devastating to global economic activity, but it would hurt the developing world the most. Thank you for the opportunity to
29, 2012). even in the smallest of ways. As my supplemental statement and analysis explains in more detail below,
appear before you today and I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Chairman Walden and Ranking Member Eshoo, for holding this hearing. Its topic is among
the most important public policy issues affecting global commerce and political freedom: namely, whether the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), or any
other intergovernmental body, should be allowed to expand its jurisdiction into the operational and economic affairs of the Internet. As we head toward the treaty
74
SSRA Affirmative
DKC-ENDI 2015
negotiations at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in December, I urge governments around the world to avoid the
temptation to tamper with the Internet. Since its privatization in the early 1990s, the Internet has flourished across the world under the current
deregulatory framework. In fact, the long-standing international consensus has been to keep governments from regulating
core functions of the Internet’s ecosystem. Yet, some nations, such as China, Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been pushing to
reverse this course by giving the ITU or the United Nations itself, regulatory jurisdiction over Internet governance. The ITU is a treatybased organization under the auspices of the United Nations.1 Don’t take my word for it, however. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said almost one year ago,
the goal of this well-organized and energetic effort is to establish “international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the
[ITU].”2 Motivations of some ITU Member states vary. Some of the arguments in support of such actions may stem from frustrations with the operations of Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Any concerns regarding ICANN, however, should not be used as a pretext to end the multi-stakeholder model
that has served all nations – especially the developing world – so well. Any reforms to ICANN should take place through the bottom-up multi-stakeholder process and
should not arise through the WCIT’s examination of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR)s. Constructive reform of the ITRs may be needed. If so,
the scope of any review should be limited to traditional telecommunications services and not expanded to include information services or any form of Internet services.
Modification of the current multistakeholder Internet governance model may be necessary as well, but we should all work together to ensure no intergovernmental
regulatory overlays are placed into this sphere. Not only would nations surrender some of their national sovereignty in such a pursuit, but they would suffocate their
own economies as well, while politically paralyzing engineering and business decisions within a global regulatory body. 1 History,
IThttp://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/history.aspx">U, http://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/history.aspx (last visited May 14, 2012). 2 Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of
the Russian Federation, Working Day, GOV’T OF THE RUSSIAN FED’N, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/15601/ (June 15, 2011) (last visited May 14, 2012).
Every day headlines tell us about industrialized and developing nations alike that are awash in debt, facing flat growth curves, or worse, shrinking GDPs. Not only
must governments, including our own, tighten their fiscal belts, but they must also spur economic expansion. An
unfettered Internet offers the brightest ray of hope for growth during this dark time of economic uncertainty, not
more regulation. Indeed, we are at a crossroads for the Internet’s future. One path holds great promise, while the other path
is fraught with peril. The promise, of course, lies with keeping what works, namely maintaining a freedom-enhancing and
open Internet while insulating it from legacy regulations. The peril lies with changes that would ultimately sweep up
Internet services into decades-old ITU paradigms. If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the
regulatory dungeon of the past. The future of global growth and political freedom lies with an unfettered Internet.
Shortly after the Internet was privatized in 1995, a mere 16 million people were online worldwide.3 As of early 2012, approximately 2.3 billion people were using the
Net.4 Internet connectivity quickly evolved from being a novelty in industrialized countries to becoming an essential tool
for commerce – and sometimes even basic survival – in all nations, but especially in the developing world. Such explosive
growth was helped, not hindered, by a deregulatory construct. Developing nations stand to gain the most from the rapid
pace of deployment and adoption of Internet technologies brought forth by an Internet free from intergovernmental
regulation. By way of illustration, a McKinsey report released in January examined the Net’s effect on the developing world, or “aspiring countries.”5 In 30
specific aspiring countries studied, including Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Turkey and Vietnam,6 Internet penetration has grown 25 percent per year for the
past five years, compared to only five percent per year in developed nations.7 Obviously, broadband penetration is lower in aspiring countries than in the developed
world, but that is quickly changing thanks to mobile Internet access technologies. Mobile subscriptions in developing countries have risen from 53 percent of the global
market in 2005 to 73 percent in 2010.8 In fact, Cisco estimates that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population sometime this year.9
Increasingly, Internet users in these countries use only mobile devices for their Internet access.10 This trend has resulted in developing countries growing their global
share of Internet users from 33 percent in 2005, to 52 percent in 2010, with a projected 61 percent share by 2015.11 The 30 aspiring countries discussed earlier are
home to one billion Internet users, half of all global Internet users. The effect that rapidly growing Internet connectivity is having on
aspiring countries’ economies is tremendous. The Net is an economic growth accelerator. It contributed an average 1.9
percent of GDP growth in aspiring countries for an estimated total of $366 billion in 2010.13 In some developing economies, Internet
connectivity has contributed up to 13 percent of GDP growth over the past five years.14 In six aspiring countries alone, 1.9 million jobs
were associated with the Internet.15 And in other countries, the Internet creates 2.6 new jobs for each job it disrupts.16 I expect that we would all agree that these
positive trends must continue. The best path forward is the one that has served the global economy so well, that of a multi-
stakeholder governed Internet. One potential outcome that could develop if pro-regulation nations are successful in
granting the ITU authority over Internet governance would be a partitioned Internet. In particular, fault lines could be drawn between
countries that will choose to continue to live under the current successful model and those Member States who decide to opt out to place themselves under an
intergovernmental regulatory regime. A balkanized Internet would not promote global free trade or increase living standards.
At a
minimum, it would create extreme uncertainty and raise costs for all users across the globe by rendering an engineering,
operational and financial morass. For instance, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced placing many of their
courses online for free – for anyone to use. The uncertainty and economic and engineering chaos associated with a newly politicized
intergovernmental legal regime would inevitably drive up costs as cross border traffic and cloud computing become
more complicated and vulnerable to regulatory arbitrage. Such costs are always passed on to the end user consumers and may very well
negate the ability of content and application providers such as Harvard and MIT to offer first-rate educational content for free. Nations that value freedom
and prosperity should draw a line in the sand against new regulations while welcoming reform that could include a
non-regulatory role for the ITU. Venturing into the uncertainty of a new regulatory quagmire will only undermine
developing nations the most.
75