Social Media Negative File
Keryk Kuiper (Iowa City High) – Kerykk@gmail.com – feel free to email me or find me at any
point if you are confused or have questions
Zahir Shaikh (Blake)
Clare McGraw (Juan Diego)
Alan Hughes (Harker)
Quick notes
For every off that is original I have included both the 1nc and the 2nc but for everything
that we have a preexisting file for I have only put the 1nc.
I think the counterplan is probably the best way to go - that or the narcissism kritik - and
T you can maybe win because it's not direct curtailment but it would be hard.
Biometrics
Frontlines
1nc
( ) If surveillance protects society it is de facto justified.
Posner 6 — Richard A. Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on
the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, was named the most
cited legal scholar of the 20th century by The Journal of Legal Studies, holds an LL.B. from
Harvard University, 2006 (“Wire Trap,” New Republic, February 6th, Available Online at
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/104859/wire-trap, Accessed 04-16-2015)
The revelation by The New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) is conducting a
secret program of electronic surveillance outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) has sparked a hot debate in the press and in the blogosphere. But there
is something odd about the debate: It is aridly legal. Civil libertarians contend that the program
is illegal, even unconstitutional; some want President Bush impeached for breaking the law. The
administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does
violate FISA (the administration denies that it does), then, to that extent, the law is
unconstitutional. This legal debate is complex, even esoteric. But, apart from a handful of not
very impressive anecdotes (did the NSA program really prevent the Brooklyn Bridge from being
destroyed by blowtorches?), there[s] has been little discussion of the program’s concrete value
as a counter-terrorism measure or of the inroads it has or has not made on liberty or privacy.
Not only are these questions more important to most people than the legal questions; they are
fundamental to those questions. Lawyers who are busily debating legality without first trying to
assess the consequences of the program have put the cart before the horse. Law in the United
States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy. In analyzing all but the
simplest legal questions, one is well advised to begin by asking what social policies are at stake.
Suppose the NSA program is vital to the nation’s defense, and its impingements on civil liberties
are slight. That would not prove the program’s legality, because not every good thing is legal;
law and policy are not perfectly aligned. But a conviction that the program had great merit would
shape and hone the legal inquiry. We would search harder for grounds to affirm its legality, and,
if our search were to fail, at least we would know how to change the law--or how to change the
program to make it comply with the law--without destroying its effectiveness. Similarly, if the
program’s contribution to national security were negligible--as we learn, also from the Times,
that some FBI personnel are indiscreetly whispering--and it is undermining our civil liberties, this
would push the legal analysis in the opposite direction. Ronald Dworkin, the distinguished legal
philosopher and constitutional theorist, wrote in The New York Review of Books in the aftermath
of the September 11 attacks that “we cannot allow our Constitution and our shared sense of
decency to become a suicide pact.” He would doubtless have said the same thing about FISA. If
you approach legal issues in that spirit rather than in the spirit of ruat caelum fiat iusticia (let the
heavens fall so long as justice is done), you will want to know how close to suicide a particular
legal interpretation will bring you before you decide whether to embrace it. The legal critics of
the surveillance program have not done this, and the defenders have for the most part been
content to play on the critics’ turf.
( ) Rights can’t be absolute and even if they were, privacy wouldn’t be one of them.
Himma ‘7
Kenneth - Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. The author holds JD and PhD and was
formerly a Lecturer at the University of Washington in Department of Philosophy, the Information School, and the
Law School. “Privacy vs. Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right”. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44,
p. 859, 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=994458
It is perhaps worth noting that absolutist conceptions are not limited to privacy rights. Some people take the position that
the moral right to life is absolute; on an absolutist conception of the right to life, it is never justified to take the life of a person—and this rules out not
only the death penalty, but the use of deadly force in defense of the lives of innocent others from a culpable attack. Many people take an absolutist
view with respect to something they call a “right to information,” holding that there should be no restrictions of any kind, including legal protection of
intellectual property rights, on the free flow of information. As this view has most famously, and idiosyncratically, been put by John Perry Barlow,
“information wants to be free.”5 When it comes to rights, absolutist talk among theorists, lawyers, and ordinary folk is not at all uncommon these days.
Indeed, some people seem to think that rights are, by nature, absolute and hence that it is a conceptual truth that all rights are
absolute. Consider the following quote from Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who ran for Congress in 2006: I am also very concerned about the
erosion of constitutional rights and civil liberties over the past few years. I taught Constitutional Law at West Point, and it makes me so angry to see our
elected leaders in Washington—specifically the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress—pushing policies that erode the foundation
of this country. The equal protection clause of the constitution is absolute. The right to privacy is absolute. The right to assemble is absolute. Yet time
and time again, the administration has supported, and the Congressional leadership has supported nominees and policies that do not follow the
constitution. With my background, I can add to this debate. And I’m not afraid to take a stand for what’s right.6 As Murphy explains it, every right in the
Constitution is absolute and hence utterly without exception. As there is nothing in the Constitution or any legal instrument or norm that suggests or
entails that constitutional rights are absolute, it is reasonable to think that Murphy believes, as many people do, that it is part of the very meaning of
having a right that it can never justifiably be infringed. This is why debates about political issues are frequently framed in terms of whether there is
some right that protects the relevant interests; rights provide the strongest level of moral or legal protection of the relevant interests. It is certainly true
that rights provide a higher level of protection than any other considerations that are morally relevant, but it is not because rights are, by nature,
absolute. Rights provide robust protection of the relevant interests because it is a conceptual truth that the infringement of any right cannot be justified
by an appeal of the desirable consequences of doing so. No matter how many people it might make happy, it would be wrong to intentionally kill an
innocent person because her right to life takes precedence over the interests of other people in their own happiness. As Ronald Dworkin famously puts
this conceptual point, rights trump consequences.7 But this conceptual truth about rights does not imply rights are, by nature, absolute. The claim that
rights trump consequences implies only that some stronger consideration than the desirable consequences of infringing a right can justify doing so.
there is some such consideration that would justify infringing some
rights. One such candidate, of course, is the existence of other more important rights. It is commonly thought
This latter claim leaves open the possibility that
that at least some rights are commensurable and can be ranked in a hierarchy that expresses the relative weight each right in the hierarchy has with
respect to other rights. For example, one
might think that the right to life is at the top of the hierarchy of
would explain[s] the common intuition that
one may use deadly force when necessary to defend innocent lives from culpable attack, but not
commensurable rights, and that property rights are in this hierarchy also. This
when necessary only to defend property rights from violation. If, as seems clear from this example, it is possible for two rights to conflict and for one to
outweigh the other, it follows that rights are not, by nature, absolute. What may explain the mistaken view that rights are necessarily absolute is
confusion about the relationship of various terms that flesh out the status, origin, and contours of moral rights and obligations. For example, rights
are frequently described as “inviolable,” meaning that a right can never be justifiably violated. This, of course, is a conceptual
truth; to say that a right is violated is to say that its infringement is without justification. But this does not imply that rights can
never be justifiably infringed; a person’s right to life can be justifiably infringed if he (they) culpably
shoots at an innocent person and there is no other way to save that person’s life except through
use of lethal force in defense of his life. Rights are also thought, by nature, to be supreme, relative to some system of norms—moral, social,
or legal—in the sense that they cannot be defeated by other kinds of protections; moral rights are thought to be supreme over all other kinds of
considerations, including social and legal rights. But
this does not imply that rights are absolute because it says
nothing about the relative importance of one right to another; it simply asserts that, by nature, rights
outweigh all other relevant considerations. Supremacy and inviolability are part of the very nature of a right, but these properties do
not entail that rights are, by nature, absolute. Of course, the negation of the claim that all rights are absolute does not imply that no rights are absolute.
The possibility of conflicts between any two rights does not preclude there being one right that wins every conflict because it is absolute, and hence,
without exception. A moral pacifist, for example, takes this view of the moral right to life and holds that intentional killing of a human being is always
wrong. Moreover, if there are two rights that do not come into conflict with each other and win in conflicts with all other rights, those two rights might be
absolute. One might think, for example, that the rights to privacy and life can never conflict and that both are absolute. I
am somewhat skeptical
that any right is absolute in this strong sense, but if there are any, it will not be privacy. As we will see in more
detail, privacy is commensurable with other rights, like the right to life, which figures into the right to security. It seems clear that privacy rights and the
example, a psychologist might be justified in protecting a patient’s
privacy interests even though doing so includes information that might prevent that person from
committing a minor property crime of some kind, but she would not be justified in protecting that
information if the psychologist knows its disclosure is necessary to prevent a murder. In any event, I
right to life can come into conflict. For
will discuss these kinds of examples in more detail below.
( ) No Privacy violation- FISC check abuse
Branda ‘14
(et al; JOYCE R. BRANDA, Acting Assistant Attorney General, BRIEF FOR THE APPELLEES - Amicus Brief for
Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Amici” means “friend of the court” and –
in this context - is legal reference to the Reporters Committee – October 2nd https://www.eff.org/document/governments-smith-answering-brief)
Plaintiff provides no plausible explanation for how the program could cause that distress. She does not contend that there is any reasonable likelihood
that government personnel would actually review metadata about her calls that the government may have acquired under the Section 215 program.
That likelihood is particularly remote if “[n]one of her communications relate to international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Pl Br. 4.
Again, information
in the Section 215 database is subject to substantial protections and limits on
access imposed by orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Those orders do not permit
indiscriminate access to or review of the metadata; instead, there must be an advance judicial
finding (or, in cases of emergency, an advance finding by government officials and judicial approval after the fact) that a given selector
is suspected of association with terrorism, and only the small fraction of metadata responsive to queries using such suspectedterrorist selectors—that is, within two steps of the judicially approved selector—may be reviewed.
( ) Biosurveillance is key to global effectiveness
McNickle 12
(Michelle McNickle, Associate Editor of InformationWeek Healthcare, “Feds To Use Social
Media For Biosurveillance”, http://www.informationweek.com/regulations/feds-to-use-socialmedia-for-biosurveillance/d/d-id/1107452?, ZS)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently awarded Accenture Federal
Services a two-year contract to help the Office of Health Affairs (OHA) enhance its
biosurveillance capabilities. With the help of Accenture, OHA will begin using information
gathered from social media sites -- Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr -- to better inform and
protect the public against national health emergencies, such as disease outbreaks or biological
attacks. Accenture defines biosurveillance as the "monitoring of public health trends and
unusual occurrences, relying on pre-existing, real-time health data -- data that s publicly
available and easily obtained," according to a statement. "Because of the vast amount of data
and information available and readily shared through social media … and the rapid pace
information is shared, collecting and understanding information from these channels is critical."
The initiative is a pilot program that John Matchette, partner at Accenture and leader of its
Public Safety agency work, said the company is hoping to have operational in approximately
eight months. In an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare, Matchette described the
program as using people as "sensors" to detect health issues such as pathogens or symptoms.
"The best way to do this is to treat humans as sensors and let them self-report," Matchette said.
Gathering more data points and reacting faster to potential threats are the two main goals for
Matchette and his team, he said, and social media will make this possible. Matchette made
clear the initiative isn't aimed at mining data that's secret or private. The agency is looking at
public data to see where patterns exist in different geographic areas. The program is based on a
key-word approach to scanning social media sites. Accenture will begin by developing a lexicon
of health conversations that spans these sites to use as a baseline. "Step one is to get that
identified, and then we have standard interfaces that go out and look at these websites, like
Facebook and Twitter, and they watch for these trends," Matchette said. "There's a lot of health
discussion at the same time, so mission one is to understand what normalcy looks like, and
once you've done that, you can look for deviations from normal, and that’s how you detect
patterns." After developing this baseline, Matchette said the company will be in a position where
it can "react and modify…. [A] lot of this is tweaking the underlying analytics to begin to run and
get results." The underlying technology the company is using, he said, isn't custom code.
Instead, Accenture has a collaboration platform, which integrates data sources and other offthe-shelf products. "So the effort isn't in the coding of the solution because the analytics have
been developed," Matchette said. "It's deciding what the lexicon is, and then refining the
results."
( ) Biosurveillance is key to solve international disease outbreaks – empirics
RTI 13
(Neely Kaydos-Daniels, RTI International, Director, Influenza Programs - Central America
Region, Director of Health Security at RTI International, Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at
the Center for Disease Control, “Study: Biosurveillance Provides Early Detection of Disease
Outbreaks”, http://www.rti.org/newsroom/news.cfm?obj=18554B0D-5056-B10031F8E9637DB5227A, ZS)
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – Biosurveillance – the automated monitoring of health
trend data – can enhance the detection of naturally occurring or intentional disease outbreaks,
according to a study by researchers at RTI International. The study, published in the March
issue of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, conducted three case studies from 2007-2008 whose
biosurveillance systems cover more than 10 million people. The in-depth interviews describe
how biosurveillance systems have been used by state and local public health practitioners to
identify and investigate outbreaks. For example, the researchers found that in North Carolina,
several university students got food poisoning at an event just before a semester break. That
meant that the students ended up visiting emergency rooms throughout the state with their
gastrointestinal symptoms. "Ordinarily these circumstances would have made identifying the
source of this outbreak very difficult, if not impossible," said Neely Kaydos-Daniels, Ph.D.,
senior research epidemiologist at RTI and the paper's lead author. "However, because the data
from these events were entered into the biosurveillance system, health officials were able to
identify the source of the outbreak." In another case, a rapid increase of rash illness caused by
itch mites was first detected by biosurveillance before it was reported by other means.
Epidemiologists were able to estimate the increase in number of cases of the rash over time
through the biosurveillance system. According to the study, biosurveillance helped state and
local health departments track epidemics over time. That information was instrumental in the
decision-making process of health departments and hospitals to implement control measure to
protect at-risk populations and prevent future cases. However, the study also showed that the
systems often identify a large number of false positives and were considered more useful for
outbreaks of severe disease than for milder disease, because the systems currently only pull
data from emergency departments. "Biosurveillance will be even more effective if we can
integrate data from primary care physicians with emergency departments," Kaydos-Daniels
said. "The consideration of public health data needs for biosurveillance is critical to our
population's health. Federal initiatives to encourage adoption of electronic health records among
health care providers are vital to improving the utility of biosurveillance and the capacity of
health departments."
( ) Bio surveillance creates info spread and awareness – it’s the vital internal link
Fleming and Pamela 14
(Eric Fleming & Pamela Pamelá, Florida International University, Research Assistants to Dr.
John Stack, Professor of Politics and International Relations and Law and Director of the School
of International and Public Affairs, “Using Social Media as a Method for Early Indications &
Warnings of Biological Threats”, http://magg.fiu.edu/program/capstone-project/2014-capstoneworking-papers/southcom-pam_eric_social-media-and-biosurveillance-capstone-april-2014edited-by-dawndavies.pdf, ZS)
In a globalized world, biosurveillance needs to match the velocity and intensity of a potential
viral outbreak. Therefore, social media is being explored as a non-traditional way to detect a
pandemic. Numerous websites act as potential channels for individuals to discuss symptoms
and share their geographical location, so governments and private enterprises have explored
various models in detecting and tracking potential pandemics. This paper provides an overview
of the existing literature on social media’s potential for biological detection and existing viral
tracking models. Furthermore, this paper provides examples of social media’s potential for
detection, provides a framework from which to analyze social media as a destabilizing power,
and offers a new model and policy recommendations. Velocity and intensity are two measures
that are vital in detecting and monitoring the onset of pandemics. In an era where time-space
compression has manifested across the globe, and greater interconnectivity amongst
populations continue to propagate, the need to detect and track microbial outbreaks are
paramount. While globalization introduced humanity to an abundance of technology and trade,
these advancements present increasingly greater challenges for monitoring viral outbreaks.
Therefore, there is not only a desire, but also a need for a revolutionary system in
biosurveillance. Currently, millions of humans are crossing borders and integrating with
countless populations, making a viral epidemic incredibly difficult to manage. For instance,
history witnessed the calamitous effects the Black Plague, Small Pox, and the Spanish Flu had
on civilizations. The aftermath of the black plague led to 30-60 percent reduction in European
population, with some cities having estimates of 70-80 percent mortality rate (Alchon, 2003, 21).
Additionally, considerable societal changes occurred that led to a deterioration of church
authority, peasant revolts, and attacks on various populations (Whipps, 2008). The threat of
bioterrorism is not without warrant. Most patients with bioterrorism-related diseases experience
initial symptoms that could be interpreted as common illness, such as influenza. Other
indications may include acute respiratory distress, gastrointestinal symptoms, feverish
hemorrhagic conditions, and similar illnesses with either dermatologic or neurologic ailments
(Bravata et al. 2004, 911). Identifying these conditions, therefore, is crucial to not only detecting
the diseases they are normally linked to, but also to the discovery of bioterrorism attempts. To
prevent another pandemic, it is essential to find a new method of detecting the onset of
indications and warnings before an outbreak occurs. This new method should have the
capability to mirror a pathogen’s velocity and intensity in all areas of society, so government
agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations could
respond accordingly. Hence, there is growing literature about matching infectious diseases with
another global phenomenon that is manifesting hastily across all sectors of society, with the
potential to revolutionize viral antigen detection: social media. Social media is transforming itself
into a powerful and adaptable tool that many public and private organizations increasingly seek
to understand. Social media is a global digital community where individuals stay connected with
each other by direct and split-second electronic exchange of information constantly throughout
the day. While forms of social media have been around for ages, this is revolutionary, since
people now communicate instantaneously across national borders and oceans in mere
seconds. As a result, many organizations have used this to their advantage in promoting
businesses or building awareness for a certain campaign. A website, such as Facebook, boasts
having over one billion users worldwide, making it an incredibly large network that functions by
linking individuals together and exchanging user generated content. A large global community
can be sure to share information about what individuals are discussing and what news they are
sharing, but can governments use it to their advantage in detecting potential biological
outbreaks? Governments are now joining the social media fury. Presidential campaigns
incorporate social media for promoting their message and now various agencies promote their
agenda through websites. Conversely, we have also witnessed the awesome chaos and power
of social media and its consequential effects on governments’ attempts to control and maintain
the community. The Arab Spring, Venezuela, and Ukraine are recent examples of this.
However, with the ability of users to discuss their opinions, share videos, news articles, and live
events in a public sphere, will it be possible to also detect an upcoming pandemic? In a
globalized world where travel and technology is rapidly evolving, social media could conceivably
be a crucial tool in locating an infectious disease. The following study will explore the various
avenues social media has intersected in the area of biosurveillance. First this research will
discuss defining social media and the various significant websites, then go into the successes
and limitations of biosurveillance. Finally, this examination will conclude discussing the possible
policy recommendations and future that social media has in regard to biosurveillance.
Backlines
Privacy Bad
Privacy is massively overvalued
Posner 13 — Richard A. Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on
the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, was named the most
cited legal scholar of the 20th century by The Journal of Legal Studies, holds an LL.B. from
Harvard University, 2013 (“Privacy is overrated,” New York Daily News, April 28th, Available
Online at http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/privacy-overrated-article-1.1328656, Accessed
04-16-2015)
There is a tendency to exaggerate the social value of privacy. I value my privacy as much as the
next person, but there is a difference between what is valuable to an individual and what is
valuable to society. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a law professor rather than a judge, I
published an article called “The Right of Privacy,” in which I pointed out that “privacy” is really
just a euphemism for concealment, for hiding specific things about ourselves from others. We
conceal aspects of our person, our conduct and our history that, if known, would make it more
difficult for us to achieve our personal goals. We don’t want our arrest record to be made public;
our medical history to be made public; our peccadilloes to be made public; and so on. We want
to present sanitized versions of ourselves to the world. We market ourselves the way sellers of
consumer products market their wares — highlighting the good, hiding the bad. I do not argue
that all concealment is bad. There is nothing wrong with concealing wealth in order to avoid
being targeted by thieves or concealing embarrassing personal facts, such as a deformity or
being related to a notorious criminal, that would not cause a rational person to shun us but
might complicate our social and business relations. There may even be justification for allowing
the concealment of facts that might, but should not, cause a person to be shunned. Laws that
place a person’s arrest (as distinct from conviction) record behind a veil of secrecy are based on
a belief that prospective employers would exaggerate the significance of such a record, not
realizing, for example, that arrests are often based on mistakes by witnesses or police officers,
or are for trivial infractions. Privacy-protecting laws are paternalistic; they are based on a
skepticism regarding whether people can make sensible evaluations of an arrest record or other
private facts that enter the public domain. Still, a good deal of privacy just facilitates the
personal counterpart of the false advertising of goods and services, and by doing so, reduces
the well-being of society as a whole. I am not suggesting that privacy laws be repealed. I don’t
think that they do much harm, and they do some good, as just indicated. But I don’t think they
serve the public interest as well as civil libertarians contend, and so I don’t think that such laws
confer social benefits comparable to those of methods of surveillance that are effective against
criminal and especially terrorist assaults.
Util v. Absolutism
Ethics in a vacuum is morally irresponsible.
Issac, ‘2
(Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Vol. 49 No. 2, Spring)
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world one
must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To
say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo
Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding
concern with moral goodness
undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intentions does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally comprised parties
may seem like the right thing, but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving
any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world
of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness, it is often a form of
complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics-as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a potentially
immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3)
it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it
is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with
“good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of
communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it
is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these
effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It
alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
No Violation of Constituion
Surveillance doesn’t violate the 4th amendment – no human review and not invasive.
Branda ‘14
(et al; JOYCE R. BRANDA, Acting Assistant Attorney General, BRIEF FOR THE APPELLEES - Amicus Brief for
Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Amici” means “friend of the court” and –
in this context - is legal reference to the Reporters Committee – October 2nd https://www.eff.org/document/governments-smith-answering-brief)
In district court, plaintiff attempted to fill that gap in her claim to standing, asserting that, if the government had in fact acquired
metadata about her calls, she would suffer a cognizable injury each time the government queries the Section 215 database, even if
queries of Section 215 metadata are performed
electronically; a human analyst reviews only metadata that is responsive to an electronic query, and no one reviews
nonresponsive information. It is no more an injury for a computer query to rule out particular telephony metadata
as unresponsive to a query than it would be for a canine sniff to rule out a piece of luggage as
nonresponsive to a drug investigation, see United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 707 (1983) (canine sniff of
luggage does not violate a reasonable expectation of privacy), or for a chemical test to rule out a
particular substance being cocaine, see United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 123 (1984). Where telephony
metadata associated with particular calls remains unreviewed and never comes to any human being’s
attention, there is no invasion of any constitutionally cognizable privacy interests, and no injury to support
standing to sue. At the very least, the absence of any such human review would mean that no
infringement of a Fourth Amendment privacy interest demonstrably occurred here. See infra p. 54-55.
metadata about her calls were never responsive to a query. But
No impact to a 4th Amendment violation – the Special Needs Doctrine justifies minor
privacy intrusions
Branda ‘14
(et al; JOYCE R. BRANDA, Acting Assistant Attorney General, BRIEF FOR THE APPELLEES - Amicus Brief for
Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Amici” means “friend of the court” and –
in this context - is legal reference to the Reporters Committee – October 2nd https://www.eff.org/document/governments-smith-answering-brief)
Even if plaintiff had a cognizable privacy interest in Verizon Wireless’s business records—and she does not—the Fourth
Amendment would permit the government to acquire those records under the special needs
doctrine. The Section 215 telephony-metadata program serves the paramount government interest in
preventing and disrupting terrorist attacks on the United States, a compelling special governmental need. And
because of the significant safeguards in the program—including a requirement of court authorization based on
reasonable suspicion before a human analyst accesses the data—the impact on cognizable privacy interests is at most
minimal.
Social M. K2 Biosurveil
DHS contracts prove social media is necessary to effective biosurveillance – stats
McGee 12
(Marianne McGee, Staff Writer for Gov Info Security, “Using Social Media for Biosurveillance”,
http://www.govinfosecurity.com/using-social-media-for-biosurveillance-a-5278, ZS)
The Department of Homeland Security is testing whether scanning social media sites to collect
and analyze health-related data could help identify infectious disease outbreaks, bioterrorism or
other public health and national security risks. The department has signed a $3 million, one-year
contract with Accenture Federal Services, which is providing software and services for the
project. The biosurveillance pilot involves automatically scanning social media sites, such as
Facebook and Twitter, to collect and analyze health-related data in real time, says John
Matchette, managing director for Accenture's public safety portfolio. The information being
collected includes a variety of health-related keywords and other information, including medical
symptoms, that show up in social medial postings. The data will be collected and analyzed in
aggregate, Matchette says. "The information won't be tracked back to individuals who posted it,"
he stresses, to help ensure privacy. But one privacy advocate questions whether DHS is taking
adequate steps to ensure privacy. "Even when data is in aggregate, we don't have any clear
policies around how data will be used and how it can be traced back, including if and when
there are signs of an illness outbreak," says Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy
project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. "I think it's a legitimate question to ask
[DHS] what the guidelines are for using this data. I'd prefer they have a plan in advance for
dealing with this, rather than waiting." Representatives of DHS and Accenture did not reply to a
request for comment on McGraw's concerns. Watching for Trends The social media data
analytics technology will "watch for trends," such as whether new or unusual clusters of
symptoms in various geographic regions are being reported on social networking sites,
Matchette explains. The analysis of social media data is evolving, he adds, pointing out that
both recent presidential campaigns tapped into sites such as Facebook and Twitter to comb
through data for trends. While Accenture's work in this pilot focuses on analysis of social media
data, the biosurveillance effort has underlying capabilities that could be expanded to integrate
data from other sources, such as hospital emergency departments, drug distribution companies
and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Matchette says. "This is big data
analytics." The project is the latest in a series of DHS data analysis efforts for biosurveillance.
For example, DHS already is analyzing data that's collected by the CDC from public health
departments nationwide. Also, it's collecting and analyzing air samples in several cities for signs
of bio-terrorist chemicals, such as anthrax. The technology infrastructure for the social media
project includes Accenture's collaboration platform software and social media analytics software
from Accenture's partner in the project, SAS Institute.
Cartography
Frontlines
1nc
( ) FISA court solves
Katyal and Caplan ‘8 [Neal Katyal and Richard Caplan are Law professors at Georgetown
University, “The Surprisingly Stronger Case for the Legality of the NSA Surveillance Program:
The FDR Precedent” Stanford Law Review, Feb. 2008,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40040407.pdf // date accessed 6/29/15 K.K]
FISA was created in 1978 as part of Congress's overhaul of intelligence activities to govern
domestic electronic surveillance of agents of foreign powers.12 The Act mandates that the Chief
Justice of the United States designate eleven district judges from seven of the United States
judicial circuits to form a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).13 Of these, at least
three judges must reside within twenty miles of Washington, D.C.14 The judges of this court
hear the government's applications for foreign intelligence surveillance in secret and determine
whether the requested surveillance meets the requirements set forth in FISA. Once a judge of
the FISA court has denied an application for surveillance, the government may not petition
another judge of the same court for approval of the same application.15 In most cases, FISA
requires that the government conduct domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes
only pursuant to judicial authorization. The standards for that authorization, however, do not
comport with the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirements for an ordinary warrant.
Rather, FISA is more permissive in the type and scope of the searches it allows, requiring far
less judicial supervision when the government collects intelligence about foreign powers
domestically.16 In most circumstances, a federal agent seeking to use surveillance under FISA
must, with the approval of the Attorney General, submit an ex parte application to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.17 That application must state, among other things, (1) the
identity or description of the target of surveillance, (2) the facts relied upon to justify the belief
that the target is a foreign power (or agent thereof) and that each of the places to be targeted is
used by or about to be used by a foreign power (or agent thereof), (3) detailed description of the
type of information sought and the type of communications to be monitored, (4) that obtaining
foreign intelligence information is "a significant purpose" of the surveillance, and (5) that such
information cannot reasonably be obtained by alternative methods
( ) No NSA overload – Accumulo tech solves.
Harris ‘13
(Not Scott Harris, because large data sets do sometimes overwhelm him… But Derrick Harris. Derrick in a senior
writer at Gigaom and has been a technology journalist since 2003. He has been covering cloud computing, big data
and other emerging IT trends for Gigaom since 2009. Derrick also holds a law degree from the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. This evidence is also internally quoting Adam Fuchs – a former NSA employee that was involved in
software design. “Under the covers of the NSA’s big data effort” – Gigaom - Jun. 7, 2013 https://gigaom.com/2013/06/07/under-the-covers-of-the-nsas-big-data-effort/)
The NSA’s data collection practices have much of America — and certainly the tech community — on edge, but sources familiar with the
agency’s technology are saying the situation isn’t as bad as it seems. Yes, the agency has a lot of data and can
do some powerful analysis, but, the argument goes, there are strict limits in place around how the agency can use it
and who has access. Whether that’s good enough is still an open debate, but here’s what we know about the technology that’s
underpinning all that data. The technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis
perspective is Accumulo — an open-source database the agency built in order to store and analyze huge amounts of
data. Adam Fuchs knows Accumulo well because he helped build it during a nine-year stint with the NSA; he’s now co-founder and CTO of a company
called Sqrrl that sells a commercial version of the database system. I spoke with him earlier this week, days before news broke of the NSA collecting
data from Verizon and the country’s largest web companies. The
NSA began building Accumulo in late 2007, Fuchs said,
because they were trying to do automated analysis for tracking and discovering new terrorism suspects.
“We had a set of applications that we wanted to develop and we were looking for the right infrastructure to build them on,” he said. The problem was
those technologies weren’t available. He liked what projects like HBase were doing by using Hadoop to mimic Google’s famous BigTable data store,
but it still wasn’t up to the NSA requirements around scalability, reliability or security. So, they began work on a project called CloudBase, which
eventually was renamed Accumulo. Now, Fuchs said, “It’s
operating at thousands-of-nodes scale” within the
NSA’s data centers. There are multiple instances each storing tens of petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1,000 terabyes or 1 million gigabytes)
of data and it’s the backend of the agency’s most widely used analytical capabilities. Accumulo’s ability to handle data in a variety of
formats (a characteristic called “schemaless” in database jargon) means the NSA can store data from numerous sources all within
the database and add new analytic capabilities in days or even hours. “It’s quite critical,” he added. What the NSA can
and can’t do with all this data As I explained on Thursday, Accumulo is especially adept at analyzing trillions of data
points in order to build massive graphs that can detect the connections between them and the strength of the connections. Fuchs didn’t talk about
the size of the NSA’s graph, but he did say the database is designed to handle months or years worth of information
and let analysts move from query to query very fast. When you’re talking about analyzing call records, it’s easy to
see where this type of analysis would be valuable in determining how far a suspected terrorist’s
network might spread and who might be involved.
( ) Accumulo solves without violating privacy.
Henschen ‘13
Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications
with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of
Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of Transform Magazine, and Executive Editor at DM News. He has covered IT
and data-driven marketing for more than 15 years. “Defending NSA Prism's Big Data Tools”- Information Week Commentary - 6/11/2013 - http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/defending-nsa-prisms-bigdata-tools/d/d-id/1110318?
The more you know about NSA's Accumulo system and graph analysis, the less likely you are to
suspect Prism is a privacy-invading fishing expedition. It's understandable that democracy-loving citizens everywhere are
outraged by the idea that the U.S. Government has back-door access to digital details surrounding email messages, phone conversations, video chats,
social networks and more on the servers of mainstream service providers including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Skype and Apple.
But the more you know about the technologies being used by the National Security Agency (NSA), the agency behind the controversial Prism program
revealed last week by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the less likely you are to view the project as a ham-fisted effort that's "trading a cherished
American value for an unproven theory," as one opinion piece contrasted personal privacy with big data analysis. The
centerpiece of the
NSA's data-processing capability is Accumulo, a highly distributed, massively parallel processing key/value store
capable of analyzing structured and unstructured data. Accumolo is based on Google's BigTable data model, but
NSA came up with a cell-level security feature that makes it possible to set access controls on individual bits
of data. Without that capability, valuable information might remain out of reach to intelligence analysts who would otherwise have to wait for
sanitized data sets scrubbed of personally identifiable information. Sponsor video, mouseover for sound [ Want more on the Prism controversy? Read
NSA Prism: Inside The Modern Surveillance State. ] As InformationWeek reported last September, the NSA has shared Accumulo with the Apache
Foundation, and the technology has since been commercialized by Sqrrl, a startup launched by six former NSA employees joined with former White
House cybersecurity strategy director (and now Sqrrl CE0) Ely Khan. "The reason NSA built Accumulo and didn't go with another open source project,
like HBase or Cassandra, is that they needed a platform where they could tag every single piece of data with a security label that dictates how people
can access that data and who can access that data," said Khan in an interview with InformationWeek. Having left government employment in 2010,
Accumulo makes
it possible to interrogate certain details while blocking access to personally identifiable
information. This capability is likely among the things James R. Clapper, the U.S. director of National Intelligence, was referring to in a statement
on the Prism disclosure that mentioned "numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties." Are They Catching Bad Guys? So the NSA
can investigate data with limits, but what good is partial information? One of Accumulo's strengths is finding connections among
Kahn says he has no knowledge of the Prism program and what information the NSA might be collecting, but he notes that
seemingly unrelated information. "By bringing data sets together, [Accumulo] allowed us to see things in the data that we didn't necessarily see from
looking at the data from one point or another," Dave Hurry, head of NSA's computer science research section, told InformationWeek last fall.
Accumulo gives NSA the ability "to take data and to stretch it in new ways so that you can find out how to
associate it with another piece of data and find those threats."
( ) The affirmative exaggerates contact chaining – minimization, numbers collected and
lack of content disprove the advantage
Mann 14 — Scott Mann is a research associate with the Strategic Technologies Program at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C., 2014 (“Fact Sheet:
Metadata”, Center For Strategic & International Studies, 2/27/14 available at
http://csis.org/publication/fact-sheet-metadata-0 date accessed 7/6/14 // K.K)
Assessment: These criticisms are wildly exaggerated. Press accounts make it sound like NSA
has looked at millions of records. In practice, NSA queried only 288 primary “seed” phone
numbers in 2012, and its ultimate contact chain analysis only touched 6,000 numbers
connected to foreign intelligence activity. To search all records would be time-consuming and
hinder analysis of relevant intelligence information. Metadata collected under Section 215 is
limited to the call-log records of a particular phone number. The metadata does not include the
“content” of a call, nor does it include the names, addresses or any other personally identifying
information; it only shows the links between phone numbers. Contrary to the ACLU claims, it
cannot be used by the NSA to ascertain intimate personal information. An analyst can look at
metadata only after he or she has demonstrates a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a
phone number is associated with a foreign terrorist organization, and only 22 NSA officials can
authorize a query selector. Metadata queries are closely monitored through a series of
minimization procedures, which limit the retention of and access to U.S. person data. Other
procedural safeguards include limiting data access, creating auditable records of all searches,
requiring monthly reports on activities, time limitations on the retention of data, as well as
quarterly reviews by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Despite the care taken by the
NSA to prevent the abuse of data, there is an expectation that a federal agency should not have
the authority to approve its own search requests. The legitimacy of metadata program oversight
may be improved if the NSA was required to get court approval for database queries.
( ) Contact chaining is key to secure the border
Chappell 14 — Bill Chappell holds a bachelor's degrees in English and History from the
University of Georgia and is a reporter/producer of National Public Radio, 2014 (“NSA
Reportedly Collected Millions of Phone Texts Every Day”, NPR, 1/16/14, available at
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/16/263130142/nsa-reportedly-collectedmillions-of-phone-texts-every-day date accessed 7/6/15 // K.K)
As recently as 2011, the National Security Agency was collecting almost 200 million text
messages each day, according to a new story by The Guardian that cites documents from
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The texts were used to develop financial and location
data, the newspaper says. An image posted by The Guardian shows a presentation slide titled
"Content Extraction Enhancements For Target Analytics: SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to
Exploit." Marked "Top Secret," it resembles the slides that were previously shown as part of the
trove of materials Snowden gave to journalists last year. The NSA's collection of text messages
in the program, codenamed Dishfire, is arbitrary, The Guardian says, and the information is
stored in a database for potential future uses. The newspaper notes that the system works
globally – meaning Americans' text messages are included in the collection process. According
to the presentation, texts from U.S. phone numbers are removed from the database. After the
story was published Thursday afternoon, the spy agency, which has been embarrassed by
revelations about its massive data collection programs since last summer, told the BBC, "The
implication that NSA's collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false." From The Guardian
come these examples of the data extracted by the NSA on a normal day: • "More than 5 million
missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone's social network
from who they contact and when)" • "Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network
roaming alerts" • "More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also
included the ability to extract and save images." • "Over 800,000 financial transactions, either
through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users" The NSA's practices and
abilities are slated to be the topic of a speech by President Obama Friday (you can follow that
event live at NPR.org, starting at 11 a.m. ET). NPR's Scott Neuman has a preview today, listing
Five Changes To The NSA You Might Hear In Obama's Speech.
( ) Hezbollah is a unique threat based on the border – sustained intelligence is key to
dissuade terrorist attacks on U.S soil
Levitt 13 — Matthew Levitt is the director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and
Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2013 (“South of the Border, A
Threat From Hezbollah” Washington Institute, Spring 2013, available at
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/opeds/Levitt20130515-JISA.pdf date
accessed 7/6/15 // K.K)
Hezbollah’s expanding criminal networks have led to closer cooperation with organized crime
networks, especially Mexican drug cartels. In a March 2012 speech at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, Michael Braun, former DEA chief of operations, detailed Hezbollah’s skill in
identifying and exploiting existing smuggling and organized crime infrastructure in the region.
Braun and other officials have noted that the terrain along the southern U.S. border, especially
around San Diego, is similar to that on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Intelligence officials believe
drug cartels, in an effort to improve their tunnels, have enlisted the help of Hezbollah, which is
notorious for its tunnel construction along the Israeli border. In the relationship, both groups
benefit, with the drug cartels receiving Hezbollah’s expertise and Hezbollah making money from
its efforts.20 In 2008, the Mexican newspaper El Universal published a story detailing how the
Sinaloa drug cartel sent its members to Iran for weapons and explosives training. The article
reported that the Sinaloa members traveled to Iran via Venezuela, that they used Venezuelan
travel documents, and that some members of Arab extremist groups were marrying local
Mexican and Venezuelan citizens in order to adopt Latino-sounding surnames and more easily
enter the United States.21 Also on the U.S. radar is the relationship between Hezbollah and the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). “One thing both Hezbollah and the FARC
have in common is a demonstrated willingness to work with outside groups that do not share
their same ideology or theology, but who share a common enemy,” notes Latin America expert
Douglas Farah.22 A July 2009 indictment exposed Jamal Youssef, a former member of the
Syrian military and known international arms dealer, who attempted to make a weapons-forcocaine trade with the FARC. Unbeknownst to him, Youssef negotiated the deal with an
undercover DEA agent. The military-grade arms he agreed to provide had been stolen from Iraq
and stored in Mexico by Youssef’s cousin, who he claimed was a Hezbollah member.23 Staging
ground and safe haven Latin America is significant for Hezbollah and other terrorist
organization. The Journal of International Security Affairs 81 South of the Border, A Threat from
Hezbollah tions as well: the region provides an ideal point of infiltration into the United States. In
at least one instance, a highly trained Hezbollah operative, Mahmaoud Youssef Kourani,
succeeded in sneaking across the border into the U.S. through Mexico in the trunk of a car.
Kourani paid the owner of a Lebanese café in Tijuana $4,000 to smuggle him across the border
in February 2001. The café owner, Salim Boughader Mucharrafille, admitted to assisting more
than 300 Lebanese sneak into the U.S. in similar fashion over a three-year period. An attempt to
establish a Hezbollah network in Central America, foiled by Mexican authorities in 2010,
provides even more insight into Hezbollah’s foothold in Mexico. Hezbollah operatives, led by
Jameel Nasr, employed Mexican nationals who had family ties in Lebanon to set up a network
targeting Western interests, the media reported. According to these reports, Nasr routinely
traveled to Lebanon to receive directions from Hezbollah.24 Over the past several years, U.S.
criminal investigations also have revealed links between the group’s illicit activities in the United
States and criminal networks in Latin America. Fertile soil For some, Hezbollah’s attacks in
Buenos Aires are ancient history. Indeed, the government of Argentine President Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner recently announced that her country was partnering with the Islamic
Republic of Iran to establish an independent truth commission to resolve the AMIA bombing.25
In fact, Argentina’s own investigation into the matter has already determined beyond a shadow
of a doubt that Hezbollah and Iran partnered together to carry out these bombings.26 This
disturbing turn of events demonstrates how far some in the region have yet to go to get serious
about the threat Hezbollah and Iran pose. The need for attention is perhaps greater today than it
has been in years past, since Hezbollah—as a result of both necessity and opportunity—
appears to have renewed operational planning focused on South America. Confronting the
threat it poses will require close law enforcement, intelligence, and policy coordination
throughout the Western Hemisphere. And with Hezbollah actively plotting terrorist attacks
around the world, such cooperation should take shape as quickly as possible
Backlines
Accumulo
Data overload wrong – Accumulo tech solves
Gallagher ‘13
Sean Gallagher is the IT editor at Ars Technica. Sean is a University of Wisconsin grad, a former systems integrator,
a former director of IT strategy at Ziff Davis Enterprise. He wrote his first program in high school – “What the NSA can
do with “big data”” - Ars Technica - Jun 11, 2013 - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/what-thensa-can-do-with-big-data/2/
Ironically, about the same time these two programs were being exposed, Internet companies such as
Google and Yahoo were
solving the big data storage and analysis problem. In November of 2006, Google published a paper on BigTable, a
database with petabytes of capacity capable of indexing the Web and supporting Google Earth and other applications. And the work at Yahoo to
catch up with Google's GFS file system—the basis for BigTable—resulted in the Hadoop. BigTable and Hadoop-based databases offered a
way to handle huge amounts of data being captured by the NSA's operations, but they lacked
something critical to intelligence operations: compartmentalized security (or any security at all, for that matter). So in 2008, NSA set out
to create a better version of BigTable, called Accumulo—now an Apache Foundation project. Accumulo is a "NoSQL"
database, based on key-value pairs. It's a design similar to Google's BigTable or Amazon's DynamoDB, but Accumulo has special
security features designed for the NSA, like multiple levels of security access. The program is built on the
open-source Hadoop platform and other Apache products. One of those is called Column Visibility—a capability that allows individual items within a
row of data to have different classifications. That allows users and applications with different levels of authorization to access data but see more or less
information based on what each column's "visibility" is. Users with lower levels of clearance wouldn't be aware that the column of data they're
prohibited from viewing existed. Accumulo
also can generate near real-time reports from specific patterns in
data. So, for instance, the system could look for specific words or addressees in e-mail messages that come from a range of IP
addresses; or, it could look for phone numbers that are two degrees of separation from a target's phone number. Then it can spit those chosen
e-mails or phone numbers into another database, where NSA workers could peruse it at their
leisure. In other words, Accumulo allows the NSA to do what Google does with your e-mails and Web
searches—only with everything that flows across the Internet, or with every phone call you make. It works
because of a type of server process called "iterators." These pieces of code constantly process the information sent to
them and send back reports on emerging patterns in the data. Querying a multi-petabyte database and waiting for a response would be deadly slow,
especially because there is always new data being added.
The iterators are like NSA's tireless data elves.
No NSA data overload - Accumulo checks.
Kelly ‘12
Jeff Kelly is a Principal Research Contributor at The Wikibon Project and a Contributing Editor at SiliconANGLE. He
focuses on trends in Big Data and business analytics. His research has been quoted and referenced by the Financial
Times, Forbes, CIO.com, Network World, GigaOM, TechTarget and more – “Accumulo: Why The World Needs
Another NoSQL Database” – Wikibon Blog – August 20th - http://wikibon.org/blog/breaking-analysis-accumulo-whythe-world-needs-another-nosql-database/
If you’ve been unable to keep up with all the competing NoSQL databases that have hit the market over the
last several years, you’re not alone. To name just a few, there’s HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB, Riak, CouchDB, Redis, and Neo4J.
To that list you can add
Accumulo, an open source database originally developed at the National Security
Agency. You may be wondering why the world needs yet another database to handle large volumes of multistructured data. The answer is, of course, that no one of these NoSQL databases has yet checked all the feature/functionality boxes
that most enterprises require before deploying a new technology. In the Big Data world, that means the ability to handle the three
V’s (volume, variety and velocity) of data, the ability to process multiple types of workloads (analytical vs. transactional),
and the ability to maintain ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) compliance at scale. With each new NoSQL
entrant, hope springs eternal that this one will prove the NoSQL messiah. So what makes Accumulo different than all the rest?
According to proponents, Accumulo
is capable of maintaining consistency even as it scales to
thousands of nodes and petabytes of data; it can both read and write data in near real-time; and,
most importantly, it was built from the ground up with cell-level security functionality.
Accumulo tech solves overload – and does so without mass privacy violations.
Jackson ‘13
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service, and is
based in New York. “NSA's Accumulo data store has strict limits on who can see the data” - PC World - Oct 31, 2013
- http://www.pcworld.com/article/2060060/nsas-accumulo-nosql-store-offers-rolebased-data-access.html
With its much-discussed enthusiasm for collecting large amounts of data, the NSA naturally found much
interest in the idea of highly scalable NoSQL databases. But the U.S. intelligence agency needed some security of its own,
so it developed a NoSQL data store called Accumulo, with built-in policy enforcement mechanisms that strictly limit
who can see its data. At the O’Reilly Strata-Hadoop World conference this week in New York, one of the former National Security Agency
developers behind the software, Adam Fuchs, explained how Accumulo works and how it could be used in fields other than intelligence gathering. The
agency contributed the software’s source code to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011. “Every single application that we built at the NSA has
some concept of multi-level security,” said Fuchs, who is now the chief technology officer of Sqrrl, which offers a commercial edition of the software.
The NSA started building Accumulo in 2008. Much like Facebook did with its Cassandra database around the same time, the NSA used the Google Big
Table architecture as a starting point. In the parlance of NoSQL databases, Accumulo is a simple key/value data store, built on a shared-nothing
architecture that allows for easy expansion to thousands of nodes able to hold petabytes worth of data. It features a flexible schema that allows new
columns to be quickly added, and comes with some advanced data analysis features as well. Accumulo's killer feature Accumulo’s
killer
feature, however, is its “data-centric security,” Fuchs said. When data is entered into Accumulo, it must be
accompanied with tags specifying who is allowed to see that material. Each row of data has a cell
specifying the roles within an organization that can access the data, which can map back to
specific organizational security policies. It adheres to the RBAC (role-based access control) model. This approach allowed the
NSA to categorize data into its multiple levels of classification—confidential, secret, top secret—as well as who in an organization could access the
data, based on their official role within the organization. The database is accompanied by a policy engine that decides who can see what data. This
model could be used anywhere that security is an issue. For instance, if used in a health care organization, Accumulo can specify that only a patient
and the patient’s doctor can see the patient’s data. The patient’s specific doctor may change over time, but the role of the doctor, rather than the
NSA found that the data-centric approach “greatly simplifies
application development,” Fuchs said. Because data today tends to be transformed and reused for different analysis applications, it
individual doctor, is specified in the database. The
makes sense for the database itself to keep track of who is allowed to see the data, rather than repeatedly implementing these rules in each application
that uses this data.
Mosaic Protection
Frontlines
1nc
( ) Social media presents the façade of intimacy through self-enhancing depiction of
identity
Livingstone ‘8 [Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media
and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, “Taking risky
opportunities in youthful content creation: Teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy,
privacy and self-expression”, LSE Research Online, 2008
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27072/1/Taking_risky_opportunities_in_youthful_content_creation_(LSE
RO).pdf // date accessed 6/28/15 K.K]
With this in mind, Ellie, Nina and others seem to suggest that, for younger teenagers, selfattention is enacted through constructing an elaborate, highly stylized statement of identity as
display. Thus a visually ambitious, ‘pick and mix’ profile, that frequently remixes borrowed
images and other content to express continually shifting tastes offers for some a satisfactorily
‘successful’ self, liked and admired by peers. But this notion of identity as display – which
characterizes Daphne and Danielle’s profiles and, to a lesser degree, those of several of the
others - is gradually replaced by the mutual construction among peers of a notion of identity
through connection. On this alternative approach, elements of display are excised from the
profile, replaced by the visual privileging of one’s contacts, primarily through links to others’
profiles and by posting photos of the peer group socializing offline. Equally stylized, albeit
employing a different aesthetic, and still focused on the reflexive tasks of self-observation and
self-assessment, this later phase brings to mind Giddens’ (1991: 91) argument that the ‘pure
relationship’ is replacing the traditional relationship long embedded in structures of family, work
or community. As he puts it, ‘the pure relationship is reflexively organized, in an open fashion,
and on a continuous basis’, prioritizing the values of authenticity, reciprocity, recognition and
intimacy. Reminiscent of the concerns reflected by teenagers when talking about social
networking, the continuous revision of the self is hinted at when Leo says, ‘I’ll always be adding
new friends’. The implications for judging others are brought out not only by Ellie’s emphasis,
above, on people who are ‘actually’ friends and so know you already, but also by Ryan’s
observation about others that, ‘you look at their pictures, see if they are authentic or not, so if
they ain’t got any comments and they’re just adding people, then I can’t believe them’. Now, too,
we may see that Danny’s omission of personal information on his profile is less a curious
neglect of self than the prioritization of a self-embedded in social connections - for it is not that
Danny cannot be bothered about networking: he sustains links with 299 friends and checks
every day to see ‘if I’ve got any, like, messages, new friend requests or anything like that, like,
new comments’. In terms of affordances, then, social networking sites frame, but do not
determine. It remains open to young people to select a more or less complex representation of
themselves linked to a more or less wide network of others. These choices pose advantages
and disadvantages. Elaborating the presentation of self at the node supports the biographisation
of the self by prioritizing a managed and stylized display of identity as lifestyle. But it risks
invasions of privacy, since the backstage self is on view (Goffman, 1959), potentially
occasioning critical or abusive responses from others. Something of the associated anxiety is
evident in Ryan’s comment about his profile that ‘hopefully people will like it - if they don’t, then
screw them’. The interlinking of opportunities and risks is also apparent when Danielle
discusses how her friend used Piczo to express her unhappiness when her parents separated,
‘because other people can advise you what to do or say, don’t worry, you can go through it’; yet
she is one of the few interviewees who talked about the risk of hostile comments, noting that
‘sometimes the comments are cruel and they’re [her friends] all crying and upset’.
( ) Can’t implement the theory – too slow technology changes.
Kerr, 2012 (Orin S., Professor of Law @ George Washington University Law School “THE
MOSAIC THEORY OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT” Michigan Law Review Lexis)
The first difficulty with the mosaic theory is the most obvious: Its implementation raises so many
difficult questions that it will prove exceedingly hard to administer effectively. Because the mosaic
theory departs dramatically from existing doctrine, implementing it would require the creation of a new set of
Fourth Amendment rules – a mosaic parallel to the sequential precedents that exist today. The problem is not only the
number of questions, but their difficulty. Many of the questions raised in Part III of this article are genuine puzzles that Fourth
Amendment text, principles and history cannot readily answer. Judges should be reluctant to open the legal equivalent of Pandora’s
Box. It
is particularly telling that not even the proponents of the mosaic theory have yet proposed
answers for how the theory should be applied. For example, a group of Fellows at Yale’s Information Society
Project who endorse the mosaic approach simply dismissed the conceptual difficulties of its implementation on the ground that
answering such puzzles is “why we have judges.”198 A pro-mosaic amicus brief in Jones signed by several prominent legal
academics was similarly nonresponsive. Although the mosaic approach requires “tough decisions” to be made, the brief noted,
courts have encountered difficult questions elsewhere in Fourth Amendment law. 199 While
one can admire such
confidence in the capabilities of the judiciary, it would provide more comfort if proponents of the
mosaic theory would at least be willing to venture guesses as to how it should apply. The
challenge of answering the questions raised by the mosaic theory has particular force because
the theory attempts to regulate use of changing technologies. Law enforcement implementation
of new technologies can occur very quickly, while judicial resolution of difficult constitutional
questions occurs at a more glacial pace. As a result, the constantly-evolving nature of
surveillance practices could lead new questions to arise faster than courts can settle them. Old
practices would likely be obsolete by the time the courts resolved how to address them, and the
newest surveillance practices would arrive and their legality would remain unknown. Like Lucy and
Ethel trying to package candy on the everfaster conveyor belt, 200 the mosaic theory could place judges in the uncomfortable
position of trying to settle a wide range of novel questions for technologies that are changing faster than the courts can resolve how
to regulate them. Consider the changes in location-identifying technologies in the last three decades. Thirty years ago, the latest in
police technologies to track location was the primitive radio beeper seen in Knotts. But radio beepers have gone the way of the 8track tape. Today the police have new tools at their disposal that were unknown in the Knotts era, ranging from GPS devices to cellsite records to license–plate cameras. This rapid pace of technological change creates major difficulties for courts trying to apply the
mosaic theory: If
the technological facts of the mosaic change quickly over time, any effort to answer
the many difficult questions raised by the mosaic theory will become quickly outdated. Courts may
devise answers to the many questions discussed in Part III, but by the time they do the relevant technology is likely to have gone the
way of the radio beeper.
( ) There is a sequential approach to the Fourth Amendment now
Kerr, 2012 (Orin S., Professor of Law @ George Washington University Law School “THE
MOSAIC THEORY OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT” Michigan Law Review Lexis)
The five votes in favor of a mosaic approach in United States v. Jones do not establish the
theory as a matter of law. The majority opinion in Jones failed to adopt the mosaic approach, and it only touched on the
mosaic method in passing to express skepticism of it.187 Even if five votes of the current court are ready to embrace the theory,
lower courts must adhere to Supreme Court holdings even when subsequent developments suggest that the Supreme Court would
reject those holdings if it reviewed them.188 For
now, then, the sequential approach remains good law. At the
same time, the concurring opinions in Jones invite lower courts to consider embracing some
form of the mosaic approach. Our attention therefore must turn to the normative question: Should courts embrace the
mosaic theory? Is the mosaic approach a promising new method of Fourth Amendment interpretation, or is it a mistake that should
be avoided? This section argues that
courts should reject the mosaic theory. The better course is to retain
the traditional sequential approach to Fourth Amendment analysis. The mosaic theory aims at a reasonable
goal. Changing technology can outpace the assumptions of existing precedents, and courts may need to tweak prior doctrine to
restore the balance of privacy protection from an earlier age. I have called this process “equilibrium adjustment,”189 and it is a
longstanding method of interpreting the Fourth Amendment. But the mosaic theory aims to achieve this goal in a very peculiar way.
( ) Courts are not ruling on the Mosaic theory now
Bellovin et al, 2014 (Steven M., Prof of Computer Science @ Columbia, Renee M. Hutchins,
Associate Prof. of Law @ Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Tony Jebara, Associate
Prof. of Computer Science @ Columbia, and Sebastian Zimmeck, Ph D. Candidate in Computer
Science @ Columbia, “When Enough is Enough: Location Tracking, Mosaic Theory, and
Machine Learning” New York University Journal of Law & Liberty Lexis)
In the context of location tracking, the
Court has previously suggested that the Fourth Amendment may (at
some theoretical threshold) be concerned with the accumulated information revealed by surveillance.3
Similarly, in the Court’s recent decision in United States v. Jones, a majority of concurring
justices indicated willingness to explore such an approach.4 However, in general, the Court has
rejected any notion that technological enhancement matters to the constitutional treatment of
location tracking.5 Rather, it has decided that such surveillance in public spaces, which does not require physical trespass, is
equivalent to a human tail and thus not regu-lated by the Fourth Amendment. In this way, the Court has avoided a quantitative
analysis of the amendment’s protections. The
Court’s reticence is built on the enticingly direct assertion that
objectivity under the mosaic theory is impossible. This is true in large part because there has
been no rationale yet offered to objectively distinguish relatively short-term monitoring from its
counterpart of greater duration.6 This article suggests that by combining the lessons of machine learning with the mosaic
theory and apply-ing the pairing to the Fourth Amendment we can see the contours of a response. Machine learning makes clear
that mosaics can be created. Moreover, there are important lessons to be learned on when this is the case.c
( ) Reasonable expectation of privacy is based on a probabilistic view of the fourth
amendment. That fails because society has no idea what surveillance is common or rare.
Kerr, 2012 (Orin S., Professor of Law @ George Washington University Law School “THE
MOSAIC THEORY OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT” Michigan Law Review Lexis)
The third problem with the
mosaic theory is that most formulations of it are based on a probabilistic
approach to the reasonable expectation of privacy test that proves ill-suited to regulate
technological surveillance practices. Supreme Court decisions have utilized several different inquiries for what makes
an expectation of privacy constitutionally reasonable.201 In some cases the Court has looked to what a reasonable person would
perceive as likely;202 in other cases the Court has looked to whether the particular kind information obtained is worthy of protection;
203 in some cases the Court has looked to whether the government violated some legal norm such as property in obtaining the
information; 204 and in other cases the Court has simply considered whether the conduct should be regulated by the Fourth
Amendment as a matter of policy.205 Use of these multiple inquiries (what I have called “models”) of Fourth Amendment protection
allows the Court to adopt different approaches in different contexts, ideally selecting the model that best identifies the need for
regulation in that particular setting.206 For the most part, formulations of the mosaic theory rest on the first of these approaches –
what a reasonable person would see as likely. I have called this the
probabilistic approach to Fourth Amendment
protection,207 as it rests on a notion of the probability of privacy protection. The more likely it is
that a person’s will maintain their privacy, the more likely it is that government conduct defeating
that expectation counts a search. Under this model, the Fourth Amendment guards against surprises. The paradigmatic
example is Bond v. United States,208 which involved government agents manipulating the duffel bag of a bus passenger to identify
a wrapped brick of drugs inside it. A bus passenger expects other passengers to handle his bag but not “feel the bag in an
exploratory manner,”209 the Court held, so the exploratory feel violated a reasonable expectation of privacy. Both Judge Ginsburg
and Justice Alito authored mosaic opinions that rely on such probabilistic reasoning. Judge Ginsburg deemed long-term GPS
monitoring a search because no stranger could conduct the same level of monitoring as a GPS device. Justice Alito reached the
same result on the grounds that a reasonable person would not expect the police to obtain so much information. The probabilistic
approach presents a poor choice to regulate technological surveillance because most individuals lack a reliable way to gauge the
likelihood of technological surveillance methods. The
probabilistic expectation of privacy applied in Bond
relied on widespread and repeated personal experience. Bus passengers learn the social
practices of bus travel by observing it first-hand. In contrast, estimating the frequency of
technological surveillance practices is essentially impossible for most people (and most judges).
Surveillance practices tend to be hidden, and few understand the relevant technologies. Some
people will guess that privacy invasions are common, and others will guess that they are rare.
But none will know the truth, which makes such probabilistic beliefs a poor basis for Fourth
Amendment regulation.
( ) Courts can’t administer the mosaic theory
Kerr, 2012 (Orin S., Professor of Law @ George Washington University Law School “THE
MOSAIC THEORY OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT” Michigan Law Review Lexis)
The concurring opinions in Jones invite lower courts to experiment with a new approach to the
Fourth Amendment search doctrine. The approach is well-intentioned, in that it aims to restore
the balance of Fourth Amendment protection by disabling the new powers created by
computerization of surveillance tools. But despite being well-intentioned, the mosaic theory
represents a Pandora’s Box that courts should leave closed. The theory raises so many novel
and difficult questions that courts would struggle to provide reasonably coherent answers. By
the time courts worked through answers for any one technology, the technology would likely be
long obsolete. Mosaic protection also could come at a cost of lost statutory protections, and
implementing it would require courts to assess probabilities of surveillance that judges are
poorly equipped to evaluate. In this case, the game is not worth the candle. The concurring
opinions in Jones represent an invitation that future courts should decline. Instead of adopting a
new mosaic theory, courts should consider the need to engage in equilibrium-adjustment within
the confines of the traditional sequential approach.
Backlines
Mosaic
That evidence is below
Self Enhancement
That evidence is below
Case Turns
Kills V2L
1nc
Social media correlates to jealousy, social tension, isolation, and depression – stats
Economist 13
(“Facebook is bad for you, Get a life!”, http://www.economist.com/news/science-andtechnology/21583593-using-social-network-seems-make-people-more-miserable-get-life, ZS)
THOSE who have resisted the urge to join Facebook will surely feel vindicated when they read
the latest research. A study just published by the Public Library of Science, conducted by Ethan
Kross of the University of Michigan and Philippe Verduyn of Leuven University in Belgium, has
shown that the more someone uses Facebook, the less satisfied he is with life. Past
investigations have found that using Facebook is associated with jealousy, social tension,
isolation and depression. But these studies have all been “cross-sectional”—in other words,
snapshots in time. As such, they risk confusing correlation with causation: perhaps those who
spend more time on social media are more prone to negative emotions in the first place. The
study conducted by Dr Kross and Dr Verduyn is the first to follow Facebook users for an
extended period, to track how their emotions change. The researchers recruited 82
Facebookers for their study. These volunteers, in their late teens or early 20s, agreed to have
their Facebook activity observed for two weeks and to report, five times a day, on their state of
mind and their direct social contacts (phone calls and meetings in person with other people).
These reports were prompted by text messages, sent between 10am and midnight, asking them
to complete a short questionnaire. When the researchers analysed the results, they found that
the more a volunteer used Facebook in the period between two questionnaires, the worse he
reported feeling the next time he filled in a questionnaire. Volunteers were also asked to rate
their satisfaction with life at the start and the end of the study. Those who used Facebook a lot
were more likely to report a decline in satisfaction than those who visited the site infrequently. In
contrast, there was a positive association between the amount of direct social contact a
volunteer had and how positive he felt. In other words, the more volunteers socialised in the real
world, the more positive they reported feeling the next time they filled in the questionnaire. A
volunteer’s sex had no influence on these findings; nor did the size of his (or her) social
network, his stated motivation for using Facebook, his level of loneliness or depression or his
self-esteem. Dr Kross and Dr Verduyn therefore conclude that, rather than enhancing wellbeing, Facebook undermines it.
Off Case
Topicality – Curtail
1nc
1. “Curtail” means to restrict
Webster’s 15 – Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th Ed., “curtail”,
http://www.yourdictionary.com/curtail
verb
To curtail is defined as to restrict something, stop something or deprive of something.
An example of curtail is when a town wants to stop drunk driving.
2. “Restriction” requires binding enforcement---policies that have discouraging effects
on surveillance but don’t legally limit it aren’t topical
Barnett 3 (Stephen R., Boalt Professor of Law Emeritus – University of California, Berkeley,
“No-Citation Rules Under Siege: A Battlefield Report and Analysis”, The Journal of Appellate
Practice and Process, Fall, 5 J. App. Prac. & Process 473, Lexis)
C. "Restrictions" on Citation: Introducing Draft B Despite this assurance, under the present
drafting it is not clear that the proposed Rule 32.1 does preserve circuit choice on the question
of citation weight. When the proposed Rule says, "No prohibition or restriction may be imposed
upon the citation of [unpublished] judicial opinions," what does "restriction" [*491] mean? If a
circuit's rule provides - as several do 122 - that unpublished opinions may be cited only for their
"persuasive" value, is that not a "restriction" on their citation? One might think so. And if so, it
would follow that circuit rules limiting citation to persuasive value are forbidden by Rule 32.1,
because no such limit is imposed on the citation of published opinions. 123 Two possible
remedies come to mind. One is legislative history, or drafter's gloss. The Committee Note might
declare the committee's view that the Rule deals only with citability and "says nothing
whatsoever about the effect that a court must give" to the cited opinions. 124 If we may assume
that the judges and lawyers operating in the federal appellate courts have no aversion to
legislative history, 125 this approach might produce the committee's desired interpretation of its
Rule. The other approach would proceed on the basis that if you want to permit citation, you
might just say that citation is permitted. 126 Draft B thus would simply provide: Any opinion,
order, judgment, or other disposition by a federal court may be cited to or by any court. This
language would make quite clear the committee's view that the Rule deals only with permitting
citation and says nothing about the weight to be given citations. Draft B also would take the lead
out of the drafting. You don't have to be Bryan Garner to object to the present draft's double
negative ("no prohibition)"; its vast passive ("may be imposed"); its [*492] awkward laundry list
of unpublished dispositions; or its backhanded approach of making opinions citable by banning
restrictions on citation. Before concluding, however, that the elegant Draft B should replace the
committee's cumbersome Draft A, it is necessary to consider how each draft would handle a
major problem that will arise. D. Discouraging Words This is the problem of discouraging words.
Although nine of the thirteen circuits now allow citation of their unpublished opinions, all nine
discourage the practice; they all have language in their rules stating that such citation is
"disfavored," that unpublished opinions should not be cited unless no published opinion would
serve as well, that the court "sees no precedential value" in unpublished opinions, and so forth.
127 The question is whether such discouraging words are a forbidden "restriction" on citation
under proposed Rule 32.1. The Advisory Committee addresses this question with the following
Delphic pronouncement: Unlike many of the local rules of the courts of appeals, Rule 32.1(a)
does not provide that citing "unpublished" opinions is "disfavored" or limited to particular
circumstances (such as when no "published" opinion adequately addresses an issue). Again, it
is difficult to understand why "unpublished" opinions should be subject to restrictions that do not
apply to other sources. 128 The first sentence of this passage does not say that Rule 32.1
would overrule those local rules - only that it is "unlike" them. The second sentence, however,
characterizes the discouraging words as "restrictions," so in the committee's apparent view,
Rule 32.1 would overrule them. Four questions follow: (1) Are discouraging words "restrictions"
on citation under Rule 32.1? (2) What difference, if any, does it make? (3) What is the risk of
judicial resistance to [*493] no-citation rules, through discouraging words or other means? and
(4) Should discouraging words be forbidden? 1. Are Discouraging Words "Restrictions" under
Rule 32.1? The committee's statement notwithstanding, it is not clear that discouraging words
have to be considered "restrictions" on citation under the proposed Rule 32.1. These words may
be wholly admonitory - and unenforceable. The Fourth Circuit's rule, for example, states that
citing unpublished opinions is "disfavored," but that it may be done "if counsel believes,
nevertheless, that [an unpublished opinion] has precedential value in relation to a material issue
in a case and that there is no published opinion that would serve as well." 129 On the question
of what counsel "believes," surely counsel should be taken at her word; counsel's asserted
belief that an unpublished opinion has precedential or persuasive value should not be
considered a falsifiable fact. Hence no sanction should be available for violating the Fourth
Circuit's rule, and the rule's discouraging language in turn would not be a "prohibition or
restriction" that was barred by Rule 32.1 as presently drafted. In the rules of some other circuits,
however, the language disfavoring citation of unpublished opinions is unmoored from anyone's
"belief" and arguably does impose an objective "prohibition or restriction" determinable by a
court. 130 A court might find, for example, that the required "persuasive value with respect to a
material issue that has not been addressed in a published opinion" 131 was not present, and
hence that the citation was not permitted by the circuit rule. With what result? It would follow,
paradoxically, that the opinion could be cited - because the circuit rule would be struck down
under Rule 32.1 as a forbidden "restriction" on citation. The committee's double-negative
drafting thus creates a Hall of Mirrors in which citation of an unpublished opinion [*494] would
be allowed either way. If the local rule's discouraging language is merely hortatory, it is not a
"restriction" forbidden by Rule 32.1; but that doesn't matter, because such a rule does not bar
the citation in the first place. If, on the other hand, the local rule's language has bite and is a
"restriction," then Rule 32.1 strikes it down, and again the citation is permitted. 2. What
Difference Does It Make Whether Discouraging Words Are "Restrictions"? There is one live
question, however, that would turn on whether a local rule's discouraging language constituted
a "restriction" on citation. If the language was a restriction, it would be condemned by Rule 32.1
132 and so presumably would have to be removed from the local circuit rule. Each circuit's rule
thus would have to be parsed to determine whether its discouraging words were purely
hortatory or legally enforceable; and each circuit thus would have to decide - subject to review
by the Judicial Conference? - which of its discouraging words it could keep.
3. Voting issue--4. Limits---allowing effectual reductions explodes the topic. Any action can potentially
result in less surveillance. Limits are key to depth of preparation and clash.
5. Ground---our interpretation is key to establish a stable mechanism of legal prohibition
that guarantees core ground based on topic direction. They allow the Aff to defend
completely different processes like “oversight” that dodge core DAs and rob the best
counterplan ground.
SOP Counterplan
1nc
The United States Supreme Court should rule based on the separation of powers
doctrine that the gathering of intelligence data from social networks is unconstitutional.
1st and 4th amendment challenges to surveillance fail – the counterplan is key to
legitimately stopping surveillance
Slobogin 15
(Christopher -Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Chris Slobogin has authored more than 100
articles, books and chapters on topics relating to criminal procedure, mental health law and
evidence. Named director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Criminal Justice Program in 2009,
Professor Slobogin is one of the five most cited criminal law and procedure law professors in the
country, according to the Leiter Report, Vanderbilt University Law School, Standing and Covert
Surveillance, Pepperdine Law Review, February 18, 2015,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2567070, JZG)
IV. A THIRD BASIS
FOR CHALLENGING SURVEILLANCE: SEPARATION OF POWERS AND
THE NONDELEGATION DOCTRINE One response to standing arguments based on the insights of scholars like
Milligan and Richards is that they ignore the close relationship between standing and the scope of the right in question.131 Indeed,
when the Fourth Amendment is the basis for the claim, the Supreme Court has explicitly conflated standing with the Amendment’s
substance. In Rakas v. Illinois, 132 the Court stated that the decision as to whether a defendant can make a Fourth Amendment
claim “forthrightly focuses on the extent of a particular defendant’s rights under the Fourth Amendment, rather than on any
theoretically separate, but invariably intertwined concept of standing.”133 If a government action is not a Fourth Amendment
“search” vis-à-vis the litigant, Rakas held, then the litigant lacks standing to challenge it. If that reasoning is the correct approach to
standing, then in cases challenging covert surveillance on Fourth or First Amendment grounds everything rides on whether the
surveillance, as it operates in the way the plaintiff describes it, infringes the plaintiff’s reasonable expectations of privacy or speech
and association interests.134 While such a finding would presumably be made in the Clapper case, which involved the alleged
interception of the content of overseas phone calls,135 it is less certain in connection with collection and querying of metadata.
The Fourth Amendment is only meant to protect reasonable expectations of privacy.136 Supreme
Court case law to date strongly suggests that any privacy one might expect in one’s metadata or
Internet activity is unreasonable, because we assume the risk that third parties to which we
knowingly impart information (here phone companies and Internet service providers) will in turn divulge it to the
government.137 The same type of analysis might limit standing in cases brought under the First
Amendment. As the Court intimated in Clapper, 138 one could conclude that even if speech and
association are inhibited by surveillance, that inhibition proximately results from the individual’s
choices, not from anything the government has done to the individual.139 On this view, even if an
individual can show that he or she was targeted, standing to contest surveillance does not exist
unless and until the government uses the seized information against the individual, because
otherwise a colorable claim that a constitutionally cognizable interest was infringed cannot be made. If, despite its impact on political
participation, covert surveillance like the metadata program remains immune from Fourth and First Amendment challenges, there
remains another avenue of attack, derived directly from separation of powers doctrine. In other
work, I have argued that, even if the Fourth (or First) Amendment does not govern a particular type of
surveillance, Ely’s political process theory provides a basis for challenging panvasive actions
that are the result of a seriously flawed political process.140 More specifically, panvasive surveillance
might be challengeable on one of three grounds: (1) the surveillance is not authorized by the
appropriate legislative body; (2) the authorizing legislative body does not meaningfully represent
the group affected by the surveillance; or (3) the resulting legislation or law enforcement’s
implementation of it violates notions underlying the non-delegation doctrine.141 The first and
third of these grounds are based explicitly on separation of powers concerns. As I pointed out, some
panvasive surveillance has not been legislatively authorized or has been authorized by
legislation that does not announce an “intelligible principle” governing the implementing
agency.142 Panvasive surveillance is also defective under non-delegation principles if, as I have
argued is true of the NSA’s metadata program, it is implemented by rules or practices that are not
explained, were produced through flawed or non-transparent procedures, or are applied
unevenly.143 Based on several Supreme Court cases, particularly in the administrative law area,144 I concluded that any one
of these deficiencies could be the basis for the claim that the legislature, the relevant law
enforcement agency, or both are failing to carry out their constitutional obligations as lawmaking and law implementing bodies.145 Although this type of claim, like the Fourth and First Amendment claims,
aims at “generalized relief,” the Court itself has often granted standing to individuals making separation
of powers claims.146 The rationale of these cases is not difficult to grasp, because it again
reflects the political process rationale. Many years ago Justice Brandeis stated, “[T]he doctrine
of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency
but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.”147 More recently, Chief Justice Burger asserted that
“checks and balances were the foundation of a structure of government that would protect
liberty.”148 More recently still, in Bond v. United States149 the Court stated “[t]he structural principles secured by the separation
of powers protect the individual as well.”150 If one accepts the possibility that a separation of powers
argument can be made in covert surveillance cases, then parties who can demonstrate the type
of injury described above—that is, a significant stifling of political participation that, to borrow the
Second Circuit’s language in its Clapper decision,151 is a reasonable, non-fanciful, and non-paranoid reaction
to covert surveillance—should have standing to challenge panvasive surveillance even if it is not a
search under the Fourth Amendment or does not abridge First Amendment freedom. The merits claim would not be
that the surveillance is an unreasonable search or infringement of speech or association rights,
but rather that the legislature has failed in its delegation task or that the relevant law
enforcement or intelligence agency has acted in an ultra vires fashion. These are the types of separation
of powers claims that courts ought to hear because they assure the proper functioning of the political process that the Court is so
eager to protect (with, inter alia, its standing doctrine). To requote Chief Justice Roberts, “[T]he obligation of the Judiciary [is] not
only to confine itself to its proper role, but to ensure that the other branches do so as well.”152
Mosaic Disadvantage
1nc Cyber Harassment
Cyberharassment is a growing problem - mosaic theory hinders apprehension.
Gray, Keats Citron, and Rinehart, 2013 (David, Associate Professor, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, Danielle, Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law,
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Liz Clark, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, “SYMPOSIUM ON CYBERCRIME: FIGHTING
CYBERCRIME AFTER UNITED STATES V. JONES” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
Lexis)
Cyberharassment is a widespread and growing challenge for law enforcement in the United
States. These online attacks feature threats of violence, privacy invasions, reputation-harming
falsehoods, impersonation, computer hacking, and extortion. They often appear in e-mails,
instant messages, blog entries, message boards, or sites devoted to tormenting individuals. As
the executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime explained in her congressional testimony supporting the 2006
cyberstalking amendment to the Violence Against Women Act: Stalkers
are using very sophisticated technology ...
- installing spyware on your computer so that they can track all of your interactions on the Internet, your purchases,
your e-mails and so forth, and then using that against you, forwarding e-mails to people at your job, broadcasting your whereabouts,
your purchases, your reading habits and so on, or installing GPS in your car so that you will show up at the grocery store, at your
local church, wherever and there is the stalker and you can't imagine how the stalker knew that you were going to be there... . I am
happy that this legislation amends the statute so that prosecutors have more effective tools, I think, to address technology through
VAWA 2005. n257 Although some attackers confine their harassment to networked technologies, others use all available tools to
harass victims, including real-space contact. Offline harassment or stalking often includes abusive phone calls, vandalism,
850,000 adults experienced
stalking with an online component in 2006, including threats in e-mails, text messages, chat
rooms, and blogs. n259 Young people are even more likely to experience some form of
cyberharassment. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that, during the 20082009 school year, 1.5 million young people in the United States were victims of some form of
cyberharassment. n260 Already a significant problem, [*789] cyberharassment is on the rise.
College students now report more sexually harassing speech in online interactions than in faceto-face ones. As the National Institute of Justice explains, the "ubiquity of the Internet and the ease with which it allows others
unusual access to personal information" make individuals more accessible and vulnerable to online abuse. n261 Harassing
someone online is far cheaper and less personally risky than confronting them in space. n262
Cyberharassment and the identity of its victims follow the well-worn pathways of bias crimes. The most recent Bureau of
Justice Statistics findings report that 74% of online stalking victims are female. n263 Perpetrators
are far more likely to be men. n264 Unsurprisingly, the content of these attacks are often sexually
explicit and demeaning, drawing predominantly on gender stereotypes. As one blogger observed, "the
fact is, to be a woman online is to eventually be threatened with rape and death. On a long
enough timeline, the chances of this not occurring drop to [*790] zero." n265 Cyberharassment also
follows racial lines. A study conducted in 2009 asked 992 undergraduate students about their experience with
cyberharassment. According to this study, nonwhite females faced cyberharassment more than any
other group, with 53% reporting having been harassed online. Next were white females, with 45% reporting having been
targeted online, with nonwhite males right behind them at 40%. The group least likely to have been harassed was
white males, at 31%. n266 Across race, being lesbian, transgender, or bisexual also raised the risk of
being harassed. real n267 Another disturbing feature of cyberharassment is that it tends to be
perpetrated by groups rather than individuals. Those who engage in abusive online conduct
often move in packs. n268 Cyberharassers frequently engage proxies to help torment their victims. n269 These group
threatening mail, and physical assault. n258 According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
attacks bear all of the hallmarks of violent mob behavior. So much so, in fact, that one of us has dubbed them "cyber mobs." n270
As with sole practitioners, online mob harassment is more likely to be perpetrated by members of dominant demographics, and to
draw on popular stigmas for the purpose of shaming and degrading their targets. n271 Of course,
cold statistics and
general description tell at best part of the story of legitimate government and law enforcement
interests in preventing, detecting, and prosecuting cyberharassment. Recent efforts to highlight
the privacy interests that compel recognition of the mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment privacy
make liberal use of individual stories, in part to pluck [*791] empathetic strings in the audience. n272 In weighing the
competing interests at stake in regulating access to and use of digital surveillance technologies,
it is therefore fair to consider the impact of crimes like cyberharassment in individual cases. Take the
publicly reported case of D.C. v. R.R. n273 D.C. was a high school student who was actively pursuing a career in the entertainment
industry as a singer and actor. n274 He used a pseudonym in his professional career, n275 under which he maintained a fan site
that, among other features, allowed visitors to post comments to a "guestbook." Several students at D.C.'s school, who were later
identified in a civil suit, engaged in a pattern of targeted harassment of D.C. by posting comments to his website. Some were simply
offensive - one student told D.C. that he was "the biggest fag in the [high school] class." n276 Others, however, went much further,
threatening physical and sexual violence in graphic detail. One person posted on D.C.'s website, "I want to rip out your fucking heart
and feed it to you... . If I ever see you I'm ... going to pound your head in with an ice pick. Fuck you, you dick-riding penis lover. I
hope you burn in hell." n277 Another post told D.C. that he was "now officially wanted dead or alive," and a third promised to
"unleash my manseed in those golden brown eyes." n278 According to a California appellate court, the contents of these posts
suggested that "the students ... sought to destroy D.C.'s life, threatened to murder him, and wanted to drive him out of [his high
school] and the community in which he lived." n279 In that goal they were successful. On [*792] advice of law enforcement, who
consulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, D.C. withdrew from his school and moved with his family to the other end of the state.
n280 Despite these efforts, the student newspaper at his former school reported his new location and the name of his new
Cyberharassment
has also spawned a new brand of extortion labeled "sextortion." n283 This is a form of blackmail
in which the extortionist threatens to publicize images or information that his target might find
embarrassing unless the victim provides sexually explicit pictures and videos or agrees to
participate in live sex shows via Skype or other direct video communications. n284 One infamous
institution. n281 As a consequence of this harassment, D.C. developed a persistent anxiety disorder. n282
perpetrator of sextortion schemes invaded his targets' computers using malicious software that allowed him to mine his victims' hard
drives for compromising images or to capture images using their own computer cameras. n285 He then used those images and
access to his targets' computers and e-mail accounts to terrorize them until they agreed to produce sexually explicit pictures or
videos for him. Young
people are particularly vulnerable. n286 Teenagers who are extorted into
engaging in explicit sex acts under threat and at such a formative stage of their development
are also more likely to suffer scarring emotional and psychological harm. n287 As United States Attorney
Joseph Hogsett put the [*793] point when commenting on a successful prosecution, "This defendant may not remember his alleged
Cyberharassers engage in telephone
harassment as well. For example, in September 2010, Daniel Leonard pleaded guilty to a pattern of harassment that
victims, but the true tragedy is that not one of them will ever forget." n288
involved over 4,000 threatening and sexually explicit phone calls made to over 1,200 phone numbers using an Internet "spoofing"
service that masked his phone number from the call recipients. n289 Others go further still by using the Internet to incite others to
rape and stalk victims. Federal
prosecutors recently brought a cyberstalking indictment against a man
who impersonated his ex-girlfriend online over a four-year period, inciting others to stalk her in
person. The man posted online advertisements with the victim's contact information and her alleged desire for sex with strangers.
On porn sites, he uploaded videos of her having sex (which he filmed while they were dating) alongside her contact information.
n290 Because strange men began appearing at her home demanding sex, the woman changed her name and moved to another
state. Her ex-boyfriend discovered her new personal information and again posted her name, address, and an invitation to have sex
on pornography sites next to her picture. The cycle repeated itself, with strange men coming to her house at night demanding sex.
Although this victim was never physically assaulted, others are not so lucky. In December 2009, Ty McDowell broke into the home
of a woman in Casper, Wyoming, tied her up, and raped her. During the course of the [*794] attack, he told her: "You want an
aggressive man, bitch, I'll show you aggressive." n291 Although McDowell did not know his victim, his crime was not random.
Rather, he had responded to an online advertisement posted on Craigslist that purported to be from a woman seeking to fulfill her
own rape fantasies. After a lengthy correspondence with the ad's poster, McDowell believed that he was fulfilling his victim's desires.
n292 He was not. As a subsequent investigation would reveal, McDowell was in communication with Jebediah Stipe, who posted
the ad and arranged the attack on his ex-girlfriend. n293 Stipe and McDowell were sentenced to sixty-year prison terms after
Cyberharassment can also be more
general. Sites that encourage sexualized online abuse are all too common. The website
pleading guilty to charges of aggravated kidnapping, rape, and burglary. n294
IsAnyoneUp.com provides a notorious example. For a time, it was one of the most popular forums on the Internet for "revenge
porn," which entails spurned former lovers posting sexualized pictures of their ex-wives and ex-girlfriends on a public forum so that
others can leer at and demean them. n295 Although IsAnyoneUp.com eventually shut down amidst protests and outcry, its operator,
Hunter Moore, started a similar site under a different name, HunterMoore.TV, which may eventually include not only pictures of
women, but also an overlaid map to the homes of those featured in the pictures. n296 Consider too "Violentacrez," a notorious
Reddit administrator [*795] who oversaw forums like "Jailbait," "Creepshots," "Rapebait," "Incest," "Beatingwomen," and
"Picsofdeadjailbait," each of which featured pictures and commentary from his followers that celebrated the interests described by
the forums' titles. n297 There
is, of course, much more to be written about the incidents and dynamics
of cyberharassment crimes. For present purposes, however, the foregoing is sufficient to show
that there are significant and legitimate governmental interests at stake in preventing, detecting,
and prosecuting various forms of cyberharassment. Although cyberharassment is relatively new,
executives and legislatures have manifested these interests by setting up dedicated
enforcement units and passing tailored criminal statutes. n298 As we argue in the next section,
adopting a mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment likely will implicate these law enforcement
concerns by limiting access to both existing and future digital surveillance techniques and
technologies. n299
Online harassment and the lack of response from institutions allows for threats,
violence, and discrimination against women to continue unabated
Hess 14 – Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer and popular Gender & Sexuality reporter, 2014
(“Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet,” Pacific Standard, 1/6/14,
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170, 7/3/15)//CM
A woman doesn’t even need to occupy a professional writing perch at a prominent platform to become a target. According to a 2005
women and
men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still
disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on
the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer
organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical:
A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online”
that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied
than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006,
report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade,
researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms.
Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names
received 3.7. There are three federal laws that apply to cyberstalking cases; the first was passed in 1934 to address harassment
through the mail, via telegram, and over the telephone, six decades after Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. Since the initial
passage of the Violence Against Women Act, in 1994, amendments to the law have gradually updated it to apply to new
technologies and to stiffen penalties against those who use them to abuse. Thirty-four states have cyberstalking laws on the books;
But making
quick and sick threats has become so easy that many say the abuse has proliferated to the
point of meaninglessness, and that expressing alarm is foolish. Reporters who take death threats seriously
most have expanded long-standing laws against stalking and criminal threats to prosecute crimes carried out online.
“often give the impression that this is some kind of shocking event for which we should pity the ‘victims,’” my colleague Jim Pagels
wrote in Slate this fall, “but anyone who’s spent 10 minutes online knows that these assertions are entirely toothless.” On Twitter, he
added, “When there’s no precedent for physical harm, it’s only baseless fear mongering.” My friend Jen Doll wrote, at The Atlantic
Wire, “It seems like that old ‘ignoring’ tactic your mom taught you could work out to everyone’s benefit.... These people are bullying,
or hope to bully. Which means we shouldn’t take the bait.” In the epilogue to her book The End of Men, Hanna Rosin—an editor at
Slate—argued that harassment of women online could be seen as a cause for celebration. It shows just how far we’ve come. Many
women on the Internet “are in positions of influence, widely published and widely read; if they sniff out misogyny, I have no doubt
they will gleefully skewer the responsible sexist in one of many available online outlets, and get results.” "Twitter is the place where I
laugh, whine, work, schmooze, procrastinate, and flirt. It sits in my back pocket wherever I go and lies next to me when I fall asleep.
And since I first started writing in 2007, it's become just one of the many online spaces where men come to tell me to get out." So
women who are harassed online are expected to either get over ourselves or feel flattered in
response to the threats made against us. We have the choice to keep quiet or respond “gleefully.” But no matter
how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has
severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can
overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees,
online protection services, and missed wages. I’ve spent countless hours over the past four years logging the
as the Internet becomes increasingly
central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and work freely online will be
shaped, and too often limited, by the technology companies that host these threats, the
constellation of local and federal law enforcement officers who investigate them, and the
popular commentators who dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of
whom have little personal understanding of what women face online every day. This Summer,
online activity of one particularly committed cyberstalker, just in case. And
Caroline Criado-Perez became the English-speaking Internet’s most famous recipient of online threats after she petitioned the
British government to put more female faces on its bank notes. (When the Bank of England announced its intentions to replace
social reformer Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on the £5 note, Criado-Perez made the modest suggestion that the bank make
an effort to feature at least one woman who is not the Queen on any of its currency.) Rape and death threats amassed on her
Twitter feed too quickly to count, bearing messages like “I will rape you tomorrow at 9 p.m ... Shall we meet near your house?”
Then, something interesting happened. Instead of logging off, Criado-Perez retweeted the threats, blasting them out to her Twitter
followers. She called up police and hounded Twitter for a response. Journalists around the world started writing about the threats.
As more and more people heard the story, Criado-Perez’s follower count skyrocketed to near 25,000. Her supporters joined in
urging British police and Twitter executives to respond. Under the glare of international criticism, the police and the company spent
the next few weeks passing the buck back and forth. Andy Trotter, a communications adviser for the British police, announced that it
was Twitter’s responsibility to crack down on the messages. Though Britain criminalizes a broader category of offensive speech
than the U.S. does, the sheer volume of threats would be too difficult for “a hard-pressed police service” to investigate, Trotter said.
Police “don’t want to be in this arena.” It diverts their attention from “dealing with something else.” Feminine usernames incurred an
average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7. Meanwhile, Twitter issued a blanket
statement saying that victims like Criado-Perez could fill out an online form for each abusive tweet; when Criado-Perez supporters
hounded Mark Luckie, the company’s manager of journalism and news, for a response, he briefly shielded his account, saying that
the attention had become “abusive.” Twitter’s official recommendation to victims of abuse puts the ball squarely in law enforcement’s
court: “If an interaction has gone beyond the point of name calling and you feel as though you may be in danger,” it says, “contact
your local authorities so they can accurately assess the validity of the threat and help you resolve the issue offline.” In the weeks
after the flare-up, Scotland Yard confirmed the arrest of three men. Twitter—in response to several online petitions calling for
action—hastened the rollout of a “report abuse” button that allows users to flag offensive material. And Criado-Perez went on
The
Internet is a global network, but when you pick up the phone to report an online threat, whether you
are in London or Palm Springs, you end up face-to-face with a cop who patrols a comparatively puny
jurisdiction. And your cop will probably be a man: According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2008,
only 6.5 percent of state police officers and 19 percent of FBI agents were women . The numbers get
receiving threats. Some real person out there—or rather, hundreds of them—still liked the idea of seeing her raped and killed.
smaller in smaller agencies. And in many locales, police work is still a largely analog affair: 911 calls are immediately routed to the
local police force; the closest officer is dispatched to respond; he takes notes with pen and paper. After Criado-Perez received her
hundreds of threats, she says she got conflicting instructions from police on how to report the crimes, and was forced to repeatedly
“trawl” through the vile messages to preserve the evidence. “I can just about cope with threats,” she wrote on Twitter. “What I can’t
cope with after that is the victim-blaming, the patronising, and the police record-keeping.” Last year, the American atheist blogger
Rebecca Watson wrote about her experience calling a series of local and national law enforcement agencies after a man launched a
website threatening to kill her. “Because I knew what town [he] lived in, I called his local police department. They told me there was
nothing they could do and that I’d have to make a report with my local police department,” Watson wrote later. “[I] finally got through
to someone who told me that there was nothing they could do but take a report in case one day [he] followed through on his threats,
at which point they’d have a pretty good lead.” The first time I reported an online rape threat to police, in 2009, the officer dispatched
to my home asked, “Why would anyone bother to do something like that?” and declined to file a report. In Palm Springs, the officer
who came to my room said, “This guy could be sitting in a basement in Nebraska for all we know.” That my stalker had said that he
lived in my state, and had plans to seek me out at home, was dismissed as just another online ruse. Of course, some people are
investigated and prosecuted for cyberstalking. In 2009, a Florida college student named Patrick Macchione met a girl at school, then
threatened to kill her on Twitter, terrorized her with lewd videos posted to YouTube, and made hundreds of calls to her phone.
Though his victim filed a restraining order, cops only sprung into action after a county sheriff stopped him for loitering, then
reportedly found a video camera in his backpack containing disturbing recordings about his victim. The sheriff’s department later
worked with the state attorney’s office to convict Macchione on 19 counts, one of which was cyberstalking (he successfully appealed
that count on grounds that the law hadn’t been enacted when he was arrested); Macchione was sentenced to four years in prison.
Consider also a recent high-profile case of cyberstalking investigated by the FBI. In the midst of her affair with General David
Petraeus, biographer Paula Broadwell allegedly created an anonymous email account for the purpose of sending harassing notes to
Florida socialite Jill Kelley. Kelley reported them to the FBI, which sniffed out Broadwell’s identity via the account’s location-based
metadata and obtained a warrant to monitor her email activity. In theory, appealing to a higher jurisdiction can yield better results.
“Local law enforcement will often look the other way,” says Dr. Sameer Hinduja, a criminology professor at Florida Atlantic University
and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “They don’t have the resources or the personnel to investigate those crimes.”
County, state, or federal agencies at least have the support to be more responsive: “Usually they have a computer crimes unit,
savvy personnel who are familiar with these cases, and established relationships with social media companies so they can quickly
send a subpoena to help with the investigation,” Hinduja says. But in my experience and those of my colleagues, these
larger
law enforcement agencies have little capacity or drive to investigate threats as well.
Despite his
pattern of abusive online behavior, Macchione was ultimately arrested for an unrelated physical crime. When I called the FBI over
headlessfemalepig’s threats, a representative told me an agent would get in touch if the bureau was interested in pursuing the case;
nobody did. And when Rebecca Watson reported the threats targeted at her to the FBI, she initially connected with a sympathetic
agent—but the agent later expressed trouble opening Watson’s file of screenshots of the threats, and soon stopped replying to her
emails. The Broadwell investigation was an uncommon, and possibly unprecedented, exercise for the agency. As University of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire criminal justice professor Justin Patchin told Wired at the time:
“I’m not aware of any case when
the FBI has gotten involved in a case of online harassment.” After I received my most recent round of threats,
I asked Jessica Valenti, a prominent feminist writer (and the founder of the blog Feministing), who’s been repeatedly targeted with
online threats, for her advice, and then I asked her to share her story. “It’s not really one story. This has happened a number of
When rape and death threats first started pouring into her
inbox, she vacated her apartment for a week, changed her bank accounts, and got a new cell
number. When the next wave of threats came, she got in touch with law enforcement officials,
who warned her that though the men emailing her were unlikely to follow through on their
threats, the level of vitriol indicated that she should be vigilant for a far less identifiable threat:
silent “hunters” who lurk behind the tweeting “hollerers.” The FBI advised Valenti to leave her
home until the threats blew over, to never walk outside of her apartment alone, and to keep
aware of any cars or men who might show up repeatedly outside her door. “It was totally
impossible advice,” she says. “You have to be paranoid about everything. You can’t just not be
in a public place.” And we can’t simply be offline either. When Time journalist Catherine Mayer reported the bomb threat
times over the past seven years,” she told me.
lodged against her, the officers she spoke to—who thought usernames were secret codes and didn’t seem to know what an IP
address was—advised her to unplug. “Not one of the officers I’ve encountered uses Twitter or understands why anyone would wish
to do so,” she later wrote. “The officers were unanimous in advising me to take a break from Twitter, assuming, as many people do,
that Twitter is at best a time-wasting narcotic.” All of these online offenses are enough to make a woman want to click away from
Twitter, shut her laptop, and power down her phone. Sometimes, we do withdraw: Pew found that from 2000 to 2005, the
percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28 percent to 17 percent, “entirely
because of women’s fall off in participation.” But for many women, steering clear of the Internet isn’t an option. We use our devices
to find supportive communities, make a living, and construct safety nets. For a woman like me, who lives alone, the Internet isn’t a
fun diversion—it is a necessary resource for work and interfacing with friends, family, and, sometimes, law enforcement officers in
The Internet is a global network, but when you pick
up the phone to report an online threat, you end up face-to-face with a cop who patrols a
comparatively puny jurisdiction. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman draws a distinction
between “tourists” and “vagabonds” in the modern economy. Privileged tourists move about the
world “on purpose,” to seek “new experience” as “the joys of the familiar wear off.”
Disempowered vagabonds relocate because they have to, pushed and pulled through mean
streets where they could never hope to settle down. On the Internet, men are tourists and
women are vagabonds. “Telling a woman to shut her laptop is like saying, ‘Eh! Just stop seeing your family,’” says Nathan
an effort to feel safer from both online and offline violence.
Jurgenson, a social media sociologist (and a friend) at the University of Maryland. What does a tourist look like? In 2012, Gawker
unmasked “Violentacrez,” an anonymous member of the online community Reddit who was infamous for posting creepy
photographs of underage women and creating or moderating subcommunities on the site with names like “chokeabitch” and
“rapebait.” Violentacrez turned out to be a Texas computer programmer named Michael Brusch, who displayed an exceedingly
casual attitude toward his online hobbies. “I do my job, go home, watch TV, and go on the Internet. I just like riling people up in my
spare time,” he told Adrian Chen, the Gawker reporter who outed him. “People take things way too seriously around here.”
Abusers tend to operate anonymously, or under pseudonyms. But the women they target often
write on professional platforms, under their given names, and in the context of their real lives.
Victims don’t have the luxury of separating themselves from the crime. When it comes to online
threats, “one person is feeling the reality of the Internet very viscerally: the person who is being
threatened,” says Jurgenson. “It’s a lot easier for the person who made the threat—and the person who is investigating the
threat—to believe that what’s happening on the Internet isn’t real.” When authorities treat the Internet as a fantasyland, it has
profound effects on the investigation and prosecution of online threats. Criminal threat laws largely require that victims feel tangible,
immediate, and sustained fear. In my home state of California, a threat must be “unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and
If
police don’t know whether the harasser lives next door or out in Nebraska, it’s easier for them to
categorize the threat as non-immediate. When they treat a threat as a boyish hoax, the
specific” and convey a “gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution of the threat” to be considered a crime.
implication is that the threat ceases to be a criminal offense. So the victim faces a psychological
dilemma: How should she understand her own fear? Should she, as many advise, dismiss an
online threat as a silly game, and not bother to inform the cops that someone may want to—ha,
ha—rape and kill her? Or should she dutifully report every threat to police, who may well dismiss
her concerns? When I received my most recent rape and death threats, one friend told me that I should rest assured that the
anonymous tweeter was unlikely to take any physical action against me in real life; another noted that my stalker seemed like the
type of person who would fashion a coat from my skin, and urged me to take any action necessary to land the stalker in jail. Danielle
Citron, a University of Maryland law professor who focuses on Internet threats, charted the popular response to Internet death and
rape threats in a 2009 paper published in the Michigan Law Review. She found that Internet harassment is routinely dismissed as
“harmless locker-room talk,” perpetrators as “juvenile pranksters,” and victims as “overly sensitive complainers.” Weighing in on one
online harassment case, in an interview on National Public Radio, journalist David Margolick called the threats “juvenile, immature,
and obnoxious, but that is all they are ... frivolous frat-boy rants.” When
police treat a threat as a boyish hoax, the
implication is that the threat ceases to be a criminal offense. Of course, the frat house has never been a
particularly safe space for women. I’ve been threatened online, but I have also been harassed on the street, groped on the subway,
followed home from the 7-Eleven, pinned down on a bed by a drunk boyfriend, and raped on a date. Even if I sign off Twitter, a
Today, a legion of anonymous harassers are free to play their
“games” and “pranks” under pseudonymous screen names, but for the women they target, the
attacks only compound the real fear, discomfort, and stress we experience in our daily lives.
threat could still be waiting on my stoop.
2nc Cyber Harrasment
Adopting the mosaic theory limits investigators ability to solve cyber harassment.
Gray, Keats Citron, and Rinehart, 2013 (David, Associate Professor, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, Danielle, Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law,
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Liz Clark, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, “SYMPOSIUM ON CYBERCRIME: FIGHTING
CYBERCRIME AFTER UNITED STATES V. JONES” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
Lexis)
Despite these complications, tracing
an IP address is a common and effective way for authorities to
identify perpetrators of cyberharassment crimes. At present, the public-observation and third-party
doctrines grant law enforcement unfettered discretion to track IP addresses across the Internet.
Most cyberharassment is, to one degree or another, public. Furthermore, the third-party doctrine means
that law enforcement officers need a subpoena, at most, to secure user information associated
with an IP address from ISPs and other third parties, including social-networking sites. n307 A
mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment privacy might well change [*798] all of this. Tracking
someone's online activities using an IP address over a period of time is akin to tracking a
person through physical space using GPS-enabled tracking devices. By aggregating information about a
user and his online activities, law enforcement officers using these fairly basic digital surveillance
techniques can therefore assemble precisely the sorts of revealing informational mosaics that
worried the concurring Justices in Jones. Digital surveillance technology that offends mosaic
sensibilities promises even more benefits than IP traces to law enforcement officers interested
in detecting cybercrimes. Take, for example, forums such as those organized and moderated by Violentacrez. n308
Although under current law and free speech doctrine it is perfectly legal to view and comment
on pictures of young women in public, law enforcement officers might have reason to worry that
habitues of forums like "Jailbait" and "Creepshots" are more likely than most to produce or
possess actual child pornography. It is, of course, impossible to conduct even cursory investigations of the tens and
hundreds of thousands of those who visit these sites, much less to distinguish between casual curiosity seekers and practicing
pedophiles. Here, broad-scale
aggregation technology, in combination with ever more sophisticated
data analytics designed to identify and track those patterns of online conduct that correlate with
higher risks of illegal on-and offline activities, would be tremendously valuable to law
enforcement. Once officers have identified a smaller universe of potential offenders, they can
then further narrow their investigative fields by using passive techniques like online honey traps
to more definitively identify those who are trafficking in or actively seeking to possess child
pornography. n309 Again, although these digital surveillance techniques and technologies are not
presently subject to Fourth Amendment review, either individually or in the aggregate, the
situation would likely change under a mosaic theory. In fact, officers might find themselves
assembling informational mosaics sufficient to trigger Fourth Amendment concerns quite by
accident. n310 Regardless, law enforcement's legitimate interests in using digital surveillance
technology would be affected. n311 Fusion centers also hold significant potential for law
enforcement's efforts to detect and prosecute cyberharassment. The Department of Justice, in conjunction
with the National Center for Missing and Exploited [*799] Children, maintains a substantial database of known images of child
pornography, each of which has a unique digital fingerprint called a "hash value." n312 Fusion centers, which have access to most
Internet traffic, provide a unique - although as yet unexploited - resource that law enforcement agents can use to screen for the
transmission of known images of child exploitation. Outside
the relatively narrow field of child pornography
cases, those who engage in cyberharassment and cyberstalking still tend to use a fairly
predictable pattern of words, phrases, and images. The software used by most malicious stalkers also tends to
come from a stable of online resources, which again bear an identifiable digital signature. Although the true technical capacities of
fusion centers are largely unknown to the public, they appear to have the ability to monitor Internet and communications traffic for
precisely these sorts of markers. That same capacity is, of course, precisely what raises concerns about fusion centers from a
the prospect of adopting a mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment
privacy raises serious concerns that the legitimate and important law enforcement goals of
detecting and prosecuting cybercrimes may be compromised.
mosaic theory point of view. Here again,
Cyberharrassment leads to violations of privacy and violence in the name of “Free
Speech” – this is especially true for oppressed groups
Schroder 13 - Jared C. Schroeder, doctoral candidate at the Gaylord College of Journalism &
Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on free speech and
free press issues as they apply to the emerging network society. Before moving to academia, he
was a professional journalist for several years, 2013 (“Electronically Transmitted Threats and
Higher Education: Oppression, Free Speech, and Jake Baker,” Review of Higher Education
36.3, Spring 2013, Project Muse, 7/3/15)//CM
Numerous conflicts arise when the theories of the First Amendment and concepts regarding
oppression are placed beside one another. This article does not seek to condemn one area of
literature or the other. Instead, this section seeks to illuminate areas of conflict between the two
theoretical approaches. The Baker case is particularly relevant because it captures the
challenges involved in the network society, the higher education setting, and conflicts between
oppression and freedom of speech. It is not the only incident that raises questions regarding the
impact of emerging online technology on providing a safe learning atmosphere. Rutgers
University student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after his roommate filmed him having sex
with another man and posted the video online (Starkman, 2010). The roommate and another
student face criminal charges for invasion of privacy. Clearly, Clementi’s privacy was invaded in
an insensitive and, likely, ignorant way. In other words, the technological abilities of his
tormentors outpaced their ethical understanding of the power of the new media. The scenario,
though even more tragic, is similar to the Baker case. New technologies allowed a person to be
oppressed and tormented, and the universities were left wondering what they could have done
differently. Using Young’s (2010) definition, the young woman who was named and described in
Baker’s story, as well as others on campus, can be viewed as oppressed. While oppression
does not automatically cross the Supreme Court’s threshold of true threats, it certainly raises
questions about the safety and viability of the learning environment. In the Baker case,
oppression comes in the form of structural norms and values; his actions can be seen as
structurally accepted, to some extent, because he followed the rules created by the dominant
culture. This rule-following can be seen in the court’s reasoning for siding with Baker. While his
behavior was viewed as deviant (United States v. Alkhabaz, 1997), the structural protections for
free speech shielded him, while leaving the young woman vulnerable. This section addresses
these ideas by examining the case through the violence and cultural imperialism concepts
discussed by Young (2010). No physical violence occurred toward the female classmate Baker
described in his story; but Young (2010) noted that oppressive violence includes [End Page
305] harassment, humiliation, and intimidation. Young (2010) explained: “The oppression of
violence consists not only in direct victimization, but in the daily knowledge shared by all
members of oppressed groups that they are liable to violation, solely on account of their group
identitiy” (p. 43). After hearing about the violent, explicit, and deadly story she was cast in by
one of her classmates, the young woman felt the effects of violent oppression. In his dissent,
Judge Krupansky wrote: “Jane Doe’s reaction to those threats when brought to her attention
evinces a contrary conclusion of a shattering traumatic reaction that resulted in recommended
psychological counseling” (United States v. Alkhabaz, 1997, p. 1507). Other women students
chose not to attend class when they heard about the story. Their fear-based response is also
evidence of oppressive violence. Members of the oppressed group were forced to alter the way
they live because they felt vulnerable to violence. Finally, the violence was made possible and
somewhat acceptable by the decision of the court. Baker did not have to stop writing and
communicating his stories about the young woman. He did not have to take down his posts. The
court said what he did was legal. The structures in place made the oppression possible.
1nc Police
Mosaic theory undermines the ability of undercover agents to work in law enforcement.
Bedi, 2014 (Monu, Assistant Professor, DePaul University College of Law, “SOCIAL
NETWORKS, GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT MOSAIC
THEORY” Boston University Law Review Lexis)
Scholars have questioned the viability of the mosaic theory, particularly as it relates to the status
of government investigative practices.11 Accepting this theory puts routine government surveillance in jeopardy of
Fourth Amendment restrictions.12 It seems that even the brief surveillance of an individual could reveal private information. For
instance, a single trip to a particular religious gathering or political function could reveal compromising or otherwise personal
information that an individual would like to keep secret. More generally, people may disagree as to what society thinks is reasonable
or unreasonable surveillance.13 Perhaps even short-term monitoring of a person’s public movements in a remote area where police
this theory also
severely curtails the application of the Third Party Doctrine, the corollary to the Public Disclosure Doctrine
(collectively the “Doctrines”).15 The Third Party Doctrine states that any information disclosed to another
person or entity—much like the public generally—loses any Fourth Amendment protection.16
This doctrine allows law enforcement to use undercover agents and surreptitiously gather
information without a warrant.17 However, under the mosaic approach, one could also argue that
these communications, taken in the aggregate, can reveal private information about this person
(e.g., disclosures about religious or privately held beliefs) and thus should be protected, particularly if the agent
goes to great lengths in gaining the confidence of the suspect.1
are not likely to find themselves would also qualify as an unreasonable intrusion.14 To make matters worse,
Police effectiveness and internet surveillance strategies are key to stopping atrocities
such as child pornography
Wortley and Smallbone 12 – Richard Wortley has a PhD in psychology, and worked as a
prison psychologist for ten years, and is a past national Chair of the Australian Psychological
Society’s College of Forensic Psychologists; Stephen Smallbone is a psychologist and
Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and an Australian Research Council
‘Future’ Fellow, 2012 (“Child Pornography on the Internet,” Problem-Oriented Guides for Police
Problem-Specific Guides Series No. 41, 5/2012, Avaliable Online at
http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Child_Pornography_on_the_Internet.pdf, accessed on
7/3/15)//CM
General Considerations for an Effective Response Strategy As noted, Internet child
pornography presents some unique challenges for law enforcement agencies. However, despite
the difficulties involved in controlling the problem, local police have an important role to play. To
maximize their contribution, local police departments need to: Acquire technical knowledge and
expertise in Internet pornography. If your department does not have a specialized Internet crime
unit, then find out where you can obtain assistance or training. Appendix B lists online resources
that can provide information on national and international initiatives, tips and leads, technical
assistance, and staff training. Establish links with other agencies and jurisdictions. It is important
that local police departments share information and coordinate their activities with other
jurisdictions. Appendix B also lists agencies that have specific programs or sections designed to
provide a coordinated response to Internet child pornography. Establish links with ISPs. ISPs
can be crucial partners for police. As has been noted, there is often a lack of specific legislation
setting out ISPs’ obligations. This makes it especially important for police to establish good
working relations with ISPs to elicit their cooperation in the fight against Internet child
pornography. Prioritize their efforts. Because of the volume of Internet child pornography crime,
police forces need to prioritize their efforts and concentrate on the most serious offenders,
particularly those actually involved in abusing children and producing pornographic images.60
For example, one strategy may be to cross reference lists of Internet child pornography users
with sex offender registries to increase the chance of targeting hands-on offenders (see
Appendix B). It has been noted that success in combating child pornography is too often judged
in terms of the number of images recovered, rather than by the more significant criterion of
whether the crimes the images portray have been prevented. Specific Responses to Reduce
Internet Child Pornography It is generally acknowledged that it is impossible to totally eliminate
child pornography from the Internet. However, it is possible to reduce the volume of child
pornography on the Internet, to make it more difficult or risky to access, and to identify and
arrest the more serious perpetrators. Since 1996, ISPs have removed some 20,000
pornographic images of children from the web.62 Around 1,000 people are arrested annually in
the United States for Internet child pornography offenses.63 The following strategies have been
used or suggested to reduce the problem of child pornography on the Internet. Computer
Industry Self Regulation ISPs have a central role to play in combating Internet child
pornography. The more responsibility ISPs take in tackling the availability of child pornography
images on the Internet, the more resources police can devote to addressing the production side
of the problem. However, there are two competing commercial forces acting on ISPs with
respect to self regulation. On the one hand, if an ISP restricts access to child pornography on its
server, it may lose out financially to other ISPs who do not. Therefore, it will always be possible
for offenders to find ISPs who will store or provide access to child pornography sites. On the
other hand, ISPs also have their commercial reputation to protect, and it is often in their best
interests to cooperate with law enforcement agencies. Most major ISPs have shown a
commitment to tackling the problem of child pornography. By establishing working relationships
with ISPs, and publicizing those ISPs who take self regulation seriously, police may be able to
encourage greater levels of self regulation. Current self-regulatory strategies include:1.
Removing illegal sites. A number of ISP associations have drafted formal codes of practice that
explicitly bind members to not knowingly accept illegal content on their sites, and to removing
such sites when they become aware of their existence. Service agreement contracts with clients
will often set out expected standards that apply to site content. Large ISPs may have active
cyber patrols that search for illegal sites.64 2. Establishing complaint sites/hotlines. Some ISP
associations have set up Internet sites or hotlines that allow users to report illegal practices.65
These associations either deal directly with the complaint (e.g., by contacting the webmaster,
the relevant ISP, or the police) or refer the complainant to the appropriate authorities. 3. Filtering
browsers/search engines. ISPs can apply filters to the browsers and search engines their
customers use to locate websites. There are numerous filtering methods. For example, filters
can effectively treat certain key words as if they do not exist, so that using these words in a
search will be fruitless.66 Software that can identify pornographic images is also being
developed. Legislative Regulation Not everyone is satisfied with the current reliance on self
regulation, and there have been calls for increased legislation to compel the computer industry
to play a greater role in controlling Internet child pornography. Police may be an important force
in lobbying for tighter restrictions. Among the proposals for tighter regulation are: 4. Making
ISPs legally responsible for site content. ISPs’ legal responsibilities to report child pornography
vary among jurisdictions. In the United States, ISPs are legally required to report known illegal
activity on their sites, but they are not required to actively search for such sites.68 It has been
argued that ISPs’ legal responsibilities should be strengthened to require a more proactive role
in blocking illegal sites.69 5. Requiring the preservation of ISP records. Police may apply for a
court order to seize ISP accounts.70 However, to assist in the prosecution of offenders, ISPs
need to maintain good records of IP logging, caller ID, web hostings, and so forth.71 6.
Requiring user verification. ISPs often exercise little control over verifying the identities of
people who open Internet accounts. Accounts may be opened using false names and
addresses, making it difficult to trace individuals who engage in illegal Internet activity. In
addition, without verifying users’ ages, there is no way of knowing if children are operating
Internet accounts without adult supervision. This problem of Internet anonymity is likely to
increase as the potential to access the Internet via mobile phones becomes more common. It
has been argued that both ISPs and mobile phone networks need to strengthen procedures for
user verification.72 7. Regulating anonymous remailers. Remailers are servers that forward
emails after stripping them of sender identification. It has been argued that much tighter
regulation of remailers is necessary. Some have advocated making remailer administrators
legally responsible for knowingly forwarding illegal material, while others have called for a
complete ban on remailers.73 8. Using key escrowed encryption. Encryption of pornographic
images is shaping to be the biggest technological problem facing law enforcement agencies.
Key escrowed encryption would require anyone selling encryption software to supply a trusted
third party with a key to the code.74 This has been strongly resisted by the computer industry. In
the meantime, work continues on developing code-breaking software.
2nc Police
Mosaic theory kills the third party doctrine and law enforcement
Bedi, 2014 (Monu, Assistant Professor, DePaul University College of Law, “SOCIAL
NETWORKS, GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT MOSAIC
THEORY” Boston University Law Review Lexis)
The Third Party Doctrine would also be on shaky ground. Here, too, the mosaic theory would
upset the voluntary disclosure principle that stands at the heart of this doctrine.230 Shifting the
focus to what society or an individual deems reasonable (the first model of reasonable expectation of privacy)
would surely frustrate the use of undercover informants or other surreptitious data collection techniques that do
not require a warrant. Imagine a scenario where an informant is deep undercover for a significant
period of time gaining the trust of a Or imagine an informant who dupes a suspect into allowing
her into her home and disclosing private and incriminating information. suspect . Or perhaps the
government simply acquires a wealth of financial records from a suspect’s bank. Currently, all of these types of law enforcement
tools do not trigger Fourth Amendment protection because the individual voluntarily discloses the information to another person or
entity.231 However, under
the mosaic theory, none of these tactics are secure.232 Societal
expectations may find that these methods, too, impinge on Fourth Amendment rights as they
involve unreasonable duplicity and reveal private information. Police would thus find themselves in the new
position of having to secure a warrant based on probable cause before engaging in these practices. For some, this conclusion may
be welcomed, particularly in today’s technological world where disclosures to various entities and individuals have become
ubiquitous.233 Justice Sotomayor, in fact, raises this possibility in her concurrence.234 This Article does not take such a drastic
Any such rejection would come at the cost of jettisoning or
severely curtailing essential law enforcement investigative techniques that have historically not been
approach, nor would such a course be desirable.
subject to warrant and probable cause requirements.235
Court application of the mosaic theory is impractical and hurts police investigations.
Ostrander, 2011 (Benjamin M. Candidate for JD @ Notre Dame Law School, “THE “MOSAIC
THEORY” AND FOURTH AMENDMENT LAW” Notre Dame Law Review Lexis)
The use of emerging and existing intrusive technologies in criminal investigations certainly has the potential to have a substantial
effect on privacy. In an effort to combat the threat of such use, Maynard introduced the “mosaic theory” into Fourth Amendment law.
The “mosaic theory” holds that individual law enforcement acts that are not “searches” become
a “search” when aggregated, as the whole reveals more than the individual acts it comprises.
This Note suggests that despite the intuitive appeal of a “mosaic theory,” the use of the theory in Fourth Amendment
law is misguided. The “mosaic theory” is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s voluntary exposure analysis, which has often
classified theoretical or limited disclosures of information as complete exposures warranting no Fourth Amendment protection. 176 It
is also inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s implicit rejection of the proposition that the Fourth Amendment analysis is altered
when an investigatory technique is prolonged to the point where information may be accumulated.177 Not
only is the theory
inconsistent with existing Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, it is also impractical in application.
A problematic question arises as to what durational threshold must be crossed in order for the
use of a pattern-detecting technology to be sufficiently prolonged as to render it a search. Once
this illusive threshold is crossed and a mosaic is created, the question that then arises is how to
define the scope of the mosaic. If a pattern is created only through the use of multiple
investigatory techniques, the entire investigation will be rendered a search. Also left unanswered is the
appropriate standard of review for the use of pattern-detecting investigatory techniques in criminal investigations. The most
serious implication of the theory, however, is that it calls into question a number of previously
accepted investigatory techniques.
Law enforcement responses to child pornographers rely on effectiveness and
surveillance
Wortley and Smallbone 12 – Richard Wortley has a PhD in psychology, and worked as a
prison psychologist for ten years, and is a past national Chair of the Australian Psychological
Society’s College of Forensic Psychologists; Stephen Smallbone is a psychologist and
Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and an Australian Research Council
‘Future’ Fellow, 2012 (“Child Pornography on the Internet,” Problem-Oriented Guides for Police
Problem-Specific Guides Series No. 41, 5/2012, Avaliable Online at
http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Child_Pornography_on_the_Internet.pdf, accessed on
7/3/15)//CM
Law Enforcement Responses In the strategies discussed so far the police role has largely
involved working in cooperation with other groups or acting as educators. A number of
strategies are the primary responsibility of police. As a rule, local police will not carry out major
operations. Most major operations require specialized expertise and inter-agency and interjurisdictional cooperation. (See Appendix C for a summary of major coordinated law
enforcement operations in recent years.) However, local police will almost certainly encounter
cases of Internet child pornography in the course of their daily policing activities. Law
enforcement responses include: 19. Locating child pornography sites. Police agencies may
scan the Internet to locate and remove illegal child pornography sites. Many areas of the
Internet are not accessible via the usual commercial search engines, and investigators need to
be skilled at conducting sophisticated searches of the ‘hidden net.’ Police may issue warnings to
ISPs that are carrying illegal content. 20. Conducting undercover sting operations. Law
enforcement agents may enter pedophile newsgroups, chat rooms, or P2P networks posing as
pedophiles and request emailed child pornography images from others in the group.82
Alternatively, they may enter child or teen groups posing as children and engage predatory
pedophiles lurking in the group who may send pornography or suggest a meeting. A variation of
the sting operation is to place ads on the Internet offering child pornography for sale and wait for
replies.83 Recently, Microsoft announced the development of the Child Exploitation Tracking
System to help link information such as credit card purchases, Internet chat room messages,
and conviction histories.84 21. Setting up honey trap sites. These sites purport to contain child
pornography but in fact are designed to capture the IP or credit card details of visitors trying to
download images. These can be considered a type of sting operation and have resulted in
numerous arrests. However, their primary purpose is to create uncertainty in the minds of those
seeking child pornography on the Internet, and, therefore, reduce the sense of freedom and
anonymity they feel (see Operation Pin in Appendix C). 22. Publicizing crackdowns. Many police
departments have learned to use the media to good effect to publicize crackdowns on Internet
child pornography.85 Coverage of crackdowns in the mass media increases the perception
among potential offenders that the Internet is an unsafe environment in which to access child
pornography. 23. Conducting traditional criminal investigations. Although most media attention
is often given to technological aspects of controlling Internet child pornography, in fact many
arrests in this area arise from traditional investigative police work. Investigations may involve
information from: The public: The public may contact police directly, or information may be
received on one of the various child pornography hotlines. Computer repairers/technicians:
Some states mandate computer personnel to report illegal images.86 There are cases where
computer repairers have found child pornography images on an offender’s hard drive and
notified police.87 Police may establish relationships with local computer repairers/ technicians to
encourage reporting. Victims: A point of vulnerability for producers of child pornography is the
child who appears in the pornographic image. If the child informs others of his/her victimization,
then the offender’s activities may be exposed.88 Known traders: The arrest of one offender can
lead to the arrest of other offenders with whom he has had dealings, producing a cascading
effect. In some cases the arrested offender’s computer and Internet logs may provide evidence
of associates. (See Operation Cathedral in Appendix C.) Unrelated investigations: There is
increasing evidence that many sex offenders are criminally versatile and may commit a variety
of other offenses.89 Police may find evidence of Internet child pornography while investigating
unrelated crimes such as drug offenses.
Mosaic theory kills effective law enforcement.
Bedi, 2014 (Monu, Assistant Professor, DePaul University College of Law, “SOCIAL
NETWORKS, GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT MOSAIC
THEORY” Boston University Law Review Lexis)
The most troubling part of adopting the mosaic theory is that it requires the abandonment of , or
dramatic alterations to, the Doctrines. The basic problem is the inherent conflict between the first and second models of
reasonable expectation. While the Doctrines embrace a per se rule focusing solely on disclosure and why this vitiates
privacy, the mosaic theory rests on society’s opinion and what it deems reasonable.223 Consider
the Public Disclosure Doctrine. The fact that public movements are not protected under the
Fourth Amendment is critical to law enforcement investigations.224 Visual warrantless
surveillance remains a central part of police surveillance.225 It is not clear to what extent these
practices will remain constitutional with the introduction of the mosaic theory. For instance, it is
common for officers to track vehicles and aggregate information from various sources over a
period of time.226 As Gray and Citron point out, the “mosaic theory puts these practices and the line of
doctrine endorsing them in obvious jeopardy, particularly when officers are too successful and
their investigations produce too much information.”227 This danger is compounded by the fact
that law enforcement may use a combination of visual and technology-based surveillance (a la
Knotts) when investigating a suspect. “How, after all,” ask Gray and Citron, “are we to distinguish ‘between the supposed invasion of
aggregation of data between GPS-augmented surveillance and a purely visual surveillance of substantial length’?”228 It won’t do
The
problem is that the Public Disclosure Doctrine treats all public movements the same, regardless
of how much information is disclosed or how long it is observed.229 To carve out exceptions
based on what society thinks is unreasonable leaves vulnerable investigative techniques that
are essential to effective law enforcement.
here to simply say that a specific duration of technology-dependent surveillance violates the expectation of privacy.
Expansion of the Mosaic theory kills investigations – there are no limits, retroactivity,
and ensures court clog.
Ostrander, 2011 (Benjamin M. Candidate for JD @ Notre Dame Law School, “THE “MOSAIC
THEORY” AND FOURTH AMENDMENT LAW” Notre Dame Law Review Lexis)
Maynard left little guidance as to what durational threshold must to be crossed in order for the use of patterndetecting technology to be sufficiently prolonged as to render it a search.93 Without a clearly demarcated line, law
enforcement agents, judges, and individuals cannot know when an aggregate of information will
receive Fourth Amendment protection. Law enforcement agents are left to speculate as to how
much is too much.94 This lack of clarity will deter law enforcement agents from utilizing the full
extent of their investigatory power. This is even more problematic with respect to the “mosaic
theory’s” creation of retroactive unconstitutionality.95 As soon as a pattern is created, previously
permissible individual law enforcement steps become unconstitutional. Because the “mosaic
theory” retroactively renders the entire mosaic unconstitutional and subject to suppression, law
enforcement agents will be even more hesitant in exercising the full extent of their investigatory
power. Further, if the “mosaic theory” in the Fourth Amendment is premised on the idea that “prolonged GPS monitoring reveals
an intimate picture of the subject’s life that he expects no one to have— short perhaps of his spouse,”96 who has the burden of
proof with respect to whether the prolonged surveillance has in fact revealed an intimate picture of an individual’s life and thus
created a mosaic? Unless the location of a “stash-house” is an intimate detail, Maynard can be read to stand for the proposition that
warrantless prolonged GPS surveillance is per se unconstitutional. Such an approach would be over-inclusive in that prolonged
location monitoring that does not result in a pattern, or a pattern that does not reveal intimate details, would be rendered a search
within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and therefore subject to suppression. Once the mosaic threshold is crossed and a
mosaic is created, the question that arises is to how to define the scope of the mosaic. If law enforcement officials engage in a
number of sustained investigatory techniques—as they often do—it is likely that whole investigations will be called into question.
That is, if a pattern is detected only through the use of multiple investigatory techniques, and the theory is applied consistently, the
investigation in its entirety will be rendered a search.97 In this respect, the retroactive effect of the “mosaic theory” takes on greater
significance. Rather than having the entire investigation held inadmissible and subject to suppression, law enforcement agents will
be overly cautious as to the amount of surveillance conducted. The
lack of clarity as to how prolonged the
surveillance must be to render it a search, whether intimate details need in fact emerge, and
what the proper scope of the mosaic is will provide defendants with an arsenal to attack every
police investigation.
Using the mosaic theory hampers numerous investigative techniques.
Ostrander, 2011 (Benjamin M. Candidate for JD @ Notre Dame Law School, “THE “MOSAIC
THEORY” AND FOURTH AMENDMENT LAW” Notre Dame Law Review Lexis)
One of the most serious implications of the
“mosaic theory” in Fourth Amendment law is that it calls into
question the validity of previously accepted forms of surveillance. GPS surveillance is not the only
form of surveillance that provides law enforcement with a comprehensive and detailed record of
someone’s movements or affairs when it is sustained on a prolonged basis. Thus, the “mosaic theory,” which
focuses on the resulting patterns created by individual law enforcement acts that in and of themselves are not searches, naturally
calls into question other accepted investigative techniques that are performed on a sufficiently
prolonged basis.98 For instance, the “mosaic theory” calls into question the use of pen registers99 and
trap and trace devices,100 which have been held to not implicate the Fourth Amendment.101 The “mosaic theory” would
also seemingly implicate the prolonged use of a mail cover 102 as an investigatory technique. 103 Although the
Supreme Court has yet to address the issue, courts have held that the warrantless use of a mail cover does not violate the Fourth
Amendment.104 Another
accepted investigatory technique that can reveal very intimate details of an
individual’s life— particularly if sustained for a prolonged basis—is garbage inspections. 105 It
could plausibly be argued that the patterns that result from the prolonged use of garbage inspections are much more intrusive than
any pattern resulting from the use of a GPS device.106 The
same could be said about prolonged video
surveillance.107 It is well settled that video surveillance in public areas does not give rise to a
Fourth Amendment issue.108 Thus, video cameras may be placed outside of an individual’s residence, and so long as the
cameras are incapable of viewing the interior of the residence, no Fourth Amendment right is infringed upon.109 Since Maynard,
the “mosaic theory” has in fact been used as the basis for holding a previously accepted
investigatory technique a search. In In re Application of the United States of America for an Order Authorizing the
Release of Historical Cell-Site Information,110 Magistrate Judge Orenstein denied the government’s application for an order under
the Stored Communications Act111 directing a service provider to disclose two months worth of historical cell-site location
information. 112 According to Magistrate Judge Orenstein: The Maynard court’s concern with sustained GPS tracking over the
course of a month was not its formally continuous nature, but rather the fact that it results in a vast collection of specific data points
that, viewed together, convey the “intimate picture” of a subject’s life. It is the ability to amass a collection of such points, and not the
ability to trace the route from each one to the next, that carries with it the ability to resolve those points into a comprehensible
picture.113 Applying the “mosaic theory” to historical cell-site information, Magistrate Judge Orenstein concluded that the Fourth
The most significant
implication of the “mosaic theory,” however, is that it calls into question the governmental use of
prolonged visual surveillance in criminal investigations.115 In Maynard, the court addressed the issue of the
Amendment required the government to obtain a warrant based on a showing of probable cause.114
possible extension of the “mosaic theory” to prolonged visual surveillance.116 Although the court ultimately declined to decide
whether such a situation would constitute a search under the new theory, it suggested that visual surveillance would not be
implicated.117 The
court noted that practically, law enforcement agents do not have the capability to
sustain visual monitoring for a duration that exposes information not revealed to the public.118
This argument is unpersuasive to the extent that it suggests that a mosaic is only created if the
whole of one’s movements is captured. A pattern can be created, and thus intimate details
revealed, by the aggregation of individual law enforcement steps not necessarily constituting the
whole of the investigatory techniques employed. The court implicitly recognizes this, as even continuous GPS
tracking of a vehicle does not reveal the entirety of one’s movements, but rather only the movements of a particular vehicle. Further,
the dismissal of the implication of visual surveillance is problematic to the extent that it relies on
the probability of law enforcement success. Such probability, however, must be viewed in relation to the factual
context in which the investigation is conducted, and not in the abstract. To be sure, it is not beyond the realm of
possibility that a properly equipped and resourced law enforcement unit would be capable of
monitoring an unsuspecting individual for a continuous period of time sufficient to create a
mosaic. As a theoretical matter, the court reasoned that in contrast to prolonged GPS monitoring, the extension of the “mosaic
theory” to visual surveillance would fail as the means used to uncover private information would not defeat one’s expectation of
privacy.119 The
court’s analogy to the distinction between the placement of undercover agents and
wiretapping120 overlooks the fact that here, warrantless GPS tracking and visual surveillance are
constitutional in the first instance. In fact, the “mosaic theory” focuses on the nature of the
information revealed—a pattern exposing intimate details—and does not focus on the investigatory
method used to attain such information. Beyond prolonged visual and video surveillance, Maynard does not express
a view as to whether other investigatory techniques would be called into question by the “mosaic theory.” This analysis suggests
that the
“mosaic theory,” if consistently applied, would implicate the cumulative effect of
previously accepted surveillance methods.121 It is in this capacity that the “mosaic theory” has the potential to
revolutionize the Fourth Amendment.
Big Data Disadvantage
1nc Healthcare
Applying the Mosaic Theory hampers government’s use of big data.
Gray, Keats Citron, and Rinehart, 2013 (David, Associate Professor, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, Danielle, Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law,
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Liz Clark, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, “SYMPOSIUM ON CYBERCRIME: FIGHTING
CYBERCRIME AFTER UNITED STATES V. JONES” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
Lexis)
The amount of personal information, including health information, aggregated by government
agencies, is referred to as "Big Data," and for good reason. Federal agencies, state authorities, and their private
contractors store mind-boggling amounts of information. Given the quantity and scope of this information, there
can be no doubt that Big Data implicates privacy interests recognized by the mosaic theory of
Fourth Amendment privacy endorsed to varying degrees by the concurring opinions in Jones.
n135 As the mosaic theory suggests, aggregations of rather [*768] innocuous information may
"reveal more - sometimes a great deal more - than does the sum of its parts." n136 This is a
particularly likely prospect given Big Data's use of increasingly sophisticated analytics, which
promise to reveal far more about us than is disclosed by the raw bits and bytes, no matter how
"big" or small the data. n137 The dangers are yet more pronounced if health-related data is part of
the mix because of what this information can reveal about the most intimate of our affairs. n138 Healthcare data, by
definition, contains information that the Supreme Court has already ruled fundamentally private,
such as reproductive choice, n139 and information that the Court may deem private in the near
future, such as genetic data. n140 But not all healthcare data is protected. In Whalen v. Roe, the Court found no threat to
privacy in a law that required physicians to report to the Department of Health personal and identifying information of patients who
were prescribed certain drugs. n141 Because the required disclosure was similar to existing and essential procedures, like
mandatory child abuse reporting or sharing information with insurance companies for reimbursement, n142 and the statute provided
adequate security against data breach, the Court held that any risk to patient privacy was [*769] insufficient to violate the Fourteenth
Amendment. n143 In so holding, however, the Court hinted that, absent adequate security measures, government acquisition or
disclosure of massive amounts of private data would implicate privacy protections. n144 In his concurrence, Justice Brennan did
more than hint, suggesting that it may be necessary to restrain technological advancements that make such data accumulations
possible. n145 A little over ten years later, the Court again considered privacy issues relating to data aggregation, this time in the
form of rap sheets. n146 Although the individual criminal events that compose a rap sheet may be public record, the Court held that
the rap sheet, as a summary of the total criminal events in an individual's life, represented a potential and "substantial" n147 threat
to privacy, n148 particularly because of advances in technology that allowed for greater storage capacity. n149 Unlike in Whalen,
where the Court emphasized the routine disclosure of confidential information under specific but frequent circumstances, the Court
in U.S. Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press took pains to illustrate the very limited and
considered means by which a third party can access rap sheet data. n150 Additionally, the Court dismissed the argument that the
[*770] privacy interest in the sum of public events listed on a rap sheet "approaches zero." n151 The Court concluded that "although
there is undoubtedly some public interest in anyone's criminal history," the interest is not central to the government-monitoring
purpose of FOIA, which is to allow citizens to monitor the government, not individuals. n152 Although neither of these cases
implicated the Fourth Amendment, they involved personal data similar or identical to that which is currently being collected and
stored as part of Big Data projects. Accordingly, they incorporate key factors the Court may use to decide whether large quantities of
aggregated healthcare data can trigger privacy concerns. Among these seem to be the extent to which disclosure is commonplace,
whether the data is aggregated or dispersed, and the intent of the law authorizing collection or release. The last factor is crucial as it
relates to Big Data. The stated intent of the ACA is quite broad, ranging from quality control to fraud prevention to cost containment.
n153 By
giving researchers, law enforcement, and administrators access to large amounts of
information, Big Data could conceivably be used for all three purposes and more.
Big data is key to healthcare
Burg 14 (Natalie, contributor to Forbes who writes about growth and business patterns – cites
Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of the nonprofit Health Data Consortium, “How Big Data Will Help Save
Healthcare”, http://www.forbes.com/sites/castlight/2014/11/10/how-big-data-will-help-savehealthcare/)
More and more
companies are talking about big data these days—but it’s more than a buzzword. It might just
change the way healthcare works in the U.S. From better patient outcomes to a more transparent
healthcare system to more accessible and affordable care, big data could change every inch of
the nation’s $3 trillion healthcare industry—all for the better. According to Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of the nonprofit
Health Data Consortium, the power to access and analyze enormous data sets can improve our ability
to anticipate and treat illnesses. This data can help recognize individuals who are at risk for serious
health problems. The ability to use big data to identify waste in the healthcare system can also lower the
cost of healthcare across the board.
Big data’s key to healthcare and solves disease – saves billions and locks in new
methods of treatment and planning models
Marr 15 (Bernard, contributor to Forbes, he also basically wrote the book on internet data –
called Big Data – and is a keynote speaker and consultant in strategic performance, analytics,
KPIs and big data, “How Big Data Is Changing Healthcare”,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/04/21/how-big-data-is-changing-healthcare/)
If you want to find out how Big Data is helping to make the world a better place, there’s no better
example than the uses being found for it in healthcare. The last decade has seen huge advances
in the amount of data we routinely generate and collect in pretty much everything we do, as well as our
ability to use technology to analyze and understand it. The intersection of these trends is what we call “Big
Data” and it is helping businesses in every industry to become more efficient and productive.
Healthcare is no different. Beyond improving profits and cutting down on wasted overhead, Big Data in healthcare is
being used to predict epidemics, cure disease, improve quality of life and avoid preventable
deaths. With the world’s population increasing and everyone living longer, models of treatment delivery are rapidly
changing, and many of the decisions behind those changes are being driven by data. The drive
now is to understand as much about a patient as possible, as early in their life as possible – hopefully
picking up warning signs of serious illness at an early enough stage that treatment is far more simple (and
less expensive) than if it had not been spotted until later. So to take a journey through Big Data in healthcare, let’s start at the
beginning – before we even get ill. Wearable blood pressure monitors send data to a smartphone app, then off to the doctor. (Photo
by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) Prevention is better than cure Smart phones were just the start. With apps
enabling them to be used as everything from pedometers to measure how far you walk in a day, to calorie counters to help you plan
your diet, millions of us are now using mobile technology to help us try and live healthier lifestyles. More recently, a steady stream of
dedicated wearable devices have emerged such as Fitbit, Jawbone and Samsung Gear Fit that allow you to track your progress and
upload your data to be compiled alongside everyone else’s. In the very near future, you could also be sharing this data with your
Even if there’s nothing
wrong with you, access to huge, ever growing databases of information about the state of the
health of the general public will allow problems to be spotted before they occur, and remedies –
either medicinal or educational – to be prepared in advance This is leading to ground breaking work, often
by partnerships between medical and data professionals, with the potential to peer into the
future and identify problems before they happen. One recently formed example of such a partnership is the
doctor who will use it as part of his or her diagnostic toolbox when you visit them with an ailment.
Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance – which aims to take data from various sources (such as medical and insurance records, wearable
sensors, genetic data and even social media use) to draw a comprehensive picture of the patient as an individual, in order to offer a
tailored healthcare package. That person’s data won’t be treated in isolation. It will be compared and analyzed alongside thousands
of others, highlighting specific threats and issues through patterns that emerge during the comparison. This enables sophisticated
predictive modelling to take place – a doctor will be able to assess the likely result of whichever treatment he or she is considering
prescribing, backed up by the data from other patients with the same condition, genetic factors and lifestyle. Programs such as this
are the industry’s attempt to tackle one of the biggest hurdles in the quest for data-driven healthcare: The medical industry collects a
huge amount of data but often it is siloed in archives controlled by different doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, clinics and administrative
departments. Another partnership that has just been announced is between Apple and IBM. The two companies are collaborating on
a big data health platform that will allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to share data to IBM’s Watson Health cloud healthcare
analytics service. The aim is to discover new medical insights from crunching real-time activity and biometric data from millions of
potential users.
Zoonotic diseases coming now – effective healthcare is key to check
Naish 12 (Reporter for Daily Mail, “The Armageddon virus: Why experts fear a disease that
leaps from animals to humans could devastate mankind in the next five years Warning comes
after man died from a Sars-like virus that had previously only been seen in bats Earlier this
month a man from Glasgow died from a tick-borne disease that is widespread in domestic and
wild animals in Africa and Asia” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217774/TheArmageddon-virus-Why-experts-fear-disease-leaps-animals-humans-devastate-mankindyears.html#ixzz3E5kqxjQI)
The symptoms appear suddenly with a headache, high fever, joint pain, stomach pain and vomiting. As the illness progresses, patients can develop large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding. In at least
30 per cent of cases, Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever is fatal. And so it proved this month when a 38-year-old garage owner from Glasgow, who had been to his brother’s wedding in Afghanistan,
became the UK’s first confirmed victim of the tick-borne viral illness when he died at the high-security infectious disease unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital. It is a disease widespread in domestic and wild
animals in Africa and Asia — and one that has jumped the species barrier to infect humans with deadly effect. But the unnamed man’s death was not the only time recently a foreign virus had struck in this country
for the first time. Last month, a 49-year-old man entered London’s St Thomas’ hospital with a raging fever, severe cough and desperate difficulty in breathing. He bore all the hallmarks of the deadly Sars virus that
. Nor was it any other virus yet known to
medical science. Worse still, the gasping, sweating patient was rapidly succumbing to kidney
failure, a potentially lethal complication that had never before been seen in such a case. As medical staff
killed nearly 1,000 people in 2003 — but blood tests quickly showed that this terrifyingly virulent infection was not Sars
quarantined their critically-ill patient, fearful questions began to mount. The stricken man had recently come from Qatar in the Middle East. What on earth had he picked up there? Had he already infected others
with it? Using the latest high-tech gene-scanning technique, scientists at the Health Protection Agency started to piece together clues from tissue samples taken from the Qatari patient, who was now hooked up to
The results were extraordinary. Yes, the virus is from the same family as Sars. But its
make-up is completely new. It has come not from humans, but from animals. Its closest known relatives have been found
in Asiatic bats. The investigators also discovered that the virus has already killed someone. Searches of global medical databases revealed the
same mysterious virus lurking in samples taken from a 60-year-old man who had died in Saudi
Arabia in July. Scroll down for video Potentially deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa Potentially
a life-support machine.
deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa When the Health Protection Agency warned the world of this newly- emerging
virus last month, it ignited a stark fear among medical experts. Could this be the next bird flu, or even the next ‘Spanish flu’ — the world’s biggest pandemic, which claimed between 50 million and 100 million lives
In all these outbreaks, the virus responsible came from an animal. Analysts now believe that the
The terrifying fact is that viruses that manage to jump to us from
animals — called zoonoses — can wreak havoc because of their astonishing ability to catch us
on the hop and spread rapidly through the population when we least expect it. The virus's power and fatality rates are
terrifying One leading British virologist, Professor John Oxford at Queen Mary Hospital, University of London, and a
world authority on epidemics, warns that we must expect an animal-originated pandemic to hit
the world within the next five years, with potentially cataclysmic effects on the human race. Such a
contagion, he believes, will be a new strain of super-flu, a highly infectious virus that may originate in some
far-flung backwater of Asia or Africa, and be contracted by one person from a wild animal or
domestic beast, such as a chicken or pig. By the time the first victim has succumbed to this unknown, unsuspected new illness, they will have spread it by coughs and
sneezes to family, friends, and all those gathered anxiously around them. Thanks to our crowded, hyper-connected world, this
doomsday virus will already have begun crossing the globe by air, rail, road and sea before
even the best brains in medicine have begun to chisel at its genetic secrets. Before it even has a name, it will have
across the globe from 1918 to 1919?
Spanish flu pandemic originated from a wild aquatic bird.
started to cut its lethal swathe through the world’s population. The high security unit High security: The high security unit where the man was treated for the potentially fatal disease but later died If this new virus
They die because of something called a
‘cytokine storm’ — a vast overreaction of their strong and efficient immune systems that is
prompted by the virus. This uncontrolled response burns them with a fever and wracks their bodies with nausea and massive fatigue. The hyper-activated
immune system actually kills the person, rather than killing the super-virus. Professor Oxford
bases his prediction on historical patterns. The past century has certainly provided us with many disturbing precedents. For example, the
2003 global outbreak of Sars, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed nearly 1,000
people, was transmitted to humans from Asian civet cats in China. More... Man, 38, dies from deadly tropical disease after returning to the
follows the pattern of the pandemic of 1918-1919, it will cruelly reap mass harvests of young and fit people.
UK from Afghanistan Nine-year-old who turns YELLOW with anger: Brianna must spend 12 hours a day under UV lights because of rare condition In November 2002, it first spread among people working at a live
Nowadays, the threat from such zoonoses is far greater
than ever, thanks to modern technology and human population growth. Mass transport such as airliners can quickly fan
animal market in the southern Guangdong province, where civets were being sold.
outbreaks of newly- emerging zoonoses into deadly global wildfires. The Sars virus was spread when a Chinese professor of respiratory medicine treating people with the syndrome fell ill when he travelled to
Hong Kong, carrying the virus with him. By February 2003, it had covered the world by hitching easy lifts with airline passengers. Between March and July 2003, some 8,400 probable cases of Sars had been
reported in 32 countries. It is a similar story with H1N1 swine flu, the 2009 influenza pandemic that infected hundreds of millions throughout the world. It is now believed to have originated in herds of pigs in
Once these stowaway viruses get off the plane, they don’t
have to learn a new language or new local customs. Genetically, we humans are not very
Mexico before infecting humans who boarded flights to myriad destinations.
diverse; an epidemic that can kill people in one part of the world can kill them in any other just as
easily. On top of this, our risk of catching such deadly contagions from wild animals is growing
massively, thanks to humankind’s relentless encroachment into the world’s jungles and
rainforests, where we increasingly come into contact for the first time with unknown viral killers
that have been evolving and incubating in wild creatures for millennia. This month, an international research team announced it
had identified an entirely new African virus that killed two teenagers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009. The virus induced acute hemorrhagic fever, which causes catastrophic widespread bleeding
from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and can kill in days. A 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who attended the same school both fell ill suddenly and succumbed rapidly. A week after the girl’s death, a
nurse who cared for her developed similar symptoms. He only narrowly survived. The new microbe is named Bas-Congo virus (BASV), after the province where its three victims lived. It belongs to a family of
A report in the journal PLoS Pathogens says the virus probably
originated in local wildlife and was passed to humans through insect bites or some other as-yet
unidentified means. There are plenty of other new viral candidates waiting in the wings, guts,
breath and blood of animals around us. You can, for example, catch leprosy from armadillos, which carry the virus in their shells and are responsible for a third of
leprosy cases in the U.S. Horses can transmit the Hendra virus, which can cause lethal respiratory and neurological disease in people. In a new book that should give us all pause for thought, awardwinning U.S. natural history writer David Quammen points to a host of animal-derived infections
that now claim lives with unprecedented regularity. The trend can only get worse, he warns. Quammen highlights the
viruses known as rhabdoviruses, which includes rabies.
Ebola fever virus, which first struck in Zaire in 1976. The virus’s power is terrifying, with fatality rates as high as 90 per cent. The latest mass outbreak of the virus, in the Congo last month, is reported to have
killed 36 people out of 81 suspected cases. According to Quammen, Ebola probably originated in bats. The bats then infected African apes, quite probably through the apes coming into contact with bat droppings.
'It
is inevitable we will have a global outbreak' Studies of the virus’s genes suggest it may have first evolved as early as 1908. It was not until the Sixties that it
The virus then infected local hunters who had eaten the apes as bushmeat. Quammen believes a similar pattern occurred with the HIV virus, which probably originated in a single chimpanzee in Cameroon.
appeared in humans, in big African cities. By the Eighties, it was spreading by airlines to America. Since then, Aids has killed around 30 million people and infected another 33 million. There is one mercy with
Ebola and HIV. They cannot be transmitted by coughs and sneezes. ‘Ebola is transmissible from human to human through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can be stopped by preventing such contact,’
If HIV could be transmitted by air, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus
— another zoonosis — could be transmitted by air, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the
planet.’ Viruses such as Ebola have another limitation, on top of their method of transmission. They kill and incapacitate people too quickly. In order to spread into pandemics, zoonoses need their human
hosts to be both infectious and alive for as long as possible, so that the virus can keep casting its deadly tentacles across the world’s population. But there is one zoonosis that
can do all the right (or wrong) things. It is our old adversary, flu. It is easily transmitted through the air, via sneezes and coughs. Sars
Quammen explains. ‘
can do this, too. But
flu has a further advantage. As Quammen points out: ‘With Sars, symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious.
Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the spread of
infection Isolation: Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the spread of infection ‘That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and placed
in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. But with influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed.’
Someone who has an infectious case of a new and potentially lethal strain of flu can be walking
about innocently spluttering it over everyone around them for days before they become
incapacitated. Such reasons lead Professor Oxford, a world authority on epidemics, to warn that a new global
pandemic of animal-derived flu is inevitable. And, he says, the clock is ticking fast. Professor Oxford’s warning is as stark as it is certain: ‘I think it is
inevitable that we will have another big global outbreak of flu,’ he says. ‘We should plan for one
emerging in 2017-2018.’ But are we adequately prepared to cope? Professor Oxford warns that vigilant surveillance is the only real answer that we have. ‘New flu
strains are a day-to-day problem and we have to be very careful to keep on top of them,’ he says. ‘We
now have scientific processes enabling us to quickly identify the genome of the virus behind a new illness, so that we know what we are dealing with. The best we can do after
that is to develop and stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs that can fight new strains that we
see emerging.’ But the Professor is worried our politicians are not taking this certainty of mass death seriously enough. Such laxity could come at a human cost so unprecedentedly high that it
would amount to criminal negligence. The race against newly-emerging animal-derived diseases is one that we have to win every time. A pandemic virus needs to win
only once and it could be the end of humankind.
Isolation:
2nc Health Care
2nc – overview
Zoonotic diseases specifically cause extinction
Casadevall 12 (Arturo, M.D., Ph.D. in Biochemistry from New York University, Leo and Julia
Forchheimer Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine, former editor of the ASM journal Infection and Immunity, “The
future of biological warfare,” Microbial Biotechnology Volume 5, Issue 5, pages 584–587,
September 2012, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-7915.2012.00340.x/full)
In considering the importance of biological warfare as a subject for concern it is worthwhile to review the known existential threats.
At this time this writer can identify at three major existential threats to humanity: (i) large-scale thermonuclear war followed by a
nuclear winter, (ii) a planet killing asteroid impact and (iii) infectious disease. To this trio might be added climate change making the
planet uninhabitable. Of the three existential threats the first is deduced from the inferred cataclysmic effects of nuclear war. For the
As to an
existential threat from microbes recent decades have provided unequivocal evidence for the
ability of certain pathogens to cause the extinction of entire species. Although infectious disease
has traditionally not been associated with extinction this view has changed by the finding that a
single chytrid fungus was responsible for the extinction of numerous amphibian species (Daszak
et al., 1999; Mendelson et al., 2006). Previously, the view that infectious diseases were not a
cause of extinction was predicated on the notion that many pathogens required their hosts and
that some proportion of the host population was naturally resistant. However, that calculation
does not apply to microbes that are acquired directly from the environment and have no need
for a host, such as the majority of fungal pathogens. For those types of host–microbe
interactions it is possible for the pathogen to kill off every last member of a species without harm
to itself, since it would return to its natural habitat upon killing its last host. Hence, from the
viewpoint of existential threats environmental microbes could potentially pose a much greater
threat to humanity than the known pathogenic microbes, which number somewhere near 1500 species
second there is geological evidence for the association of asteroid impacts with massive extinction (Alvarez, 1987).
(Cleaveland et al., 2001; Taylor et al., 2001), especially if some of these species acquired the capacity for pathogenicity as a
consequence of natural evolution or bioengineering.
at: ridley
Ridley is wrong
Nuccitelli 15 (Dana Nuccitelli is a blogger on environmentguardian.co.uk. He is an environmental scientist and risk assessor,
and also contributes to SkepticalScience.comJanuary 21, 2015, “Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t
learn from the past” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/jan/21/matt-ridley-wants-togamble-earths-future-because-wont-learn-from-past, ekr)
Have you ever watched a zombie movie and wondered if the protagonists will grow physically
tired from having to repeatedly kill zombies that inevitably rise once again from the dead? That’s how people often feel when confronted with
climate change myths that were debunked years ago. These myths never seem to stay dead, inevitably being revived by
climate contrarians no matter how conclusively and repeatedly they’ve been debunked. And so we
have writer Matt Ridley once again published in the London Times complaining, “Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my motives.” That’s undoubtedly
because when an individual keeps repeating the same myths over and over again, people eventually grow tired of debunking those myths and naturally question the motives of
the individual who keeps making them. Let’s look at a few examples from Ridley’s latest article. He claims not to be worried about global warming for a few reasons, including,
The failure of the atmosphere to warm anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less than half a degree of global warming in four decades - and
average global surface temperatures have warmed
it has slowed down, not speeded up. This is incorrect –
between 0.6 and 0.7°C
over the past 40 years (lower atmospheric temperatures have also likely warmed more than 0.5°C, though the record hasn’t yet existed for 40 years). During that time, that
temperature rise has temporarily both slowed down (during the 2000s, when there was a preponderance of La Niña events) and sped up (during the 1990s, when there was a
preponderance of El Niño events). Climate models accurately predicted the long-term global warming trend. Ridley continues, Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate - about
Given that sea level has risen faster than predicted, if you’re arguing against the
dangers posed by global warming, sea level is a poor choice. Climate research projects a sea level rise in the ballpark of 1
a foot per century.
meter (3 feet) by the year 2100 if we follow the business-as-usual path advocated by folks like Matt Ridley. Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting
water vapour (as
a greenhouse gas) will amplify global warming because a warmer atmosphere can hold more of
it. Observations have confirmed this is exactly what’s happening in the real world. This isn’t an assumption
of models – it’s based on scientists’ understanding of basic atmospheric physics. Another thing that gave me pause was
rapid warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water vapour Here Ridley is again quite wrong. We know that
that I went back and looked at the history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth - population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss,
acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution and so forth. There was a
consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely predicted by leading scientists. That does not
make every new prediction of apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism. At least Ridley admits that this is a poor excuse for dismissing the
threats posed by climate change, but it’s a far poorer excuse than he realizes. The reason that the worst possible consequences from acid rain, ozone depletion, pesticide
pollution, and so forth weren’t realized is that we took action to mitigate those threats. Specifically, we put a price on the pollutants that caused acid rain and ozone depletion,
and regulated pesticide use. Those are precisely the solutions proposed to mitigate global warming. Ridley makes a similar error when discussing IPCC global warming
projections, My best guess would be about one degree of warming during this century, which is well within the IPCC’s range of possible outcomes. A further 1°C global warming
by 2100 is only a possibility in one of the scenarios considered by IPCC (called RCP2.6 or RCP3-PD, where ‘PD’ stands for a rapid peak and decline of carbon emissions). It’s
the scenario in which there is an immediate and aggressive global effort to cut carbon pollution. Specifically, human global carbon emissions peak in 2020, after which they
Ridley opposes
immediate aggressive efforts to cut global carbon pollution. It’s disingenuous at best for him to
argue that his beliefs about modest global warming are consistent with the IPCC projections
whilst advocating against the relevant pathway. It’s like arguing, “My belief that I can lose weight while eating lots of cake and ice cream
decline at a rate of around 3.5% per year, reaching zero in 2070 and continuing to fall as we remove carbon pollution from the atmosphere. Matt
is well within medical doctors’ range of my possible health outcomes.” There are numerous other errors and zombie myths in Ridley’s piece that I won’t go into. For example, he
revives long-debunked myths about the ‘hockey stick’ and ‘Climategate.’ Worst of all is the conclusion to which Ridley’s flawed arguments lead – that we needn’t take serious
action to mitigate global warming because he doesn’t believe climate consequences will be serious. One need only read the climate science literature (summarized by the
IPCC) to see how dangerous the potential consequences of climate change are if we fail to take serious action to avoid them. Ridley believes future warming will be relatively
small and hence the impacts relatively bearable, but it’s just that – his (non-expert) belief. He argues that rather than mitigate the immense risks posed by global warming, the
world should share his belief and take the gamble on the best case scenario that climate change doesn’t turn out to be too terrible. This is the part of the story where we’re
obligated to recall that Matt Ridley was the non-executive Chairman of Northern Rock, a British bank that in 2007, was the first in over 150 years to experience a run on its
deposits. Under Ridley’s chairmanship, the bank pursued a high-risk, reckless business strategy that eventually backfired, and had to be bailed out by British taxpayers to the
tune of £27 billion ($41 billion). Ridley apparently didn’t learn from that fiasco, and wants to repeat the same high-risk strategy with the global climate. His reasoning is based on
zombie myths, and if he’s wrong again, this time nobody will be able to step in and bail out the Earth’s inhabitants.
2nc – econ
Big data’s key to the global economy – facilitates private growth and innovation on a
large scale
Polonetsky and Tene 13 (Jules, Co-Chair and Director, Future of Privacy Forum, and Tene,
Associate Professor, College of Management Haim Striks School of Law, Israel; Senior Fellow,
Future of Privacy Forum; Affiliate Scholar, Stanford Center for Internet and Society, published in
the Stanford Law Review, “Privacy and Big Data: Making Ends Meet”,
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-and-big-data/privacy-and-big-data)
Big data analysis often benefits those organizations that collect and harness the data. Data-driven profits
may be viewed as enhancing allocative efficiency by facilitating the “free” economy.[15] The
emergence, expansion, and widespread use of innovative products and services at decreasing marginal costs have
revolutionized global economies and societal structures, facilitating access to technology and knowledge[16] and
fomenting social change.[17] With more data, businesses can optimize distribution methods, efficiently allocate
credit, and robustly combat fraud, benefitting consumers as a whole.[18] But in the absence of individual value or broader societal
gain, others may consider enhanced business profits to be a mere value transfer from individuals whose data is being exploited. In economic terms,
such profits create distributional gains to some actors (and may in fact be socially regressive) as opposed to driving allocative efficiency. D. Society
Finally, some data uses benefit society at large. These include, for example, data mining for purposes of national security. We do not claim that such
practices are always justified; rather, that when weighing the benefits of national security driven policies, the effects should be assessed at a broad
societal level. Similarly, data
usage for fraud detection in the payment card industry helps facilitate safe,
secure, and frictionless transactions, benefiting society as a whole. And large-scale analysis of geo-location
data has been used for urban planning, disaster recovery, and optimization of energy
consumption. E. Benefits Big data creates enormous value for the global economy, driving
innovation, productivity, efficiency, and growth. Data has become the driving force behind
almost every interaction between individuals, businesses, and governments.
Econ decline goes nuclear and escalates
Auslin 9 (Michael, Resident Scholar – American Enterprise Institute, and Desmond Lachman –
Resident Fellow – American Enterprise Institute, “The Global Economy Unravels”, Forbes, 3-6,
http://www.aei.org/article/100187)
global chaos
followed hard on economic collapse. The mere fact that parliaments across the globe, from America to Japan, are
What do these trends mean in the short and medium term? The Great Depression showed how social and
unable to make responsible, economically sound recovery plans suggests that they do not know what to do and are simply hoping
for the least disruption. Equally worrisome is the adoption of more statist economic programs around the globe, and the concurrent
decline of trust in free-market systems. The threat of instability is a pressing concern. China, until last year the
world's fastest growing economy, just reported that 20 million migrant laborers lost their jobs. Even in the flush times of recent years,
China faced upward of 70,000 labor uprisings a year. A sustained downturn poses grave and
possibly immediate threats to Chinese internal stability. The regime in Beijing may be faced with a choice of
repressing its own people or diverting their energies outward, leading to conflict with China's neighbors. Russia, an oil state
completely dependent on energy sales, has had to put down riots in its Far East as well as in downtown
Moscow. Vladimir Putin's rule has been predicated on squeezing civil liberties while providing economic largesse. If that devil's
bargain falls apart, then wide-scale repression inside Russia, along with a continuing threatening posture
toward Russia's neighbors, is likely. Even apparently stable societies face increasing risk and the threat of internal or
possibly external conflict. As Japan's exports have plummeted by nearly 50%, one-third of the country's prefectures have passed
emergency economic stabilization plans. Hundreds of thousands of temporary employees hired during the first part of this decade
are being laid off. Spain's unemployment rate is expected to climb to nearly 20% by the end of 2010; Spanish unions are already
protesting the lack of jobs, and the specter of violence, as occurred in the 1980s, is haunting the country. Meanwhile, in Greece,
workers have already taken to the streets. Europe as a whole will face dangerously increasing tensions
between native citizens and immigrants, largely from poorer Muslim nations, who have increased the labor pool in the past several
decades. Spain has absorbed five million immigrants since 1999, while nearly 9% of Germany's residents have foreign citizenship,
including almost 2 million Turks. The xenophobic labor strikes in the U.K. do not bode well for the rest of Europe.
A prolonged
global downturn, let alone a collapse, would dramatically raise tensions inside these countries.
Couple that with possible protectionist legislation in the United States, unresolved ethnic and territorial disputes
in all regions of the globe and a loss of confidence that world leaders actually know what they are doing. The result
may be a series of small explosions that coalesce into a big bang .
Big data is key to the economy – jobs, new industry expansion, and revenue
Blackburn 15 (Suzanne, PR Manager at Experian and senior contributor to the Experian
WhitePages. Experian is a data marketing analytics company that has been published for over
40 years. “Why Privacy Matters in a Data-Driven Economy”, 3/26,
http://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/p/ems-why-privacy-matters.pdf)
Beyond enabling more convenient and valuable digital experiences, data
is now fueling our national and global
economy. New business models and ways of doing business, while still in their early stages, are steering
the global economy toward a data-driven world of unprecedented access, insight, innovation
and interconnectivity. However, as data becomes fundamental to virtually every aspect of our
business and professional lives, this data-driven economy is at a crossroads. It will only continue to
grow and thrive if we collectively create the conditions where it can remain open, healthy and
responsive to the privacy concerns of consumers. Kevin Dean, General Manager and Global Head of Product, Targeting,
Experian Marketing Services notes, “The ‘plumbing’ of the data-driven economy, the part that sits out of sight behind the drywall, out
of the view of most consumers, is something that many consumers are becoming aware of for the first time.” This white paper will
assess the rise of the data-driven economy within the media and advertising industry and the evolution of privacy in that economy:
How can we ensure that data is used for good, positive and productive purposes? How can we create the conditions that will ensure
a healthy and open data-driven economy that changes the world for the better, many times over? This white paper is for the digital
and the data-driven, the organization and the individual, both the business-to-consumer and the business-to-business brand —
every link in the chain of the media and advertising ecosystem that is assessing its role in this economy and its future. According to
McKinsey, gains
for the overall economy as a result of Big Data could be up to $610 billion in
annual productivity and cost savings. Since 2007, data-related products and services have generated
about 30 percent of real personal consumption growth, according to the Progressive Policy Institute. McKinsey
estimated that Big Data could yield benefits for healthcare alone of more than $300 billion annually.
According to IDC, 570 new Websites are created every minute. According to IDC, in five years there will
be 450 billion transactions per day. According to IBM, by 2020, the amount of information in the
digital universe will grow tenfold. Advertising is an immediate example of an industry in the midst
of a data-driven growth spurt. In this industry, innovation is taking place at a rapid rate. According to
research by industry analyst Scott Brinker, the marketing technology landscape has exploded in the past four years. As of January
2015, Brinker
estimates that there are nearly 1,900 marketing-technology venders, up from 947
companies in early 2014 and only 100 in 2011. According to a study conducted by Harvard Business School in 2012, the
digital-advertising industry alone employed more than 2 million Americans in 2012, indirectly employing
3.1 million Americans in other sectors. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, the mobile app industry alone now accounts for
more than 750,000 jobs. These
are jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago. More importantly, ubiquitous
consumer data is bringing programmatic media, interactive marketing and digital-technology
companies closer together, forming a new hybrid industry with a common goal: to enhance the digital
experience of the consumer.
2nc – link
Healthcare Fraud is increasing only governmental use of big data can stop it.
Gray, Keats Citron, and Rinehart, 2013 (David, Associate Professor, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, Danielle, Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law,
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Liz Clark, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, “SYMPOSIUM ON CYBERCRIME: FIGHTING
CYBERCRIME AFTER UNITED STATES V. JONES” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
Lexis)
Any reasonable discussion of healthcare fraud must include Medicare. Medicare is a government health
insurance program for the elderly and the disabled. n154 Every day, 4.5 million claims for Medicare services
are [*771] processed. n155 In 2011, the program covered almost 49 million people, spending over $
500 billion. n156 The extent of Medicare fraud is unknown, n157 but it is believed to cost the
government somewhere between $ 60 billion and $ 90 billion a year. n158 Hospitalization claims are the
most common source of civil fraud investigations, while outpatient, medical equipment, and lab work claims are the most common
sources of criminal fraud investigations. n159 Home-health agencies and providers of durable medical equipment have particularly
high fraud rates. n160 Healthcare
fraud generally - and Medicare fraud in particular - frequently involves health
providers' charging for services never provided, billing for unnecessary equipment, stealing
medical identities, paying kickbacks for referrals, or using a Medicare number for fraudulent
billing. Complex schemes often incorporate a mix of strategies. n161 To identify [*772] fraudulent billing practices, automated
systems help investigators flag impossible claims, such as a provider's alleged removal of twenty toenails from three toes or bills for
more therapy sessions than Newtonian physics would allow. n162 Phantom billing may involve elaborate schemes in which there
are in fact no physical clinics, patients, or health practitioners. For example, a member of an Armenian organized crime group
recently admitted to creating a network of clinics and providers that existed only on paper, but nevertheless billed Medicare for
nearly $ 100 million and received over $ 35 million in payments. n163 Similar
to phantom billing is billing for
services that are not medically necessary. In one case, a doctor with a penchant for Playboy models and Picassos
received "$ 1.2 million from Medicare in 2008 ... a large portion of it from physical therapy," consisting of "heat packs, massage,
electrical stimulation and ultrasound." n164 Although government-funded massages are relatively harmless to patients, other
unnecessary treatments can be invasive and life threatening. In a recent case, investigators discovered that patients who were
disoriented and unable to control their bodily functions were being forced to attend group therapy that served no medical purpose.
n165 [*773] Providers altered their records so it would appear that patients benefited from therapy that was anything but helpful.
n166 In another case, the government alleged that a nursing home required therapists to use the most expensive treatments on
residents, even if the interventions were inappropriate or dangerous. n167 For example, it alleged that a ninety-two-year-old cancer
patient in Orlando, who was routinely spitting up blood, nonetheless received 48 minutes of physical therapy, 47 minutes of
occupational therapy, and 30 minutes of speech therapy, two days before his death. The day he died, the patient received 35
minutes of physical therapy and was scheduled for more therapy later in the day. n168 CMS reported a dermatologist who, in
addition to unnecessarily removing "benign skin lesions," reused sutures, thereby exposing patients to HIV, hepatitis C, and other
diseases. n169 Claims for medical equipment are another common target for fraudsters. Two Los
Angeles pastors recently were found guilty of running separate schemes involving power wheelchairs. In the first, the conspirators
purchased fraudulent medical documentation and billed Medicare $ 6,000 for power wheelchairs that actually cost $ 900. n170 The
conspirators also offered wheelchairs and other unnecessary equipment to Medicare beneficiaries in exchange for their Medicare
numbers. n171 If Medicare refused to pay for the chairs, the pastor instructed his employees to take the chairs away from the
beneficiaries. n172 The funds from the scheme were diverted among sham supply companies run by the pastor's wife and other
church members. n173 A second pastor and a doctor who [*774] provided fraudulent documentation pleaded guilty to running a
similar conspiracy later in the same year. n174 Prescription
medicines provide another rich territory for
healthcare fraud. A well-known dialysis provider was accused in 2012 of intentionally wasting medication by giving multiple
partial doses, instead of smaller numbers of full doses, in order to inflate charges. n175 Later that same year, a Miami pharmacy
owner pleaded guilty to fraud charges for instructing his employees to retrieve from assisted-living facilities unused medication
already billed to Medicare and Medicaid so that it could be repackaged and reused. n176 The repackaged medicine was distributed
to other assisted-living facilities or the general public and resubmitted to insurance. n177 The pharmacist also paid assisted-living
facilities to refer residents. n178 In Baltimore, a pharmacist admitted to purchasing drums of drugs from an unlicensed provider,
mislabeling them, and dispensing them to customers. n179 The same pharmacist submitted claims to Medicare for prescription
refills that were not dispensed to beneficiaries. n180 Still another pharmacist admitted to paying Medicare and Medicaid
beneficiaries for their prescriptions and then submitting reimbursement claims to insurance companies without dispensing the
medication. n181 Among his targets were [*775] patients with HIV or mental illness, whose medications are particularly expensive.
n182 Patients
are not always innocent victims, of course. Beneficiaries often participate in
healthcare fraud schemes in exchange for services or kickbacks. n183 Kickbacks range from cash n184
and cigarettes n185 to spa services and lunches. n186 In a massive operation in New York, conspirators paid $ 500,000 to
Some of these schemes are far more Dickensian, providing
subsistence benefits, such as housing, to vulnerable beneficiaries and then threatening them
with homelessness if they refuse to comply with the fraud. n188 Whether through coercion,
persuasion, or deception, individuals engaged in fraud expose Medicare beneficiaries, who are
often ill or limited in capacity, to substantial risks. Medical identity theft is a significant problem
as well. CMS reports that, in 2011, a man was convicted of stealing his brother's medical information and using it for surgery
beneficiaries in a special "kickback room." n187
covered under his brother's insurance. [*776] The victim's medical records in turn incorrectly included his brother's HIV-positive
Perpetrators also
steal the identities of unsuspecting providers who have already been approved by Medicare in
order to file fraudulent claims. n190 In one case, a home-health agency owner stopped paying his licensed personnel
status, which put the true beneficiary at risk of receiving medically unnecessary drugs and procedures. n189
and, when they quit, billed hundreds of claims under his former employees' licenses. n191 Organized crime is also involved,
creating networks of nonexistent clinics based on stolen provider information, often leading to suspicious claims, such as "[a]
pregnant woman who gets an ultrasound exam - from an ear, nose and throat doctor[, a] forensic pathologist whose patients walked
into his office, rather than being rolled in with toe tags[, a] dermatologist who conducted heart tests[, or a] psychiatrist who
performed M.R.I.'s." n192 Although
some providers' identities are stolen, others lend, rent, or sell their
identities to facilitate fraud schemes. n193 Take, for example, a case in New Jersey where a licensed provider was
"frequently either not in the office at all, or was in his personal office watching television." n194 He provided "pre-signed, blank
prescription forms" to the unlicensed employees who were diagnosing patients. n195 In another case, unlicensed physicians paid a
licensed physician "$ 2,000 a month to review and sign medical records prepared by physician assistants." n196 [*777]
Healthcare fraud is increasingly accomplished and facilitated by electronic means. n197 Rather
than steal patient information on an individual basis, hackers target medical information
databases. In May 2012, a group of hackers based in Eastern Europe breached Utah's
healthcare database, gaining access to over 780,000 records, including Social Security
numbers and medical diagnosis codes. n198 These records are essential for fraudulent billing.
According to one report, "an individual healthcare record is worth more on the black market ($ 50,
on average) than a U.S.-based credit card and personal identity with social security number
combined." n199 As healthcare fraud moves into the digital arena, traditional methods of detection
and prosecution are simply inadequate. A cybercrime requires a cybersolution, which, in the
case of healthcare fraud, will almost certainly include Big Data.
Only robust data analysis can solve healthcare fraud – Mosaic Theory prevents that.
Gray, Keats Citron, and Rinehart, 2013 (David, Associate Professor, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, Danielle, Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law,
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Liz Clark, University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law, “SYMPOSIUM ON CYBERCRIME: FIGHTING
CYBERCRIME AFTER UNITED STATES V. JONES” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
Lexis)
The overwhelming majority of data that CMS and its contractors use to detect fraud comes from
claims, payment, and referral records. n200 Now that [*778] CMS is partnering with private
insurance organizations, it will have access to private claims and other health data. n201
Additionally, the Medicare Integrity Manual lists a dozen types of data that contract agencies
should use when investigating suspicious activity, including: (1) the nature of the providers and staff; (2) the
structure of the business, overhead costs, and its relationship to other businesses; (3) the amount of business generally and the
amount of business from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements specifically; (4) the types of services rendered; (5) location; (6) history
of claims and any previous investigations; and (7) "other information needed to explain and/or clarify the issue(s) in question." n202
In part due to the involvement of international organized crime syndicates, the Department of Justice
(DOJ), which investigates and prosecutes fraud cases, considers healthcare fraud an indicator
of potential terrorism. n203 DOJ describes healthcare providers as "nontraditional information gatherers [that] can provide
[interagency data-sharing] fusion centers with both strategic and tactical information," n204 including "health surveillance networks
[and] syndromic surveillance." n205 It recommends that fusion centers, which serve as hubs for local, state, and federal information
Access to fusion-center
networks means having the ability to mine and analyze vast public databases at the state, local,
and federal level; data-broker dossiers on millions of individuals; [*779] private databases held by
cooperating entities; video streams from public and private cameras; and far more. In
prosecuting fraud cases, DOJ will have access to CMS's data as well as any data aggregated
and analyzed by fusion centers. In short, efforts to prevent, detect, and prosecute healthcare
fraud are increasingly tied to Big Data. Already an important tool for regulators and law
enforcement, Big Data is likely to become a more powerful and important asset in the years to
come. n208 The ACA contains a provision requiring the release of some of Medicare's billing
data, which previously had been blocked by a court ruling citing physician privacy. n209 CMS has
discussed plans to leverage the detection benefits of Big Data to facilitate a move towards
"fraud prevention," rather than the former method of paying claims and later attempting to
reclaim funds fraudulently acquired. n210 To this end, CMS has developed multiple task forces and agencies that tap
gathering and sharing, n206 collaborate with healthcare providers to develop analytical tools. n207
private-sector information technology resources. n211 The most recent initiative is the Fraud Prevention System (FPS), a response
to requirements in the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 "to implement predictive analytics technologies to [*780] identify and prevent
the payment of improper claims in the Medicare fee-for-service program." n212 All
of Medicare's daily 4.5 million
claims run through FPS's "predictive algorithms and other sophisticated analytics," n213 which are
similar to those used by credit card companies to detect fraudulent purchases. n214 Although FPS cannot automatically stop
payments, it "automatically generates and prioritizes leads for review and investigation." n215 FPS addresses the problem of data
silos by analyzing claims nationwide n216 and over a period of time, n217 both of which are necessary for identifying fraudulent
behavior. n218 FPS also complements the Automated Provider Screening System; the two systems are now slated for integration.
n219 CMS
has more plans to expand the reach and power of FPS, including social network
analysis n220 and adaptive analytics. n221 According to CMS, in 2011 "FPS also generated leads for 536 new ...
investigations, augmented information for 511 pre-existing investigations, and prompted 617 provider interviews and 1,642
beneficiary interviews to verify legitimate provision of Medicare services and supplies." n222 CMS claims that these efforts resulted
in a savings of $ 115 million. n223 Although modest when compared to the total of $ 4.1 billion that CMS recovered from fraud
schemes through partnerships with private contractors and government agencies in 2011, n224 the program is just getting started,
and [*781] officials expect to prevent or recover billions of dollars in losses. n225 Even when FPS was in its infancy, the Wall Street
Journal drew attention to suspicious providers using simple data analysis of a database "containing records only through 2008, and
including the claims of just 5% of randomly selected Medicare beneficiaries." n226 In 2010, the Journal described the suspect
practices of a physical therapist who later pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud. n227 Among other charges, the doctor submitted a
claim for a service that occurred while he was on vacation. n228 The Journal used the same comparatively limited data set to
identify a surgeon who was practicing in Texas after being temporarily banned from Medicare because he had performed
unnecessary and harmful surgeries in New Jersey. n229 The Journal found that the readmitted doctor's death rate was seven times
higher than the national average. n230 Another surgeon appeared to perform an unusually high number of multiple spinal
operations per patient. n231 Investigating
these types of activities requires access to Big Data. With Big
Data, governmental systems can identify providers who bill more over a specified time period
than other providers in the region. Claims analysis can detect providers who authorize
particularly expensive equipment. Analysis of individuals' claims over time can reveal
discrepancies or impossibilities, such as multiple hysterectomies, which indicate possible identity theft or
kickbacks. Looking at groups of individual claims could also reveal possible kickbacks if, for instance, a sizeable population in a
community suddenly switches to a less convenient pharmacy. As FPS incorporates social network models, the
system will gain further leverage on its data, allowing it to compare individuals against known
criminal associations, including those that work primarily in the virtual world of black-market
healthcare data. The more data the system can use to build comparative models, the more accurately the models will reflect
standard practice. n232 As evidence of this potential, CMS recently credited "sophisticated data analysis" for the indictment of a
home-healthcare physician in "the biggest health-care fraud case brought against a single doctor." n233 The doctor certified over
5,000 patients a year for home-healthcare by having his employees complete certification forms using his forged signature. n234
Although many healthcare fraud cases originate through direct reporting, including qui tam
actions, complicated schemes like those involving organized crime are more vulnerable to data
analysis, which can review and compare large volumes of claims over time. To achieve its
stated goal of stopping fraudulent payments before they reach the provider, CMS will need
robust analytical tools that can probe massive quantities of disparate data to flag automatically
suspect claims across a wide range of covered services and also evolve to identify new
fraudulent behavior as it develops. That capacity is likely to be greatly enhanced in coming years as CMS programs
gain access to the vast quantities of consumer and other data currently brokered through third-party aggregators. At each turn,
the government and its agents will face potential Fourth Amendment barriers erected by the
mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment privacy.
2nc - econ impact
innovation solves extinction
Heaberlin 4 (Scott W, Nuclear Safety and Technology Applications Product Line @ Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory, “A Case for Nuclear-Generated Electricity,” Battelle Press,
2004)
Cohen looked at all the various population estimates and concluded that most fell into the range of 4 to 16 billion. Taking the highest value when
researchers offered a range, Cohen calculated a high median of 12 billion and taking the lower part of the range a low median of 7.7 billion. The
the projections for world
population for 2050 are between 7.8 and 12.5 billion. That means we have got no more than 50 years
before we exceed the nominal carrying capacity of the earth. Cohen also offers a qualifying observation by
stating the "First Law of Information," which asserts that 97.6% of all statistics are made up. This helps us appreciate that
application of these numbers to real life is subject to a lot of assumptions and insufficiencies
in our understanding of the processes and data. However, we can draw some insights from
all of this. What it comes down to is that if you choose the fully sustainable, non-fossil fuel
long-term options with only limited social integration, the various estimates Cohen looked at give you a number like 1
billion or less people that the earth can support. That means 5 out of 6 of us have got to go, plus no new babies without an
offsetting death. On the other hand, if you let technology continue to do its thing and perhaps get even better,
the picture need not be so bleak. We haven't made all our farmland as productive as it can
be. Remember, the Chinese get twice the food value per hectare as we do in the United States. There is
also a lot of land that would become arable if we could get water to it. And, of course, in case you need to
good news in this is 12 billion is twice as many people as we have now. The bad news is that
go back and check the title of this book, there are alternatives to fossil fuels to provide the energy to power that technology. So given a positive
and perhaps optimistic view of technology, we can look to some of the high technology assumption based studies from Cohen's review. From the
semi-credible set of these, we can find estimates from 19 to 157 billion as the number of people the earth could support with a rough average
coming in about 60 billion. This is a good time to be reminded of the First Law of Information. The middle to lower end of this range, however,
might be done without wholesale social reprogramming. Hopefully we would see the improvement in the quality of life in the developing countries
as they industrialize and increase their use of energy. Hopefully, also this would lead to a matching of the reduction in fertility rates that has been
The point to all this is
the near-term future of the human race depends on technology. If we turn away from
technology, a very large fraction of the current and future human race will starve. If we just keep on
observed in the developed countries, which in turn would lead to an eventual balancing of the human population.
as we are, with our current level of technology and dependence on fossil fuel resources, in the near term it will be a race between fertility decrease
and our ability to feed ourselves, with, frankly, disaster the slight odds-on bet. In a slightly longer term, dependence on fossil fuels has got to
lead to either
environmental disaster. There are no other end points to that road. It
doesn't go anywhere else. However, if we accept that it is technology that makes us human, that
technology uniquely identifies us as the only animal that can choose its future, we can
choose to live, choose to make it a better world for everyone and all life. This means more
and better technology. It means more efficient technology that is kinder to the planet but also allows humans to
social chaos or
support large numbers in a high quality of life. That road is not easy and has a number of ways to screw up. However, it is a road that can lead to
a happier place, a better place.
Terrorism Links
1nc
Social media surveillance is key to solve terrorism – it’s the lynchpin for ISIS and AQAP –
only an increase in vigilance and crackdowns on radicalization of social media websites
cuts off the key route for training, funding, recruiting, and capabilities of terrorist groups
Carmon and Stalinsky 15
(Mr. Carmon is president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Mr. Stalinsky
is the executive director of MEMRI, “Terrorist Use Of U.S. Social Media Is A National Security
Threat”, http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/01/30/terrorist-use-of-u-s-social-media-is-anational-security-threat/3/, ZS)
American companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and other popular
services, including YouTube, WhatsApp, Skype, Tumblr and Instagram, are facilitating global
jihad. This was one of the main subjects of a recent meeting between UK Prime Minister David
Cameron and President Obama focusing on cybersecurity and counterterrorism. The president
stated, “Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorism organizations
are communicating” and that “we’re still going to have to find ways to make sure that if an AlQaeda affiliate is operating in Great Britain or in the United States, that we can try to prevent
real tragedy. And I think the companies want to see that as well. They’re patriots… we’re also
going to be in dialogue with the companies to try to make that work.” This follows Robert
Hannigan, the U.K.’s Director of the Government Communications Headquarters describing “the
largest U.S. technology companies” as “the command-and-control networks of choice for
terrorists” in The Financial Times last November. Mr. Hannigan said out loud what for too long
too few have: For almost a decade, these companies have helped Al-Qaeda, and are now
helping ISIS to fundraise, recruit, indoctrinate, and train new terrorists. Nearly every day brings
more news of the arrest of young Westerners for terror activity, planning attacks, or attempting
to travel to the Middle East to join a terror organization. ISIS has grasped the effectiveness of
social media U.S. social media companies are at the center of each of these cases. ISIS has
grasped the effectiveness of social media, culminating in its strategic decision to show the
beheading of American journalist James Foley on August 19. It first uploaded the video to
YouTube and tweeted a graphic blow-by-blow series of stills showing the knife cutting his throat,
the removal of his head, and the placement of his severed head on his lifeless body. This act
created an earthquake on social media, as thousands of these tweets went viral. The following
day, Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, tweeted, “We have been and are actively suspending accounts
as we discover them related to this graphic imagery.” But the release of the videos of ISIS’s next
four beheadings of Americans and Britons were all announced via Twitter—with more graphic
images of the beheadings and their aftermath—belying his claim. Furthermore, four months
later, the number of graphic jihadi tweets of beheadings and executions is at its peak. Most
recently, on January 20, ISIS sent via Twitter an embedded YouTube video featuring Jihadi
John, the apparent beheader in its previous videos, threatening to kill two Japanese hostages
unless the Japanese government paid a ransom of $200 million within 72 hours. Government
should be asking company heads why they aren’t doing more “Why aren’t YouTube, Facebook,
and Twitter doing more to stop terrorists from inciting violence?” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow
asked in the title of his July 10, 2014 Washington Post op-ed. This is precisely the question that
U.S. government officials should be asking the heads of these companies. Farrow also noted
that “these companies already know how to police and remove content that violates other laws.
Every major social media network employs algorithms that automatically detect and prevent the
posting of child pornography. Many, including YouTube, use a similar technique to prevent
copyrighted material from hitting the web. Why not, in those overt cases of beheading videos
and calls for blood, employ a preventive similar system?” Asked about terrorists’ use of
YouTube in a May 2013 CNN interview, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt claimed: “If
there were an algorithm to detect terrorists, trust me, we would use it.” But Google is quite
capable of identifying and removing content from its search engine using its algorithms—and
has done so on numerous occasions. But why should national security be “entrusted” to Google
employees anyway? What are their qualifications to determine what could threaten the lives of
Americans? Those who support allowing jihadi content on social media state that such content
should be left alone because of its intelligence value. In an October 9 Washington Post op-ed
titled “We Shouldn’t Stop Terrorists From Tweeting,” Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro of The
Brookings Institute defended Twitter for allowing and not removing jihadi content: “[B]anning
particular sites or individuals may make sense if the risk of recruitment and radicalization is
high. But those risks have to be weighed against the intelligence value of having groups such as
the Islamic State active on social media…” Such an approach is flawed. One can hardly imagine
the development of the global jihad movement without the Internet. An entire generation of
Muslim youth has been and continues to be radicalized online by violent images and
incitements to murder. Recruitment numbers are swelling today because for too long nothing
was done to stem the flow of this jihadi content hosted by these services. And, consider that
jihadis who post this content are fully aware that it is being monitored by Western security
agencies; the argument that allowing them to continue to use these platforms on the chance
that their accounts could yield significant intelligence is simply naive. The rebuttal to this being
that the government shouldn’t be relying solely on social media for its intelligence gathering. A
growing threat to national security Another reminder of the free rein afforded to jihadis online
was a January 10 New York Times headline soon after the Paris attacks: “Jihadists and
Supporters Take To Social Media To Praise Attack On Charlie Hebdo.” The next day, justice
and interior ministers of 12 European countries, including the U.K., France and Germany,
issued a joint statement expressing concerns about the Internet being used by terrorists, and
calling for tech companies to do more to deal with this issue. On January 12, in further evidence
of the growing threat to national security posed by Al-Qaeda’s, ISIS’, and other groups’ cyber
jihad activity, pro-ISIS hackers broke into the Twitter and YouTube accounts of U.S. Central
Command – CENTCOM – leaking documents and information and live-tweeting as they went.
“With the Sony attack that took place, with the Twitter account that was hacked by Islamist
jihadist sympathizers yesterday, it just goes to show how much more work we need to do, both
public and private sector, to strengthen our cybersecurity,” President Obama warned the
following day. Gen. Jack Keane (ret.), former U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff, understands the
strategic importance Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadi groups place on the use of social media
and the damage done by leaving it undisrupted. He stated on Fox News on October 23: “…I
think we should clearly appeal to the hosts who are running Twitter, Facebook, the various
websites, and shut these things down.” Time for Congress to catch up to terrorist use of the
Internet and create and enforce new laws to address this problem The new Congress and the
Obama administration should make this issue a priority in 2015. The long-overdue first step in
doing so would be summoning the heads of social media companies and having them clarify
what exactly their policies are. Solutions could require examination by constitutional law experts,
and might need to go all the way to the Supreme Court. There are several clear models for U.S.
policy makers to follow which European governments recently have begun to implement. On
October 8, the European Commission, with ministers from all 28 EU member states, summoned
major U.S. technology companies to a “private” meeting in Luxembourg on terrorist use of the
Internet, against the backdrop of the “flow of so-called foreign fighters” as well as “calls for
electronic jihad that the E.U. is facing.” The meeting’s goal was to come up with a plan for these
companies to stop online radicalization on their websites. It is difficult to understand why no one
in the U.S. government has taken similar action yet. These companies should be questioned in
a transparent framework, and must commit to tackling the problem of eradicating violent jihadi
content from their platforms. It is time for the government to catch up to terrorist use of the
Internet and create and enforce new laws to address this problem. The removal of a handful of
YouTube videos, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages is hardly a serious solution.
Politics Links
1nc
Plan drains PC – link only goes one way – ratchet effect makes repealing current
(programs/laws/authorizations) unique - – inertia and terrorism fears outweigh, strong
political support only sparks bigger fight
Givens, 13 -- Austen, Prof Cybersecurity @ Utica College, Harvard National Security Journal, July,
http://harvardnsj.org/2013/07/the-nsa-surveillance-controversy-how-the-ratchet-effect-can-impact-anti-terrorism-laws/
The NSA Surveillance
Controversy: How the Ratchet Effect Can Impact Anti-Terrorism Laws On June 5,
2013, the world learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s largest intelligence-gathering organization, had
been gathering the metadata of all the phone calls made by Verizon customers since early April 2013. The next day, two
prominent newspapers reported that PRISM, a top secret NSA program, had been vacuuming up customer data
from some of the world’s largest and best known information technology (IT) firms—including Google, Apple, Facebook, and
Microsoft—directly from their servers. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper later clarified that specific requests for
customer data from these IT firms were subject to tight legal controls and only targeted non-US citizens. But Clapper’s comments
outcry ensued, with some loudly opposing the NSA’s surveillance
programs and others forcefully defending them. The New York Times condemned the NSA surveillance in an
did little to calm frayed nerves. A public
editorial and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the NSA, challenging the constitutionality of the NSA
telephone call metadata collection program. Former Vice President Al Gore called the surveillance “obscenely outrageous” on
Twitter. But others came out in support of the NSA’s efforts. Senator Lindsay Graham said “I am a Verizon customer…it doesn’t
bother me one bit for the NSA to have my phone number.” Max Boot, a senior fellow with the think tank Council on Foreign
Relations, credited
the NSA surveillance with helping to reduce the number of terrorist incidents on
US soil since the attacks of September 11, 2001. A Pew Research Center poll suggested that there was
significant support among the American public for the NSA’s surveillance efforts. Despite the
heated rhetoric on both sides of the surveillance debate, the NSA’s collection of telephone call metadata
appears to be legal based upon the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s (FISC) interpretation of section 215 of the USA
PATRIOT Act. Perhaps the most interesting remarks about the NSA controversy thus far came from Representative Jim
Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the USA PATRIOT Act. He wrote that when the Act was first drafted, one of the most
controversial provisions concerned the process by which government agencies obtain business records for intelligence or law
enforcement purposes. Sensenbrenner stated that particular provision of the Act requires government lawyers to prove to the FISC
that a request for specific business records is linked to an “authorized investigation” and further stated that “targeting US citizens is
prohibited” as part of the request. Sensenbrenner argued that the NSA telephone metadata collection is a bridge too far and falls
well outside the original intended scope of the Act: “[t]he administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives
because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this [NSA surveillance] is an abuse of that law.”
Acknowledging that Sensenbrenner’s statements may have been motivated in part by political interests, the perceived creeping
surveillance
controversy—is consistent with what is known as the “ratchet effect” in legal scholarship. The ratchet effect
is a unidirectional change in some legal variable that can become entrenched over time, setting in
motion a process that can then repeat itself indefinitely.[1] For example, some scholars argued that antiterrorism laws tend to erode civil liberties and establish a new baseline of legal “normalcy” from
which further extraordinary measures spring in future crises.[2] This process is consistent with the ratchet effect, for
it suggests a “stickiness” in anti-terrorism laws that makes it harder to scale back or reverse
their provisions. Each new baseline of legal normalcy represents a new launching pad for
additional future anti-terrorism measures. There is not universal consensus on whether or not the ratchet effect is
expansion of the USA PATRIOT Act—the “abuse” that Sensenbrenner describes in the context of the NSA
real, nor on how powerful it may be. Posner and Vermeule call ratchet effect explanations “methodologically suspect.”[3] They note
that accounts of the ratchet effect often ring hollow, for they “fail to supply an explanation of such a process…and if there is such a
mechanism [to cause the ratchet effect], it is not clear that the resulting ratchet process is bad.”[4] I argue that the recent
controversy surrounding the NSA’s intelligence collection efforts underscores the relevance of
the ratchet effect to scholarly discussions of anti-terrorism laws. I do not seek to prove or disprove that the recent NSA
surveillance controversy illustrates the ratchet effect at work, nor do I debate the potential strength or weakness of the ratchet effect
as an explanation for the staying power or growth of anti-terrorism laws. As Sensenbrenner’s recent comments make clear, part of
the original intent of the USA PATRIOT Act appears to have been lost in interpretation. It is reasonable to suggest that
future
anti-terrorism laws may suffer a similar fate. Scholars can therefore benefit from exploring how the USA
PATRIOT Act took shape and evolved, and why anti-terrorism laws can be difficult to unwind.
Colorblindness Kritik
1nc
First, the affirmative’s reaction to NSA surveillance is a product of white privilege. The
abuses they’re outraged with aren’t exceptions to the rule; they are the rule.
Wise 13 — Timothy J. Wise, anti-racist activist and writer, holds a B.A. in Political Science from
Tulane University, 2013 (“Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege,” Tim Wise’s
blog, June 19th, Available Online at http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-andthe-irony-of-racial-privilege/, Accessed 02-17-2015)
The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow struck against
democracy, and that now our liberties are in jeopardy is the kind of thing one can only believe if
one has had the luxury of thinking they were living in such a place, and were in possession of
such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury enjoyed by painfully few folks
of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they have
long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in housing, the
justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have circumscribed
the boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for the latter, freedom
and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic privation in a class system
that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most other nations
with which we like to compare ourselves.
In short, when people proclaim a desire to “take back our democracy” from the national security
apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a
premise that is entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back, and
that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasn’t and it hasn’t
been.
Second, their colorblind policy analysis perpetuates racism and inequality.
Wise 10 — Timothy J. Wise, anti-racist activist and writer, holds a B.A. in Political Science from
Tulane University, 2010 (“With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White
Privilege on the Liberal-Left,” Tim Wise’s blog, August 17th, Available Online at
http://www.timwise.org/2010/08/with-friends-like-these-who-needs-glenn-beck-racism-andwhite-privilege-on-the-liberal-left/, Accessed 02-17-2015)
Liberal Colorblindness and the Perpetuation of Racism
By “liberal colorblindness” I am referring to a belief that although racial disparities are certainly
real and troubling — and although they are indeed the result of discrimination and unequal
opportunity — paying less attention to color or race is a progressive and open-minded way to
combat those disparities. So, for instance, this is the type of colorblind stance often evinced by
teachers, or social workers, or folks who work in non-profit service agencies, or other “helping”
professions. Its embodiment is the elementary school teacher who I seem to meet in every town
to which I travel who insists “they never even notice color” and make sure to treat everyone
exactly the same, as if this were the height of moral behavior and the ultimate in progressive
educational pedagogy.
But in fact, colorblindness is exactly the opposite of what is needed to ensure justice and equity
for persons of color. To be blind to color, as Julian Bond has noted, is to be blind to the
consequences of color, “and especially the consequences of being the wrong color in America.”
What’s more, when teachers and others resolve to ignore color, they not only make it harder to
meet the needs of the persons of color with whom they personally interact, they actually help
further racism and racial inequity by deepening denial that the problem exists, which in turn
makes the problem harder to solve. To treat everyone the same — even assuming this were
possible — is not progressive, especially when some are contending with barriers and obstacles
not faced by others. If some are dealing with structural racism, to treat them the same as white
folks who aren’t is to fail to meet their needs. The same is true with women and sexism, LGBT
folks and heterosexism, working-class folks and the class system, persons with disabilities and
ableism, right on down the line. Identity matters. It shapes our experiences. And to not
recognize that is to increase the likelihood that even the well-intended will perpetuate the initial
injury.
Third, their decision to highlight NSA surveillance instead of ongoing, ubiquitous
violence against people of color perpetuates white supremacy. This outweighs the case.
Wise 13 — Timothy J. Wise, anti-racist activist and writer, holds a B.A. in Political Science from
Tulane University, 2013 (“Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege,” Tim Wise’s
blog, June 19th, Available Online at http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-andthe-irony-of-racial-privilege/, Accessed 02-17-2015)
So yeah, the government is spying on you precious. And now you’re pissed?
This is the irony of privilege: the fact that some have for so long enjoyed it, in its largely
unfettered state, is precisely why some of those those same persons are now so exorcised at
the thought of potentially being treated like everyone else has been, forever; and it is also why
the state was able to get away with it for such an extended period. So long as the only possible
targets were racial and religious and class others, shock and outrage could be kept at a
minimum. And so the apparatus of profiling and monitoring and snooping and data collection
and even targeted assassination grew like mushrooms in the dark. And deep down, most of the
same white folks who are now so unhinged by the mere possibility — and a remote one at that
— that they will be treated like those others, knew what was going on.
And they said little or nothing. White liberals — with some notable exceptions — mostly clucked
their tongues and expressed how unfortunate it was that certain people were being profiled, but
they rarely spoke out publicly, or challenged those not-so-random searches at the airport, or
dared to challenge cops when they saw them harassing, or even brutalizing the black and
brown. Plenty of other issues were more pressing. The white conservatives, of course, largely
applauded either or both of those.
And now, because they mostly ignored (or even in some cases cheered) the violations of
Constitutional rights, so long as the violations fell upon someone other than themselves, they
are being freshly confronted with the surly adolescent version of the infant to which they gave
birth, at least indirectly. And they aren’t too happy with his insolence.
Yeah, well, tell it to pretty much every Arab American, every Persian American, every Afghan
American, everyone with a so-called Middle Eastern name walking through an airport in this
country for the past decade or more. Tell them how now you’re outraged by the idea that the
government might consider you a potential terrorist.
Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of black men in New York, stopped and frisked by the
NYPD over the past fifteen years, whose names and information were entered into police
databases, even though they had committed no crime, but just as a precautionary measure, in
case they ever decided to commit one. Tell them how tight it makes you to be thought of as a
potential criminal, evidence be damned.
Tell it to brown folks in Arizona, who worry that the mere color of their skin might provoke a local
official, operating on the basis of state law (or a bigoted little toad of a sheriff), to stop them and
force them to prove they belong in the country. Explain to them how patently offensive and even
hurtful it is to you to be presumed unlawful in such a way as to provoke official government
suspicion.
Tell it to the veterans of the civil rights struggle whose activities — in the Black Panthers, SNCC,
the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement, among others — were
routinely monitored (and more to the point actively disrupted and ripped apart) by government
intelligence agencies and their operatives. Tell them how incredibly steamed you are that your
government might find out what websites you surf, or that you placed a phone call last
Wednesday to someone, somewhere. Make sure to explain how such activities are just a step
away from outright tyranny and surely rank up there alongside the murder and imprisonment to
which their members were subjected. Indeed.
And then maybe, just maybe, consider how privilege — being on the upside, most of the time, of
systems of inequality — can (and has) let you down, even set you up for a fall. How maybe, just
maybe, all the apoplexy mustered up over the NSAs latest outrage, might have been conjured a
long time ago, and over far greater outrages, the burdens of which were borne by only certain
persons, and not others.
Finally, the alternative is to react with indifference to NSA surveillance. Yes, these
abuses are bad. But they’re just more of the same in a country that is not and has never
been free for people of color.
Wise 13 — Timothy J. Wise, anti-racist activist and writer, holds a B.A. in Political Science from
Tulane University, 2013 (“Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege,” Tim Wise’s
blog, June 19th, Available Online at http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-andthe-irony-of-racial-privilege/, Accessed 02-17-2015)
It’s not that I’m not angry.
It’s not that I’m not disturbed, even horrified by the fact that my government thinks it appropriate
to spy on people, monitoring their phone calls — to whom we speak and when — among other
tactics, all in the supposed service of the national interest.
That any government thinks it legitimate to so closely monitor its people is indicative of the
inherent sickness of nation-states, made worse in the modern era, where the power to intrude
into the most private aspects of our lives is more possible than ever, thanks to the datagathering techniques made feasible by technological advance.
That said, I also must admit to a certain nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations about
the National Security Agency’s snooping into phone records, and the dust-up over the leaking of
the NSA’s program by Ed Snowden. And as I tried to figure out why I wasn’t more animated
upon hearing the revelations — and, likewise, why so many others were — it struck me. Those
who are especially chapped about the program, about the very concept of their government
keeping tabs on them — in effect profiling them as potential criminals, as terrorists — are almost
entirely those for whom shit like this is new: people who have never before been presumed
criminal, up to no good, or worthy of suspicion.
In short, they are mostly white. And male. And middle-class or above. And most assuredly not
Muslim.
And although I too am those things, perhaps because I work mostly on issues of racism, white
privilege and racial inequity — and because my mentors and teachers have principally been
people of color, for whom things like this are distressingly familiar — the latest confirmation that
the U.S. is far from the nation we were sold as children is hardly Earth-shattering. After all, it is
only those who have had the relative luxury of remaining in a child-like, innocent state with
regard to the empire in which they reside who can be driven to such distraction by something
that, compared to what lots of folks deal with every day, seems pretty weak tea.
As Yasuragi, a blogger over at Daily Kos reminded us last week:
(This is) the nation that killed protesters at Jackson and Kent State Universities…The
nation that executed Fred Hampton in his bed, without so much as a warrant. The nation
that still, still, still holds Leonard Peltier in prison. The nation that supported Noriega, the
Shah, Trujillo, and dozens of other fascist monsters who did nothing but fuck over their
own people and their neighbors. The nation of Joseph McCarthy and his current-day
descendants. The nation that allows stop-and-frisk.
Before all that: The nation that enforced Jim Crow laws. Before that, the nation that built
itself on slavery and the slave trade. And before all of that, the nation that nearly
succeeded in the genocide of this continent’s indigenous peoples.
So why are you so surprised that our government is gathering yottabytes of data on our
phone calls?
Let’s be clear, it’s not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last two administrations, are no
big deal. They’re completely indefensible, no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire —
from the corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney — to legitimize them. A free
people should not stand for it.
Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein lies the rub.
Afro-Pessimism
1nc
The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itself – the system of
violent antagonisms means solving for contingent violence only reifies white supremacy
and the liberal biopolitical state
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms,” NN
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the
structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the
grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps
their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ
large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by
enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern
world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body
and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would
have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the
world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a
participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital,
a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one
hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a
being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor
power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified
and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she
had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad
discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her
without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to
what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”?
Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it
is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough
gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with
violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are
rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident?
Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair
the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple
sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms
would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there
we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of
antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two
sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political,
questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political
broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those
lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of
socially and politically engaged directors, the archive
of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing
broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred
years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two
simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become
themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and
socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by
radical politics and scholarship were not “Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be
overthrown?” but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those
steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ
large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to
the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were
accountable, in their rhetorical
the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement,
and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise
armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success,”
but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—
by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain
credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential
candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.1
One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an
ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.” The
machinations, to
political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force
of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the
power of
Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the
greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from
struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors,
and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting
(some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the
“crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a
seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with
them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a
revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the
Settlement and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse,
when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual
discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political
discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but “yes” in the sense that in even
the
most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks
in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship
as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of
Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness
and
Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as
unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles,
image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine
social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and
conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between
entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of
one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the
non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and
Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The
grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of
conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the
structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of
assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in
this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White,
and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is
also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political
discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of
suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering,
regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in
question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then
conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological
positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is,
nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.
Blackness is always already hyper visible – the affirmative misses the point – some
bodies will never have the access to anonymity because of the black aesthetic – the
affirmative allows for whiteness to remain invisible and renders blackness as an attractor
to violence
Yancy 13, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily
on issues of social justice, “Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-while-black-in-the-white-gaze/?_r=0, NN
My point here is to say that the white gaze is global and historically mobile. And its origins, while
from Europe, are deeply seated in the making of America.∂ Black bodies in America continue to
be reduced to their surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that often force
those black bodies to move through social spaces in ways that put white people at ease. We
fear that our black bodies incite an accusation. We move in ways that help us to survive the
procrustean gazes of white people. We dread that those who see us might feel the irrational fear
to stand their ground rather than “finding common ground,” a reference that was made by
Bernice King as she spoke about the legacy of her father at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.∂
The white gaze is also hegemonic, historically grounded in material relations of white power: it
was deemed disrespectful for a black person to violate the white gaze by looking directly into
the eyes of someone white. The white gaze is also ethically solipsistic: within it only whites have
the capacity of making valid moral judgments.∂ Even with the unprecedented White House
briefing, our national discourse regarding Trayvon Martin and questions of race have failed to
produce a critical and historically conscious discourse that sheds light on what it means to be
black in an anti-black America. If historical precedent says anything, this failure will only
continue. Trayvon Martin, like so many black boys and men, was under surveillance
(etymologically, “to keep watch”). Little did he know that on Feb. 26, 2012, that he would enter a
space of social control and bodily policing, a kind of Benthamian panoptic nightmare that would
truncate his being as suspicious; a space where he was, paradoxically, both invisible and yet
hypervisible.∂ “I am invisible, understand, simply because people [in this case white people]
refuse to see me.” Trayvon was invisible to Zimmerman, he was not seen as the black child that
he was, trying to make it back home with Skittles and an iced tea. He was not seen as having
done nothing wrong, as one who dreams and hopes.∂ As black, Trayvon was already known
and rendered invisible. His childhood and humanity were already criminalized as part of a white
racist narrative about black male bodies. Trayvon needed no introduction: “Look, the black; the
criminal!”
Blackness operates on an ontological register – it is impossible to make blackness
acceptable within civil society
Yancy 08, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily
on issues of social justice, “Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race “
https://books.google.com/books?id=VQAfAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=%22On+the+elevator,+
my+Black+body+is+ontologically+mapped,+its+coordinates+lead+to+that+which+is+always+immediately
%22&source=bl&ots=11lq3QEyJG&sig=m116eKlVHrBtPWmV9AOYb9v0fZU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCAQ
6AEwAGoVChMI7uOluGUxgIVhz2MCh0F3gf2#v=onepage&q=%22On%20the%20elevator%2C%20my%20Black%20body%
20is%20ontologically%20mapped%2C%20its%20coordinates%20lead%20to%20that%20which%20is%2
0always%20immediately%22&f=false, NN
On the elevator, my Black body is ontologically mapped, its cordinates lead to that which is
always immediately visible: the Black surface. The point here is that the Black body in relation to
the white gam appears in the form of a sheer exteriority, implying that the Black body "shows
up," makes itself known M terms of its Black surface. There is only the visible, the concrete, the
seen, all there, all at once: a single Black thing, =individuated, threatening, ominous, Black. The
white woman thinks she takes no part in this construction: she acts the name of the serious...
She apparently fails to see how he identity is shot through in terms of how she construe. me.
This failure is to be expected given how white privilege renders invisible, indeed, militates
against the recognition of various whitely ways of being-in-the-world. Sullivan notes that the
'habits of white privilege do not merely go noticed. They actively thwart the process of conscious
reflation on them, which allows them to seem non-existent even as they continue to function..l.
Reform is just reactionary conservatism – their unwillingness to accept that systemic
antagonisms cannot be fixed means their project is permeated with whiteness
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of sociology, “Queer
Necropolitics,” http://www.deanspade.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of 'preservation through∂ transformation' to
describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in this∂ dynamic (Harris 2007: 1539-1582;
Siegel1997: 1111-1148). In the face of∂ significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law
reform tends to provide just∂ enough transfonnation to stabilize and preserve status quo
conditions. In the case∂ of widespread black rebellion against white supremacy in the US, civil
rights law∂ and colourblind constitutionalism have operated as formal reforms that masked a∂
pe11wtuation of the status quo of violence against and exploitation of black people.∂ Explicit
exclusionary policies and practices became officially forbidden, yet the∂ disu·ibution of life
chances remained the same or worsened with the growing∂ racialized concentration of wealth in
the US, the dismantling of social welfare, and∂ the explosion of criminalization that has
developed in the same period as the new∂ logic of race neutrality has declared fairness and
justice achieved. Lesbian and gay∂ rights politics' reproduction of the Inythology of antidiscrimination law and the∂ non-stop invocation of'equal rights' frameworks by lesbian and gay
rights politics∂ marks an .investment in the legal structures of anti-blackness that have emerged
in∂ the wake of Brown. The emergence of the demand for LGBT inclusive hate crime∂ laws and
the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and james Byrd, Jr. Hate∂ Crimes Prevention Act
as a highly lauded federal legislative 'win' for lesbian and ∂ gay rights offers a particularly blatant
site of the anti-blackness central to lesbian∂ and gay rights -literally an investment in the
expansion ofcriminalization as a core∂ claim and desire of this purported 'frecdom'. 9 In the
context of the foundational∂ nature of slavery in US political formation, it is perhaps not
surprising to see a∂ political formation of white 'gay and lesbian Americans' articulate a demand
fOr∂ fi-eedom that is contingent on the literal caging of black people.∂ The fantasy that fOrmal
legal equality is all that is needed to eliminate∂ homophobia and transphobia is harmfUl not only
because it participates in the antiblack∂ US progress narrative that civil rights law reforms
resolved anti-blackness in∂ the US (thus any remaining suffering or disparity is solely an issue
of 'personal∂ responsibility'), 1IJ but also because it constructs an agenda that is harmful to
black∂ queer and trans people and other queer and trans people experiencing violent∂ systems
mobilized by anti-blackness. Formal marriage rights will not help poor∂ people, people vvhose
kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfire system∂ regardless of whether or not they
can get married, people who do not have∂ immigration status or health benefits to share with a
spouse if they had one, people∂ who have no property to pass on to their partners, or people
who have no need to∂ be shielded from estate tax. In fact, the current wave of same-sex
marriage advocacy∂ emerges at the same rime as another pro-marriage trend, the push by the
right wing∂ to reverse feminist wins that had made marriage easier to get out of and the Bushera∂
development of marriage promotion programmes (continued by Obama)∂ targeted at women on
welfare (Adams and Coltrane 2007: 17-34; Alternatives to∂ l\!larriage Project 2007; Coltrane and
Adams 2003: 363-372; Feld, Rosier and∂ Manning 2002: 173-183; Pear and Kirkpatrick 2007;
Rector and Pardue 2004).∂ The explicitly anti-black focus of the attacks on welfare and the
mobilization of∂ racialized-genclered images to do this go hand in hand with the pro-marriage
gay∂ rights frame that similarly invests in notions of 'personal responsibility', and∂ racializecl-gendered family formation norm enforcement. The articulation of a∂ desire for legal inclusion in
the explicitly anti-black, anti-poor governance regime∂ of marriage, and the centralization of
marriage rights as the most resourced equality∂ claim of gay and lesbian rights politics, affirms
its alliance with anti-blackness.∂ It is easy to imagine other queer political interventions that
would take a∂ different approach to concerns about parental rights, child custody and other∂
family law problems. Such approaches centre the experiences of queers facing the∂ worst
violence of family law, those whose problems -will not be resolved by samesex∂ marriage parents in prison, parents facing deportation, parents with∂ disabilities, youth in foster care and
juvenile punishment systems, parents whose∂ children have been removed because of 'neglect'
clue to their poverty. The choice∂ of seeking marriage rights, like the choice to pursue hate crime
laws rather than∂ decriminalization, the choice to pursue the Uniting American Families Act 11∂
rather than opposing immigration enforcement and the war on terror, the choice∂ to pursue
military service rather than demilitarization, is a choice to pursue a place∂ fOr white gay and
lesbian people in constitutively anti-black legal structures.
Racial equality under the law is not only impossible but the attempts to re-create and
shift the puzzle pieces of civil society mean slavery is reinvented in different ways
Woan 11, Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of Binghamton
University, “The value of resistance in a permanently white, civil society,”
http://gradworks.umi.com/14/96/1496586.html NN
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, in then influential Black Power, describe reformist
strategies as "playing ball" with the white man. They argue that reform plays the white man's
game in order to gain rights, i.e. appeal to a white supremacist government that is the precise
agent responsible for the original harms they are seeking to alleviate.9 While this may very well
result in the granting of new rights previously denied, it maintains a hierarchical system between
whites and nonwhites, since the latter will have to continue to appeal to the former to ask for
rights they never should have been denied in the first place. This places the former in a position
of power to accept or deny such requests. Thus, in Carmichael and Hamilton's view, attempting
to resist white supremacy by working within white supremacist institutions maintains a
dangerous system of power relations that lock in place the hierarchy between whites and
nonwhites. / It is unfortunate enough that members of minority groups face public and private
racial discrimination. It is worse, however, to place the burden of combating this discrimination
on them. What Carmichael and Hamilton aptly point out is that the hierarchy between races
mentioned above is what is responsible for this undue burden. There is not only the constant
physical struggle of protesting, writing letters, and being dragged through litigation that can often
get expensive, but there is the psychological struggle as well. Why am I not worthy of equal
protection under the law? Why is it that others do not even notice the disparate impact of the
law? Or, even worse, why is it that those who do notice, seem to not care? / What inevitably
comes with these types of reformist strategies is an emotional struggle, namely, an inferiority
complex that makes the victimized individual stop and wonder — who put the white man in
charge of my body? Appeals to the federal government to repeal discriminatory acts that deny
minorities rights becomes analogous to asking whites to eliminate such policies and to allow
others access to the same rights they enjoy every day. The racial state becomes in charge of
what nonwhites can and cannot do, and when nonwhites continue to go to whites asking them
to pass certain policies, nonwhites further legitimate this system of power relations. It is difficult
to see how true equality can be achieved wider such a system. / B. Missing the Root Cause:
The Racial State / Omi and Winant further support this claim and explain that it is not merely
individual policies passed by the United States federal government that are racist, but that racial
oppression is a structure of the government itself.10 They describe this structure as the "racial
state" to show that the state does not merely support racism, but rather, it supports the concept
of race itself. As will be discussed later in this paper, Omi and Winant explain how the state is
the agent that has defined race, and that this definition has evolved over time, to maintain the
concept of race and support racism. / Given the existence of the racial state, Omi and Winant
critique reformist strategies as falling short of achieving normative goals of eliminating racism
since the reforms merely get re-equilibriated. A look at the history of racial victories in the United
States further supports this critique. Racial victories for one minority were often made possible
only with the entrapment of another racial minority. For example, while many celebrate the racial
victory of the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, many fail to see this happened the same year as
Operation Wetback, which shifted the racial discrimination to a different population, removing
close to one million illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans, from the United States.11 Moreover,
soon after the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granting citizenship and
suffrage to Blacks. Congress chose to deny citizenship to Chinese immigrants.12 In 1941,
shortly after the establishment of the Committee on Fair Employment Practices permitted Blacks
into defense industries, Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and sent off to
internment camps. Pei-te Lien argues that all of these "coincidences" support critiques of
reformist strategies that merely target individual policies, since without challenging the racial
state as a whole, even the elimination of these individual policies will fail to eliminate racism, as
they will simply replicate themselves or shift elsewhere and target racial minorities in different
ways.14 / C. Separatist Movements / This helps to explain why political activists began adopting
other more revolutionary strategies. Contrary to Martin Luther King Jr. and many of his followers
during the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement emerged and began advocating
for more separatist strategies that rejected making reformist appeals to the United States
federal government. In his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X argued: / When you
take your case to Washington D.C., you're taking it to the criminal who's responsible: it's like
miming from the wolf to the fox. They're all in cahoots together. They all work political chicanery
and make you look like a chump before the eyes of the world. Here you are walking around in
America, getting ready to be drafted and sent abroad, like a tin soldier, and when you get over
there, people ask you what you are fighting for, and you have to stick your tongue in your cheek.
No, take Uncle Sam to court, take him before the world. / Critics of reformist strategies, such as
Malcolm X, understood the United States as being inherently racial and thus incapable of
reform. They use the "coincidences" listed above as evidence to support this claim. They view
the United States federal government as a racial state that will merely continue to define race in
new and more modernized ways, ensuring the permanence of racism with the passage of new
policies supporting these definitions. This is why they believe reformists are wrong to attack
individual policies, rather than the racial state itself. / For example, the legal enforcement of a
racially discriminatory housing covenant may have been justified due to a racist belief that
members of the minority race restricted from acquiring title within that neighborhood is inferior to
the Caucasian race. More specifically, one might support said covenant because one believes
the inferiority of that minority race and the potential they might become your neighbor will result
in a decrease in the fair market value of your property. After vigorous ongoing protests from civil
rights activists, that particular law enforcing those covenants might get repealed. However, the
reason for the repeal of that law might arise not from an ethical epiphany, but rather an
economic rationale in which the homeowner is shown his property value will remain unaffected,
or perhaps even increase. Thus, that particular act may get repealed, but the policymakers
responsible for its original draft will still be in power, and will maintain the same beliefs that
motivated that piece of legislation in the first place. Because there has been no ethical
realization of the injustice in their conduct, the chances remain high that they will construct new,
apparently different but equally discriminatory policies that will force activists to join forces once
again and continue the same fight. / This is why it is not the individual policies, but the
government itself that is the "preeminent site of racial conflict."17 Omi and Winant's proposal of
the "racial state" views the government as "inherently racial," meaning it does not simply
intervene in racial conflicts, but it is the locus of racial conflict.18 In addition to structuring
conceptions of race, the government in the United States is in and of itself racially structured.19
State policies govern racial politics, heavily influencing the public on how race should be
viewed. The ways in which it does so changes over time, often taking on a more invisible
nature. For example, Omi and Winant describe the racial state as treating race in different ways
throughout different periods of time, first as a biologically based essence, and then as an
ideology, etc. These policies are followed by racial remedies offered by government institutions,
in response to political pressures and in accordance to these different treatments of race,
varying in degree depending on the magnitude of the threats those pressures pose to the order
of society. Notable achievements during the Civil Rights Movement have served as a doubleedged sword. While the reformist strategies utilized during that period helped make certain
advances possible, it also drove other more overt expressions of racism underground. These
more invisible instantiations of racial injustice are far more difficult to identify than its previously
more explicit forms. Praising these victories risks giving off the illusion that the fight is over and
that racism is a description of the past. / For example, the ratification of the Fifteenth
Amendment gave off the illusion that all citizens thereafter had equal access to the right to vote.
Those who supported its ratification now felt entitled to the moral credentials necessary to
legitimize their ability to express racially prejudiced attitudes.21 For example, voter turnout
today remains relatively low for Asian-Americans, and many blame this on cultural differences
between Asians and Americans.22 Asian-Americans are labeled as apathetic in the political
community and they themselves have been attributed the blame for relatively low representation
of Asian-Americans in the government today.23 This however, ignores the way in which other
more invisible practices serve to obstruct Asian-Americans from being able to exercise their
right to vote. / Research by the United States Election Assistance Commission by the Eagleton
Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, for example, indicates that restrictive voter
identification requirements have effectively served to disenfranchise Asian Pacific Islanders
(APIs) from voting.24 In the 2004 election, researchers found APIs in states where voters were
required to present proper identification at the polls were 8.5% less likely to vote.25 This study
confirmed that voter ID requirements prevented a large number of APIs from voting.26 / Voter
suppression tactics also play a large role in the disenfranchisement of APIs. According to a
Voter Intimidation and Vote Suppression briefing paper by Demos, a national public policy
center, an estimated 50 Asian Americans were selectively challenged at the polls in Alabama
during August of 2004, as being ineligible to vote due to insufficient English-speaking skills.27
Many states have allowed this selective challenging of voters to take place at the polls, resulting
in a feeling of fear, intimidation, and embarrassment among APIs, driving them away from the
polls. / The danger in treasuring monumental victories such as the ratification of the Fifteenth
Amendment becomes apparent when people interpret this ratification as an indication that
voting discrimination is no longer a problem, and that if the voter turnout of Asian-Americans is
consistently low, it must be because they are politically apathetic or disinterested in American
ideals. Because they originally supported the ratification of the amendment, whites can now feel
as if they have the moral credentials to make conclusions such as the cultural differences
rationale. The same can be seen after courts ordered the desegregation of public schools and
after affirmative action programs became more widespread. People began assuming AfricanAmericans now had an equal opportunity for education and that if they did not succeed, it must
be a reflection of their intelligence or work-ethic, failing to see the ways the problem has not
been solved, but rather disguised itself in other costumes, such as tracking programs in schools
or teachers who view their presence as merely "affirmative action babies" and expect them to
fail. / One might ask, then, why can we not change the racial state one policy at a time?
Perhaps one could first work to gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat
discriminatory identification requirements and political scare tactics. It would not seem entirely
implausible to assume that the success of individual piecemeal reforms within the government
could eventually result in a transformation of the institution itself. However, simply eliminating
discriminatory policies is insufficient for an overhaul of a racial institution. / Understanding the
motivating reasons for the elimination of individual racist policies is a critical factor in
determining the success of a movement. While one justification for passing the Fifteenth
Amendment might consist of arguments in favor of equality and exposing racial injustice,
another justification might involve maintaining order and minimizing disruption, which is
important to the federal government and its ability to run smoothly. Thus, the government often
seeks out ways to normalize society through eliminating disruptions to preserve order. When
those being denied certain rights grow significantly discontent, they rebel and become
disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society. This can take the form of civil disobedience,
such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more
revolutionary measures, such as damaging government offices or violently harassing officials to
acknowledge the injustices and change policy. / All of these measures, however peaceful or
violent, disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters are filling up the streets or
blocking frequently-used road paths, and most certainly cannot run smoothly if town halls are
being lit on fire. Thus, in order to return to the desired homeostasis, those in power may often
compromise and offer to rectify the situation at hand by granting rights to individuals through
changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the disruption (the protests,
demonstrations, etc.). The lack of effort made towards protecting these rights bolsters Bell's
argument that these reforms serve more of a symbolic value rather than functional. If still
operating under the racial state, these piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the original racial
injustices in the long term, as they will only succeed in establishing a new unstable equilibrium,
only to be followed with the replication of new racial problems.28 These new problems will once
again create resentment, generate protest, and the cycle will begin to replicate itself, ensuring
the permanence of racism. Omi and Winant term this cycle of continuous disruption and
restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This trajectory supports the treatment of
racism as inevitable since even if the racial state mitigates racial disruption over a particular
policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new definition of race will emerge
triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics
The only option for the slave is to reclaim its own death through self-destruction – the
black must become the suicide bomber of civil society and use itself as a weapon to
break down white structures – it is the most powerful form of necropower to remain
incoherent to the liberal interpretations of the sovereign
Sexton 10, Jared Sexton, professor at UC Irvine, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery” NN
The final object of contemplation in Mbembe’s rewriting of Agam- ben’s rewriting of Foucault’s
biopolitics is the fin de siècle figure of resis- tance to the colonial occupation of Palestine: the
(presumptively male) suicide bomber. The slave, “able to demonstrate the protean capabilities
of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by
another,” is thus contrasted subtly with the colonized native, whose “body is transformed into a
weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense” — a cultural politics in lieu of
an armed struggle in which “to large extent, resistance and self-destruction are synonymous.”35
Resistance to slavery in this account is self-preservative and forged by way of a demonstration
of the capabilities of the human bond, whereas resis- tance to colonial occupation is selfdestructive and consists in a demonstra- tion of the failure of the human bond, the limits of its
protean capabilities. One could object, in an empiricist vein, that the slave too resists in ways
that are quite nearly as self-destructive as an improvised explosive device and that the colonial
subject too resists through the creation and perfor- mance of music and the stylization of the
body, but that would be to miss the symptomatic value of Mbembe’s theorization.¶ Mbembe
describes suicide bombing as being organized by “two apparently irreconcilable logics,” “the
logic of martyrdom and the logic of survival,” and it is the express purpose of the rubric of
necropolitics to meditate upon this unlikely logical convergence.36 However, there is a
discrepancy at the heart of the enterprise. Rightly so, the theorization of necropolitics as a
friendly critique of Agamben’s notion of bare life involves an excursus on certain “repressed
topographies of cruelty,” including, first of all, slavery, in which “the lines between resistance
and suicide, sacri- fice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom become blurred.”37 Yet, as
noted, the logic of resistance-as-suicide-as-sacrifice-as-martyrdom is for Mbembe epitomized by
the presumptively male suicide bomber at war with colonial occupation, “the most accomplished
form of necropower” in the contemporary world, rather than Hartman’s resistant female slave,
Celia, engaged in close-quarters combat with the sexual economy of slave society,¶ “the
emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.”38 Why the unannounced
transposition? Because the restricted notion of homo sacer — alongside the related notions of
bare life and the state of exception— is being used in confusion to account for the effects of the
biopolitics of race too generally. The homo sacer, “divested of political status and reduced to
bare life,” is distinguished not by her vulnerability to a specific form or degree of statesanctioned violence but by her social proscription from the honor of sacrifice.39 The homo sacer
is banned from the witness-bearing function of martyrdom (from the ancient Greek martys,
“witness”). Her suffering is therefore imperceptible or illegible as a rule. It is against the law to
recognize her sovereignty or self-possession.
Narcissism Kritik
1nc
Social media nurtures narcissistic self-inflation – the plan intensifies narcissistic
capabilities
Buffardi and Campbell ’08 [Laura and Keith, psychology professors at the University of
Georgia, “Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites”, Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 6/3/2008,
http://www.swaraunib.com/indra/Sistem%20informasi/TPB/Narcissism%20and%20Social.pdf //
date accessed 6/26/15 K.K]
Narcissism refers to a personality trait reflecting a grandiose and inflated self-concept.
Specifically, narcissism is associated with positive and inflated self-views of agentic traits like
intelligence, power, and physical attractiveness (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004; Campbell, Rudich,
& Sedikides, 2002; Gabriel, Critelli, & Ee, 1994; John & Robins, 1994) as well as a pervasive
sense of uniqueness (Emmons, 1984) and entitlement (Campbell, Bonacci, & Shelton, 2004).2
From a basic trait perspective, narcissism is associated with a high degree of
extraversion/agency and a low level of agreeableness or communion (e.g., Miller & Campbell,
2008; Paulhus & Williams, 2002). A similar high agency pattern (and negative but typically
small/nonsignificant correlations with communion) is also found in narcissists’ explicit selfconceptions (Campbell, Foster, & Finkel, 2002), implicit self-conceptions (Campbell, Bosson,
Goheen, Lakey, & Kernis, 2007), and implicit motives (Carroll, 1987). Central to most theoretical
models of narcissism in social-personality psychology is the use of social relationships in part to
regulate self-esteem, self-concept positivity, or narcissistic esteem (Campbell, 1999; Campbell,
Brunell, & Finkel, 2006; Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001; Raskin, Novacek, & Hogan, 1991). Narcissists
do not focus on interpersonal intimacy, warmth, or other positive long-term relational outcomes,
but they are very skilled at both initiating relationships and using relationships to look popular,
successful, and high in status in the short term. Narcissists participate in this dynamic “selfconstruction” (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001) via relationships to constantly affirm[s] their narcissistic
esteem. It has been suggested that this process is due, at least partially, to narcissists’
dispositional impulsivity (Vazire & Funder, 2006). How does this narcissistic self-regulation or
self-construction (we use these terms largely interchangeably) operate in the context of
interpersonal relationships more specifically? First, narcissism is linked positively with
relationship formation. For example, narcissism is associated with being (a) liked in initial
interactions (Oltmanns, Friedman, Fiedler, & Turkheimer, 2004; Paulhus, 1998), (b) perceived
as a leader (Brunell, Gentry, Campbell, & Kuhnert, 2006), (c) perceived as exciting (Foster,
Shrira, & Campbell, 2003), (d) socially confident (Brunell, Campbell, Smith, & Krusemark, 2004),
(e) entertaining (Paulhus, 1998), and (f) able to obtain sexual partners (Foster, Shrira, &
Campbell, 2006). Second, narcissism is associated negatively with seeking out or creating longterm relationships that have qualities of closeness, empathy, or emotional warmth (Brunell et al.,
2004; Campbell, 1999; Campbell & Foster, 2002). Third, narcissism is associated with using
relationships as an opportunity or forum for self enhancement. For example, narcissists brag
and show off (Buss & Chiodo, 1991), perform well when there is an opportunity for public glory
(Wallace & Baumeister, 2002), and seek attractive, high-status, “trophy” romantic partners
(Campbell, 1999). Others in relationships with narcissistic individuals, however, often suffer in
the longer term as narcissism is linked to aggressiveness (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998),
psychological control (Campbell, Foster, et al., 2002), game playing and infidelity (Campbell,
Foster, et al., 2002; Le, 2005; Schmitt & Buss, 2001), and lower levels of commitment
(Campbell & Foster, 2002). Indeed, longitudinal research on relationships has found that the
initial likeability associated with narcissism fades and is even reversed in the longer term
(Paulhus, 1998). Similarly, longitudinal research in clinical settings has found a significant longterm consequence of narcissism is the suffering of close others (Miller, Campbell, & Pilkonis,
2007). How might narcissism operate in a social networking Web site? These online
communities may be an especially fertile ground for narcissists to self-regulate via social
connections for two reasons. First, narcissists function well in the context of shallow (as
opposed to emotionally deep and committed) relationships. Social networking Web sites are
built on the base of superficial “friendships” with many individuals and “sound-byte” driven
communication between friends (i.e., wallposts). Certainly, individuals use social networking
sites to maintain deeper relationships as well, but often the real draw is the ability to maintain
large numbers of relationships (e.g., many users have hundreds or even thousands of “friends”).
Second, social networking Web pages are highly controlled environments (Vazire & Gosling,
2004). Owners have complete power over self-presentation on Web pages, unlike most other
social contexts. In particular, one can use personal Web pages to select attractive photographs
of oneself or write self-descriptions that are self-promoting. Past research shows that
narcissists, for example, are boastful and eager to talk about themselves (Buss & Chiodo,
1991), gain esteem from public glory (Wallace & Baumeister, 2002), are prevalent on reality
television (Young & Pinsky, 2006), and enjoy looking at themselves on videotape and in the
mirror (Robins & John, 1997). Personal Web pages should present a similar opportunity for selfpromotion. In sum, given the behaviors of narcissists in offline relationship contexts, we expect
that they will take advantage of the new virtual arena for pursuing a similar self-regulatory
agenda. This will include relatively high levels of relationship formation, self-promoting images
of oneself, and an overall agentic (rather than communal) self-presentation
Narcissim is fundamentally antihumanistic – it creates the possibility for domination and
when applied to foreign policy, nuclear war
Merton 65 [Thomas Merton, Card cut from the 2002 re-published version, Graduate of
Columbia University, Zen Buddhist, “Love and Living”,
https://books.google.com/books?id=uHzsRR3OID4C&pg=PT168&lpg=PT168&dq=%22narcissis
m%22+AND+%22nuclear+war%22&source=bl&ots=co3kHrdfmY&sig=5heCqgYA1Xeczg5SWe
XMYYvjRc4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bNGRVbLWIcvjQGFqoHYCA&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false, ZS]
The key problem of humanism is the problem of that authentic love which unites man to man not
simply in a symbiotic and semiconscious relationship but as person to person in the authentic
freedom of a mutual gift. Here we come[s] to the question of narcissism, which is closely related
to, in fact inseparable from, alienation. Alienated man is also narcissistic, because his love is
regressive, undeveloped, infantile. It would be interesting here to examine the possible
analogies between this modem psychological concept and the traditional Christian idea of sin,
particularly original sin. They have much in common. The narcissistic personality is centered on
the affirmation of itself and its own limited needs and desires. It sees other things and persons
as real only insofar as they can be related to these selfish desires. Psychology and
anthropology today teach us that primitive forms of religion, particularly those which make
considerable use of magic rites, tend to be associated with narcissistic thinking. But we must not
place all the blame only on primitive people. Narcissism remains a problem of enormous
magnitude, especially in our highly developed modem technological culture, which abounds in
its own hidden forms of magic thinking, superstition, ritualism. Our sophisticated modem culture
has its taboos, its obsessions, and all that goes into the formation of the neuroses, individual
and collective, which so often take the place of formal religion in the minds of men. Erich Fromm
even goes so far as to say that much of modem society and its attitudes can be summed up as
highly organized narcissism. This fascination with the self as a central and sole reality to be
satisfied and catered to in everything is at the root of all idolatrous forms of religion. Narcissism
spontaneously projects itself onto an idol from which the satisfaction of its desires is thought to
be obtained by magic, by cajoling, by manipulation, or by ruse. The characteristic syndrome of
narcissistic thought ends in this immersion in magic and quasi-omnipotent contemplation of the
idol, which is the projection of a selfish and infantile need for love or power. Though narcissism
can be efficiently employed in building up the immense power structures of industrial and
military states, it is essentially antihumanistic. Narcissism is hostile to the true development of
man's capacity to love. Narcissism alienates man and his society in a slavery to things—money,
machines, commodities, luxuries, fashions, and pseudoculture. The idolatrous mentality of
narcissism produces a fake humanism which cynically deifies man in order to cheat him of his
human fulfillment and enslave him to the "rat race" for riches, pleasure, and power. Erich
Fromm has pointed out the deadly alliance between the narcissistic mentality of mass-man and
the destructive tendencies of a society that grows rich on the prospect of nuclear war.
The alternative embraces N.S.A surveillance as a means to deconstruct anonymity –
policing of social media removes the drive for narcissistic tendencies
Rubenfeld 14 (Jed Rubenfeld is a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School and coauthor of the forthcoming book “The Triple Package.”, “Privacy vs. anonymity in the NSA
debate”, http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20140117-privacy-vs.anonymity-in-the-nsa-debate.ece, ZS)
In the world of data gathering, the key concept for setting limits on government surveillance is
privacy. But in the world of data mining, the key is anonymity. Anonymity is very different from
privacy. Walking the streets, you’re not in private, but you may be anonymous if no one
recognizes you. If you go into a store and pay cash for a book, what you’re doing isn’t private,
but, again, you may be anonymous, and that anonymity might be very important to you. When
people post material on a freely accessible website, their postings are public, not private — but
they may well be anonymous. In such contexts, the question is not whether privacy should be
honored but whether anonymity should be protected. Anonymity can in some circumstances be
a great freedom, worthy of protection. In others, it can encourage vicious behavior and enable
crime. Solving the riddle of anonymity is the central question of the brave new digital world,
even if our courts haven’t quite yet caught on. When the government engages in data mining,
anonymity deserves protection. Consider telephone metadata — the dates, times and numbers
of phone calls. Is that information “private”? Thirty-five years ago, in Smith vs. Maryland, the
Supreme Court said no. All that information is already turned over to and collected by phone
companies. Hence the government can capture metadata without any constitutional restrictions
— with no warrant, no probable cause, not even reasonable suspicion. Smith makes intuitive
sense to many people. Your metadata is not nearly as personal as your communication content
— what you say on the phone or what is said to you. Moreover, even the most personal
information is no longer private if exposed enough to others. If you take your laundry to dry
cleaners, you can’t complain when they report what they see to the government (which is what
phone companies are doing when they turn over your metadata to the NSA). Under Smith,
William Pauley, the federal judge who found in December that the NSA metadata program did
not violate privacy rights, was absolutely right. But Richard Leon, the federal judge who ruled
against the NSA program last month, was also right. Leon saw that there was something wrong
in the NSA program apart from whether metadata is private. Given the way cellphones are used
today, Leon concluded, metadata can be mined to produce a live-streaming digital portrait of an
individual’s entire life. “Records that once would have revealed a few scattered tiles of
information about a person,” he wrote, “now reveal an entire mosaic — a vibrant and constantly
updating picture of the person’s life.” For example, well-mined metadata could reveal a “wealth
of detail” about a person’s “familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.”
This is an anonymity problem: The NSA cannot create a dossier on you from your metadata
unless it knows that you made the calls the agency is looking at. The privacy question is all
about data gathering: Should the NSA have access to nationwide metadata? The right answer
to that question is yes. But identities should be hidden. Suppose the NSA had access to all the
metadata of every call a certain person made over the past five years — but didn’t know who
that person was. Instead, the NSA knew only that individual “H4QQ9F” made the calls in
question. In that world, there’s no Orwellian surveillance. But suppose that individual H4QQ9F
made a call to a known al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. Then the NSA should be permitted to
pierce the veil of anonymity and find out who H4QQ9F is. Privacy was key when the question
was whether, or how much of, our private lives could be monitored or recorded. That train has
left the station. Today, most of us allow a great deal of our lives to be monitored and recorded
— whenever we use a search engine, for example, or buy something online. Even the content
of our private communications, such as emails and chats, is now routinely exposed to and
stored by people at Facebook or Google. The key question isn’t how to keep information about
us from getting out into the world; it’s how that information can be used. The word “privacy”
doesn’t appear in the Constitution. Privacy jurisprudence was a creation of the 20th century.
Today, we need a new jurisprudence of anonymity. We need laws and technologies that can
break through anonymity when people commit crimes or torts online. But we also need laws and
technologies that will protect anonymity when government engages in 21st-century data mining.
Framework
The role of the ballot is to evaluate the most in round ethical advocacy this is paramount
for debate- First is fairness- It’s key to neg ground and flex, as well as checks back aff
side bias such as first and last speech and picks the focus of the debate. Second is
education- Omitting the implications of the affirmative opens the floodgates to recreate
the flawed policy. There is no high school equivalent of k education, which means default
to education over fairness impacts
2nc Ext: Impact
Pathological narcissism collapses dignity and crisis
Giroux ’12 [Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at
McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. “Disposable Youth,
Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty”, Taylor and Francis, 2012, K.K]
As public life is commercialized, commodified, and policed, the pathology of individual
entitlement and narcissism erodes those public spaces in which the conditions for conscience,
decency, self-respect, and dignity take root. The crisis of youth is symptomatic of the current
crisis of democracy, and as such it hails us as much for the threat that it poses as for the
challenges and possibilities it invokes. We need to liberate the discourse and spaces of freedom
from the plague of consumer narcissism and casino capitalism. We need to engage the struggle
to restore and build those public spaces where democratic ideals, visions, and social relations
can be nurtured and developed as part of a genuinely meaningful education and politics. The
time has come to take seriously the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who
bravely argued that freedom is an empty abstraction if people fail to act. Douglass insisted that
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet
depreciate agitation, are men [and women] who want crops without plowing up the ground, they
want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many
waters” (Douglass 1985: 204). The deteriorating state of American youth, especially poor white
and minority youth, may be the most serious challenge the United States will face in the 21st
century. It is a struggle that demands a new understanding of politics, one that is infused not
only with the language of critique, but also with the discourse of possibility. It is a struggle that
requires us to think beyond the given, imagine the unimaginable, and combine the lofty ideals of
democracy with a willingness to fight for its realization. But this is not a fight we can win through
individual struggles or isolated political movements. It demands new modes of solidarity, new
political organizations, and a powerful, expansive social movement capable of uniting diverse
political interests and groups. It is a struggle that is as educational as it is political, one that must
build upon self-awareness as well as historical consciousness. At the present moment, it is a
struggle whose call for reflection and action is as necessary as it is urgent. Those of us who
believe in justice and human rights need to liberate the discourse and spaces of freedom from
the plagues of militarism and consumer narcissism and struggle to build those public spaces
where democratic ideals, visions, and social relations can be nurtured and developed as part of
a genuinely meaningful education and politics—we need along with young people to build those
spaces, social relations, and institutions that give meaning to both the promise of democracy
and a future in which young people matter.
Narcissistic self-promotion necessitates self-annihilation and sustains Privacy Fatigue –
turns the internal link
Buffardi and Campbell ’08 [Laura and Keith, psychology professors at the University of
Georgia, “Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites”, Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 6/3/2008,
http://www.swaraunib.com/indra/Sistem%20informasi/TPB/Narcissism%20and%20Social.pdf //
date accessed 6/26/15 K.K]
This research has several implications both for narcissism and for Web page–mediated social
interaction. First, the expression of narcissism on social networking Web sites is very similar to
its expression in other social domains. Narcissism is related to a higher number of social
relationships, self-promoting self-presentation, and the perception of having a large number of
agentic characteristics. Only two differences were found between narcissism in the “real world”
and in online communities. The narcissists’ quotes were judged to be less entertaining than
those of non narcissists. This contrasts with the general finding that narcissists are entertaining
at first meeting (e.g., Paulhus, 1998). We would like to point out that our incongruent finding,
however, is not sufficient to suggest that narcissists’ ability to entertain others in social contexts
is subdued online. Rather, it is possible that narcissists’ quotes are actually quite entertaining to
peers who know their context but not to our RA coders who were not acquainted with the profile
owners personally. Based on our findings, it is also plausible that the extent to which the
narcissists’ quotes and other aspects of their profiles were viewed as selfpromoting directly
interfered with the quotes’ entertainment and cleverness. Therefore, additional research in
which the entertainment value of narcissists’ full profile, rather than just the quotes section, is
necessary to determine whether narcissists are less entertaining in online contexts than in faceto-face ones. In addition, the narcissists were judged to be more attractive based on their
photos than the non narcissists. This differs from past research that has found no differences in
attractiveness between narcissists and nonnarcissists (Gabriel et al., 1994). Why this disparity?
One possible explanation is that narcissists’ self-enhancing biases might lead them to consider
more attractive pictures of themselves to be more accurate representations of their true
likenesses. We would also speculate, however, that the narcissists appear to be attractive on
Facebook because they are strategically posting pictures that make them appear sexy and
attractive; this was not an option in Gabriel and colleagues’ (1994) study. Second, unacquainted
raters are able to judge Web page owners’ narcissism with some level of accuracy. This finding
is consistent with those concerning the accuracy of Big Five personality perception based on
viewing Web pages (Marcus et al., 2006; Vazire & Gosling, 2004) in that Web page viewers can
make reasonable estimates of personality from Web pages. More broadly, the correlation
between self-reported narcissism and strangers’ impressions of narcissism also suggests that at
least on Facebook, less narcissistic participants do not seem to be using the Internet as a
channel for self-promotion. That is, more modest, less self-centered individuals in real life do not
appear to be self-promoting to the degree that narcissists are on the Web. Third, our results
indicate that, as in past Big Five research (Marcus et al., 2006), viewers use Web page content
to form impressions of the Web page owner’s level of narcissism. We found that the quantity of
social interaction and main photo in particular played a significant role in this process.
Conversely, the raters seemed to have omitted other Facebook features that related to NPI
scores, including self-promoting information about the self, self-promoting quotes, less
entertaining quotes, main photo sexiness, and fun pictures, in their impression formation.
Finally, narcissistic impression ratings related (falsely) to three profile characteristics that did not
correlate with owners’ narcissistic personality, namely, quantity of information listed about the
self, self-promoting pictures, and provocative pictures. This pattern in raters’ errors of omission
and commission preliminarily suggests that individuals who have experience with social
networking Web sites, as presumably our raters did, may have developed a system or script
(Schank & Abelson, 1977) for viewing such Web pages and efficiently gleaning important
information for the context of a social networking community. It is understandable, if this is the
case, that an individual’s social capital (how popular and socially active they are quantifiably)
and attractiveness, which both can be determined quickly, play[s] an important role in
impression formation, as our results suggest. In contrast, the somewhat more difficult to
decipher written information, such as that in the About Me and Quotes sections, may be
secondary.