MM Drones Case Neg- Ravi
Strat Sheet
This is the case neg against the drones aff from the Malsin-Miller lab.
The offcase positions are the Neolib K, T-Curtail, and a states CP with a court stripping net
benefit. There’s a concession in the block to be made on T-curtail, because they probably do
meet your interpretation when evaluating the plan text in a vacuum. The concession, throws the
1ar off, and makes them think that they have no access to their advantages.
2nr can be the neolib K and case, since their internal links are super sketchy, so you just have to
win a marginal risk of the K- All of their case args are about drones being possibly beneficial, but
none of them make the reverse causal arg that without drones, our agriculture, biodiversity, and
our economy will collapse. This is definitely something you should spend some time on
exploiting.
The 2nr can also be the states cp with the court stripping net benefit. The net benefit indicates
that when the Courts make a controversial decision, there will be Congressional backlash, which
undercuts judicial legitimacy, which spills over to democratic legitimacy. The states CP definitely
solves the drones advantage, but probably doesn’t solve the judiciary advantage, but tbh that
advantage is LAUGHABLE. That advantage can be mitigated right away in 1AC CX.
I have attached a 1ac below- Starred cards may not be read in the 1AC but just are additional
impact to the food security scenario.
Their 1ac
Drones
Contention 1 is Drones
Lack of clear guidelines undermine the drone industry
Whitehouse ’13 Writer for USA Today, 2/23/15, Kaja, USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/02/23/crackdown-drones-technology-faa-nyccouncilman/23696377/
NEW YORK — The federal government isn't the only entity seeking to rein in drones as their
popularity grows.
Since 2012, 15 states have enacted laws restricting drones in some way, according to data from
theNational Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks state laws.
And if New York City Council Member Dan Garodnick gets his way, drones will be banned in the
Big Apple, except for police with a warrant, as soon as this year.
"There are a lot of very important uses for drones that exist, but until we have the ability to
enforce the rules, we are not at a point to grant permission," Garodnick told USA TODAY.
Across the country, state and local governments are grappling with a confusing array of
questions about how to deal with drones, which hold great potential to help society as well as
untested privacy and security risks.
Drone advocates say the rising plethora of restrictions threaten to leave the U.S. behind at a
time when the drone industry is growing. Drone spending is on track to hit $91 billion
worldwide in the next 10 years, according to aerospace and defense industry research group
Teal Group.
"This is an incredibly important industry," said John Frankel, founding partner of ff Venture
Capital, which is an investor in drone operator Skycatch. "It will create an enormous number of
jobs in the U.S. and abroad. It will open up enormous efficiencies for existing businesses and
industries."
If the U.S. gets too restrictive on drones, Frankel added, "Australia, Europe and Asia will become
massive markets, and we will be a backwater."
Currently, the biggest driver of new drone laws by states has been privacy, especially unlawful
government surveillance. So far, 14 of the 15 states have passed laws to curb government
agencies from using drones to monitor its citizens, such as in traffic or at a public rally.
Seven of the 15 states also sought to rein in how private citizens can use drones, according to
NCSL's data. In Louisiana, for, example, it's illegal to use a drone to monitor a person or property
without consent. Offenders face a fine of up to $500 and six months in jail.
States overcompensate for lack of federal regulation
Goodale ’13 Writer for The Christian Science Monitor, 2/6/13, Gloria Goodale, “States
consider drone bans: Overreaction or crucial for privacy rights? (+video)”,
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2013/0206/States-consider-drone-bans-Overreactionor-crucial-for-privacy-rights-video
LOS ANGELES — As scrutiny over US drone policy abroad grows, local and state officials are
considering measures to ban their use at home.
Charlottesville, Va., passed the first anti-drone law in the nation Monday, and lawmakers in at
least nine states from Massachusetts to California are considering some form of legislation
restricting the use of drones.
The perception is that “the drone program has grown with so little oversight from Congress or
lawmakers" that states have to "make up the slack,” saysMichael Boyle, a political scientist
at La Salle University in Philadelphiawho has studied the use of drones. The state and local
efforts arise from “the prospect of an increasingly intrusive nanny state – and it will lead to
invasions of privacy by governments, but also by organizations such as universities, some of
whom have already been given permits for drones.”
The local and state push to legislate is being driven more by fear than reason, says Matt Waite,
founder of the Drone Journalism Lab at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at
the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
The US economy’s on the brink
Vermeulen 6/25, CEO and founder of AlgoTrades Systems, a market technical analyst, trader
and author of Technical Trading Mastery: 7 Steps to Win With Logic. (6/25/15, Chris Vermeulen,
“Americans have no idea that the United States is on the brink”,
http://countingpips.com/2015/06/americans-have-no-idea-that-the-united-states-is-on-thebrink/)
Americans have no idea that the United States is on the brink of an economic crash. It is really
not conceivable to the majority of Americans. We have been told by President Obama that we
are experiencing economic growth and that the economy has been stable for a number of years
now. The stock market continues to surge to new heights. The NASDAQ is at a brand new alltime record high.
So how in the world can anyone be talking about an economic collapse? Many Americans will
agree that we did have a big bump in the road back in 2008, but things have pretty much
returned to normal now. Unfortunately, this brief period of stability that we have been
enjoying is an “ illusion ”.
The fundamental problems that caused the financial crisis of 2008 have yet to be addressed.
Our long-term economic problems have actually gotten worse. In the 8 years that the Fed has
been doing QE, our leaders in Congress and the White House have made no progress towards
the required Fiscal Policy changes that have to be addressed. Of course, it has just been
business as usual back in Washington DC.
Today, the entire economic system in the United States is based on debt. Without debt there is
little to no economy. Thus, debt comes from the banks and the concept of the “too big to fail
banks” is at the heart of this debt-based system.
If the economy was expanding and is as healthy as we have been led to believe, there would be
lots of buying and selling, and money would be moving around rapidly. The U.S. economy is
behaving exactly contrary to that right now. The velocity of M2 has fallen to an all-time record
low. This is a very powerful indicator that we have entered a deflationary era and that the
Federal Reserve has been attempting to combat this by flooding the financial system with
more money through more QE.
The main problem with this economy is that it has not been repaired. The only fiscal change
taking place in the high echelons of Congress has to do with the way that money is being spent
without having any money. This is what is fundamentally wrong with our economy.
In the past 7 years, it was imperative for the government to have focused on a much more
balanced budget. On a very basic level, the amount of economic activity that we have been
witnessing is not anywhere near where it should be, and the flow of money through our
economy is very stagnant. They can try to mask it for a certain period of time, but it will come
unraveled.
Why would McDonald’s plan to permanently close 700 poorly performing restaurants over the
course of 2015? Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”? Procter &
Gamble announced that it will be cutting up to 6,000 more jobs from their payroll. JP Morgan
just announced 5,000 layoffs last week. Why would they be doing this if the economy is
“getting better”?
Because the economy is NOT getting better, it has just been getting worse. Our Government has
persistently manipulated the formula in order to create a facade that they want us to see.
They are changing the calculations on GDP for the 2ND Quarter of 2015 so they will not result
in a negative number. That is truly how bad the economy really is. As recently as today, the Fed
has made a 3rd revision of the GDP which is more negative.
“The American Dream” is now dead. We live in a country where almost everyone is drowning
in debt and where a vast number of people are simply broke. This is the reason that both
parents are working in most families today. In fact, both parents are working multiple jobs in a
desperate attempt to make ends meet.
Over the years, the cost of living has risen steadily, but American paychecks have remained the
same over the last 40 years. The erosion of the middle class will continue until it will just not
exist anymore. Our dream in America has always been that we could afford a home, a car or
two, and a nice annual vacation. “The American Dream” is out of reach for more Americans than
it ever has been before. As it stands now, the middle class is dying right in front of our eyes.
Drones improve the efficiency of every sector of the economy--++Dubravac ’14, Chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association (9-2-2014, Shawn
Dubravac, Richmond Times-Dispatch, "How commercial drones can drive economic growth",
http://www.richmond.com/opinion/their-opinion/guest-columnists/article_a849638c-bf53514d-a793-51255162a0bf.html)
Drones are an exceptional example of how emerging technologies can increase the
productivity of myriad diverse businesses . Whether monitoring valuable infrastructure,
quickly and inexpensively surveying an area, or delivering rich video in real time, drones will
change the way businesses do what they do. The CEA estimates the costs related to using a
drone may be one-tenth the cost of other alternatives of certain business activities. Because
drones are such efficient cost-reducers for various use-cases, entirely new services and
consumer benefits are now on their way to market.
In some ways, the marketplace for commercial drones is limited only by our imaginations .
Drones have already helped catch cattle rustlers, capture wedding memories and monitor
national borders. In the agricultural sector alone, drones are farming crops, weeding fields and
applying fertilizers. Eventually, this technology will be integral to media outlets, real estate
professionals and emergency first responders. In July, a three-day search for a missing senior
in Wisconsin ended when an amateur drone pilot joined the effort and spotted the man after
only 20 minutes.
As in most nascent markets, companies are experimenting with drones across numerous
business applications. In July, Amazon petitioned the FAA for an exemption to allow the
company to test drones in the U.S., an effort to implement same-day package delivery. Such
experimentation can lead to lasting innovation, new business models and economic growth.
Without the exemptions, Amazon may have to move its research and development operations
abroad, resulting in fewer domestic jobs and less national investment.
In the absence of federal guidelines from the FAA, states are instead crafting their own drone
laws, creating a patchwork of different and diverse state laws. According to the National
Conference of State Legislatures, 16 states including Virginia have enacted 20 laws regarding
drone use — the latest laws, in Tennessee and Indiana, went into effect July 1. This maze of
regulations will make compliance much more complicated for companies that want to
incorporate drones into their commercial operations.
We shouldn’t delay any longer in opening our skies to new economic growth. While we’re
waiting for the government to provide clarity, the projected jobs, economic activity and $4.4
million in added tax revenue the drone sector will provide in Virginia over the coming years are
drifting that much further out of reach. We need to feed tomorrow’s economic engine today,
but the absence of forward thinking is hindering our potential.
It transforms every industry—clear regulation is key
Hash-Hoff ’13 President, Electrofab Sales, (7-19-2013, Michele Nash-Hoff, Industry Week,
"What is the Importance of Unmanned Vehicles to our Economy?",
http://www.industryweek.com/emerging-technologies/what-importance-unmanned-vehiclesour-economy)
The report states that “the main inhibitor of U.S. commercial and civil development of the UAS
is the lack of a regulatory structure.” Non-defense use of UAS has been extremely limited
because of current airspace restrictions.
The combination of greater flexibility, lower capital and lower operating costs could allow
unmanned vehicles to transform fields as diverse as urban infrastructure management,
farming and oil and gas exploration, to name a few. The use of UAS in the future could be” a
more responsible approach to certain airspace operations from an environmental, ecological
and human risk perspective.”
Present-day unmanned vehicles have longer operational duration and require less maintenance
than earlier models and are more fuel-efficient. These aircraft can be deployed in a variety of
terrains and may not require prepared runways.
Economic collapse causes competition for resources and instability that
escalates and goes nuclear
Harris and Burrows, 9 [counselor in the National Intelligence Council, the principal drafter of
Global Trends 2025, **member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future:
Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis”, Washington Quarterly,
http://www.twq.com/09april/docs/09apr_burrows.pdf]
Increased Potential for Global Conflict
Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and
interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing
sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While
we continue to believe that the Great
Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful
effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the
sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would
not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which
the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile
economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier.
In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on
the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For
those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most
dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established
groups inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks and
newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that
would become narrower in
an economic downturn.
The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence
would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries
about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security
arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own
nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the
great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity
conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between
those states involved are not well established. The
close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with
inherent difficulties in
achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel,
short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus
on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises .
underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce
Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could
reemerge , particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist
practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure
their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government
leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even
actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime
security concerns are providing a rationale for
naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus
focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead
to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in
protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to
be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a
more dog-eat-dog world.
Drones are key to sage brush restoration-saves sage grouse
Ridler 6/17, Writer for the associated press (6/17/15, Keith Ridler, Star Tribune, “Scientists fly
drones to map sagebrush as part of Western wildfire strategy”,
http://www.startribune.com/scientists-fly-drones-to-map-sagebrush-for-wildfirestrategy/307804721/)
BOISE, Idaho — Scientists have deployed drones over western Idaho to map a little-known
landscape as part of an effort to reduce wildfire risks and protect sage grouse and other
wildlife across the West.
They say they have to learn more about what grows in the region so that when charred areas
are restored, land managers don't plant a type of sagebrush that sage grouse won't eat.
The football-sized bird found in 11 states is being considered for federal protections under the
Endangered Species Act.
"The lack of maps is a huge, critical problem for conserving sagebrush and any species — like
sage grouse — that depend on it," Matt Germino, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist, said.
"We have probably replanted the wrong type of sage brush to some habitats," he said.
A key part of the Interior Department's new wildfire strategy involves replacing native plants
after giant blazes, which have been an increasing problem in rangeland in many Western states
over the last decade. Such efforts would reduce the likelihood of invasive plants, which often
burn more easily, from overrunning scorched areas.
Scientists want to use drones to identify and map the range of three subspecies of big
sagebrush. The most abundant is called Wyoming big sagebrush. Basin big sagebrush is the most
drought-tolerant. Mountain big sagebrush, meanwhile, is typically found at higher elevations.
The first problem with creating such a map, scientists say, is the enormous size of the landscape.
Attempts to use satellites have failed because they can't supply the necessary detail. Sending
scientists out to map on foot isn't practical because of the giant landscapes involved.
The second problem is that the three sagebrush subspecies are so similar that even expert
botanists examining plants close up have trouble telling them apart.
Wildlife, however, can tell the difference, Jennifer Forbey, a researcher with Boise State
University, said. For sage grouse, she noted, their entire winter diet is sagebrush.
They’re a keystone species
Welch ’10, Seattle Times staff reporter(3-4-2010, Craig Welch, Seattle Times, "Big impact on
West if sage grouse is recommended as protected species",
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/big-impact-on-west-if-sage-grouse-isrecommended-as-protected-species/)
The problem for the grouse is simple: Half the sagebrush habitat in the West is gone.
“These birds need a pretty big landscape,” said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
biologist Derek Stinson. “They depend on sage brush, and lots and lots of it.”
Before dawn Thursday, as he does almost every day this time of year, Schroeder, the biologist,
piloted his truck down unmarked dirt roads. His eyes danced in the dark as he scanned empty
wheat fields for strutting grouse.
With the windows down he heard them almost as soon as he spied them, the males puffing out
their chests and rolling their feathers and issuing what sounded like monstrous burps. The
morning spring ritual is how they compete with one another to try to attract a female to mate.
Adult females weigh about 2 pounds, males up to 7 pounds. Chowing for eight months out of
the year on scratch-dry sagebrush needles, grouse are plump, skittish birds that often range 20
miles between their leks — their strutting grounds — and where they nest. But they are
sensitive to noise and easily driven off by farms and roads. Tall structures like power lines, wind
turbines and oil derricks on treeless grasslands offer new perches for predators — golden
eagles, gyrfalcons and other raptors — that might swipe grouse for lunch.
They once occupied desert that is now the Tri-Cities. The Columbia Basin Irrigation Project filed
their lands with water. The wild brush fires that once drove grouse to new areas now squeeze
them into smaller and smaller pockets.
Like spotted owls, the grouse are considered a keystone species — a means to judge the health
of an entire landscape. And the landscape they represent is one of the West’s largest. Based on
how grouse are faring, Schroeder said the Western grasslands could use some help.
Keystone species loss causes a domino effect-destroying the entire ecosystem
National Geographic ’11 (4/20/11, National Geographic, “keystone species”,
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/encyclopedia/keystone-species/)
A keystone species is a plant or animal that plays a unique and crucial role in the way
an ecosystem functions. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically
different or cease to exist altogether .
All species in an ecosystem, or habitat, rely on each other. The contributions of a keystone
species are large compared to the species' prevalence in the habitat. A small number of
keystone species can have a huge impact on the environment.
A keystone species is often, but not always, a predator. A few predators can control
the distribution and population of large numbers of prey species. A single mountain lion near
the Mackenzie Mountains in Canada, for example, can roam an area of hundreds of kilometers.
The deer, rabbits, and bird species in the ecosystem are at least partly controlled by the
presence of the mountain lion. Their feeding behavior, or where they choose to make their
nests and burrows, are largely a reaction to the mountain lion's activity. Scavenger species, such
as vultures, are also controlled by the activity of the mountain lion.
A keystone species' disappearance would start a domino effect. Other species in the habitat
would also disappear and become extinct. The keystone species' disappearance could affect
other species that rely on it for survival. For example, the population of deer or rabbits would
explode without the presence of a predator. The ecosystem cannot support an unlimited
number of animals, and the deer soon compete with each other for food and water resources.
Their population usually declines without a predator such as a mountain lion.
Without the keystone species, new plants or animals could also come into the habitat and
push out the native species. Some species of hummingbirds are keystone species in the
Sonoran Desert of North America. Hummingbirds pollinate many varieties of native cactusand
other plants. In areas of the Sonoran Desert with few hummingbirds, invasive species such
as buffelgrasshave taken over the ecosystem.
The theory that the balance of ecosystems can rely on one keystone species was first
established in 1969 by American zoology professor Robert T. Paine. Paine's research showed
that removing one species, thePisaster ochraceus sea star, from a tidal plain on
Tatoosh Island in the U.S. state of Washington, had a huge effect on the surrounding
ecosystem. The sea stars are a major predator for mussels on Tatoosh Island. With the sea stars
gone, mussels took over the area and crowded out other species. In this ecosystem, the sea star
was the keystone species.
The sea otter is another example of a keystone species in the Pacific Northwest. These mammals
feed on sea urchins, controlling their population. If the otters didn't eat the urchins, the urchins
would eat up the habitat'skelp. Kelp, or giant seaweed, is a major source of food and shelter for
the ecosystem. Some species of crabs, snails, and geese depend on kelp for food. Many types
of fish use the huge kelp forests to hide from predators. Without sea otters to control the urchin
population, the entire ecosystem would collapse.
Herbivores can also be keystone species. In African savannas such as the Serengeti plains in
Tanzania, elephants are a keystone species. Elephants eat small trees, such as acacia, that grow
on the savanna. Even if an acacia tree grows to a height of several feet, elephants are able to
knock over the tree and uproot it. This feeding behavior keeps the savanna a grasslandand not a
forest or woodland. With elephants to control the tree population,
grasses thrive and sustain grazing animals such as antelopes, wildebeests, and zebras. Smaller
animals such as mice and shrews are able toburrow in the warm, dry soil of a savanna. Predators
such as lions and hyenas depend on the savanna for prey. Elephants are the keystone species
that maintain the entire savanna ecosystem.
Biodiversity loss causes extinction
Nagan and Hammer ’14, Winston P. Nagan is Sam T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of
Law, Affiliate Professor of Anthropology, Affiliate Professor of Latin American and African
Studies, University of Florida; Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town; Craig Hammer is
Program Lead and Senior Operations Officer with the World Bank, Washington, D.C. (2014,
Winston P. Nagan and Craig Hammer, New York Law School Law Review, “SOLVING GLOBAL
PROBLEMS: PERSPECTIVES FROM INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLICY: The Conceptual and
Jurisprudential Aspects of Property in the Context of the Fundamental Rights of Indigenous
People: The Case of the Shuar of Ecuador”, lexis)
The sustained existence of Earth's natural resources, particularly its biodiversity, is of critical
importance to human survival, and efforts to safeguard these resources can be understood as a
form of self-preservation. Commentators have noted that biodiversity "provide[s] important
services to humans--such as . . . structure, food and bio-molecules that can be used for the
development of drugs or alternative fuels--that increase in value with their richness." n210 The
World Bank has stated that:
Biodiversity is the foundation and mainstay of agriculture, forests, and fisheries, soil
conservation and water quality. Biological resources provide the raw materials for livelihoods,
sustenance, trade, medicines, and industrial development. Genetic diversity provides the basis
for new breeding programs, improved crops, enhanced agricultural production, and food
security. Natural habitats and ecosystems provide services--such as water flow, flood control,
and coastal protection--that reduce human vulnerability to natural hazards, including drought,
floods, tsunamis and hurricanes. Forests, grasslands, freshwater and marine habitats provide
benefits of global value such as carbon sequestration, nutrient and hydrological cycling, and
biodiversity conservation. Careful ecosystem management provides countless streams of
benefits to, and opportunities for, human societies, while also supporting and nurturing the
web of life. n211
It is therefore no surprise that biologist and natural theorist Edward O. Wilson has famously
written in The Diversity of Life that loss of biodiversity is the "scientific problem of great[est]
immediate importance for humanity ." n212 In the context of attempted expropriation of
Shuar land for commercial extraction of resources and the bioprospecting of plant life from
Shuar territory by outside agents who also appropriate the Shuar's Traditional Knowledge, these
mind-boggling macro-level considerations are certainly at play.
The Brink is now—biodiversity loss will cause extinction
Germanos ’13, Staff writer for Common Dreams, (5/28/13, Andrea Germanos, Common
Dreams, “UN: Accelerating Biodiversity Loss a 'Fundamental Threat' to the 'Survival of
Humankind'”, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2013/05/28/un-accelerating-biodiversityloss-fundamental-threat-survival-humankind)
The accelerating loss of biodiversity poses a " fundamental threat" to the "survival of
humankind," warned the head of the United Nations new biodiversity body, as he also sounded
the alarm on the declining biodiversity on farms. Zakri Abdul Hamid, founding chair of the
Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), made the
comments at the 7th Trondheim Conference in Norway on Monday. On the widely noted
declining plant and animal biodiversity in the wild, Zakri said “we are hurtling towards
irreversible environmental tipping points that, once passed, would reduce the ability of
ecosystems to provide essential goods and services to humankind.” But biodiversity loss is
hitting farms also, said Zakri, threatening the world's food supplies, both in terms of livestock
as well as crops.
Drones make ag more efficient
Homeland Security News Wire7/13 13 July 2015, ("Food security, drones," LLC News
Wire Publications, LLC, http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150713-dronescontribute-to-improving-crops)
Greenhouse farming
has suitable soils to apply new technologies. Today, numerous greenhouses have advanced
main purposes of greenhouse farming are
climate control, both at local and global levels, and crop monitoring. In such a way, there is a need
to measure certain environmental variables of the greenhouse continuously and accurately.
Researchers have used an unmanned aerial vehicle powered by four rotors called quadcopter
or quadrotor. The use of these aerial robots is spreading due to their reduced size (from a few
decimeters to a meter or two), their low cost and the number of pieces of equipment that can
transport, for example, cameras or sensors. The quadrotor was equipped with sensors for
temperature, humidity, luminosity, and carbon dioxide concentration as well as a controller to
collect this data and send it to a wireless network. Researchers have carried out a complete analysis of computational
systems to control climate or supply water and nutrients to plants. The
fluid dynamics and have set the optimal position for these sensors and showing that propellers flows do not produce interference in their actions.
The quadrotor can follow programmed routes autonomously in the greenhouse or move freely in search of anomalies in its measurements. Finally,
all systems were shown in an experiment in a greenhouse located at the “plastic sea” in Almeria. The
robot flew the whole
greenhouse in twenty minutes and generated maps of temperature, humidity, luminosity, and
carbon dioxide concentration. These maps can be used, amongst others, to guarantee optimal
environmental conditions for plant growth or to detect leaks of temperature and humidity caused by cover damages.
Specifically, Drones allow for precision farming
P.J. Griekspoor, 3-21-2013, "Precision Agriculture Seen as Big Winner in Drone Technology,"
No Publication, http://farmprogress.com/story-precision-agriculture-seen-big-winner-dronetechnology-9-96113
The biggest thing on the horizon in precision agriculture is Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flights,
according to a new report from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems
International.¶ Kansas, already a leader in research on the vehicles that are expected to see
explosive growth when integration into national airspace begins in 2015, ranks No. 7 among
states likely to see economic benefits the report says, with the state expected to see a $2.9
billion impact and 3,700 new jobs between 2015 and 2025.¶ The greatest area of growth
indicated by the report will be in precision agriculture, which is slated to grow 10 times that of
the public safety market for UAS. Precision agriculture use of UAS refers to two segments of the
farm market: remote sensing used to scan plants for health problems, growth rates and
hydration; and precision application of needed pesticides or nutrients in order to save money
and reduce environmental impact.¶ Aerial sensing with the hexacopter, can provide mapping of
an entire section of land at 1-inch resolution in about 18 minutes – a task that would take hours
if not days on a tractor.¶ Aerial sensing with the hexacopter, can provide mapping of an entire
section of land at 1-inch resolution in about 18 minutes – a task that would take hours if not
days on a tractor.¶ Members of the Kansas Ag Research and Technology Association got an
upclose look at the work that is being done at Kansas State University by agronomy professor
Kevin Price, who is working closely with Deon van der Merwe, head of the toxicology section at
the K-State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.¶ UAVs can help monitor crop conditions¶ Van der
Merwe is a remote-controlled aircraft enthusiast who is excited about the prospect of using
UAVs, commonly referred to as drones, to detect blue-green algae blooms in bodies of water.¶
Price brought two aircraft to the KARTA conference, a flying wing by RiteWingRC called the
Zephyr II and a DJI S800 Spreading Wings hexacopter.¶ Price said the promise of using the
aircraft to do remote sensing to monitor crop condition, detect diseases and map fields for
variable rate application of nutrients or pinpoint areas for fungicide or pesticide application, is
huge.¶ Aerial sensing with the hexacopter, for example, can provide mapping of an entire
section of land at 1-inch resolution in about 18 minutes – a task that would take hours if not
days on a tractor.¶
That’s key to prevent ag collapse
Sarah Gonzalez, 2-27-2013, "Data analysis, biotech are key in agriculture's future
sustainability," No Publication, http://www.agri-pulse.com/ag-issues-biotech-future-22613.asp
Bayer's forum, which began on Tuesday in Orlando, Florida, included a futuristic look at
agriculture in the year 2025, just 25 years before the world population is expected to reach
nine billion and agriculture is required to increase productivity by 70 percent. “We've been
able to convince consumers that biotechnology is the core of sustainability” by 2025, Kottmeyer
said, adding that convincing and educating consumers is more important than convincing
regulators. During the shift of focus from regulator to consumer he predicts, Kottmeyer said it is
important to appeal to the emotional sentiments on which the consumer bases decisions.
Furthermore, the organic customer is attracted to simpler agriculture, social justice,
sustainability and good stewardship, which he says are all things biotechnology can provide.
“The approach that they're rejecting has a clear benefit to the very things most important to
them,” he said. The benefits of seed technology will be realized, particularly because of the
increased global population in 2050, as well as the prediction that more than half the world
population will be in the middle class by that date. He said this huge middle class, particularly in
China and India, will create a new consumer. While the European Union currently blocks all U.S.
biotechnology products, Kottmeyer is optimistic the consumer will drive a change. He noted
that data analytics, which allowed him to make his 2025 predictions, show that finding ways
to influence consumers is much simpler than normally anticipated. “You just have to crunch
the data,” he said. In fact, the entire agriculture industry is currently moving into a “datacentric” era, said David Nicholson, head of Bayer's Research and Development, during the
forum. Using the information gained from technology in a way that helps agriculture achieve
the required 70 percent increase in productivity is the key to success or failure, he said.
Precision agriculture, in particular, is the focus of this data-driven era allowing the farmer to
know what to grow and where to grow it for the best results. “When we think of the farmer of
the future we see a grower as CEO,” said David Hollinrake, Bayer's Vice President of Agriculture
Commercial Operations Marketing, adding that farming will increasingly become a business
investment instead of a lifestyle or family choice. “We want to be able to participate as an
enabler of using data as precision tools.”
U.S. is a key leader in world food production
Gayle Tzemach, 8-2-2012, "U.S. Drought and Rising Global Food Prices," Council on Foreign
Relations, http://www.cfr.org/food-security/us-drought-rising-global-food-prices/p28777
This is the hottest summer on record in the United States since 1895, and people are beginning to wonder whether this type of drought that we're experiencing could become a
The United States is a pivotal player in world food production and has the most
sophisticated agricultural sector in terms of seeds, technology, irrigation, deep commodity
new normal.
markets, and future markets. If the United States crop is so devastated by drought, what is going to happen to the rest of the world? How do rising U.S.
food prices affect global food prices down the world's food supply chain? Which areas of the globe are most at risk? There are many large food producers in the world. China is
the largest wheat producer, but it is also the largest wheat consumer. What makes the United States unique is that we are the largest exporter, so we produce about 35 percent
of the world's corn and soybean supply. Those two commodities are crucial in the food chain, because they are used for feed stock for animals. Around the world you have rising
middle classes, a growing demand for meat and protein in the diet, and countries around the world are becoming increasingly dependent on relatively inexpensive food stocks
from the United States. When you see a crop failure of the magnitude you have seen this summer, it flows through the whole food chain. Right now you have American livestock
producers taking their pigs and cattle to the slaughter house because they simply don't have the food to be feeding them. So you're going to see meat prices in the short term in
you're going to see rising meat prices; [experts] are predicting
already 4 to 5 percent price increases in meat for the next year. That flows through the whole
food chain, [to] big-population countries that import a lot of food, such as the Philippines,
Afghanistan, Egypt. And when you see rapidly rising food prices, of course it leads to
instability. We've seen [this] in the last five years across many of those countries, and you see rising food prices translate almost directly into street protests. You're
the United States go down, but over the longer term
going to see the continuation of [political] instability driven in part by rapidly rising food prices. In 2008, we had food protests across much of the Middle East, so
governments are going to be very much on the alert for unrest and very sensitive to it. Egypt is already
spending about one-third of its subsidies on food, and it is draining the Egyptian foreign exchange reserve to continue those subsidies. This combination of an already mobilized
population out on the streets demanding lots of different changes [in Egypt], and rising food prices is going to create a very unstable atmosphere. What are some policy
responses for alleviating the pressures being felt in the United States and other countries because of rising food prices? In the United States, we have to look at our own policies
that are part of the problem, [including] our mandated use of ethanol in gasoline. This is something that is a mandated [10] percent that is not flexible, and when you have rising
food prices and a problem with the failing crop, you would think that maybe we could lighten up on the ethanol mandate. Because right now so much of our food production is
going into ethanol. So you've already seen governors across the United States in some of the hard-hit states saying, "Shouldn't we review our ethanol policies?" That's not a
we have a rising global
population. We have more mouths to feed every year, and food security for the world is a
critical issue. We should be looking at how to build in more resilience into the global food
system. Africa, which has the highest population growth rates of any continent in the world, used to feed itself and used to export food, but [its] agriculture has suffered
short-term fix, but it is potentially longer-term and something we should be looking at carefully. In terms of policy,
tremendously over the last half century. Only 4 percent of the land in Africa is even irrigated, and you've seen a green revolution occur in many parts of the world that has really
passed Africa by. And so building in greater resilience and improving the agricultural capacity of Africa is a critical part of this equation, so that Africa has more of an ability to
feed itself and become more a part of the global supply chain and not be so dependent on it. Unfortunately, governments have not made the investments in the agricultural
sector that they needed to over the past half century, which is why you have this situation in Africa today.
US agriculture solves war
Lugar 2000 (Richard Lugar, US Senator from Indiana, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, and a member and former chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, 2000)
In a world confronted by global terrorism, turmoil in the Middle East, burgeoning nuclear
threats and other crises, it is easy to lose sight of the long-range challenges. But we do so at our
peril. One of the most daunting of them is meeting the world’s need for food and
energy in this century. At stake is not only preventing starvation and saving the environment,
but also world peace and security. History tells us that states may go to war over access to
resources, and that poverty and famine have often bred fanaticism and terrorism.
Working to feed the world will minimize factors that contribute to global instability and
the proliferation of [WMDs] weapons of mass destruction. With the world
population expected to grow from 6 billion people today to 9 billion by mid-century,
the demand for affordable food will increase well beyond current international
production levels. People in rapidly developing nations will have the means greatly to
improve their standard of living and caloric intake. Inevitably, that means eating more meat.
This will raise demand for feed grain at the same time that the growing world population will
need vastly more basic food to eat. Complicating a solution to this problem is a dynamic that
must be better understood in the West: developing countries often use limited arable land to
expand cities to house their growing populations. As good land disappears, people destroy
timber resources and even rainforests as they try to create more arable land to feed
themselves. The long-term environmental consequences could be disastrous for the entire
globe. Productivity revolution To meet the expected demand for food over the next
50 years, we in the United States will have to grow roughly three times more
food on the land we have. That’s a tall order. My farm in Marion County, Indiana, for example,
yields on average 8.3 to 8.6 tonnes of corn per hectare – typical for a farm in central Indiana. To
triple our production by 2050, we will have to produce an annual average of 25 tonnes per
hectare. Can we possibly boost output that much? Well, it’s been done before. Advances in the
use of fertilizer and water, improved machinery and better tilling techniques combined to
generate a threefold increase in yields since 1935 – on our farm back then, my dad produced 2.8
to 3 tonnes per hectare. Much US agriculture has seen similar increases. But of course there is
no guarantee that we can achieve those results again. Given the urgency of expanding food
production to meet world demand, we must invest much more in scientific research and target
that money toward projects that promise to have significant national and global impact. For the
United States, that will mean a major shift in the way we conduct and fund agricultural science.
Fundamental research will generate the innovations that will be necessary to feed the world.
The United States can take a leading position in a productivity revolution. And our success at
increasing food production may play a decisive humanitarian role in the survival of
billions of people and the health of our planet.
Best studies prove it goes nuclear
Gary Kleyn, 25 May 2012, WA State Director at Australian Christians, Research Manager at
Future Directions International “International Conflict Triggers and Potential Conflict Points
Resulting from Food and Water Insecurity,”
http://www.futuredirections.org.au/files/Workshop_Report_-_Intl_Conflict_Triggers__May_25.pdf
A study by the International Peace Research Institute indicates that where food
security is an issue, it is more likely to result in some form of conflict. Darfur,
Rwanda, Eritrea and the Balkans experienced such wars. Governments, especially in
developed countries, are increasingly aware of this phenomenon. The UK Ministry of
Defence, the CIA, the US Center for Strategic and International Studies ¶ and the Oslo Peace
Research Institute, all identify famine as a potential trigger for conflicts and possibly
even nuclear war.
***A Food crisis will collapse civilization through disease and terrorism
Brown 09 – [Lester, environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder
and president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization, recipient of 26
honorary degrees and a MacArthur Fellowship, has won several prizes and awards, including the
United Nations Environment Prize, the World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the Blue
Planet Prize, “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/civilization-food-shortages/]
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from
trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided
by events such as today’s economic crisis. For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems
preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life?
What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list
of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization
might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too! For many years I have studied global agricultural,
population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political
tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food
shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization. I can no longer
ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world
food
economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a
collapse is possible.¶ The Problem of Failed States¶ Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends
unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the environmental field are well into our third decade of charting trends of
environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a single one.¶ In six of the past nine years world grain
production has fallen short of consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest began, world carryover
stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low. In
response, world grain prices in the¶ spring and summer of last year climbed to the¶ highest level ever.¶ As demand for food rises
faster than supplies¶ are growing, the resulting food-price
inflation puts severe stress on the governments of
countries already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry
people take to the streets. Indeed, even before the¶ steep climb in grain prices in 2008, the number of failing states was
expanding [see sidebar at left]. Many of their problems stem from a failure¶ to slow the growth of their populations. But if the
food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate.
We have entered a new era in geopolitics. In the 20th century the main threat to international security was
superpower conflict; today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of¶ power but its absence that puts us at risk. States fail
when national governments can no longer provide personal security, food security¶ and basic social services
such as education and¶ health care. They often lose control of part or all¶ of their territory. When governments lose their¶ monopoly
on power, law
and order begin to disintegrate.¶ After a point, countries can become so dangerous that
food relief workers are no longer¶ safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia¶ and Afghanistan,
deteriorating conditions have¶ already put such programs in jeopardy.¶ Failing states are of international concern
because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political
stability everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008¶ list of failing states, has become a base
for piracy.¶ Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist training.¶ Afghanistan, number seven, is the world’s¶
leading supplier of heroin. Following the massive¶ genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from that¶ troubled state, thousands of
armed soldiers among¶ them, helped to destabilize neighboring Democratic¶ Republic of the Congo (number six).¶ Our
global
civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nationstates to control the
spread of infectious disease, to manage the international monetary system, to control
international terrorism and to reach¶ scores of other common goals. If the system for controlling
infectious diseases—such as polio,¶ SARS or avian flu—breaks down, humanity will be in trouble. Once
states fail, no one assumes responsibility for their debt to outside lenders. If enough states
disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization itself.
***Terrorism guarantees extinction
Hellman 08 – (Martin E. Hellman, emeritus prof of engineering @ Stanford, “Risk Analysis of
Nuclear Deterrence” SPRING 2008 THE BENT OF TAU BETA PI,
http://www.nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf)
* Cites CT experts
The threat of nuclear terrorism looms much larger in the public’s mind than the threat of a full-scale nuclear war, yet
this article focuses primarily on the latter. An explanation is therefore in order before proceeding. A terrorist attack
involving a nuclear weapon would be a catastrophe of immense proportions: “A 10-kiloton bomb
detonated at Grand Central Station on a typical work day would likely kill some half a million people, and inflict over a trillion dollars
The likelihood
of such an attack is also significant. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has estimated the chance of
a nuclear terrorist incident within the next decade to be roughly 50 percent [Bunn 2007, page 15]. David
in direct economic damage. America and its way of life would be changed forever.” [Bunn 2003, pages viii-ix].
Albright, a former weapons inspector in Iraq, estimates those odds at less than one percent, but notes, “We would never accept a
situation where the chance of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl would be anywhere near 1% .... A nuclear terrorism attack is a
low-probability event, but we can’t live in a world where it’s anything but extremely low-probability.” [Hegland 2005].
In a
survey of 85 national security experts , Senator Richard Lugar found a median estimate of 20 percent for
the “probability of an attack involving a nuclear explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the
next 10 years,” with 79 percent of the respondents believing “it more likely to be carried out
by terrorists” than by a government [Lugar 2005, pp. 14-15]. I support increased efforts to reduce the threat of
nuclear terrorism, but that is not inconsistent with the approach of this article. Because terrorism is one of the potential
trigger mechanisms for a full-scale nuclear war , the risk analyses proposed herein will include estimating the risk
of nuclear terrorism as one component of the overall risk. If that risk, the overall risk, or both are found to be unacceptable, then the
proposed remedies would be directed to reduce which-ever risk(s) warrant attention. Similar remarks apply to a number of other
threats (e.g., nuclear war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan). His article would be incomplete if it only dealt with the threat
of nuclear terrorism and neglected the threat of full-scale nuclear war. If both risks are unacceptable, an effort to reduce only the
terrorist component would leave humanity in great peril. In fact, society’s
almost total neglect of the threat of
full-scale nuclear war makes studying that risk all the more important. The cosT of World War iii The
danger associated with nuclear deterrence depends on both the cost of a failure and the failure rate.3 This section explores the cost
of a failure of nuclear deterrence, and the next section is concerned with the failure rate. While other definitions are possible, this
article defines a failure of deterrence to mean a full-scale exchange of all nuclear weapons available to the U.S. and Russia, an event
that will be termed World War III. Approximately 20 million people died as a result of the first World War. World War II’s fatalities
were double or triple that number—chaos prevented a more precise determination. In both cases humanity recovered, and the
world today bears few scars that attest to the horror of those two wars. Many people therefore implicitly believe that a third World
War would be horrible but survivable, an extrapolation of the effects of the first two global wars. In that view, World War III, while
horrible, is something that humanity may just have to face and from which it will then have to recover. In contrast, some of those
most qualified to assess the situation hold a very different view. In a 1961 speech to a joint session of the Philippine Congress,
General Douglas MacArthur, stated, “Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. … If you lose, you are
annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No
longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a
duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
expressed a similar view: “If deterrence fails and conflict develops, the present U.S. and NATO strategy carries with it a high risk that
Western civilization will be destroyed” [McNamara 1986, page 6]. More recently, George Shultz,
William Perry,
Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn4 echoed those concerns when they quoted President Reagan’s belief that nuclear weapons were
“totally irrational, totally inhu- mane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” [Shultz
2007] Official studies, while couched in less emotional terms, still convey the horrendous toll that World War III would exact: “The
resulting deaths would be far beyond any precedent. Executive branch calculations show a range of U.S. deaths
from 35 to 77 percent (i.e., 79-160 million dead)… a change in targeting could kill somewhere between 20 million and 30 million
additional people on each side .... These calculations reflect only deaths during the first 30 days. Additional millions would be
injured, and many would eventually die from lack of adequate medical care … millions of people might starve or freeze during the
follow- ing winter, but it is not possible to estimate how many. … further millions … might eventually die of latent radiation effects.”
[OTA 1979, page 8] This OTA report also noted the possibility of serious ecological damage [OTA 1979, page 9], a concern that assumed a new potentiality when the TTAPS report [TTAPS 1983] proposed that the ash and dust from so many nearly simultaneous
nuclear explosions and their resultant fire-
storms could
usher in a nuclear winter that might erase
homo sapiens from the face of the earth, much as many
scientists now believe the K-T Extinction that wiped out
the dinosaurs resulted from an impact winter caused by ash and dust from a large asteroid or comet striking Earth. The TTAPS
report produced a heated debate, and there is still no scientific consensus on whether a nuclear winter would follow a full-scale
even a limited nuclear exchange or one between
newer nuclear-weapon states, such as India and Pakistan, could have devastating long-lasting climatic
consequences due to the large volumes of smoke that would be generated by fires in modern megacities. While it is uncertain
nuclear war. Recent work [Robock 2007, Toon 2007] suggests that
how destructive World War III would be, prudence dictates that we apply the same engi- neering conservatism that saved the
Golden Gate Bridge from collapsing on its 50th anniversary and assume that
preventing World War III is a
necessity—not an option.
***Diseases cause extinction
Guterl 12 – [Fred, award-winning journalist and executive editor of Scientific American,
worked for ten years at Newsweek, has taught science at Princeton University, The Fate of the
Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, 1-2,
Google Books, online
Over the next few years, the bigger story turned out not to be SARS, which trailed off quickly, bur avian influenza, or bird flu. It had
been making the rounds among birds in Southeast Asia for years. An outbreak in 1997 Hong Kong and another in 2003 each called
for the culling of thousands of birds and put virologists and health workers into a tizzy. Although the virus wasn't much of a threat to
humans, scientists fretted over the possibility of a horrifying pandemic. Relatively few people caught the virus, but more than half of
them died. What would happen if this bird flu virus made the jump to humans? What if it mutated in a way that allowed it to spread
from one person to another, through tiny droplets of saliva in the air? One
bad spin of the genetic roulette wheel
and a deadly new human pathogen would spread across the globe in a matter of days . With a kill
rate of 60 percent, such a pandemic would be devastating, to say the least.¶ Scientists were worried, all right, but the
object of their worry was somewhat theoretical. Nobody knew for certain if such a supervirus was even possible. To cause that kind
of damage to the human population, a flu virus has to combine two traits: lethality and transmissibility. The more optimistically
minded scientists argued that one trait precluded the other, that if the bird flu acquired the ability to spread like wildfire, it would
lose its ability to kill with terrifying efficiency. The virus would spread, cause some fever and sniffles, and take its place among the
pantheon of ordinary flu viruses that come and go each season.¶ The optimists, we found out last fall, were
wrong. Two
groups of scientists working independently managed to create bird flu viruses in the lab that had that killer
combination of lethality and transmissibility among humans. They did it for the best reasons, of course—to
find vaccines and medicines to treat a pandemic should one occur, and more generally to understand how influenza viruses work. If
we're lucky, the scientists will get there before nature manages to come up with the virus herself, or before someone steals the
genetic blueprints and turns this knowledge against us. ¶ Influenza is a natural killer, but we have made it our own. We have
created the conditions for new viruses to flourish—among pigs in factory farms and live animal markets and a
connected world of international trade and travel—and we've gone so far as to fabricate the virus ourselves. Flu is
an excellent example of how we have, through our technologies and our dominant presence on the planet, begun to
multiply the risks to our own survival
Judiciary
Contention 2 is the Judiciary
The war on terror lead to a system of judicial deference to the executive
McCormack ’14 E.W. Thode Professor of Law, University of Utah. (1/1/14, Wayne
McCormack, Washington and Lee Law Review, “U.S. Judicial Independence: Victim in the “War
on Terror””,
http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4374&context=wlulr, vol 71,
issue 1)
One of the principal victims in the United States’ so-called “war on terror” has been the
independence of the U.S. Judiciary. Time and again, challenges to assertedly illegal conduct on
the part of government officials have been turned aside, either because of overt deference to
the government or because of special doctrines such as the state secrets privilege and standing
requirements. I have even described the behavior of the United States since 9/11 as a “war on
the rule of law.”1
This Article catalogs the principal cases first by the nature of the government action challenged
and then by the special doctrines invoked. What I attempt to show is that the Judiciary has
virtually relinquished its valuable role in the U.S. system of governance, which depends on
judicial review. In the face of governmental claims of crisis and national security needs, the
courts have refused to examine, or have examined with undue deference, the actions of
government officials. Oddly enough, the mostly Republican Supreme Court has shown more
stiff resistance than most of the lower courts,2 but still has ducked some significant issues.3
In the cases considered here, the U.S. government has taken the position that inquiry by the
Judiciary into a variety of actions against alleged malfeasors would threaten the safety of the
nation.4 This is pressure that amounts to intimidation. When this level of pressure is mounted
to create exceptions to established rules of law, it undermines due process of law.
Perhaps one or two examples of government warnings about the consequences of a judicial
decision would be within the domain of legal argument. But a long pattern of threats and
intimidation to depart from established law undermines judicial independence. That has been
the course of the U.S. “war on terror” for over a decade now.
The plan would be a key reversal—SCOTUS ruling on drones takes power back
Peetros ’13, Staff writer for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (2/26/13, Samantha A.
Petros, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, “Supreme Court places National Security Agency
above the law”, http://www.bordc.org/blog/supreme-court-places-national-security-agencyabove-law)
Today, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decided, in a monumental 5-4 case, that the secrecy of
government surveillance can perversely insulate dragnet warrantless wiretapping scheme
from judicial review. In one fell swoop, the case effectively invites the government to continue
spying on law-abiding Americans en masse, renders the judiciary institutionally complicit in
constitutional violations, and places the National Security Agency (NSA) above the law.
The NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program caused an earthquake when first revealed in 2005,
by New York Times journalists who risked prosecution to alert the public to a secret government
scheme to wiretap the entire phone system and the Internet.
Having previously prompted threats of a mass resignation by Justice Department officials under
the Bush administration, the program was sensibly struck down as unconstitutional by multiple
federal courts, only to be reversed on appeal. Today’s decision allows government surveillance
to continue in secret, without meaningful checks and balances.
While five Justices claimed that alternative sources of review are available, their finding buries
the court’s head in the sand . For instance, SCOTUS defers to the secret FISA court, which
according to the Director of National Intelligence, has previously found parts of the NSA’s
program unconstitutional. Yet despite repeated requests, even Congress does not know the
details of that judicial decision, let alone whether and how the program has been modified to
satisfy constitutional limits.
According to BORDC’s Shahid Buttar:
The Clapper decision is a constitutional travesty of the highest order, reflecting the erosion of
privacy, judicial independence, and constitutional government. By allowing executive secrecy
to insulate violations from review, five Justices of the Supreme Court have effectively killed
what shreds once remained of the Fourth Amendment. Every American should be gravely
concerned, and anyone who still considers America “the land of the free” should carefully
reconsider their assumptions.
Congress must reverse its premature decision to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) to provide the check on executive abuses that the Court has abdicated.
Buttar has written about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping scheme since Congress amended
the FISA statute in 2008, for sources including Huffington Post.
BORDC has covered more recent developments, including the recent re-authorization of
the 2008 FISA amendments by Congress.
Surveillance is a key test ground for judicial review—FISA sacks independence
McCormack ’14 E.W. Thode Professor of Law, University of Utah. (1/1/14, Wayne
McCormack, Washington and Lee Law Review, “U.S. Judicial Independence: Victim in the “War
on Terror””,
http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4374&context=wlulr, vol 71,
issue 1)
The Ninth Circuit reversed on the ground that Mayfield lacked standing because he had settled
the damages claim “and a declaratory judgment would not likely impact him or his family.”423
And although at least one judge said he “shares the very significant concerns that the ‘significant
purpose’ standard violates the Fourth Amendment,”424 the Mayfield opinion has been termed
an “outlier.”425 Thus, with the exception of a lone judge in Oregon, courts have universally
accepted the argument that FISA is not subject to the standards applicable to judicial search
warrants.426 The common rubric is that foreign intelligence is different and gives rise to “special
needs” of government surveillance. It is difficult, however, to see what is “special” about
surveilling alleged plotters of violence. Perhaps special needs could apply in the case of
foreign governments or political entities, which are not part of “the people” protected by the
Fourth Amendment anyway. The only persons who come within the concerns of FISA are really
foreign citizens in the United States whom the government has probable cause to believe are
acting as agents of a foreign power. Thus, the whole premise of FISA as a special needs
exception to the Fourth Amendment could be flawed even before the change to “a significant
purpose,” and is surely flawed, as the Oregon court believed, when the relaxed standards have
the “primary purpose” of law enforcement.
The “special needs” cases to which the courts have referred in creating this exception have all
been instances in which the target of the search had undertaken some voluntary departure
from the private realm—such as traveling by air, driving on a public street, or operating a
restaurant—in which the public safety demanded an inspection without regard to probable
cause.427 It is possible that taking to the airwaves through telephone or internet is a similar
departure from normal life such that we have relinquished any claim to privacy. But this
conclusion should at least deal carefully with all the Supreme Court precedents regarding
expectations of privacy, the issue covered in the next section.428
Just dealing with the basic justification of FISA, with the lone exception of a district judge in
Oregon, we have the apparent specter of the Judiciary yielding to executive claims of special
needs arising from the threat of violence, resulting in a failure of judicial review and loss of
judicial independence . But, in 2013 came the “revelation” that the FISA Court had authorized
unlimited recording of data communications by U.S. citizens within the United States—a
revelation of little surprise to those who were following the issue.
Judicial deference causes military adventurism with nuclear weapons
Scales ‘2, Professor of law at the University of Denver (December 2002, Anna Scales, Seattle
Journal for Social Justice, “The Jurisprudence of the Military-Industrial Complex”,
http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1416&context=sjsj)
So, what is the jurisprudence of the military-industrial complex? The short answer is this: the
military-industrial complex has arrived at a comfy situation where it is either exempt from the
rule of law, or else gets to make every decision that informs what the rule of law would
require in a given situation. It is kind of like having your cake and eating it with the Lord.
Eisenhower could have no idea how huge, seamless, and synergistic this complex would
become, including not just weapons manufacture, but virtually all relations of law, production,
and populations in the world. I am going to take a couple of minutes to spell out how the
military side of this complex presently works, erasing boundaries with industrial interests, and
indeed, with any other legally recognized interests at all
First, our nation’s history and legitimacy rest upon a separation of military power from
democratic governance. For that reason, the armed forces are subject to constitutional
constraint.
Second, however, as an aspect of separation of powers, courts try not to interfere in areas of
foreign policy and military affairs. Often this is referred to as the “political question” doctrine, a
determination that a matter is beyond the capabilities of judges. The strongest argument for
this deference is that the political branches—or the military itself—have superior expertise in
military matters. That may be true in some situations. I am not sure, for example, the Supreme
Court would have been the best crowd to organize the invasion of Normandy. But what we now
have is an increasingly irrational deference .7 Consider three cases:
a. In Korematsu v. United States, 8 the Supreme Court said the internment of JapaneseAmericans at the beginning of 1942 was constitutional, based upon a military assessment of the
possibility of espionage in preparation for a Japanese invasion of the United States. It turns out
that the information provided by the military to the Supreme Court was falsified.9 But note two
things: (1) the nation was in the midst of a declared world war, and (2) in subsequent less urgent
circumstances, Korematsu would seem to argue strongly for military justifications to have to be
based upon better, more reliable information than was offered there.
b. In the 1981 case of Rostker v. Goldberg, 10 the Supreme Court decided that it was
constitutional for Congress to exclude women from the peacetime registration of potential
draftees, even though both the Department of Defense and the Army Chief of Staff had testified
that including women would increase military readiness. But Congress got the benefit of the
military deference doctrine as a cover for what I think was a sinister political purpose—to
protect the manliness of war—and the Supreme Court felt perfectly free to ignore what those
with the real expertise had to say.
c. Most recently, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 11 the Fourth Circuit held that a U.S. citizen who had
been designated an “enemy combatant”12 could be detained indefinitely without access to
counsel. In this case, however, not only is there no declared war,13 but also, the only evidence
regarding Mr. Hamdi was a two-page affidavit by a Defense Department underling, Mr. Mobbs.
Mobbs stated that Mr. Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan, and had been affiliated with a
Taliban military unit. The government would not disclose the criteria for the “enemy
combatant” designation, the statements of Mr. Hamdi that allegedly satisfied those criteria, nor
any other bases for the conclusion of Taliban “affiliation.”14 And that is as good as the evidence
for life imprisonment without trial has to be. Deference to the military has become abdication.
In other words, what we presently have is not civilian government under military control, but
something potentially worse, a civilian government ignoring military advice,15 but using the
legal doctrine of military deference for its own imperialist ends.
Third, the gigantic military establishment and permanent arms industry are now in the
business of justifying their continued existences. This justification is done primarily, as you
know, by retooling for post-Cold War enemies—the so-called “rogue states”—while at the same
time creating new ones, for example by arming corrupt regimes in Southeast Asia.16 I was
reminded of this recently when we went to see comedian Kate Clinton. She thought Secretary
Powell had taken too much trouble in his presentation attempting to convince the Security
Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.17 Why not, she asked, “just show them the
receipts?”
Fourth, we have seen the exercise of extraordinary influence by arms makers on both domestic
and foreign policy. For domestic pork barrel and campaign finance reasons, obsolete or
unproven weapons systems continue to be funded even when the military does not want
them!18 And, just when we thought we had survived the nuclear arms race nightmare, the
United States has undertaken to design new kinds of nuclear weapons,19 even when those
designs have little military value.20 Overseas, limitations on arms sales are being repealed, and
arms markets that should not exist are being constantly expanded21 for the sake of dumping
inventory, even if those weapons are eventually used for “rogue” purposes by rogue states.
This system skews security considerations, and militarizes foreign policy . Force has to be the
preferred option because other conduits of policy are not sufficiently well-funded. Plus, those
stockpiled weapons have got to be used or sold so that we can build more.
Fifth, enlarging upon this in a document entitled The National Security Policy of the United
States, we were treated last September to “the Bush doctrine,” which for the first time in U.S.
history declares a preemptive strike policy. This document states, “America will act against
emerging threats before they are fully formed.”22 If they are only emerging and not fully
formed, you may wonder, how will we know they are “threats”? Because someone in
Washington has that perception, and when the hunch hits, it is the official policy of this
country to deploy the military.23 All options—including the use of nuclear weapons —are
always on the table.
Plan
Thus the plan: The United States Supreme Court should rule that warrantless
federal domestic drone surveillance is a violation of the fourth amendment.
Solvency
Contention 3 is Solvency
A supreme court ruling is key to keep the law ahead of the tech—it’s a crucial
check on intrusive surveillance
Stanley and Crump 11 – (Jay Stanley – Senior Policy Analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy
and Technology Project, former analyst at the technology research firm Forrester. Catherine
Crump – staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project and a
nonresident fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society) [Protecting Privacy From
Aerial Surveillance:]
(https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/protectingprivacyfromaerialsurveillance.pdf) //MC
UAVs and privacy
With the federal government likely to permit more widespread use of drones, and the
technology likely to become ever more powerful, the question becomes: what role will drones
play in American life? Based on current trends—technology development, law enforcement
interest, political and industry pressure, and the lack of legal safeguards— it is clear that
drones pose a looming threat to Americans’ privacy. The reasons for concern reach across a
number of different dimensions:
Mission creep. Even where UAVs are being envisioned for search and rescue, fighting wildfires,
and in dangerous tactical police operations, they are likely to be quickly embraced by law
enforcement around the nation for other, more controversial purposes. The police in Ogden,
Utah think that floating a surveillance blimp above their city “will be a deterrent to crime when
it is out and about.”58 In Houston, police suggested that drones could possibly be used for
writing traffic tickets.59 The potential result is that they become commonplace in American
life.60
Tracking. The Justice Department currently claims the authority to monitor Americans’ comings and goings using GPS tracking devices—without a warrant. Fleets of UAVs,
interconnected and augmented with analytics software, could enable the mass tracking of vehicles and pedestrians around a wide area.
New uses. The use of drones could also be expanded from surveillance to actual intervention in law enforcement situations on the ground. Airborne technologies could be
developed that could, for example, be used to control or dispel protesters (perhaps by deploying tear gas or other technologies), stop a fleeing vehicle, or even deploy
weapons.61
In addition, drones raise many of the same issues that pervasive video surveillance brings in any context. For example:
Chilling effects. What would be the effect on our public spaces, and our society as a whole, if everyone felt the keen eye of the government on their backs whenever they
ventured outdoors? Psychologists have repeatedly found that people who are being observed tend to behave differently, and make different decisions, than when they are not
being watched. This effect is so great that a recent study found that “merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior.”62
Voyeurism. Video surveillance is susceptible to individual abuse, including voyeurism. In 2004, a couple making love on a dark nighttime rooftop balcony, where they had every
reason to expect they enjoyed privacy, were filmed for nearly four minutes by a New York police helicopter using night vision. This is the kind of abuse that could become
commonplace if drone technology enters widespread use. (Rather than apologize, NYPD officials flatly denied that this filming constituted an abuse, telling a television reporter,
“this is what police in helicopters are supposed to do, check out people to make sure no one is … doing anything illegal”).63
Discriminatory targeting. The individuals operating surveillance systems bring to the job all their existing prejudices and biases. In Great Britain, camera operators have been
found to focus disproportionately on people of color. According to a sociological study of how the systems were operated, “Black people were between one-and-a-half and twoand-a-half times more likely to be surveilled than one would expect from their presence in the population.”64
Institutional abuse. In addition to abuse by the inevitable “bad apples” within law enforcement, there is also the danger of institutional abuse. Sometimes, bad policies are set at
the top, and an entire law enforcement agency is turned toward abusive ends. That is especially prone to happen in periods of social turmoil and intense political conflict. During
the labor, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 20th century, the FBI and other security agencies engaged in systematic illegal behavior against those challenging
the status quo. And once again today we are seeing an upsurge in spying against peaceful political protesters across America.65
Automated enforcement. Drones are part of a trend toward automated law enforcement, in which cameras and other technologies are used to mete out justice with little or no
human intervention. This trend raises a variety of concerns, such as the fact that computers lack the judgment to fairly evaluate the circumstances surrounding a supposed
violation, and may be susceptible to bugs and other software errors, or simply are not programmed to fairly and properly encapsulate the state of the law as passed by
legislatures.66
One point that is often made with regards to new surveillance technologies is that, while they may increase government surveillance of individuals, they can also increase
individuals’ ability to record the activities of officials, which can serve as a check on their power.67 Too often, however, the authorities seek to increase their surveillance over
individuals (for example, by installing surveillance cameras throughout public spaces) while restricting individuals’ ability to use that same technology as a check against their
power (for example, by attempting to prevent individuals from videotaping police68). Already, security experts have started expressing concern that unmanned aircraft could be
used for terrorism69—which naturally raises the question: will individuals be able to make use of the new technology for their own purposes, or will government seek a
monopoly over the new technology by citing fears of its use for terrorism?
The Fourth Amendment restricts the use of drones
With drone technology holding so much potential to increase routine surveillance in American
life, one key question is the extent to which our laws will protect us. The courts should
impose limits on the use of drones for surveillance , prohibiting them from becoming
pervasive.
The Supreme Court has never taken a position on whether the Fourth Amendment places
limits on government use of UAV surveillance . However, it allowed some warrantless aerial
surveillance from manned [staffed] aircraft.
In the 1986 decision California v. Ciraolo, the Supreme Court focused on whether an individual
has a privacy interest in being free from aerial surveillance of his backyard. The police had
received a tip that Dante Ciraolo was growing marijuana in his backyard, but high fences
prevented them from viewing his backyard from the street. The police borrowed a plane, flew it
over the backyard and easily spotted marijuana plants growing there. Ciraolo argued that his
Fourth Amendment rights were violated because the government did not get a warrant. The
Court rejected this argument, explaining that there was no intrusion into his privacy because
“[a]ny member of the public flying in this airspace who glanced down could have seen
everything that these officers observed.”70
In Dow Chemical Co. v. United States, also decided in 1986, the Supreme Court addressed
whether the Environmental Protection Agency violated Dow’s Fourth Amendment rights when it
employed a commercial aerial photographer to use a precision aerial mapping camera to take
photographs of a chemical plant. The Court found no violation, in part because the camera the
EPA used was a “conventional, albeit precise, commercial camera commonly used in
mapmaking,” and “the photographs here are not so revealing of intimate details as to raise
constitutional concerns.” However, the Court suggested that the use of more sophisticated,
intrusive surveillance might justify a different result . It wrote, “surveillance of private property
by using highly sophisticated surveillance equipment not generally available to the public, such
as satellite technology, might be constitutionally proscribed absent a warrant.”71
In Florida v. Riley, decided in 1989, the police had received a tip that Michael Riley was growing
marijuana in a greenhouse on the property surrounding his home. The interior of the
greenhouse was not visible from the ground outside the property, and the greenhouse had a
ceiling, though two panels in the ceiling were missing. A police officer flew over the greenhouse
and spotted marijuana through the openings in the roof. While no reasoning commanded a
majority of the Court, four justices concluded that its decision in Ciraolo applied because Riley
had left part of the greenhouse open to public view , and so the search was constitutional.72
Because of their potential for pervasive use in ordinary law enforcement operations and
capacity for revealing far more than the naked eye, drones pose a more serious threat to
privacy than do manned [staffed] flights. There are good reasons to believe that they may
implicate Fourth Amendment rights in ways that manned flights do not.
Government use of UAVs equipped with technology that dramatically improves on human
vision or captures something humans cannot see (such thermal or x-ray images) should be
scrutinized especially closely by the courts. This follows from the Supreme Court’s statement
in Dow Chemical that using sophisticated technology not generally available to the public may
be considered a search under the Fourth Amendment. It is also suggested by the 2001 case Kyllo
v. United States, in which the court rejected the use of thermal imaging devices to peer into a
suspect’s home without a warrant.73
Further, the Supreme Court has suggested that the pervasive or continuous use of a
surveillance technology may heighten Fourth Amendment concerns. In United States v. Knotts,
the Supreme Court addressed whether attaching primitive “beeper” tracking technology to a car
violated the driver’s Fourth Amendment rights.74 Although it concluded that the use of the
beeper in that case did not violate the Fourth Amendment, it held that if “such dragnet type law
enforcement practices” as “twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country” ever
arose, it would determine if different constitutional principles would be applicable. Citing to
this language in Knotts, the federal appeals court in Washington D.C. recently ruled that
attaching a GPS device to a person’s car and tracking his movements for 28 days fell into this
category of dragnet-type surveillance and held that the government’s warrantless tracking
violated the Fourth Amendment. 75 That case is now up on review before the Supreme Court.
Because drones allow for surveillance at least as pervasive and continuous as GPS tracking,
the courts should recognize that the Fourth Amendment places restrictions on their use.
With drones as in so many areas, the technology is moving far more rapidly than our
jurisprudence , and it is important that the courts keep the Constitution relevant in the world
of high technology in which we are increasingly going to be living.
Recommendations
UAVs are potentially extremely powerful surveillance tools, and that power, like all government
power, needs to be subject to checks and balances. Like any tool, UAVs have the potential to be
used for good or ill. If we can set some good privacy ground rules, our society can enjoy the
benefits of this technology without having to worry about its darker potentials. We impose
regulations on what law enforcement can do all the time, for example allowing law enforcement
to take a thermal image of someone’s home only when they get a warrant. We need to impose
rules, limits and regulations on UAVs as well in order to preserve the privacy Americans have
always expected and enjoyed.
Current drone usage is under shaky assumptions of due-process – brightlines
are necessary to solve abuse
Gerstein 12 – (Josh Gerstein –writer @ Politico, specializing in legal and national security issues, attended Harvard
College and received a Bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in government.) [Obama: U.S. seeks 'due process' in drone strikes]
(http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2012/09/obama-us-seeks-due-process-in-
drone-strikes-134889.html) //MC
"It's very important for the president and the entire culture of our national security team to
continually ask tough questions about, are we doing the right thing, are we abiding by rule of
law, are we abiding by due process," Obama said in an interview with CNN first aired on
Monday. "And then set up structures and institutional checks, so that, you know, you avoid
any kind of slippery slope into a place where we're not being true to who we are."
Obama's comments echo Attorney General Eric Holder's remarks in a speech in Chicago in
March explaining the legal basis the administration asserts for the drone strikes, part of broader
programs sometimes referred to as "targeted killing." However, Holder acknowledged in that
speech that the "due process" the administration has employed does not involve an
independent review by the courts.
"Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to
national security," Holder said then. "The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not
guarantee judicial process."
Critics say the kind of due process Holder and Obama are describing is pretty weak stuff: layers
of internal administration review, rather than a more formal process involving a court . One
oddity of the current legal situation remains that the U.S. government needs some kind of
court-approved warrant to intentionally eavesdrop on the telephone or e-mail of a U.S. citizen
suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda, like Anwar Al-Awlaki. However, using a drone, a
missile, bomb or military raid to intentionally kill that same person requires no approval from
the judicial branch.
Another thing absent here despite the administration's welcome steps towards explaining the
scope and legal rationale of the drone programs: transparency. While the various systems for
authorizing such strikes have been reported on in books like Dan Klaidman's "Kill or Capture"
and news stories like this one in May in the New York Times, virtually nothing about the
mechanics of the process is officially on the record. In addition, it's unclear how if at all the
secret authorizing system deals with the issue of whether terrorist suspects, particularly
Americans, need to be on notice that the government is seeking them before they're killed in a
process that offers no opportunity for surrender on the spot.
The administration has also said that it only uses deadly force where capture is "not feasible,"
something president described as limiting the program to "very remote areas [where] it's
difficult to capture them." However, the question of feasibility, sometime referred to as "undue
risk" to the U.S. soldiers or operatives who might carry out an operation, seems highly
subjective .
T-Curtail
1NC
Interpretation: Curtail means reduce or limit
Merriam-Webster 15 © 2015 Merriam-Webster, Incorporated http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/curtail
Curtail verb cur·tail \(ˌ)kər-ˈtāl\
: to reduce or limit (something)
Full Definition of CURTAIL
transitive verb
: to make less by or as if by cutting off or away some part <curtail the power of the executive
branch> <curtail inflation>
Violation: The aff just passes a Supreme Court ruling to stop unwarranted drone
surveillance- This doesn’t necessitate a reduction in surveillance- All
surveillance could continue if it meets the regulatory standards- In fact, it could
even increase
Now curtail goes beyond regulation
BusinessWorld 14 BusinessWorld June 18, 2014 Wednesday Gov't agencies told to
comment on petition vs higher traffic fines lexis
Ximex Delivery Express, Inc. (XDE) said the transportation agencies went beyond their
mandate as the order does not regulate but instead "curtails" an individual's right to earn a
living.
"[The new rules] deprive the owners of the fleets ... from pursuing what could be the only
means of livelihood that they know," XDE said.
Voters:
1. Limits- The aff’s interpretation allows for countless regulations that could
possibly effect surveillance. Permitting reduction by effect is unlimiting.
2. Bidirectionality- Explodes limits, because the aff can impose regulations to
even allow for increased aerial surveillance, which overloads the negative’s
burden and even steals neg ground
2NC
AT: WM
We’ll explicitly concede your we meet argument- This means that the aff isn’t a
regulation, but rather a direct reduction- This turns all of your offense- The
whole 1AC is a litany of reasons why drones are good, but the plan reduces the
amount of drones- This shows that the status quo is a lot better than the plan
States CP
1NC
Text: The fifty states governments of the United States should through the
NCCUSL ban warrantless use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles surveillance within
each of their respective territories.
States can require agencies to have a warrant before drone surveillance
Heverly 15 – Robert A. Heverly is an Associate Professor of Law at the Albany Law School. (“Game of Drones: The Uses and Potential Abuses of
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the U.S. and Abroad: ARTICLE: THE STATE OF DRONES: STATE AUTHORITY TO REGULATE DRONES,” 8 Alb. Gov't L. Rev. 29)
A number of states have enacted legislation that limits public use of drones, especially in
terms of law enforcement and a number of states have placed explicit restrictions on drone
use by state and local law enforcement. These vary from requiring a warrant for drone
operations by enforcement entities – though many warrant requirement statutes provide
exceptions in certain defined circumstances – to reporting on drone use by public entities and
controlling collection, use, and retention of drone gathered information. Some states have set
up administrative agency procedures for authorizing drone use by public entities, and another
has instituted training and licensing procedures applicable to public use of drones. State level
prohibitions on all use of drones by state and local public entities have also been enacted
which may be styled either as "prohibitions" or "moratoria." These may be limited in their
application, for example, to a prohibition on using drones for traffic law enforcement, and the
state legislation may provide many exceptions to the prohibitions. These attempts to restrict
public use of drones often occur both due to legislators' own reactions to drone use and the
surveillance possible with them and to public pressure on elected officials to control the new
technologies. The restrictions will most likely have no effect on federal operations, whether
administrative, law enforcement, or otherwise, as federal officers are most likely not bound by
state restrictions in this regard.
NCCUSL is able to produce uniform state laws for adoption.
NCCUSL 13 (NCCUSL, 2013, “UNIFORM ACT ON PREVENTION OF AND REMEDIES¶ FOR HUMAN
TRAFFICKING”
http://www.uniformlaws.org/shared/docs/Prevention%20of%20and%20Remedies%20for%20H
uman%20Trafficking/2013_UPRHT_Final%20Act.pdf)
The Uniform Law Commission (ULC), also known as National Conference of Commissioners¶ on Uniform State Laws
(NCCUSL), now in its 122nd year, provides states with non-partisan,¶ well-conceived
and well-drafted legislation that brings clarity and stability to critical areas of¶
state statutory law.¶ ULC members must be lawyers, qualified to practice law. They are practicing lawyers, judges,¶ legislators
and legislative staff and law professors, who have been appointed by state¶ governments as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto
Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to¶ research, draft and promote enactment of uniform state laws in areas of state law where¶
uniformity is desirable and practical.¶ • ULC
strengthens the federal system by providing
rules and procedures that are consistent¶ from state to state but that also reflect the diverse
experience of the states.¶ • ULC statutes are representative of state experience, because the organization is made up¶ of
representatives from each state, appointed by state government.¶ • ULC keeps state law up-to-date by addressing important and
timely legal issues.¶ • ULC’s
efforts reduce the need for individuals and businesses to
deal with different laws¶ as they move and do business in different states.¶ •
ULC’s work facilitates economic development and provides a legal platform for foreign¶ entities to
deal with U.S. citizens and businesses.¶ • Uniform Law Commissioners donate thousands of hours of their time and legal and¶
drafting expertise every year as a public service, and receive no salary or compensation¶ for their work.¶ • ULC’s deliberative and
uniquely open drafting process draws on the expertise of¶ commissioners, but also utilizes input from legal experts, and advisors and
observers¶ representing the views of other legal organizations or interests that will be subject to the¶ proposed laws.¶ • ULC
is
a state-supported organization that represents true value for the states,
providing¶ services that most states could not otherwise afford or duplicate.
Solvency
State legislation of drones solves best, federal model can’t predict future
situations
Gruber 4-25-15 – [Robert H. – litigation associate @ Greenberg Traurig] [COMMERCIAL DRONES AND PRIVACY: CAN
WE TRUST STATES WITH “DRONE FEDERALISM”?] (http://tinyurl.com/pgpsp64) [Richmond Journal of Law & Technology Volume
XXI, Issue 4] (accessed 7-13-15
There are also several arguments in favor of leaving commercial¶ drone regulation largely in
the hands of the states. The technology is new,¶ and state experimentation might lead to a
better result than a federal¶ “statute of first impression,” so to speak.214¶ Privacy—
particularly outside¶ of law enforcement contexts—has traditionally been a product of state
and¶ common law.215¶ [74] Margot Kaminski has made a compelling case for drone¶
federalism, contending that states are better suited to address the “complex¶ space” between
the privacy and First Amendment rights at stake. 216¶ Kaminski argues that because federal
legislation is more costly, more time¶ consuming to enact, and more likely to be struck down
as unconstitutional,¶ states are a better laboratory for experimenting with approaches to¶
commercial and private UAS regulation.217¶ Moreover, state legislatures¶ are capable of
tailoring protections to meet new technologies according to¶ their citizens’ particular needs—
for example, it should come of no¶ surprise that California is one of a few states to pass an antipaparazzi¶ law.218¶ [75] Another argument made in favor of drone federalism (and privacy¶
federalism in general) is that it is difficult for a single federal law to¶ foresee each varied
situation that may arise in the future.219¶ [76] It is possible that a pure federalism model
would work well if—as¶ is probably the case for less-controversial areas of the law—states¶
cautiously tested the waters of restrictions on civil/commercial drones.¶ Unfortunately, that
does not appear to be the case here; they are diving¶ straight in.220¶ The specter of drone
warfare and robotic monitoring has¶ wrought enough damage on drones’ image that, by the
time the FAA fully¶ integrates private UAS in the national airspace, it may be impossible in a¶
significant number of states to operate one without risking civil or¶ criminal liability. 221¶ As
mentioned earlier, as long as the third-party¶ doctrine remains viable, the incentive for states
to bring civil drone¶ restrictions up to speed with moratoria on government surveillance will
be¶ great.222¶ [77] The states have also done little to demonstrate that they are¶ concerned
with the “complex space” between the First Amendment and¶ privacy. The Texas Privacy Act,
enacted in response to a drone’s¶ discovery of environmental violations, arguably violates the
First¶ Amendment outright. The cattle industry has sponsored bills in several¶ states forbidding
the recording of farmland.223¶ Some states, by prohibiting¶ flights over private property, appear
to be straining to reach as much¶ conduct as existing First Amendment precedent could possibly
allow.¶ [78] Moreover, the Supreme Court’s preference against issuing broad¶ holdings when
privacy and the First Amendment collide suggests that¶ even some unconstitutional attempts are
unlikely to be overturned in one¶ fell swoop. Instead, courts might invalidate statutes on
particular cases’¶ facts. The result could be that unconstitutional laws persist for some time,¶
continuing to infringe on First Amendment rights, eroding rather than¶ being overturned.¶ [79]
State legislation results in inter-state and federal cooperation—no solvency
deficits
Kaminski 13 – Margot E. Kaminski is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and a Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at
the Yale Law School. (“Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry,” California Law Review, The Circuit, Paper 8, May 2013, Quay)
states have been the historical locus of governance of personal privacy , and, as discussed, have
also been the locus of recent tensions between privacy and the First Amendment. This makes
them the historical site of experimentation with privacy law that collides with the First Amendment. It is
appropriate for state laws to continue to serve that function with respect to civilian drone use.
Each state will be able to express privacy values reflective of its own citizens’ differing
Thus
principles and needs, and courts can determine whether these values collide with the First Amendment. Eventually, state civilian
drone laws may converge into a floor that other states can each build on, with the more
successful statutes—the ones that survive First Amendment scrutiny in courts— serving as the blueprint for eventual
federal legislation . For now, however, we truly do not have a uniform idea of how to balance privacy against speech rights in
gathering information. If we federally legislate civilian drone surveillance, we risk creating a
Congressional floor that collides with the First Amendment.
State regulations requiring drone warrants before solve
Schlag 13 – Chris Schlag is a J.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He has a B.S. in Environmental Health from Colorado
State University and an M.S. in Occupational Health, Safety and Environmental Management from Columbia Southern University. (“The New Privacy
Battle: How the Expanding Use of Drones Continues to Erode Our Concept of Privacy and Privacy Rights,” 13 PGH. J. Tech. L. & Pol'y 1, Spring 2013,
Quay)
Many states have taken the initiative to propose state specific legislation about drone use
within state borders. Florida, Montana, and Virginia were some of the first states to propose legislation in
2013, with the majority of their proposed state legislation just waiting to be signed into law. Though the states differ in their
focus and goals of proposed legislation, the majority of states have proposed legislation at this time. The
argument has been made that drones are no more invasive to privacy than the standard helicopter surveillance. However, a survey of proposed
legislation clearly suggests that privacy
during drone surveillance is actually a major concern. In a majority of
proposed state bills, states want to implement, at a minimum, a probable cause requirement before
law enforcement can obtain a warrant for the use of drones to collect evidence against an individual. Some states'
proposed legislation would ban weaponization of drones owned and operated within the state; other states
have focused their bills on limiting aerial surveillance of groups such as farmers and ranchers ,
or for specific types of crimes, such as felonies. Additionally, two states, Massachusetts and North Dakota, have explicitly limited drone surveillance
when that surveillance implicates an individual's First Amendment protected activities. State
proposed legislation is a step in
the right direction but is still largely insufficient in protecting all of an individual's privacy interests. Currently, none of the
proposed state legislation fully addresses privacy nor provides sufficient privacy checks on third
party use of drones for surveillance purposes. Under many of the proposed bills, drones can still be used by law
enforcement to obtain information available in "plain view" or open space without a
warrant , regardless of any existing individual expectation of privacy. Additionally, privately owned drones used for security and/or scientific
purposes by third parties are not even discussed under the proposed bills.
States solve drones better—more experience with local situations
Kaminski 13 – Margot E. Kaminski is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and a Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at
the Yale Law School. (“Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry,” California Law Review, The Circuit, Paper 8, May 2013, Quay)
Congress should defer to states on privacy regulations governing
civilian drone use for video and audio surveillance. States have experience regulating many of the kinds of
privacy violations contemplated by those who fear drones, and state legislation permits
Assuming these conditions are met,
experimentation with these regulations, subject to crucial feedback from courts on FirstAmendment boundaries. Congress should therefore wait to enact regulation of civilian use of drones for information-gathering until
more data emerges out of state experimentation. At the least, Congress should avoid preempting state regulation in any drone privacy statute it does
enact. A
number of state laws raise questions similar to those likely to be raised by drone
regulation. State wiretapping laws, Peeping Tom laws, video voyeurism laws, and paparazzi
laws all currently regulate privacy-intrusive photography, videography, and sound recordings. These laws vary in how
they handle the scope of privacy protection against video and photographic intrusion. State wiretap laws, for example, vary in
whether they require the consent of one party, or the consent of all parties. They vary in whether there
must be a reasonable expectation of privacy in the conversation for a privacy violation to occur, and they vary in whether the act of recording must be
surreptitious to be banned.56 Peeping Tom statutes criminalize peeping through a hole or other aperture into a person’s home. They are sparsely
enacted, and relatively ineffective, because they require catching the Tom in the act.57 Video voyeurism statutes criminalize the viewing, videotaping,
or photographing of another without knowledge or consent, when done for the purpose of sexual arousal.58 Some
of these statutes
require establishing a reasonable expectation of privacy, and some require that the criminalized image be of a nude
or partially nude subject. Paparazzi statutes ban paparazzi from using special technologies to intrude on the personal life and personal spaces of
celebrities.59 In handling these state statutes, many
courts have shown a reluctance to find a reasonable
expectation of privacy in public places. However, states could conceivably get around this
reluctance if desired, through legislation . Presumably, states will also try to regulate the taking of
photographs, video, or audio recordings from drones, as Texas H.B. 912 currently proposes. Drone antisurveillance laws thus resemble these state privacy statutes that have led courts to grapple
with the appropriate balance between privacy and free speech. The state wiretap law cases discussed above
demonstrate that a wholesale ban on drone-based recordings would implicate a substantial First Amendment interest. A wholesale ban of
drone videography would thus likely not be found constitutional, because it would ban an
entire medium of expression. But as current state laws demonstrate that a number of
narrower privacy protections may be societally acceptable and even necessary, these types of
restrictions may be imported into state anti-drone-surveillance legislation. In the next section, I explore
the various ways in which states might legislate to protect privacy implicated by drone use.
Less likely to get struck down
Kaminski 13 – Margot E. Kaminski is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and a Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at
the Yale Law School. (“Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry,” California Law Review, The Circuit, Paper 8, May 2013, Quay)
Regulating law enforcement drone use poses few countervailing dangers from
legislating thoughtlessly or in haste; such legislation would implicate Fourth Amendment rights rather
than First Amendment rights, so the worst case scenario is that such legislation might eventually be
found by courts not to protect enough privacy. The more interesting and difficult privacy puzzle
arises from drone use by private—not public—actors. Regulating civilian drone use will be
treacherous, as such regulation potentially threatens First Amendment rights . Because of that threat,
civilian drone regulation may get overturned, as courts sort out the scope of those First
Amendment rights. Regulating civilian drone use on the federal level thus risks being
unconstitutional or, barring that, unstable . Several states are considering banning civilian
drone photography, or more broadly, civilian drone use.16 The proposed Texas Privacy Act, H.B. 912, bans drone photography without the
consent of the property owner on whose property the image is taken, and at the time of this Essay’s writing, has passed the Texas House and is up for
debate in the state Senate.17 Two
proposed federal bills restrict the gathering of images and other
information by civilians.18 One of these federal bills can be read to preempt state regulation of drone flights between states. 19 This
Essay argues that preemption of state drone regulation would be a mistake.
It costs less
Kaminski 13 – Margot E. Kaminski is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and a Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at
the Yale Law School. (“Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry,” California Law Review, The Circuit, Paper 8, May 2013, Quay)
The important question in privacy regulation of civilian drone use is thus whether this regulation should be
enacted by the federal government, or by states. The tension between privacy and First
Amendment freedom is unlikely to be resolved in one fell swoop by a federal statute; moreover, federal
preemption will preclude state experimentation. Federal legislation is also costlier and more difficult to enact ,
and risks getting overturned by courts concerned about First Amendment implications. Rather than
attempt to get federal legislation right on the first try, and risk having it rejected by First Amendment-protective courts, we should allow
states to run through less costly iterations.
The counterplan solves
Matiteyahu 15 – Taly Matiteyahu is an Executive Staff Editor, COLUM. J. L. & SOC. PROBS., 2014-15. J.D. Candidate 2015, Columbia Law
School. (“Drone Regulations and Fourth Amendment Rights: The Interaction of State Drone Statutes and the Reasonable Expectation of Privacy,” 48
Colum. J.L. & Soc. Probs. 265, Winter 2015, Quay)
In February 2012, President Barack Obama signed the
FAA Modernization and Reform Act into law, heralding the official
introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles ("drones") into domestic airspace. The Act calls on the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) to begin integrating drones into the national airspace system by 2015. n2
Drones are aircrafts that do not carry human operators and are capable of operating remotely or autonomously on a preprogrammed flight path. n3
They can be as small as an insect or the size of a commercial airplane. n4 Drones
can be equipped with high-power
cameras, thermal scanners, license plate readers, [*267] moving target indicators, LADAR (laser radar),
LIDAR (light detection and ranging), and facial recognition software. Nonweaponized domestic uses for drones are boundless.
They can be used for mapping, n12 crop dusting, n13 environmental protection, n14 wildlife tracking, n15 delivering packages, n16 search and rescue
missions, n17 and a host of other purposes. n18 The
FAA predicts that 30,000 drones will fill domestic skies
within ten years. As drones are introduced into American skies, they will likely change the landscape
of national airspace. However, drones' benefits do not come without a cost. Legal scholars and politicians have
already voiced concerns indicating the perception that current safeguards for protecting
individual privacy are insufficient , particularly from the use of drones by law enforcement. n20
This apprehension is compounded by scholars' perceptions that neither the FAA, whose responsibility
is to ensure safety and efficiency in national airspace, n21 nor any other regulatory body, is currently equipped to
protect privacy interests. n22 In the meantime, some states are enacting legislation in an effort to regulate
drone use and protect individual privacy. n23 As drones proliferate, individuals will look to state laws
and the Fourth Amendment to provide protection against intrusions of privacy. The Fourth
Amendment's reasonable expectation of privacy test, used to delineate the bounds of Constitutional protection, will
be central to determining the scope of permissible warrantless drone use by law enforcement.
This Note considers how state drone statutes may interact with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and inform contemporary reasonable expectations
of privacy. Part II reviews Fourth Amendment precedents and applications of the reasonable expectation of privacy test in tracking cases and in cases
where the Supreme Court distinguishes between the home, curtilage, and open fields. Part III provides a survey of state drone statutes currently in
effect, their purposes, and their practical effects on [*269] the use of drones by the government and private parties. n24 Part IV discusses how state
drone statutes may inform the Supreme Court's understanding of what expectations of
privacy are "reasonable" within an interpretive framework delineated by Orin S. Kerr's Four Models of Fourth
Amendment Protections. n25 Finally, Part V predicts that state drone statutes will influence the Court's current
understanding of the reasonable expectation of privacy, whether explicitly or implicitly, as drones
develop technologically and are regulated.
AT Perm do both
Perm includes federal action means it still links to the net benefit. If it doesn’t
its severance and voter on fairness.
It also doesn’t make any sense – they haven’t explained an actual purpose to
passing the exact same regulations on the state and federal level. Specifically in
the context of drones, federal regulations will prevent state laws.
Ryle 14 (TROY A. RULE , Nov. 19, 14, “FAA should curb its regulatory authority over commercial drone use”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rule-drone-regulation-faa-20141120-story.html, JJ)
Small drones are not built for lengthy interstate flights at altitudes where conventional airplanes fly, so
why should a federal agency be the chief regulator of these devices? Rather than seeking
to expand its regulatory jurisdiction all the way down to the ground, the FAA should advocate for
itself a more limited role in a collaborative federal, state and local regulatory scheme tailored to the unique
attributes of drone technologies.¶ The idiots that want the FAA to get out of the way are the first that would be screaming
negligence the first time some knucklehead flew his drone into a landing airliner. The idea that drones deserve unfettered
access to our nation's skies is ludicrous. The people demanding quick action...¶ The FAA should be focused on
those aspects of drone regulation that are most appropriately implemented at the federal government level. For instance, the
agency could accelerate the development of national drone safety and performance standards
analogous to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's manufacturing standards for motor vehicles. Among other
things, these FAA standards could require that all commercial drones incorporate specific global positioning system features to
ensure compatibility with a nationally standardized geo-fence network designed to keep drones out of the way of conventional
aircraft. At least one leading drone manufacturer is already using “geo-fence” software to prevent operators from flying their
drones into the airspace surrounding hundreds of airports around the world.¶ Most
other facets of civilian drone
regulation are better suited for lower levels of government. Several state legislatures have already
enacted drone-related statutes, but states should be doing much more. In addition to creating registration and licensing
programs for commercial drones and their operators, legislatures could enact laws that clarify the scope of landowners' rights
to exclude drones from the airspace directly above their land. If tailored properly, these aerial trespass statutes could help to
address a wide array of conflicts involving drones, including those involving law enforcement uses of drone devices.¶ Local
governments are well-positioned to serve valuable functions in drone regulation as well. In
particular, drone zoning laws adopted at the local level could permit wider use of drones
in certain commercial or agricultural zones while imposing greater restrictions on drones above residential
areas. Municipalities could even adopt temporary-use permit provisions to accommodate occasional drone use by real estate
agents and wedding photographers without compromising landowner privacy. Regrettably,
until the FAA signals
that it does not intend to regulate these sorts of activities at the federal level, most local
officials are unlikely to craft innovative drone policies within their communities.
State level regulations have to come before federal ones.
Bennett 09/14 (Wells C. Bennett is a Fellow in the Brookings Institution's Governance Studies
program, Brookings Institution, September 2014 “Civilian Drones, Privacy, and the¶ FederalState¶ Balance”
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2014/09/civilian%20drones%20pri
vacy/civilian_drones_privacy_bennett_NEW.pdf, JJ)
A lack of mission-critical data cuts against having the federal government¶ dive headlong into
crafting liability rules for civilian drones and privacy. It¶ would be hard to design a preemptive,
national-level policy without knowing¶ more about what sorts of drones will fly, what sorts of privacy
rules will¶ survive a first round of legal review, and so forth. State regulation and drone¶ integration together will
furnish some key answers to those questions over¶ time. To put the point somewhat differently,
the principal “drone federalist”¶ arguments seem mostly correct.
AT State Fiat Bad
Defense 1. Reciprocal
a. The Aff use of federal government includes thousands of agencies
and departments.
2. Counterplan fiats all states in unison, which is fundamentally the same as
1 actor
3. Lit checks – federal key warrants are easy to find regardless to the
number of states.
Reject the argument not the team
AT Uniformity
NCCUSL empirically works – Uniform Commercial Code proves
Thunder 10 (James M. Thunder, Washington D.C. attorney, 11.16.10, Strengthening
Federalism: The time is right for serious action on this fundamental constitutional matter,
http://spectator.org/articles/38573/strengthening-federalism, JJ)
Another process by which a state legislature may consider laws passed by sister states is by way of
the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), a private organization consisting of
appointees by the state governors. Over the past 60 years, the NCCUSL has proposed to the
states some 150 model and uniform laws covering a variety of topics, available on its website and in a threevolume work called Uniform Laws Annotated. One such uniform state law is the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). Every
state has adopted it, some with a few minor changes. In the world of business, the UCC is pervasive. It
governs sales, secured transactions, letters of credit, and more. It is difficult to conceive of modern business
being transacted in America without it. Congress could have passed such a law under the
Constitution's Commerce Clause. Instead, the NCCUSL and the American Law Institute drafted the
document over a ten-year period and then proposed it in 1952 to the states for their adoption. Still another
process by which state legislatures may work in concert is the development of interstate compacts. They are formally submitted to
Congress as required by Article I, Section 10. Many such compacts create intergovernmental agencies such as the Port Authority of
New York and New Jersey (owner of the World Trade Center), the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (California and Nevada), and the
Colorado River Compact (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and California). The Council of State Government
lists 195 compacts that it believes are currently in force and do not deal with state boundaries. I believe Congress should review its
procedures to ensure that it encourages multi-state cooperation in resolving regional or national problems.
Even when there are variations of the law, NCCUSL is key to check those
variations don’t contradict each other.
Legal Info Institute No date (Legal Information Institute, No Date, “Uniform Laws”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uniform, JJ)
The greatest successes of the "Uniform Law" approach have been in the field of commercial
and business law. Beginning with the Commissioners first product, the separate Uniform
Negotiable Instruments Law (at one time in effect in all the states) and Uniform Sales Act (also
widely adopted), the Conference, working together with the American Law Institute, later
produced the Uniform Commercial Code (now in effect in some version in nearly all U.S.
jurisdictions -- see the LII's Uniform Commercial Code Locator page).¶ Uniform Laws: as vehicles
of law revision or reform¶ While uniformity was the original aim of the Uniform Law process
overseen by NCUSL, in time law revision or reform became a significant purpose as well.
Topics for legislation where state to state variance did not create a serious problem for the
conduct of business or interstate mobility but where state laws were judged by legal experts as
being in need of reform have been the subject of Uniform Laws. To the extent particular acts
are justified by this broader aim, their failure to win widespread adoption or to withstand the
pressure for state by state variation provides less solid a basis for judging success. Indeed, such
efforts may reasonably be seen as bearing fruit in cases where a Uniform Law is but one of
several proposals catalyzing and shaping legislative reform. The Uniform Residential Landlord
and Tenant Act might be viewed a fair success, in this light, despite its fairly limited adoption.
AT Circumvention
Federal agencies do not have power to control local enforcement’s use of
drones which is what their Sorcher evidence state is the reason for backlash.
Waddell 02/05/15 (KAVEH Waddell, s a staff correspondent for National Journal, February 5,
2015 “Few Privacy Limitations Exist on How Police Use Drones”
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/few-privacy-limitations-exist-on-how-police-use-drones20150205)
But the Federal Aviation Administration only takes safety into consideration when it grants a law
enforcement agency approval to use drones, leaving privacy protections to legislation—which,
depending on the state in question, may or may not exist.¶ Agencies as large as the Michigan
State Police and as small as the Grand Forks County [N.D.] Sheriff's Department have received FAA approval to
use drones. Most departments use them for missions like search-and-rescue or for photographing a crime scene or an accident
site.¶ But unless a law enforcement agency is within one of the 14 states that have passed
privacy legislation limiting how police can use drones, there's little in theory keeping it from
using a drone for a less innocuous end—such as surveillance without a warrant. "While the federal
government retains responsibility for the airspace, under most circumstances a state/local
government can impose restrictions on the agencies for which it's responsible," an FAA spokesperson
said in an emailed statement.
AT Links to Politics
Putting the plan through state governments means Obama doesn’t need to use
any PC to convince congressmen to pass the plan.
Even if the public ties him to the states’ decision his PC is not affected because
it’s based upon influence over government officials not the general public.
Courts DA
Congress views domestic drones as a necessity
Waterman 12 [Shaun - editor of POLITICO Pro Cybersecurity. He is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the BBC and United Press
International. “Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress”, Washington Times, 2/7/12, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/feb/7/coming-to-asky-near-you/?page=all] Bschulz 24
Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this
week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace. The
FAA Reauthorization Act, which President
orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing
and licensing of commercial drones by 2015. Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for
Obama is expected to sign, also
electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well. “There are serious policy questions on the
horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on
Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for
surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch. The
provision in the legislation is the fruit of “a
huge push by lawmakers and the defense sector to expand the use of drones ” in American
airspace, she added. According to some estimates, the commercial drone market in the United States could be worth hundreds of millions of
dollars once the FAA clears their use. The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020. The highest-profile use of drones
by the United States has been in the CIA’s armed Predator-drone program, which targets al Qaeda terrorist leaders. But the vast majority of U.S. drone
missions, even in war zones, are flown for surveillance. Some drones are as small as model aircraft, while others have the wingspan of a full-size jet. In
Afghanistan, the U.S. use of drone surveillance has grown so rapidly that it has created a glut of video material to be analyzed. The
legislation
would order the FAA, before the end of the year, to expedite the process through which it authorizes the
use of drones by federal, state and local police and other agencies. The FAA currently issues certificates, which
can cover multiple flights by more than one aircraft in a particular area, on a case-by-case basis. The Department of Homeland Security is the only
federal agency to discuss openly its use of drones in domestic airspace. U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the
nine drones, variants of the CIA’s feared Predator. The aircraft, which are flown remotely by a team
of 80 fully qualified pilots, are used principally for border and counternarcotics surveillance under four long-term
FAA certificates. Officials say they can be used on a short-term basis for a variety of other publicsafety and emergency-management missions if a separate certificate is issued for that mission. “It’s not all about
surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said. Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned
department, operates
aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added. The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and
other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular
missions. The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose
which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the
certifications. “We need a list so we can ask [each agency], ‘What are your policies on drone use? How do you protect privacy? How do you ensure
compliance with the Fourth Amendment?’ ” Ms. Lynch said. “Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the
procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic
Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington. The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to
streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said. “We are looking at our options” to oppose that, she added. Section
332 of the new FAA legislation also orders the agency to develop a system for licensing commercial drone flights as part of the nation’s air traffic
control system by 2015. The agency must establish six flight ranges across the country where drones can be test-flown to determine whether they are
safe for travel in congested skies. Representatives
of the fast-growing unmanned aircraft systems industry
say they worked hard to get the provisions into law. “It sets deadlines for the integration of [the drones] into the
national airspace,” said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group. She
said drone technology is new to the FAA. The legislation, which provides several
deadlines for the FAA to report progress
to Congress, “will move the [drones] issue up their list of priorities ,” Ms. West said.
Congressional retaliation will undercut courts --- they have no institutional
protection against the backlash
Crabb, 12 --- United States District Judge, Western District of Wisconsin (2012, Barbara B., Wisconsin Law Review, “ADDRESS: ROBERT W.
KASTENMEIER LECTURE: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN CONGRESS AND THE COURTS,” 2012 Wis. L. Rev. 871)
Another thirty years passed before the judicial system had the opportunity to become self-governing. In 1922, Congress authorized the establishment
of what is now the Judicial Conference of the United States, to be made up of the chief judges of each circuit court of appeals, headed by the Chief
Justice, and charged with the responsibilities of holding annual meetings to make policy, report on the condition of the dockets in each circuit, and
submit recommendations for improving the administration of justice. n21 In 1939, Congress established the Administrative Office of the United States
Courts, subject to the control of the Chief Justice and the Judicial Conference, and gave the office financial control of the lower federal courts and
primary responsibility for the administration of the federal judiciary. n22 Among other things, this meant that for the first time, the courts were not in
the questionable position of having to seek funding from the most frequent litigator in their courts, the Department of Justice. n23 In 1967, Congress
authorized the establishment of the Federal Judicial Center, the judiciary's educational and research arm. n24 In 1980 and again in 2002, Congress
enacted legislation giving the judicial councils of each circuit new responsibilities for judicial discipline. n25
[*878] These major
changes in court administration put the judicial branch on a firmer footing than it
had been in the nineteenth century and gave it a larger measure of autonomy, but they did not change the
basic relationship between the two branches. The judiciary remained dependent on Congress
for the confirmation of new judges, the creation of new judgeships, funding for courthouses,
their basic budgets, and procedural rules, just as it is today. The courts still have no
independent source of funding. They have no right to be heard on congressional decisions to expand or restrict the scope of the
courts' jurisdiction or to enact laws that will increase the courts' workload. In other words, when it comes to matters affecting
institutional independence, the judiciary has no constitutional protection and its power is
limited to persuasion. If Congress wanted to, it could retaliate against the courts by cutting
the courts' funding ; disestablishing individual courts ; adding or taking away Justices from
the Supreme Court; imposing crippling restrictions on the operations of the courts ; narrowing
their jurisdiction; impeaching individual judges and Justices; and refusing to confirm nominees
to fill judicial vacancies.
The framers set up what could well be a recipe for disaster : giving the judiciary the last word
on the law, with the inevitable controversies that authority will provoke, and then giving it
no institutional protection . It is a little like giving a person a very old and very unpredictable gun for personal security. If used
properly, the gun may perform its intended function, but it's just as possible that it will inflict great damage on its owner. Making the
judiciary the final arbiter on the meaning of the law, with the authority to declare a law or
practice unconstitutional gives it power, but a power that can be explosive and set off
backlashes of varying proportions . By no means is it a power that can ward off
encroachment by the other branches. When an entity has little power in a relationship, it
behooves it to assess the sticking points between it and its protagonist, husband carefully what little power it
possesses , employ diplomacy, look for areas in which the interests of both parties are in alignment, and seek ways to enhance what little power
of persuasion it has.
This crushes judicial independence
Baum, 9 --- Professor of Poli Sci at Ohio State (Lawrence, Congress & the Presidency, “Review of “When Courts
and Congress Collide: The Struggle for Control of America's Judicial System” Taylor and Francis)
Geyh’s explanation of the customary independence of courts, supported by his analysis of historical developments, provides considerable insight into
the limited use of congressional powers over the courts. Clearly, Congress
as a body developed a kind of self-restraint,
one that became more deeply rooted over time. Members of Congress who want to take
strong concrete action against the courts have had a strong burden of proof to overcome. When
members who agree with what the courts have done combine with members who are reluctant to attack judicial independence, they create a
formidable barrier to action.
One potential drawback to historical analysis of a current phenomenon is that it is
tempting to interpret the outcome of
history—-in this case, customary judicial independence—-as inevitable and permanent. That is
especially true when the resulting state of the system is characterized in terms of equilibrium .
Geyh avoids that temptation. Indeed, he thinks that the courts’ independence might decline markedly as
the current era of court-congressional relations continues. He ascribes that possibility largely
to a growing belief that judges act on their own preferences rather than the law, a belief that
weakens congressional deference to the courts .
Geyh argues that federal judges have helped to preserve their independence by acting
cautiously in relation to Congress . He catalogues the array of forms that this caution takes. He recognizes that caution has been
mixed with bold actions that could be expected to arouse congressional wrath, and he sees increasing judicial boldness in the
current era as another potential catalyst for inroads on judicial independence. Admittedly, it is difficult to
determine the extent to which judges rein themselves in with Congress in mind and even more difficult to determine the effects of such choices. But
Geyh makes a good case that
judicial caution has helped to protect the courts’ relative autonomy .
Democratic transitions will fail without Supreme Court leadership
Suto 11 --- Research Associate at Tahrir Institute and J.D. [07/15/11, Ryan Suto is a Research Associate at Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy,
has degrees in degrees in law, post-conflict reconstruction, international relations and public relations from Syracuse Law, “Judicial Diplomacy: The
International Impact of the Supreme Court”, http://jurist.org/dateline/2011/07/ryan-suto-judicial-diplomacy.php]
The Court is certainly the best institution to explain to scholars, governments, lawyers and lay
people alike the enduring legal values of the US, why they have been chosen and how they
contribute to the development of a stable and democratic society. A return to the mentality
that one of America's most important exports is its legal traditions would certainly benefit the
US and stands to benefit nations building and developing their own legal traditions, and our relations
with them. Furthermore, it stands to increase the influence and higher the profile of the bench. The Court
already engages in the exercise of dispensing justice and interpreting the Constitution, and to deliver its opinions with an eye toward their diplomatic
value would take only minimal effort and has the potential for high returns. While
the Court is indeed the best body to
conduct legal diplomacy, it has been falling short in doing so in recent sessions. We are at a
critical moment in world history . People in the Middle East and North Africa are asserting
discontent with their governments . Many nations in Africa, Asia, and Eurasia are grappling
with new technologies, repressive regimes and economic despair . With the development of
new countries, such as South Sudan, the formation of new governments, as is occurring in
Egypt, and the development of new constitutions, as is occurring in Nepal, it is important that
the US welcome and engage in legal diplomacy and informative two-way dialogue . As a nation with
lasting and sustainable legal values and traditions, the Supreme Court should be at the forefront of public legal
diplomacy. With each decision, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to better define,
explain and defend key legal concepts. This is an opportunity that should not be wasted.
Democracy prevents global wars
Kagan ’15 [Bob. Senior Fellow for Foreign Policy at Brookings. “Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics” 1/25/15
http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2015/01/democracy-in-decline-weight-of-geopolitics-kagan //GBS-JV]
global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in
regional and international institutions and agreements as never before.”[10] Those norms had an impact on the
internal political processes of countries, making it harder for authoritarians to weather
political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy . But “norms” are
Diamond and others have noted how important it was that these “
transient as well. In the 1930s, the trendsetting nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s, variants of socialism were in vogue. But from
the 1970s until recently,
the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed—some might
principles and embedded them in international institutions and agreements.
Equally important was the role that the United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy
where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S. contribution was simply to prevent military
coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in what might have
been a natural cycle, preventing nations that ordinarily would have been “due” for an
authoritarian phase from following the usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More
often , it played the role of “catcher in the rye” —preventing young democracies from falling
off the cliff—in places such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped to give the third wave unprecedented breadth and durability.
Finally, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the fall of Central and Eastern
Europe’s communist regimes and their replacement by democracies. What role the United States played in hastening the Soviet
even say imposed—democratic
downfall may be in dispute, but surely it played some part, both by containing the Soviet empire militarily and by outperforming it economically and
technologically. And at the heart of the struggle were the peoples of the former Warsaw
Pact countries themselves. They had long
yearned to achieve the liberation of their respective nations from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from
communism. These peoples wanted to join the rest of Europe, which offered an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of
the United States. That Central
and East Europeans uniformly chose democratic forms of government,
not simply the fruit of aspirations for freedom or comfort. It also reflected the
desires of these peoples to place themselves under the U.S. security umbrella. The strategic,
however, was
the economic, the political, and the ideological were thus inseparable . Those nations that wanted to be
part of NATO, and later of the European Union, knew that they would stand no chance of admission without democratic credentials. These democratic
transitions, which turned the third wave into a democratic tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. That
democratic, united, and prosperous Western Europe was even there to exert a powerful
magnetic pull on its eastern neighbors was due to U.S. actions after World War II.
a
Relations High Now
Relations between congress and the courts are increasing now – familiarity
Palazzolo, 14 – [Joe, Staff Writer for the Wall Street Journal on legal affairs, The Wall Street Journal, “Congress and the Courts Are Learning to
Get Along”, 12/18/14, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/12/18/congress-and-the-courts-are-learning-to-get-along/, 7/7/15]JRO
The legislative and judicial branches are less neighborly than they once were, but efforts are
underway to rekindle a spark in the relationship. The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t had a
member with experience as an elected politician since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a former state
senator in Arizona, retired nearly a decade ago. Likewise, only seven members of Congress, all in the House, were
judges. The past couple years may have marked a low point in inter-branch relations. The partial
shutdown of the government in 2013 “caused broad disruptions” to the courts, which were already smarting from budget cuts. U.S. District Judge
Richard G. Kopf in Nebraska, writing on his blog during the shutdown, told Congress to “go to hell,” capturing the sentiments of more than few of his
colleagues. To
bridge the gulf, federal judges have been meeting with legislators under the
auspices a Pew Charitable Trusts program called “Safe Spaces,” according to a recent interview posted on the
website of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. In the interview, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the Second
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says mending fences is smart from a practical perspective. “After
all, the courts depend upon Congress for the appropriation of its budget.” He goes on: We have to
understand that the courts will be reviewed in terms of operations by the Congress . They will want to make
sure that our funds are being used appropriately and efficiently. So, we respect congressional prerogatives. We want
the Congress to respect judicial prerogatives as to the decisions of particular cases and the
decisional autonomy that courts need to have. Understanding each other is essential if we
are to do our work effectively. A few seconds later, he breaks the news that judges and legislators (and staff) are
learning to be neighbors again. Judge Katzmann says: As part of that work to improve relations
between the branches, the Pew Charitable Trusts has included us in its program on safe
spaces, and what this program involves is, over the next two years, having a variety of kinds of
meetings with the Hill. So we had a wonderful meeting with the House Judiciary Committee that included the chair and ranking member –
Chairman Goodlatte and John Conyers — Justice Breyer, Justice Alito, other members of Congress. We had a meeting just recently with the committee
staffs of the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. We’re having a meeting this spring with senators. And so these
kinds of interactions foster a familiarity, make it easier when there are issues having to do
with the administration of justice for the branches to interact. A spokeswoman for the
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts declined to describe the nature of the discussions but said there are no set agendas. A
spokeswoman for Pew Charitable Trusts, who also declined to reveal the content of the meetings , said, “We have been pleased to
work with Judge Katzmann and others to facilitate discussion among members of Congress
and the judiciary on issues of common interest.”
Link: Constitutional Rulings
Controversial constitutional rulings cause significant Congressional backlash –
constitutional amendments can be passed to overturn them
Miller 09 [Mark - Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Professor of History, Director of Law and Society Program, at Clark University,
‘Constitutionalism and Democracy : View of the Courts from the Hill : Interactions Between Congress and the Federal Judiciary.” University of Virginia
Press, 2009, proquest] Bschulz 9
In theory, when the Supreme Court or another federal court issues a constitutionally based decision, the only way for Congress to overturn that
decision is through a constitutional amendment. In fact, a
variety of amendments to the Constitution have been
enacted mainly to overturn Supreme Court decisions, including the Eleventh Amendment, the Civil War
amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth), the Sixteenth Amendment, and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. In
addition, a variety of constitutional amendments designed to overturn specific Supreme Court
decisions have been proposed but never ratified. For example, there have been efforts to pass constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion,
prohibiting flag burning, allowing prayer in schools, and prohibiting gay marriage. To date, none of these proposed amendments have received the twothirds vote in both houses of Congress necessary to send them to the states for ratification. Even
when Congress enacts a
constitutional amendment, however, the inter-institutional conversation does not end. As Comiskey has
noted, “Because the courts can rule on disputes over the meaning of an amendment’s terms, amendments do not always end the
constitutional dialogue on the subjects they address” (2008, 207).
Some of the most persistent proposals for constitutional amendment proposals have been aimed at prohibiting burning of the American flag as a form
of political protest. Votes on proposed constitutional amendments to prohibit flag burning have been taken nearly every year since the Supreme
Court’s decisions in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) allowing it. Almost every year since these cases were handed down,
one house of Congress has gotten the necessary two-thirds vote to pass the proposed amendment, but the other house has failed to reach that
threshold. Thus the proposed amendment has never been sent to the states for ratification because it has never gotten the necessary vote in both
houses of Congress at the same time.
In reality, Congress can also take statutory steps to reverse the policy announced by the Court,
if not the constitutional decision itself. Davidson notes that the same partisan and ideological fights that
Congress engages in over a wide variety of policy issues clearly spill over into issues of constitutional
interpretation. “Partisan and ideological allegiances are as divisive as ever,” he writes, “and are
especially salient in congressional responses to pressing constitutional questions”
(1993, 118). But
one Democratic member of Congress warned that Congress should not rush to overturn constitutionally based decisions of the Supreme Court. This
member said to me, “The President has said that he has an equal role in interpreting the Constitution with Congress and the Supreme Court, but that is
not true. Congress and the President must follow the Supreme Court in constitutionally based cases because the job of the courts is to interpret the
Constitution. We can’t just ignore court rulings on the Constitution like the President has tried to do.”
Of the twenty-three Supreme Court decisions studied by Robert Dahl (1957), in effect seventeen
were reversed by Congress. Likewise, Joseph Ignagni and James Meernik (1994) found that in the years 1954– 90 Congress had in effect
reversed the policy direction in thirteen of the sixty-five decisions they studied. For example, in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth
Amendment did not protect the offices of a newspaper from police searches if the police had a search warrant. Congress responded by passing
legislation granting additional protections to newspapers (see Peretti 1999, 142). Using a different methodology, Pickerill (2004, 41) found that in
almost half of the cases he studied, Congress acted to save statutes found to be unconstitutional by the courts. Pickerill argues that although at times
Congress will directly confront the Court’s constitutionally based decisions, “it is much more common for Congress to amend legislation in a manner
that makes clear concessions to the Court’s decision” (2004, 49).
Link: Statutory Interpretations
Unpopular statutory interpretations not only cause congressional backlash but
get ignored
Miller 09 [Mark - Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Professor of History, Director of Law and Society Program, at Clark University,
‘Constitutionalism and Democracy : View of the Courts from the Hill : Interactions Between Congress and the Federal Judiciary.” University of Virginia
Press, 2009, proquest] Bschulz 8
Congress and the federal
courts also have routine interactions regarding federal court decisions
involving statutory interpretation. Federal courts routinely interpret the statutes enacted by Congress. As Lawrence Baum and Lori
Hausegger remind us, “The largest share of the Court’s work is interpretation of statutes enacted by Congress” (2004, 107). Of course, when the
majority in Congress is unhappy with a judicial decision involving statutory interpretation,
they can simply pass a new statute to overturn the court’s decision (see, e.g., Henschen 1983). For example,
in 1978 Congress enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act after the Supreme Court held that
pregnancy was not a protected disability under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (see Pacelle 2002, 94). The
Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1991 overturned at least a dozen Supreme Court statutoryinterpretation decisions regarding the ability of victims to sue for alleged race and sex discrimination. In fact, it is not
uncommon for Congress to move to overturn judicial decisions involving statutory
interpretation
(see, e.g., Eskridge 1991a; and Baum and Hausegger 2004). R. Shep Melnick (1995, 101) believes that Congress overturns many
more judicial-policy statements than Eskridge has found, in large part because many members of Congress may not even realize that they are taking
action to overturn a court decision in any given piece of legislation. Mark Graber (1993) and George Lovell (2003), among
others,
argue that at times Congress intentionally passes statutes with ambiguous language, thus
further empowering the courts by almost requiring them to interpret the ambiguous statutes.
In other words, Congress punts the most controversial decisions to the courts in order to preserve a fragile coalition in the legislative branch. After the
courts issue rulings involving statutory interpretation, Congress may decide to review its original ambiguous compromise. Davidson (1993) reports that
Congress now pays increasing attention to the statutory-interpretation decisions of the courts. According to Davidson, “An increasingly frequent source
of the lawmaking agenda is found in judicial interpretations of existing statutory language” (1993, 103). Jeb Barnes (2004b) has found that
Congress pays a great deal of attention to the statutory-interpretation decisions of the federal
courts. As Barnes has summarized the changing nature of the such rulings by the courts, “Put simply, today’s federal judges not
only serve their traditional role of resolving politically important constitutional disputes, but
also pay a significant role in administering conflicts among competing agencies over the
meaning of statutes and considering public challenges to regulatory procedures and decisions”
(J. Barnes 2004a, 36).
Link Magnifier: Congress Scrutinizes
Court decisions are subject to extreme Congressional scrutiny – ensures
backlash
Miller 09 [Mark - Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Professor of History, Director of Law and Society Program, at Clark University,
‘Constitutionalism and Democracy : View of the Courts from the Hill : Interactions Between Congress and the Federal Judiciary.” University of Virginia
Press, 2009, proquest] Bschulz 12
Pickerill has found that Congress pays a great deal of attention to constitutionally based
judicial decisions, at least those from the Supreme Court. Congress may not devote much time to constitutional issues in its initial debates on
legislation (Pickerill 2004, 67), but it does respond when the courts declare congressional actions to be
unconstitutional. As Pickerill notes, “Congress is highly responsive to Supreme Court decisions
striking federal statutes; that is, Congress usually responds formally to the Supreme Court by
repassing the statute in modified form, amending the Constitution, or taking other official
action” (2004, 7). “When it comes to constitutional issues,” he concludes, “Congress is often a reactive
body” (2004, 145). Congress is certainly aware of the voice of the courts in the inter-institutional
constitutional debate, although the legislative branch may not always yield to the dictates of
the judicial branch.
The more routine interactions between Congress and the federal courts illustrate that the two institutions have very different
perspectives and wills. At times, these regular interactions inevitably produce friction and
tension between the two institutions. At times, Congress has attempted to use its institutional
powers in the judicial confirmation process and in the budgetary process, among others, to help
shape the direction of judicial decisions. At other times, Congress has been more direct in its attempts to guide or alter the
scope of judicial decisions. Since constitutional interpretation is a continuous dialogue among the
political actors in American society, these interactions between Congress and the courts will
probably continue well into the future. Congress will always attempt to influence the decision making of federal judges,
including the justices who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. While this continuous conversation among the branches of government is certainly healthy,
there are limits as to how far Congress should go in its attempts to influence judicial decisions. When
Congress goes too far, the
majority in Congress may get what they want in the short term, but at the expense of the
fundamental principle of judicial independence . Independent federal courts must remain key participants in the ongoing
inter-institutional constitutional conversation.
I/L: Backlash Destroys Legitimacy
Congressional backlash will crush judicial legitimacy --- even an unsuccessful
attack will gut judicial review
Martin, 1 --- Prof of Political Science at Washington University
(Andrew D., Statuatory Battles and Constitutional Wars: Congress and the Supreme Court)
But the large policy payoff in the constitutional cases. What
does the ability of the President and Congress to
attack through overrides or other means constitutional court decisions imply in terms of the
cost of the justices bear? If an attack succeeds and the court does not back down, it effectively removes the
court from the policy game and may seriously or, even irrevocably harm its reputation,
credibility, and legitimacy . Indeed, such an attack would effectively remove the court from
policy making, thus incurring an infinite cost. With no constitutional prescription for judicial review, this
power is vulnerable, and would be severely damaged if congress and the president were effective in
attack on the Court. But even if the attack is unsuccessful , the integrity of the court may be
damaged, for the assault may compromise its ability to make future constitutional decisions
and, thus, more long-lasting policy. One does not have to peer as far back as scott v. sandford to find examples; Bush v. Gore
(2000, U.S.) may provide one. To be sure, the new President and Congress did not attack the decision, but
other members of government did of course, unsuccessfully at least in terms of the ruling’s impact. Yet, there seems little doubt
that the critics (not to mention the decision itself) caused some major damage to the reputation of the court ,
the effects of which the justices may feel in the not-so-distant future.
I/L: Congress Strips Court
The congress will backlash against unpopular decisions and strip the court of
jurisdiction
Miller 09 [Mark - Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Professor of History, Director of Law and Society Program, at Clark University,
‘Constitutionalism and Democracy : View of the Courts from the Hill : Interactions Between Congress and the Federal Judiciary.” University of Virginia
Press, 2009, proquest] Bschulz 3
Historically, court stripping has often been threatened, for example by labor supporters and other progressives during the conservative activist era of
the Supreme Court from the 1890s to the mid-1930s (see Ross 1994). Today,
it is the conservatives who are acting to
strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over a variety of types of cases. While their actions are controversial,
some conservatives, such as former attorney general Edwin Meese, have clearly stated their preference that Congress strip the courts of jurisdiction
under many circumstances. These
conservatives often feel that too many federal judges take a liberal
activist approach to judicial decision making and that court-stripping legislation is one clear
way to reign in a judiciary in which federal judges improperly “legislate from the bench.” In other
words, these conservatives feel that the courts should reflect the will of the majority, and they
perceive liberal judicial activism as counter-majoritarian. For example, overstating the historical record a bit Meese
said, “Congress has in the past withdrawn jurisdiction from the lower federal courts when it became dissatisfied with their performance or concluded
that state courts were the better forum for certain types of cases” (Meese and Dehart 1997, 181– 82). In September 2004 the Senate Republican Policy
Committee distributed a report entitled Restoring Popular Control of the Constitution: The Case for Jurisdiction-Stripping Legislation. The report states
that “the American people must have a remedy when they believe that federal courts have overreached and interpreted the Constitution in ways that
Thus court stripping
is a method for changing the direction of federal judicial decisions and altering the
independent voice of the courts in the inter-institutional constitutional dialogue.
are fundamentally at odds with the people’s common constitutional understandings and expectations” (Kyl 2004, 1).
Congress will strip the courts of jurisdiction because of controversy – empirics prove
Brandenburg 09 [Bert - Executive Director, Justice at Stake Campaign. Justice at Stake (JAS) is a nonpartisan national partnership working
to keep courts fair, impartial, and independent. “OURTS UNDER PRESSURE: THE GROWING THREAT TO IMPARTIAL JUSTICE”, 59 Syracuse L. Rev. 371
(2008-2009)] Bschulz 6
The second recent threat to impartial justice was a
surge in efforts to strip jurisdiction from federal courts, often
in retaliation for rulings in highprofile cases. It was not the first such round of attacks. After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown
v. Board of Education decision, angry lawmakers sought to block federal courts from ruling on public education laws.24 During the 1960s and 1970s,
issues like the draft, Miranda warnings, busing, school prayer, and abortion sparked efforts to cut the courts' power to review challenges to federal
laws. 25 The
latest cycle of assaults began in 1996, a presidential election year that saw three
major court-stripping laws and a political assault on a sitting judge. 26 In the wake of the Oklahoma City
bombing, Congress passed an anti-terrorism bill that dramatically restricted federal judicial review
for death row inmates and for many immigrants facing deportation. 27 The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act eliminated or
severely restricted the ability of immigrants to seek a federal court review as they seek asylum from persecution or fight deportation efforts. 28 The
Prison Litigation Reform Act drastically diminished the ability of prisoners to get a day in court to object to abusive prison conditions, and weakened the
authority of federal judges to craft remedies when those conditions actually break the law. 29 The efforts quickened after the 2002 elections. The
2003 "Feeney Amendment" sharply limited the ability of federal judges to issue sentences
below federal guidelines.30 In 2004, the House of Representatives passed a measure to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to rule on
challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance. 31 The House also passed the "Marriage Protection Act," which singled out one law (the Defense of Marriage
Act) for special treatment, exempting it from any review by the federal courts.32 Another measure passed in 2005 gave the Secretary of Homeland
Security unilateral power to waive any law on the books that might interfere with the building of border fences-including civil-rights and minimumwage protections, and even criminal laws.33 The
recent surge in culture-war attacks on the courts culminated
in the effort to rig the Terri Schiavo case. Congressional efforts to send a family dispute into federal court were so politically
transparent that they generated a national backlash.34 Other measures fell short, but showed the surge in anti-court sentiment. Proposed marriage
amendments to the Constitution sought to take powers from state judges to rule on family law issues they have handled for centuries. 35 The
"Constitution Restoration Act" would have denied federal courts the power to hear any suit involving a governmental official's "acknowledgment of
God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." 36 For good measure, any judge caught exceeding his or her jurisdiction could have been
impeached.37 A
separate House measure would have allowed Congress to reverse any Supreme
Court decision that struck down a law on constitutional grounds.38
Congress can undercut the Court in a number of ways when it disagrees with
decisions
Miller, 6 --- Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Relations at Clark University (Summer 2006,
Mark C., Case Western Reserve University, “SYMPOSIUM: JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE AND JUDICIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT
BALANCE: When Congress Attacks the Federal Courts,” 56 Case W. Res. 1015))
IV. Conclusion
There are of course other examples of ways that a determined majority in Congress can attack
the independence of the federal judiciary. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in detail some of the other
mechanisms that could be used by Congress to attack the federal courts. For example, this paper has discussed neither court packing plans,
such as those advocated by President Franklin Roosevelt, n80 nor various plans to prevent federal courts from hearing
certain types of cases, commonly referred to as court-stripping proposals. n81 Other actions that Congress could
take include proposals to divide up the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in response to the
particular ideological path taken by that court. n82 Certainly, a determined majority in Congress can
find other innovative avenues for attacking the courts.
It is clear that the federal courts and Congress have radically different institutional cultures and wills. These different institutional wills and institutional
perspectives mean that the two branches usually do not understand the other's decision-making process very well. For the sake of the rule of law, we
need to know more about the interactions and relationships between these two governmental bodies. The Entin and Jensen paper takes an important
step closer to reaching that level of knowledge.
Congress can meddle with courts in a number of ways after offending opinions
Geyh, 03 --- Professor of Law at Indiana (Winter/Spring 2003, Charles G., Indiana Law Journal, “Judicial
Independence, Judicial Accountability, and the Role of Constitutional Norms in Congressional Regulation of the Courts,” 78 Ind. L.J. 153))
There is a multitude of ways that a motivated Congress could conceivably get the Supreme
Court's attention. I have already alluded to some: it could impeach and remove justices who issue
offending opinions, or it could defy unacceptable decisions, exclude troublesome categories of
cases from the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction, pursue constitutional amendments
limiting judicial review, or manipulate judicial appointments so as to avoid the confirmation of
judges who would perpetuate a narrow view of congressional power. In addition, it could hold the
judiciary's budget hostage , or (with the aid of a cooperative President) enlarge the size of the Supreme Court to ensure a sympathetic
majority.
With the possible exception of manipulating the appointments process, the
foregoing suggestions are likely to elicit an
"oh, come now" response. But why? One [*157] explanation is that such proposals are thought to violate the independence of
the judiciary as guaranteed by Article III of the U.S. Constitution; another is that, regardless of their constitutionality, these proposals are unacceptable
because they undermine the spirit of interbranch comity that the political branches seek to preserve. And yet, according to oft-cited lore, the
political branches have exploited these devices for judicial control throughout our history, and
with rare exception, the judiciary has acquiesced: n16 at the turn of the Nineteenth century, Congress packed and
unpacked the lower courts for partisan ends in the "Midnight Judges" affair, and impeached judges for their strident, pro-Federalist sympathies; a
generation later, Georgia defied the Supreme Court altogether, and President Andrew Jackson declared that he had the constitutional authority to do
likewise; during Reconstruction, a radical Republican Congress stripped the Court of jurisdiction to undo an important piece of Reconstruction
legislation, and, the story goes, packed and unpacked the Supreme Court for political purposes. During the populist and progressive period, proposals
to curb or eliminate judicial review and end life tenure abounded, culminating in a successful effort by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to intimidate the
Supreme Court into changing its pattern of decisionmaking by proposing to pack the Court with New Deal sympathizers. And a generation later, Richard
Nixon campaigned to end Warren Court liberalism in the wake of calls to impeach Earl Warren and William O. Douglas, and did so by replacing retiring
justices with avowedly more conservative successors.
AT: Congress Can’t Strip
Congress has authority to strip courts
Yoo, 7 --- Professor of Law at UC Berkeley (Fall 2007, Jesse Choper and John Yoo, California Law Review, “Wartime
Process: A Dialogue on Congressional Power to Remove Issues from the Federal Courts,” 95 Calif. L. Rev. 1243, JMP)
Yoo: Whether
Congress has the authority to remove federal jurisdiction over a class of federal
question cases is a difficult issue, but it seems to me that the balance of authorities is in favor
of the power . Congress has traditionally been understood by most, n36 but not all, n37
commentators to hold the power to decide whether to implement Article III's jurisdictional
grants to the federal courts. This power comes from several sources. First, Article III, Section 2's enumeration of the cases and
controversies to which the federal judicial power extends has not generally been thought to be self-executing. n38 Second, Congress has the
power to decide whether to create the inferior courts at all, and this power has been thought
to imply the authority to define what cases will be heard by those courts . n39 These powers allow
Congress to remove whole categories of cases from the jurisdiction of both the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court.
Neither Article I nor Article III appears to place any substantive limitation on how Congress
chooses to use these powers. In the past, the Court has accepted the removal of jurisdiction
when Congress obviously sought to stop the Court from reaching substantive outcomes with
which [*1254] Congress disagreed. The clearest example of this is Ex Parte McCardle, in which the Court upheld Congress's elimination
of an 1867 Act's grant of appellate jurisdiction to the Supreme Court in federal habeas claims. n40 Reacting to Ex Parte Milligan, n41 decided the year
before McCardle, Congress stripped the Court of jurisdiction because it feared that the Court would use the case to pass on the constitutionality of
military occupation of the Southern States during Reconstruction. Congress even went so far as to act after the Court had heard oral argument but
before it had issued a judgment. n42 Nonetheless, in McCardle the Court upheld the law and dismissed the case, saying that it lost jurisdiction the
moment Congress passed the stripping law and had no authority to declare the law invalid. In Lauf v. E.G. Shinner, the Norris-La Guardia Act removed
jurisdiction from the federal courts to issue injunctions in labor dispute cases, again because Congress disagreed with the course of previous judicial
decisions. n43
Congress does react to controversial decisions and disregard of congressional
directives
Crabb, 12 --- United States District Judge, Western District of Wisconsin (2012, Barbara B., Wisconsin Law Review, “ADDRESS: ROBERT W.
KASTENMEIER LECTURE: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN CONGRESS AND THE COURTS,” 2012 Wis. L. Rev. 871, JMP)
The divides between and among the branches are a given in our system. The congressional-executive divide
is a continuing struggle for supremacy, fueled by the constant pull of partisan politics, ideology, lobbyists, the media, financial influence, and the
unrelenting focus on the next election. The
judicial-legislative divide is marked by legislative indifference,
broken intermittently by periods of anger provoked by controversial judicial decisions or the
perception that judges are disregarding congressional directives . Partisan politics are at play in the relationship,
particularly when Congress confirms, or refuses to confirm, judicial nominees and when it establishes, or refuses to establish, new judgeships, but these
fights are essentially between Congress and the executive branch. The judiciary is the battlefield, not the army.
The fact is that "few
in Congress know much about or pay attention to the third branch of
government," as Congressman Kastenmeier observed in 1988. n1 He continued: "in some respect, the judiciary
for the Congress is ... sort of tolerated by benign neglect." n2 Columnist Andrew Cohen made essentially the same
point in a March 18, 2012, article on TheAtlantic.com, lamenting the slow pace of Senate confirmation of judicial nominees and the lack of
understanding among some legislators of what federal judges do. n3 He noted in particular the legislative failure to appreciate the importance of
judges to job creation "to the extent [that judges] bring certainty and finality to legal disputes" and to "the financial uncertainty that pending litigation
brings." n4
This lack of understanding is unfortunate, but not surprising. Senators and representatives are inundated with matters of importance to attend to. The
old days in which long-serving legislators developed knowledge and experience in particular areas have largely faded away; legislators do not serve as
long as they used to, even when they are not subject to term limits. The legislative week is shorter, because more members keep their homes in their
districts, and the constant pressure [*873] to raise reelection funds means less time for learning about legislation and providing oversight. Increasing
partisanship makes it harder for legislators to agree on even routine matters. (And, to be fair, judges do not know all that much about the nuts and
bolts of legislating.)
Courts can’t check congressional backlash
Crabb, 12 --- United States District Judge, Western District of Wisconsin (2012, Barbara B., Wisconsin Law Review, “ADDRESS: ROBERT W.
KASTENMEIER LECTURE: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN CONGRESS AND THE COURTS,” 2012 Wis. L. Rev. 871, JMP)
When Congress responds to perceived problems, in the courts or elsewhere, by proposing
legislation that the courts find threatening to their independence, there is little the courts
can do . If the legislation is a true threat to decisional independence, the courts may be obliged by the Constitution to strike down the legislation.
When the legislation is a threat only to institutional independence and therefore not
prohibited by the Constitution, the courts must fall back on persuasion, diplomacy, and
compromise. The Civil Justice Reform Act provides an example. The Act raised questions about judicial independence when it was proposed in
1990 for the purpose of reducing the cost of litigation. n37 To judges, the bill was overly intrusive: it attempted to prescribe exactly how courts should
handle civil cases; when they should hold pretrial conferences; who should hold them (judges only; never magistrates); and how quickly judges were to
get cases to trial. n38 In addition, it required analyses of caseloads and semiannual reporting of motions under advisement and cases that had been
pending for more than three years. n39
Impact: Turns Case- Congress Ignores
Congress will ignore the decision
Miller 09 [Mark - Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Professor of History, Director of Law and Society Program, at Clark University,
‘Constitutionalism and Democracy : View of the Courts from the Hill : Interactions Between Congress and the Federal Judiciary.” University of Virginia
Press, 2009, proquest] Bschulz 11
Of course, when
the Supreme Court issues a constitutionally based decision, there is no guarantee
that Congress will actually follow the ruling. At times, Congress just ignores constitutional
decisions from the courts . For example, in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha (1983)
the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not constitutionally use a one-house veto to
overrule decisions by federal agencies. The response from Congress has been to continue to
enact such legislative vetoes, and a variety of presidents have signed them into law. Thus
Congress has effectively ignored the Court’s decision in Chadha (see Fisher and Adler 2007, 222– 24). It is
difficult for the Supreme Court to be an active participant in the inter-institutional
constitutional dialogue when the other branches simply ignore the Court’s pronouncements.
Congress regularly overrides Supreme Court decisions that overturn federal law
Emenaker, 2013 – MA Government at Johns Hopkins University, MA Social Science at Humboldt State University, BA Political Science with
minor in Sociology at Humboldt State University (Ryan Eric, “Constitutional Interpretation and Congressional Overrides: Changing Trends in CourtCongress Relations”, College of the Redwoods , March 28-30, 2013, SSRN database)//TT
A third trend identified by this paper is the increased number of successful overrides to Court decisions nullifying federal law. In
most
instances when federal law was nullified, bills were proposed to modify the decision. In 29.3 percent
of cases invalidating federal law, during the Rehnquist Court, Congress successfully overrode the Court decision. The rate of overrides found in this
study is significantly higher than the rate found in a previous study of constitutional-interpretation-overrides. This
rate of overrides is
also significantly higher than what has been found in studies focused on statutory overrides.
Obviously, the low override rates found in studies focusing on statutory interpretation decisions fail to reflect the commonality of constitutionalinterpretation-overrides. This may indicate—despite commonly held beliefs—that it is actually easier for Congress to override a decision based on
constitutional interpretation than it is a decisions based on statutory interpretation.
This frequency of overrides also directly
challenges the belief that the Court has the final word in interpreting the Constitution. Further
these results negate the notion that Congress’s only option after the Court nullifies federal law is
amending the Constitution, clearly Congress can and does simply pass statues to modify
constitution-interpretation-decisions. The above information clearly indicates that interactions between the
Court and Congress do not end with judicial review. It also indicates that theories of Court-Congress relations that do
not account for constitutional-interpretation-overrides are incomplete.
It is important to note that the high rate of nullifications of federal law, and the high rate of congressional overrides, both observed during the
Rehnquist Court, do not necessarily reflect hostility between the two branches. In some instances the Court struck down acts of Congress by inviting a
congressional override. This clearly supports theories that the justices do not always seek to avoid being overridden. Override invitations suggest it is
too simplistic to conclude that Court action nullifying federal law, or congressional attempts to override, automatically indicate strained relations
between the branches.
At the same time it is also important to note that not all congressional overrides are based on invitations. This means that Supreme Court judges
sometimes fail to avoid uninvited overrides. If
the justices are acting strategically to avoid overrides, as rational
choice scholars suggest, they often miscalculate. The interactions between the Rehnquist Court and Congress also
highlighted a process involving multiply rounds of constitutional interpretation. As the process in the Metropolitan Washington Airports Act and Boerne
showed, interactions
between Congress and the Court continued after the first instance of judicial
review. Current rational choice models fail to diagram this level of complexity, oversimplifying the interactions of the two branches.
Impact: Turns SOP
Turns SOP and guts judicial model
Schwartz, 12 --- Symposia Editor, Cardozo Law Review (Karissa M., Cardozo Law Review de novo, “ARTICLE: SOUND THE ALARM: THE
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF JUDICIAL COMPENSATION,” 2012 Cardozo L. Rev. De Novo 101, JMP)
CONCLUSION
The country's first constitutional crisis, Marbury v. Madison, n197 resulted in the doctrine of judicial review and established the independence of the
judicial branch. Marbury v. Madison created a vigorous judiciary, which has served the United States well for more than two hundred years. Since that
Judges have contributed
to the growth and prosperity of this nation and are entitled to be compensated fairly for the
work they do. n198 No other branch can take on the role of the judiciary, as it goes expressly
against the constitutionally mandated separation of powers doctrine .
Thus, Congress must adhere to the Constitution and take the necessary steps to fairly compensate the federal judicial branch. If Congress fails
to make adjustments to the current compensation structure, America will lose the diverse
decision, judges have weighed in on major questions of constitutional rights that have shaped American society.
and independent judiciary that has created the highest standard of jurisprudence in this
nation, if not the world.
Impact: Democracy
Judicial independence guarantees democratic stability --- interpret the
constitution, protect minority rights, and maintain rule of law
Gibler and Randazzo, 11 --- *Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Alabama, AND **Associate Professor of Political
Science, University of South Carolina.
(July 2011, Douglas Gibler and Kirk Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent Judiciaries on the Likelihood of Democratic Backsliding”, JSTOR)//Yak
The difficulties of establishing judicial independence have led some to argue that courts only reflect elite interests. Tsebelis (2002), for example, argues
that courts almost never constitute a separate veto player within a polity. Judicial-selection
procedures in most countries
practically guarantee that courts will fail to provide new constraints on the policymaking
process. Only when other political actors take extreme positions or when a new issue, not related to judicial selection, comes before the court can
the judiciary pose an effective veto. This is why judicial independence does not necessarily lead to higher rates of judicial annulment (Burbank,
Friedman, and Goldberg 2002). This is also why institutionalization of the courts matters as newly independent courts will tend to reflect executive
and/or legislative policy pref erences on most issues (Epstein, Knight, and Shvetsova 2001). Nevertheless, the attention other political actors devote to
the courts suggests that judicial
institutions can matter. Yeltsin was concerned enough with the Russian
constitutional court to dismiss it entirely, as was Argentina's military regime in 1976 and its
democratic regime in 1983. These rulers understand that even courts lacking judicial independence can
provide increased legitimacy for the dominant position of other political actors (Larkins 1998).
The weak version of judicial independence argues a selection effect. Courts matter by
providing constraints on the crafting of legislation. Stone Sweet (2000, see also Shapiro and Stone 1994), for example,
notes that parliaments in Europe increasingly alter their behavior to conform to court rulings,
sometimes by asking the judiciary for input before passing law. Because judicial influence places
limits on the preferences of parliamentary actors, parliaments often govern as the courts desire so that law reflects judicial interests even in the
absence of judicial intervention. Difficulties arise in testing this argument since scholars must deduce prior preferences from what is likely to be
strategic political behavior. What is clear, however, is that judicial
preferences affect the content of legislation even
if no annulments are observed.
The stronger version of judicial independence argues that courts
can play a central role in guaranteeing democratic
stability . The judiciary is responsible for interpreting the constitution, for protecting minority
rights, and often with securing other procedures associated with liberal government (Larkins 1996).
More generally, courts are responsible for maintaining the rule of law (O'Connor 2003, 2008), and this
guarantee serves as the last step to ward ensuring the establishment of consolidated
democracy (Linz and Stepan 1996). Absent judicial protection, citizens lose their ability to monitor and
check the ruling regime with speech, press, and public demonstration. Consequently, the judiciary
ensures that political leaders do not act in complete disregard for statutory and constitutional
law.
Judicial independence allows a strong middle class to prevent autocratic
reversions
Gibler and Randazzo, 11 --- *Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Alabama, AND **Associate Professor of Political
Science, University of South Carolina.
(July 2011, Douglas Gibler and Kirk Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent Judiciaries on the Likelihood of Democratic Backsliding”, JSTOR)//Yak
One of the strongest predictors of democratic survival seems to be wealth (Lipset 1959,75). Przeworski and
various coauthors (Przeworski et al. 1996; Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Przeworski et al. 2000) argue that wealth provides the
antidote to all types of antidemocratic reversions. According to their research, democratic transitions occur for myriad
reasons that are often unrelated to economic development. Nevertheless, high levels of state wealth (usually measured by GDP)
provide strong societal protections against reversions from democracy. A strong middle class
makes autocratic repression more difficult (Moore 1966; Reuschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992), and more
generally, an
increase in the number of powerful actors within society is more likely to bring
about a competitive, democratic equilibrium (Olson 1992). Though the role of wealth in establishing democracy has been
questioned (Boix 2002; Boix and Stokes 2003; Epstein et al. 2006), no one seems to doubt that wealth prevents
reversions from democracy.
The mechanisms by which wealth maintains democratic stability leave room only for instrumental
influence from an independent judiciary . For example, the ability of Lipset's (1959) middle class or Moore's (1966)
to demand political power would also presuppose a judiciary that guarantees
property and other individual rights. In this case, power within society rests with these new
interests, not an institution. Thus, any political leverage the court has becomes completely endogenous
to public support, and absent public support, an independent judiciary becomes meaningless.
bourgeoisie
Empirically, this logic suggests a spurious relationship as controls for wealth will render the effects of independent judiciaries statistically insignificant in
any study involving a representative sample of cases. This argument provides a baseline hypothesis with which to test the effects of judicial
independence.
Judicial independence prevents concentration of power in the executive during
economic crisis
Gibler and Randazzo, 11 --- *Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Alabama, AND **Associate Professor of Political
Science, University of South Carolina.
(July 2011, Douglas Gibler and Kirk Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent Judiciaries on the Likelihood of Democratic Backsliding”, JSTOR)//Yak
Military crises are often associated with rejections of democratic principles (Desch 1996; Gibler 2012;
Thompson 1996). Though the causal mechanisms are not completely uniform across theories, the majority of these second-imagereversed arguments assume that conflict changes the distribution of power within the state ( Rasler
and Thompson 2004). The modal path toward reversions to authoritarianism follows several well-documented responses to external threat. First, the
executive seeks increased political power to efficiently deal with potential threats (Rasler 1986).
This move is backed by a public that seeks security and defense of national pride (Mansfield and
Snyder 2003). Increased nationalism and increased power for the executive mean that dissent will
be quashed as an intolerant majority moves against the opposition (Gurr 1998). Institution ally, a
strong military is created to deal with the threat, and this military becomes a significant force
within society (Lasswell 1997). Finally, power is institutionalized within an executive that now has a
strong military to enforce its position within the polity (Gibler 2010).
Building on the connection between wealth and democratic survival, many scholars have argued that economic crises
can also lead to increased concentrations of power within the executive. O'Donnell's (1973) work provided
one of the first of these arguments. Concen trating on Brazil and Argentina, O'Donnell argued that the wealth initially created by import substitution
industrialization did not translate initially into strong regimes capable of withstanding economic downturns. When
economic crises
crippled the governments, powerful elite interests established authoritarian regimes to
facilitate the painful economic measures necessary for the protection of property and
economic recovery (see also Crowther 1986; Im 1987). Meanwhile, Gasiorowski (1995) pro vides substantial empirical
support for the argument that democratic breakdown follows economic recessions (see Kaufman
1976; Skidmore 1977; Wallerstein 1980).
The economic crisis model has also been incorpo rated into the foreign policy literature by the diversionary
use of force theory.
difficult economic times, leaders may provoke low-level conflicts to
distract the public from failures in leadership. Successful involvement in foreign conflicts then
creates a rally effect that salvages their electoral future (DeRouen 2000). Although the model has received only
modest em pirical support when predicting the use of force interna tionally (Gelpi 1997; Levy 1989; and more recently, Oneal and Tir 2006), each
theory explicitly assumes at least a partial breakdown of democracy during economic crises as
the executive seeks increased political power. Note, too, the implicit assumption that public support follows the use of
According to this theory, during
force; this is consistent with the external threat argument above.
Role of Judiciary
Both crisis
models outlined above rely on a common mechanism that leads to democratic
reversion: crisis affects the domestic bargaining power of various actors, this advantages the executive vis-a-vis other domestic actors, and
eventually, power is concentrated in the executive as democratic principles are eroded. The causal mechanism in both
scenarios relies on the opportunity given the executive by each type of crisis, as this opportunity, when
coupled with popular backing, allows the executive to supersede the constitution in favor of expediency.
An independent judiciary can affect this process in two ways. First, established judiciaries are
likely to deter executives from using the crisis as an opportunity to gain power. An executive
during crisis will likely not risk additional political decisions that question their authority. While
this weak form of judicial independence creates few judicial annulments, the court does
buttress the political power of other societal and governmental interests against executive
incursions. The strong form of judicial independence manifests when the executive is overtly
checked with annulments as the court favors mi nority rights and participatory democracy . In
either case, the executive is constrained by the court and democracy maintains . Both forms of judicial
independence lead to our central hypothesis:
HI: Established independent judiciaries decrease the likelihood of regime reversions toward authoritarian governmental systems.
In Hypothesis 2, we modify slightly the argument regarding the effects of an independent judiciary by including a time restriction. As the literature
suggests, only established independent judiciaries are likely to have an ability to counter executive or legislative influences. Since most studies view
new judiciaries as reflections of elite interests, we are agnostic about the effects of new courts:
H2: New independent judiciaries will have no effect on the likelihood of regime reversions toward authoritarian governmental systems.
Courts need independence to preserve legitimacy and prevent authoritarianism
Gibler and Randazzo, 11 --- *Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Alabama, AND **Associate Professor of Political
Science, University of South Carolina.
(July 2011, Douglas Gibler and Kirk Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent Judiciaries on the Likelihood of Democratic Backsliding”, JSTOR)//Yak
Should judiciaries succeed in creating broad popular support and establish their independence, the court can
serve as a powerful political force within the regime. This explains why autocratic regimes
often preempt the threat of court-led embarrassments and restrict the judiciary's ability to
hear unfriendly cases. Although courts under authoritarian regimes tend to consist of impartial judges, courts in autocracies
also tend to possess narrow legal authority (Larkins 1998). For example, the Franco regime in Spain had a
separate court to handle politically sensitive cases (Toharia 1974).
Judiciaries that lack political independence have strong incentives to protect the interests in
power and exercise whatever authority they have only at the margins. Dependent courts
therefore regularly seek cases over which ruling elites have little concern in order to distance
their branch from the executive. Or justices will make rulings to curry favor with those likely to
gain power (Helmke 2002). Either way, to maintain the legitimacy of the court, justices must pay
attention to the prevailing economic conditions within the state, the concentration of executive power, the
identity of litigants, and the constitutional ramifications of their decisions before rul ing against
elite interests (Bumin, Randazzo, and Walker 2009; Gibson, Caldeira, and Baird 1998; Herron and Ran dazzo 2003). Assumed, then, is
a highly strategic court that develops its legitimacy and independence over time.
Judicial independence key to stabilization during democratic transition
OFFICE OF DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNANCE 02 (January 2002, Office of Democracy and Governance; Bureau
for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance; U.S. Agency for International Development. “GUIDANCE FOR PROMOTING JUDICIAL
INDEPENDENCE AND IMPARTIALITY,” http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNACM007.pdf) WM
<B. The Importance of Judicial Independence and Impartiality Judicial
independence is important for precisely the reasons
that the judiciary itself is important. If a judiciary cannot be relied upon to decide cases impartially,
according to the law, and not based on external pressures and influences, its role is distorted and public confidence in
government is undermined. In democratic, market-based societies, independent and impartial
judiciaries contribute to the equitable and stable balance of power within the government. They
protect individual rights and preserve the security of person and property. They resolve
commercial disputes in a predictable and transparent fashion that encourages fair competition and economic
growth. They are key to countering public and private corruption, reducing political
manipulation, and increasing public confidence in the integrity of government. Even in stable
democracies, the influence of the judiciary has increased enormously over the past several decades.
Legislation protecting social and economic rights has expanded in many countries, and with it
the court’s role in protecting those rights. The judiciary has growing responsibility for resolving
increasingly complex national and international commercial disputes. As criminal activity has
also become more complex and international and a critical problem for expanding urban populations,
judges play a key role in protecting the security of citizens and nations. Judiciaries in countries
making the transition to democratic governance and market economies face an even greater burden.
Many of these judiciaries must change fairly dramatically from being an extension of executive
branch, elite, or military domination of the country to their new role as fair and independent
institutions. At the same time, the demands on and expectations of these judiciaries are often high, as views about citizens’
rights, the role of the executive branch, and market mechanisms are rapidly evolving . The
judiciary often finds itself a focal point as political and economic forces struggle to define the
shape of the society . These judiciaries also face the serious crime problems that frequently
accompany transitions, as well as enormous issues of corruption, both that carried over from old regimes, as
well as corruption newly minted under changing conditions.>
Links
Neolib K
State Surveillance
The aff’s criticism of state surveillance reproduces neoliberal social relations –
privacy protection is undergirded by the assumption of economic individualism
– that papers over the coercive functions of the market and prevents use of the
state to challenge corporate power
Fuchs 11
Christian Fuchs 11, Professor of Social Media at University of Westminster, “Towards an
alternative concept of privacy,” Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,
Vol. 9, Iss. 4, p. 232-3, fwang
Etzioni (1999) stresses that liberal
privacy concepts typically focus on privacy invasions by the state, but
ignore privacy invasions by companies . The contemporary undermining of public goods by
overstressing privacy rights would not be caused by the state, but rather stem:
[...] from the quest for profit by some private companies. Indeed, I find that these corporations now
regularly amass detailed accounts about many aspects of the personal lives of millions of individuals,
profiles of the kind that until just a few years ago could be compiled only by the likes of the East German Stasi. [...] Consumers,
employees, even patients and children have little protection from marketeers, insurance
companies, bankers, and corporate surveillance (Etzioni, 1999, p. 9f).
The task of a socialist privacy conception is to go beyond the focus of privacy concepts as
protection from state interference into private spheres, but to identify those cases, where
political regulation is needed for the protection of the rights of consumers and workers.
It is time to break with the liberal tradition in privacy studies and to think about alternatives . The Swedish socialist
philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö (2010) stresses that liberal privacy concepts imply “that one cannot only own
self and personal things, but also means of production” and that the consequence is “a very
closed society , clogged because of the idea of business secret, bank privacy, etc.” (Tännsjo¨, 2010, p.
186). Tännsjö argues that power structures should be made transparent and not be able to hide
themselves and operate secretly protected by privacy rights. He imagines based on utopian socialist ideas an
open society that is democratic and fosters equality so that (Tännsjö, 2010, pp. 191-8) in a democratic socialist society, there is, as
Tännsjö indicates, no need for keeping power structures secret and therefore no need for a liberal concept of privacy. However, this
does in my view not mean that in a society that is shaped by participatory democracy, all forms of privacy vanish. There
are
some human acts and situations, such as defecation (Moore, 1984), in which humans tend to want to be
alone. Many humans would both in a capitalist and a socialist society feel embarrassed having to defecate next to others, for
example by using toilets that are arranged next to each other without separating walls. So solitude is not a pure ideology,
but to a certain desire also a human need that should be guaranteed as long as it does not result
in power structures that harm others . This means that it is necessary to question the liberal-capitalist
privacy ideology , to struggle today for socialist privacy that protects workers and consumers,
limits the right and possibility of keeping power structures secret and makes these structures
transparent. In a qualitatively different society, we require a qualitatively different concept of privacy, but not the end of
privacy. Torbjrn Tännsjö’s work is a powerful reminder that it is necessary not to idealize privacy, but to think
about its contradictions and its relation to private property.
The aff’s paranoia of excessive government induces neoliberalism’s control of
society
Anderson 12
Ben Anderson, Reader in the Department of Geography at Durham University, “Affect and
biopower: towards a politics of life,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 37,
No. 1, p. 37-8, fwang
By ‘affective condition’ I mean an affective atmosphere that predetermines how something – in this case the state – is habitually encountered, disclosed and can be related to.
Bearing a family resemblance to concepts such as ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977) or ‘emotional situation’ (Virno 2004), an ‘affective condition’ involves the same doubled
and seemingly contradictory sense of the ephemeral or transitory alongside the structured or durable. As such, it does not slavishly determine action. An ‘affective condition’
shapes and influences as atmospheres are taken up and reworked in lived experience, becoming part of the emotions that will infuse policies or programmes, and may be
transmitted through assemblages of people, information and things that attempt to organise life in terms of the market.
State-phobia obviously exists
in complex coexistence with other affective conditions. To give but two examples, note how Connolly (2008) shows how
existential bellicosity and ressentiments infuse the networks of think tanks, media and
companies that promote neoliberal policies . Or consider how Berlant (2008) shows how ‘nearly utopian’ affects of belonging to a world of
work are vital to the promise of neoliberal policies in the context of precariousness. In addition state-phobia has and will vary as it is
articulated with distinct political movements. For example, the USA ‘Tea Party’ phenomenon is
arguably animated by an intensified state-phobia named in the spectre of ‘Big Government’ and
linked to a reactivation of Cold War anxieties about the threat of ‘Socialism’. But the ‘Tea Party’ also involves a
heady combination of white entitlement and racism, affective-ideational feelings of freedom, and the pervasive economic insecurity that follows from economic crisis.
How, then, do we get from state-phobia to a logic of governing that purports to govern ‘as little as
possible’ but actually intervenes ‘all the way down’ through ‘ permanent activity, vigilance and
intervention ’ (Foucault 2008, 246)? State-phobia traverses quite different apparatuses, and changes across
those apparatuses. As Foucault puts it, it has many ‘agents and promoters’ (2008, 76), meaning that it can no longer be localised. It circulates alongside
the concern with excessive government, reappears in different sites and therefore overflows any one neoliberalising apparatus (2008, 187). Hinting to a genealogy of state-
Foucault differentiates it from a similarly ‘ambiguous’ phobia at the end of the 18th century about
despotism, as linked to tyranny and arbitrariness (2008, 76). State-phobia is different . It gives a push to the question
of whether government is excessive, and as such animates policies and programmes that are
based on extending the market form to all of society . State-phobia is, on this account, both cause and
effect of the neoliberal identification of an ‘economic-political invariant’ (2008, 111) across disparate
forms of economic intervention (including the New Deal, Keynesianism and Nazism). Developing Foucault’s brief comments on its ‘inflationary’ logic
(2008, 187), we can think of state-phobia as being bound up with the anticipatory hyper-vigilance of
affects,
paranoia (Sedgwick 2003). It is based on an ‘elision of actuality’ that passes over what the state is actually doing to always find the ‘great
fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state’ (Foucault 2008, 188). In short, neoliberalism is imbued with a
suspicion of any state economic action that is not wholly in the service of organising life around
the market form.
Specific Surveillance
Focusing on specific manifestations of the surveillance state ignores the cultural
normalization of surveillance writ large.
Giroux 14
Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson
University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” 2-10, Truth-out,
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwelliansurveillance-state, fwang
Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life . In fact, it is more appropriate to analyze the culture
of surveillance , rather than address exclusively the violations committed by the corporatesurveillance state. In this instance, the surveillance and security state is one that not only listens,
watches and gathers massive amounts of information through data mining necessary for identifying consumer
populations but also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of surveillance
technologies and privatized commodified values into all aspects of their lives. Personal
information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based websites and
gathered daily as people move from one targeted web site to the next across multiple screens
and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “social media users gladly give up their liberty and
privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,” all the while endlessly shopping online and
texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit
every public space from the streets, commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools
our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like. ¶ Yet
the most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting
of information but also
in a culture that normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and
enticements for consumers who use the new digital technologies and social networks to
simulate false notions of community and to socialize young people into a culture of security and
commodification in which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of
private addictions, self-help and commodification .
Privacy Rights
Privacy is rooted in possessive individualism and property relations that sustain
neoliberalism – their discourse only ensures economic domination and
alienation
Sevignani, 12 (Sebastian Sevignani studied media and communication, philosophy, and
theology at the University of Salzburg. He obtained a master's degree in communication studies
(Mag. phil.) in 2009. From 2007 until 2010, he worked at the University of Salzburg's
Department of Communication Studies as scholar in the Media Economics Research Group
(Abteilung für Medienökonomie). He has started work on his doctoral thesis, which focuses on
the social possibilities/ potentials of the media in (knowledge-based) capitalism. Sebastian. "The
Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and the Alternative Social Networking Site Diaspora*." Journal
for a Global Sustainable Information Society 12.2 (2012): 608-10. Web. 16 July 2015.
<http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/view/25>.)
By employing Marx’s theory, I have thus far shown that the
properties of the dominant privacy notion –
competitive individualism, exclusive control, exchangeable private property – have their very
origin in the commodity exchange. The commodity exchange hides human sociality. Value
appears as property of things and not as a social relation. Hence, it is important to own things
for realising their value. But sociality asserts itself behind people’s back and establishes pressures to perform that are not
controlled by the individuals. They perceive themselves as competitors. C.B. Macpherson (1962) detected the great influence of the
outlined objective forms of thought within the most influential philosophical and political thinking, from Hobbes to Locke, and
labelled it “possessive individualism”. Possessive
individualism denotes a kind of thinking and a social
practice. Within capitalism it is useful and necessary that the individual perceives herself or
himself as essentially “the proprietor of his own person and capacities, for which he owes
nothing to society” (Macpherson, 1962, 263) and enters “into self-interested relations with
other individuals” (Macpherson 1962, 263). The value associated with privacy comes from these
kinds of objective forms of thought. Admittedly, there has been much critique of this kind of privacy
(Habermas 1991, 74; Lyon 1994, 186, 196; Etzioni 1999, 194), but for the evaluation of these critiques, it is important to keep in
mind that privacy’s origin in possessive individualism is not arbitrary; rather, this style of privacy
originates from
material, capitalist practices. There are also several newer privacy theories that do not proceed
from the liberal individualistic point of view (for instance: Solove 2008, 91-98); however, the
dominant mode of production in society remains bound to that point of view. We cannot simply
define privacy differently without leaving social practices as they are. 3.5. The Political Aspect: Privacy and
Class Domination Ideology was defined as a specific form of human association that evokes a false consciousness and a structure of
political domination. I have shown that it
is in the associational form of commodi- ty exchange that
ideology is falsified and thus makes privacy one-sided and individualistic. But what about the political
dimension of ideology? I am stuck for an answer that addresses why ideology and therefore ideological notions of privacy are tied to
implicit class domination and are therefore problematic. Marx gives an answer to this question within his capital theory. It is
important to stress that there is a logical unity between the value theory and capital theory in Marx. The unity exists because
commodity exchange and exploitation take place in capitalist reality at the same time. This means that commodity exchange and its
objective forms of thought are necessarily interwoven with capitalism, i.e. we cannot separate them. And it also means that the
dominant notion of privacy is related to the maintenance of political domination. Marx describes
capital as self-processing value (Marx 1867/1976, 257); in short, ‘M-C-M’: in the sphere of circulation, money (M) is invested for a
specific commodity production (C) and results then, if the sale was successful, in more money (M’). Why are investments profitable?
Marx gives the following answer. Self-processing value is possible due to the commodification of the workforce. The workforce is a
certain commodity as it is able to produce more value than it costs to reproduce. For instance, food and opportunities for
regeneration, such as free time, sleeping, etc. that have to be produced, are reproduction costs of the workforce. The difference
between these costs and the surplus produced by workers is appropriated by the buyers of the workforce. In this manner,
capitalists are steadily able to appropriate the societally-produced surplus by workers. They
become therefore richer and more powerful than workers. Consequently, a structural class
division in society becomes inevitable. Why is such appropriation legitimate? It is legitimate
because the principle of equivalence, “do ut des”, “I give that you may give”, no one cheats
anyone, remains intact and therefore the mutual recognition as private property owners is not
affected. On the contrary, fair commodity exchange – and therefore the ideological notion of
privacy – is presupposed for a capitalist class society. Not surprisingly, class society affects the
privacy issue, as argued in section 2. Marx argues that besides commodity exchange, i.e. labour performed privately and in
isolation, capitalism needs to work out “a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the
realization of their labour” (Marx 1867/1976, 874). In the prehistory of capitalism, this separation took place through a violent
process of expropriation of great segments of the population, to which Marx refers as “primitive accumulation of capital” (Marx
1867/1976, part eight). Thereby, workers were set free, but this “liberation” was of ambiguous character. It resulted in a dual sense
of freedom (Marx 1867/1976, 270-272), namely, workers are free of personal dependences, for instance, from their overlords in
feudalism, but also free from the ownership of the condition for the realisation of their labour. Workers are on the one hand free to
engage in contracts. This freedom is precisely the freedom of commodity exchange. On the other hand, workers are forced to
engage in contracts and to sell their labour power on the markets to make ends meet. This freedom is also set in commodity
exchange as it is a freedom to choose regardless of one’s social status. Hence, workers are forced to maintain their status as a
subaltern class because the capitalist can steadily appropriate the societal surplus that is produced by the workers (Marx 1867/1976,
729f.). This fair exploitation process is, according to Marx, a structural reason for domination in society. The capitalist quality of
society as class society is expressed by the right to have others work for you and the right to private property in labour’s terms of
realisation. These rights are identified with the right to private property in general in an ideological manner (Macpherson 1978).
Today’s uni- tary legal frameworks for different sorts of private property are only possible because commodity exchange and
appropriation of societally produced surplus are not divisible (Römer 1978, 140). The universal right to private property, to use,
abuse, alienate or exchange something, and the right to receive the fruits that the usage of something generates, does not matter if
only the things owned are needed for life, or the conditions within which labour can be realised (means of production) are private
property, or if private property is extended to the labour force (Munzer 2005, 858). In terms of privacy, Niels van Dijk (2010, 64)
points to an interesting difference in legislation between Europe and the U.S. While in the U.S. tradition, personal data is
predominantly seen as a commodity and therefore exchangeable (privacy as property), in Europe there is “little room for
propertization of personal data” (van Dijk 2010, 64), because privacy is conceptualized as a persona right and important for the
individual’s dignity (McGeveran 2009; Shepherd 2012). But human dignity is generally seen as inalienable. In the discussion on the
question whether privacy should or should not be alienable, exchangeable, and tradable on the markets, it is crucial to understand
that in capitalism any commodification process presupposes rights that cannot be alienated or exchanged. The labourer must not
become a slave, cannot alienate his or her whole person because this would reverse the double freedom of the labourer (Pateman
2002, 33). This is a feature of capitalist progress in comparison to previous forms of society. According to Marx, this means that
domination, which still exists, is mediated through basic freedoms of the individual. Macpherson (1962, 264; see also Pateman 2002)
argues that alienability of the labour force presupposes itself a universal, inalienable right of self-ownership that originates from the
practice of commodity exchange and contains, as already outlined, the circulation sphere-based rights of freedom, equality,
property, and self-interest (Marx 1867/1976, 280). In terms of privacy, I conclude that approaches
to privacy as an
inalienable right may be helpful but are ultimately not sufficient to be an alternative to capitalist
class domination particularly if they operate with the notion of autonomy and privacy as selfpossession. Carole Pateman argues that the double freedom assigned to the worker in capitalism is a “political fiction” (Pateman
and Mills 2007, 17f.) since the inalienable part of the individual that enters into employment contracts cannot be separated from the
individual’s alienable aspects. When employers buy work force, it is demanded that the worker brings in his or her knowledge, skills,
etc., which in fact is his or her person. Labour cannot be separated from person-being and personbecoming (Marx 1976, 283). The
same applies to privacy and personal data. It is a fiction to assume that users can exchange their personal data and that this
exchange would not affect their person, which also has to be conceptualised as non-alienable in order to speak meaningfully of free
and voluntary exchanges on privacy markets. Pateman argues that contracts, although entered voluntarily, enable superiority and
subordination. Hence, there is also a subordination of the users at stake when they accept commercial SNSs’ terms of use. Such
subordination is a precondition for exploitation and class domination ultimately. Ellerman refers to this fiction as a “personthing
mismatch” (Ellerman 2005, 463) as if aspects of personality could be alienated like things. The
political fiction of
severability of person and work force or person and personal data can easily be understood as
ideology and fetishism in the sense that I have outlined it here. Whereas privacy can, though ought
not, be seen as an inalienable right, private property rea- sonably cannot (Andrew 1985, 529; Pateman 2002, 20-21;
Litman 2000, 1295-1297). The closer privacy comes to private property, the more privacy is alienable or
exchangeable, becoming itself a commodity. It does then not only contribute to the capitalist
ideology, but also directly to exploitation. In Table 1, I summarise what we can learn from Marx in terms of
understanding privacy in (informational) capitalism.
Privacy cements neoliberalism ensuring economic inequality – the “right to be
left alone” drives excessive concern for personal well-being and prevents
collective solidarity
Sevignani, 12 (Sebastian Sevignani studied media and communication, philosophy, and
theology at the University of Salzburg. He obtained a master's degree in communication studies
(Mag. phil.) in 2009. From 2007 until 2010, he worked at the University of Salzburg's
Department of Communication Studies as scholar in the Media Economics Research Group
(Abteilung für Medienökonomie). He has started work on his doctoral thesis, which focuses on
the social possibilities/ potentials of the media in (knowledge-based) capitalism. Sebastian. "The
Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and the Alternative Social Networking Site Diaspora*." Journal
for a Global Sustainable Information Society 12.2 (2012): 603-04. Web. 16 July 2015.
<http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/view/25>.)
The starting point of the modern privacy debate was an article by Samuel D. Warren and Louis
D. Brandeis published in 1890. The motive for writing this article was an infringement during the wedding of Warren’s
daughter by the press. In this article, privacy is defined as the “right to be left alone” (Warren and
Brandeis 1890/1984, 76). “The right to be left alone” is identical with the liberal core value of
negative freedom (Rössler 2001, 20f.), and as such it determines most of the subsequent
theoretical work on privacy and situates it within the liberal tradition. The plethora of values
that are associated with privacy, such as the value of freedom, autonomy, personal well-being
and so forth, mostly stem from this very kind of thinking. Serving these values, informational privacy is today
most often defined either as control over the flow of information or over the access to information. For Alan F. Westin, “privacy is
the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them
is communicated to others” (Westin 1967, 7). Westin focuses on the control of information, which makes him a prototypical
proponent of “control-theories” of privacy (Tavani 2008, 142f.). On the other hand, there are “access-theories” of privacy (Tavani
2008, 141f.). Gavinson, for instance, relates privacy “to our concern over our accessibility to others: the extent to which we are
known to others, the extent to which others have physical access to us, and the extent to which we are the subject of others'
attention” (Gavinson 1980/1984, 347). If we combine these two major strands of privacy approaches, one
can speak of
privacy as individual control over access to personal information (Moor 1997; Tavani 2008). Some
authors challenge the non-determination of “privacy as control” definitions (e.g., Wacks 2010, 40f.; Solove 2008, 25); they argue that
these theories fail to define the content of privacy. In fact, control theories deal with the “freedom to choose privacy” (Wacks 2010,
41), rather than a determination of the content to be deemed private. Here, privacy is what is subjectively seen as private; such
theories, therefore, foster individuals’ exclusive control over their data, and do not want to and cannot lay claim to privacy within a
good society and a happy fulfilled life (Jaggar 1983, 174). Access theories differ on this point; these theories can denote a realm of
privacy that is not at the disposal of the individual’s choice by any means (Fuchs 2011b, 223). For instance, such determinations of
privacy could include the agreement that individuals’ bodies, homes or financial issues such as bank secrecy, are inherently private.
In access theories, privacy is what is objectively private and, therefore, theories as these can conjure up constraints to individuals’
control over their data in terms of certain values. It
is crucial to understand that access theories may allow
thinking about what privacy should be in a good society, but not as a matter of necessity. In fact,
access theories of privacy are also most often situated within the liberal tradition and have a
limited notion of societal issues as the stress is on the individual control aspect. A resemblance
between privacy and property is often noted in the literature (Lyon 1994, 186; Laudon 1996, 93; Brenkert
1979, 126; Habermas 1991, 74; Goldring 1984, 308f.; Lessig 2002, 250; Hettinger 1989, 45; Geuss 2001, 103; Sofsky 2007, 95f.;
Solove 2008, 26-28; Moore 2008, 420; Kang 1998; Litman 2000; Westin 1967, 324-325; Varian 1997; Samuelson 2000), but
has
rarely been analysed critically (exception: Fuchs 2011b). A broad notion that expresses its fundamental character for
human life and fits in with various kinds of property, understands property as a social relation with regard to (tangible and/or
intangible) things (Pedersen 2010c). Macpherson
speaks about three possible forms: private property,
state property, and common property. He points out that private property and state property
are of similar structure, since in both the social relation with regard to things is exclusionary
(Macpherson 1978, 5). Macpherson further remarks upon three shifts in the property notion,
which took place when capitalism and market society appeared (Macpherson 1978, 9f.). These shifts include
relevant – and, as we shall see, ideological – identifications: private
property, based on a relation of exclusion, is
taken for property as such; property in the consumable means of life is identified with property
in producing these means of life; and property in producing the means of life is identified with a
specific property in producing the means of life, namely property of the labour force. These
shifts are not arbitrary; rather, Macpherson argues that they are needed by market society and
capitalism (Macpherson 1978, 9). Nowadays, private property is commonly associated with four aspects: the right to use, to
abuse, to alienate or exchange something, as well as the right to receive the fruits that the usage of something generates (Munzer
2005, 858). Private property can be or probably has always been constrained by state or society (Christman 1996). However, “it may
be called an absolute right in two senses: it is a right to dispose of, or alienate, as well as to use; and it is a right which is not
conditional on the owner’s performance of any social function” (Macpherson 1978, 10). CC: Creative Commons License, 2012. 604
Sebastian Sevignani A
relation of exclusion lies behind privacy as well as in the case of private
property. I will now point to some similarities between both concepts on a phenomenological
level. In the next section, the resemblance is then explored more systematically using Marxian theory. Most often, privacy is
defined as an individual’s right against others and society (ensuring negative freedom), so one
may conclude that an opposition against ‘the common’ lies behind the privacy discourse. In the
age of the Internet, “just as the individual concerned about privacy wants to control who gets
access to what and when, the copyright holder wants to control who get access to what and
when” (Lessig 2002, 250). Consequently, there is much discussion about how, on the one hand, to understand, justify, and
criticize intangible private property, and on the other hand, to analyse, welcome, or mourn the blurring between the public and
private realm online (with respect to SNS: boyd 2007). Further similarities
between privacy and private
property can be found in their dependence on people’s class status (Goldring 1984, 313;
Papacharissi 2010). It makes an important difference if one has private property only in things
that one needs for life, or if one has much more private property than he or she needs for life.
There are rich private property owners who possess far more housing space than they can ever
use. On the other hand, there are poor private property owners, being on welfare, who only
possess their labour power. In terms of privacy, there are, for instance, people who rely on
sharing the flat with other people that brings along several constraints in temporarily
withdrawing from other people, or they may be forced to report their whole private life to state
authorities (Gilliom 2001). However, there are people who have far more privacy. For instance,
people who live in castles are well protected from any unappreciated intrusions, be they from
other people, noise, or anything else. These people may be able to circumvent reporting their
financial status to state authorities, using the law effectively on their behalf by means of tax and
investment consultants. As much as private property, privacy is also good for different things depending
on one’s class status. In capitalism, all people rely on having private property in order to satisfy their material and cultural
needs. For the rich and powerful, private property ensures that they have the right to own the means of production and use them
for their own purpose. For the poor, private property is essential because only via private property can they reproduce their labour
power and ensure that they will make ends meet. In
capitalism, all humans also rely on having privacy in order
to be competitive within a society that forces them to compete, and at the same time to allow
for spaces of escape from that competition (Geuss 2001, 88). Rich and powerful people’s call for
privacy is not only about individuation, but moreover about ensuring the sanctity of their wealth
while hiding its origin (one thinks of bank secrecy, for instance). The poorer people also call for
privacy in order to protect their lives against overexploitation and other forms of powerful
abuse by the rich (Demirovic 2004). Not surprisingly, we know of theories that draw consequences from the outlined close
connection between the individualistic control theory of privacy and private property by conceptualising the right to privacy as a
right to property (Laudon 1996, 93; Lessig 2002; Kang 1998; Varian 1997). Property, according to the previously outlined identifying
processes, is for these authors always to be understood as private property. Privacy as property would strengthen the individual
control of personal data (Laudon 1996, 93; 97) and would prevent privacy invasions that occur when personal data is accessed nonconsensually (Laudon 1996, 99). The “privacy
as property”-approach demands that “everyone possesses
information about themselves that would be valuable under some circumstances to others for
commercial purposes. Everyone possesses his or her own reputation and data image. In this
sense, basing privacy on the value of one’s name is egalitarian. Even the poor possess their
identity. In the current regime of privacy protection, not even the wealthy can protect their personal information” (Laudon 1996,
102). Admittedly, with other political implications in mind, Lessig says, in the context of privacy as property, that “property talk
[...] would strengthen the rhetorical force behind privacy” (Lessig 2002, 247). If privacy is
property, then it becomes possible to speak about theft regarding the non-consensual usage of
personal data (Lessig 2002, 255).
Transparency
The aff’s regulatory intervention to re-establish business confidence and
consumer trust reproduces neoliberalism – the root cause of surveillance is an
ideology of publicity that demands all information be disclosed so that it can be
consumed – the aff merely shifts technologies of disclosure from the state to
the market
Dean 3
(Jodi. Professor in the Political Science department @ Hobart and William Smith Colleges. "Why
the Net Is Not a Public Sphere." Constellations 10.1 (2003): 100-01. Web. 15 July 2015.
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123net/intro/dean_net_publicsphere.pdf) TB
In complaints of both lack and excess, the invocation of the public, or the terri- torialization of cyberia as a public, functions to
authorize regulatory interven- tions. 15 Too little security, too little trust to be able to know that one is dealing with rational, fully
individuated agents? Better install some sorts of mechanisms that can let us know who one is, codes that will warrant the other
person as a responsible subject. 16 Too many opinions? Too many voices? Better put in filters so that the real authorities can be
if cyberia really is the public sphere, if it really does let in all the voices and
opinions and give equal access to all within its domain, what is the problem? Put somewhat differently,
why exactly is it a nightmare of inclusion? What is the base line from which this is measured? The answer is global capital,
or, in a term I take from Paul A. Passavant, communicative capitalism . 18 These regulatory
interventions are invoked and pursued so as to make the Net safe for commercial exchange, to
protect the Intranets of finan- cial markets, establish the trust necessary for consumer
confidence in online transactions, and to make appear as a public sphere what is clearly the
material basis of the global economy.  These two contradictory accounts of the Net as a public sphere suggest that it
recognized. 17 But
might be more productive to treat the public sphere as an ideological construct and subject it to ideology critique. As theorized by
Slavoj Zizek, ideology refers to the “generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and the non-visible,
between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes in this relationship.” 19 My claim is that a notion of public in the sense
of visible, accessible, and known operates together with a notion of secrecy in the sense of hidden, inaccessible, and unknown in a
matrix that configures how democracy is imagined in contemporary technoculture. 20 If
the public aspires to inclusivity,
transparency, and reconciliation, then the secret holds open these aspirations via the promise
that a democratic public is within reach – once all that is hidden has been revealed . Along with
technologies of surveillance and
practices of dissemination are installed to fulfill these promises, to bring everything before the gaze of the
public. Publicity works through demands to disclose or reveal the secret and realize the public as
the ideal self-identical subject/object of democracy. Publicity, in other words, is the ideology of
technoculture. In contrast with other Marxist theorizations, the Z ˇ iz ˇekian account of ideology does not involve false
networked communications and practices of education and informatization,
consciousness and ideology critique does not involve unmasking this falsity to reveal an underlying truth. Instead, Z ˇ iz ˇek upgrades
the concept of ideology in order to apply it to a cynical age. Precisely because cyni- cism incorporates an ironic distance from
everyday social reality, unmasking is clearly pointless.
People know very well that they are playing into the
hands of advertisers, say, but they do it nevertheless, despite their knowledge of what is going on. For Zizek, then, ideology
refers to the beliefs involved when we go ahead and do something nevertheless . Ideology affects what we do, not
what we know . Furthermore, insofar as ideology refers to practices of belief, it has a profoundly material dimension. Belief is
exteriorized in cultural practices, insti- tutions, and technologies. When we “go through the motions” despite what we know, we
uphold, reinforce these institutions. Thus, rather than designating the interior disposition of an individual, belief, again persists at
the level of actions and in those practical, technological, conditions that produce them. I contend that today these conditions are
best understood as the materialization of norms of publicity.
Iran Politics
Lobbyists have major influence on drones in Congress
Stone 12 (Andrea Stone, reporter at Huffington post, 05/25/2012, Drone Lobbying Ramps Up
Among Industry Manufacturers, Developers,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/28/drone-lobbying-companies_n_1546263.html)
While privacy advocates fret over the implications of going from 300 licensed drones to as many
as 30,000 by 2020, the industry is salivating over myriad applications that include agriculture, energy
exploration, weather research, traffic control, wildlife tracking and movie production, to name a few.¶ A recent study by the
Teal Group, an aviation and defense consulting firm, estimated that global spending on unmanned aircraft
will almost double over the next decade, from $5.9 billion annually to $11.3 billion. Most of that growth will be in
the U.S.¶ “The expansion of remotely piloted vehicles will create jobs and boost local economies across the country," AUVSI
President Michael Toscano said in an emailed statement to The Huffington Post. He cited the group's study that estimated drones
would create 23,000 new jobs by 2025. “In addition to the positive impact on jobs, the expansion of remotely piloted vehicles also
holds the potential to save money for local governments and taxpayers, as they cost much less to operate than helicopters and other
manned aircraft.Ӧ For
now, though, money is flowing into campaign war chests and covering many
billable hours for lobbyists.¶ AUVSI more than doubled its lobbying budget in 2011, spending
$280,000 to work on the FAA bill that authorizes the expanded use of drones outside the military. As a PowerPoint
presentation recently obtained by Republic Report shows, the industry group all but wrote the
legislation . "Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word," it says.¶ No wonder. Political action committees
affiliated with drone manufacturers donated a total of $2.3 million to the nearly 60 members of the
bipartisan House Unmanned Systems Caucus, according to First Street Research. Most of that, 77 percent, went to Republicans.¶ The
top recipient was Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), the caucus co-chair who also heads the House Armed Services Committee. He
received $176,500 in donations from major defense contractors, including Northrop Grumman, whose Global Hawk drone is made in
his district.¶ Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee, came in second with
$112,000 from drone-related PACs. His district includes the Army's Redstone Arsenal, which conducts drone research.¶ When it
comes to diversified defense contractors, it is difficult to determine how much money is being spent specifically on drones. Many
defense contractors facing reduced Pentagon spending are scrambling to rebrand and tweak their products for the domestic market.
Bronstein-Moffley has said financial disclosure data indicates that military contractors like Raytheon, Bell Helicopter Textron and
General Atomics have increased their spending on lobbying.¶ "Military vendors are trying to craft the regulations around their
products," said Patrick Egan, a small-business consultant in the industry. "Money talks."¶ Companies that specialize in drone
technology are clearly getting their messages across.¶ According
to data compiled by the Influence Explorer, a
AeroVironment gave
nearly $23,000 in campaign contributions to Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.). In 2010, the soon-to-retire
congressman inserted a $1 million earmark for the company to develop a small but lethal handheld drone.
Last year, AeroVironment -- which has federal contracts worth more than $100 million -- spent
almost $2.6 million on lobbyists.
project by the non-partisan, non-profit accountability group Sunlight Foundation, drone-maker
Lobbyists against any drone regulation
Moran and Seetharaman 02/24/15 (David Morgan and Deepa Seetharaman, reporter for
Reuters Feb 24th 2015 “Industry Lobbyists Take Aim at Proposed FAA Drone Rules”
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2015/02/24/lobbyists-faa-drone-rules/)
WASHINGTON and SAN FRANCISCO -- Businesses hoping to capitalize on the commercial potential of
drones are preparing to push back against proposed regulations that would strictly limit how the aircraft
can be used.¶ During a 60-day public comment period on the rules, lobbyists representing a range of
industries, from Internet giants Amazon.com (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL) to aerospace firms and the news media, say they
will try to convince regulators that cutting-edge technologies make some of the limitations proposed last
week by the Federal Aviation Administration unnecessary.¶ Spending on lobbying by special interests that list drones
as an issue surged
from $20,000 in 2001 to $35 million in 2011 to more than $186 million in 2014, according
And the proposed rules provide a
new focus of lobbying efforts. if approved as written, the new FAA rules would lift the current near-ban on flying drones
to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying activity.
for commercial purposes, but its restrictions would make many business applications, such as package delivery, unfeasible.
Drones
1NC
The framing issue here is that they can’t access any of their impacts- None of
their scenarios make a brink claim in the status quo, but rather say that drones
might be beneficial to certain sectors.
Status quo solves—new FAA regulations
Morgan 6/17 – David Morgan is a reporter for Reuters. (“FAA expects to clear U.S. commercial drones within a year,” Reuters,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/17/us-usa-drones-congress-idUSKBN0OX1P020150617, June 17, 2015, Quay)
U.S. commercial drone operations could take flight on a large scale by this time next year, as
federal regulators finalize rules allowing widespread unmanned aerial system use by companies,
according to congressional testimony on Wednesday. A senior Federal Aviation Administration official said the
agency expects to finalize regulations within the next 12 months. Previous forecasts had anticipated rules by the
end of 2016 or the beginning of 2017. "The rule will be in place within a year," FAA Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker said
in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee. " Hopefully before June 17,
2016," he added. Drone advocates expect unmanned aerial systems to transform a number of
industries – from agriculture and energy production to real estate, news and entertainment,
transportation and retailing. At the congressional hearing, a senior Amazon.com executive told lawmakers that the e-commerce
retailer would be ready to begin delivering packages to customers via drones as soon as federal rules allow. “We’d like to begin delivering to our
customers as soon as it’s approved," Misener said. “We will have (the technology) in place by the time any regulations are ready. We are working very
quickly.” Amazon said its plans, which call for delivering packages to customers within 30 minutes, would require FAA rules to accommodate advanced
drone technology envisioned by the company's Prime Air operations. FAA
regulations proposed in February are more
restrictive - requiring drones to fly during daylight hours only and to remain within an
operator's visual line of sight. FAA officials are in discussions with industry stakeholders including
Amazon and Google Inc about crafting final regulations that could accommodate more sophisticated
drone systems capable of flying autonomously over longer distances. Whitaker said in written testimony
that advanced technology standards are scheduled to be completed in 2016. The shortened FAA time-horizon for final rules
follows a series of agency actions to accommodate commercial drones. FAA officials have been under
pressure from lawmakers and industry lobbyists, who claim U.S. companies are losing billions in potential savings and revenues while waiting for
regulators to open the way for drones. The
agency has also streamlined its process for exempting companies
from a near-ban on commercial drone operations. Whitaker said the FAA is now allowing up to 50 companies a week to
use drones as part of their businesses.
Alt causes—fear of commercial drones
Dolesh 15 – Richard J. Dolesh is NRPA’s Vice President of Conservation and Parks. (“The Drones are Coming,” Parks & Recreation,
http://www.parksandrecreation.org/2015/March/The-Drones-are-Coming/, March 1, 2015, Quay)
So what’s not to like about drones? Well, crashes, lost drones, operator errors, mechanical
failures, privacy invasions and other undesirable consequences of inept or irresponsible drone flying, just to
name a few reasons. Such outcomes are becoming an increasing concern of those responsible for
public safety, not to mention the ever-present threat of a drone being used in a terrorist plot. There is
already a compendium of hair-raising stories of near-misses or collisions with drones including reports of
drones flying too close to aircraft or in other highly inappropriate locations. Reports of drones flying within 50 feet of
commercial aircraft at New York City airports make some believe that a collision with an airliner is not a
matter of if, but when. Parks have not been exempt from problems created by irresponsibly piloted drones, including a number of highprofile incidents at iconic national parks such as Zion and Grand Canyon. A widely reported incident occurred at Mount
Rushmore National Park when a hobby drone was launched from a parking lot, hovered over a crowd of
1,500 people gathered for an evening program at the monument, and then flew over and around the four
sculpted heads before being flown back to the parking lot. Other public complaints about inappropriate or
unauthorized use of drones have been received by the National Park Service (NPS), including harassment
of wildlife, noise at iconic scenic viewing points and drone crashes in parks . Jeffrey Olson, public affairs
officer for NPS, says that the prohibition on unmanned aircraft in national parks issued by Director Jon Jarvis in a policy memo last June was “basically a
The ban on new drone flying was prompted by public complaints concerning incidents
similar to what happened at Mount Rushmore. NPS management policies call for careful consideration of any “new form of
recreation,” which drone flying clearly is, and the impact of this activity has not been evaluated. The administrative action will
trigger a review of existing and proposed policies and will lead to a Notice of Proposed Regulation, a process that is likely
to take about 18 months, according to Olson. Incidents from rogue operators or inexperienced pilots are not
the only concern. Privacy advocates, industrial and national security experts, and law
timeout.”
enforcement officials are very concerned about the potential use of drones in terrorist plots
or other criminal activity. Drones are starting to be a concern at virtually every large-scale public event that someone might want to
observe or photograph, such as a drone that buzzed Chicago Park District’s Lollapalooza Festival last year. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) even
went so far as to declare the 2015 Super Bowl a “No Drone Zone,” and issued an advisory to enjoy the game, but “leave your drone at home.”
Concerns about drones range from the relatively minor annoyance of crashes in open areas to the very
deep concern regarding bad behavior by pilots whose ignorance or dangerous operation of drones can
literally endanger people’s lives. Many drone enthusiasts are concerned about rogue
operators giving all operators a black eye . “The rogues are outliers,” according to Jon Resnick, policy and marketing
representative for DJI. Christopher Vo, president of the DC Area Drone User Group, says, “ There are a lot of people who are
interested in flying safely and who just want to find places to fly.” Nonetheless, there are still many concerns
about drones from a variety of quarters, especially park agencies that many expect to be on the front lines of
managing public flying of hobby drones. Vo agrees that crashes and uncontrolled descents are an issue. “Everyone
who gets their first drone and takes it out to fly will crash — that’s almost a guarantee,” he says.
“But it is not necessarily a problem, just a reality. The solution is user education about where it is safe to fly and to not fly near buildings or over private
property.” Technology improvements, says Vo, such as inexpensive onboard infrared sensors and downward-facing cameras will help measure changes
in speed and assist automatic hold, takeoff and landing. “It is also why the industry is trying to make drones lighter, stronger and safer,” he says. Vo
points out that how a drone is flown is a factor in how safe it is. There
are two principal methods of piloting drones, FirstPerson-View (FPV) and Line-of-Sight flying. In FPV flight, the operator flies the aircraft through
the lens of an onboard camera. Some think this is a largely unsafe way to fly, and that hobby drones should be
only be flown by line-of-sight with a spotter present at all times the drone is in operation.
A strong drone industry is inevitable—public support is changing and
opposition will be overcome
Quinnell 15 – Rich Quinnell has been covering electronics technology for more than 15 years. Prior to becoming a technical journalist he had
spent more than a decade as an embedded systems designer and engineering project manager for companies such as Matrix Imaging, Cooper
LaserSonics, and the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). He has degrees in electrical engineering and applied physics,
with additional graduate work in communications, computer design, and quantum electronics. (“Investors Hot on Drones,” EE Times,
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325588, February 6, 2015, Quay)
A common view of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as drones, seems to center on their use as
weapons, invaders of privacy, or annoying (to others) toys. But despite such negative images ,
drones are proving themselves invaluable in an increasing number of applications. This, in turn, is gathering
investor interest , turning drones into a hot prospect for 2015. Unlike traditional radio-controlled (RC) hobbyist
aircraft, UAVs exercise a great deal of autonomy in their operation even though they might have a (remote) human pilot. Sensors and
onboard computing, for instance, automatically stabilize the UAV's flight in the presence of
wind and other perturbations, eliminating the need for flying skills. Some UAVs are even able to follow pre-defined flight plans or
automatically return to their launch point without additional human intervention at all. UAVs are to RC aircraft what CNC machines are to manual
lathes; a robotic version. And robots
designs are proliferating. In the last year we have seen robots for farming,
search and rescue, and law enforcement as well as a continuing stream of industrial robots. UAVs are simply
another genre in the robotics field, and one that is gathering increasing interest. In a recent webcast on
Investing in Robots by Robotics Business Review, UAVs – drones – were a center of discussion. On online survey conducted among
participants had drones emerge as the top investment idea for 2015. More than 40% of
respondents expressed investment interest in drones , well ahead of consumer, industrial, and medical robotics.
Commercial applications of drones are responsible for much of the interest. According to venture capital
firm Foundry Group founder Brad Feld, speaking at the webinar, " drones are at the sweet spot" in an ongoing transfer
of technology from military to commercial purposes. He pointed out that in the last 24 months commercial drones have
undergone dramatic evolution. Many of the present commercial applications for drones are echoes of their military duties. Drones are being used for
surveying and mapmaking, in situation assessment in disaster relief operations, wildfires, and the like, and for search-and-rescue of missing persons in
wilderness areas. But other uses are also appearing. Both Google
and Amazon have been experimenting with the
use of drones for rapid delivery of goods, BP is using drones for oil pipeline inspection, and
drones are helping farmers monitor vast acres of cropland as well as assess growth characteristics so as to better target
fertilizing and watering efforts. The operation of drones often falls under the jurisdiction of governmental agencies such as the FAA,
which seek to control the shared use of airspace. And abuses of drones have stirred up a backlash of public opinion
against them, resulting in restrictions that could throttle market growth. These issues are challenges that the
nascent drone industry will need to overcome, but there is hope. Agencies such as the Small UAV Coalition and
the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI)
are providing public relations and legislative
support to the industry , seeking to ensure that appropriate regulations get formulated.
Meanwhile, commercial drone developers are beginning to abound. Clicking on the image above will take you
to a slideshow of representative drones and their applications at work in the skies today.
Alt Cause to econ growth- Price stability
Ivanovitch 7/27 (Michael Ivanovitch: An independent analyst focusing on world economy,
geopolitics and investment strategy. He served as a senior economist at the OECD in Paris,
international economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and taught economics at
Columbia Business School, “America’s 'goldilocks' economy is here,” 7/27/15,
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/27/americas-goldilocks-economy-is-here.html)
Here is a piece of evidence with a clear-cut meaning: Over the four quarters through April, the U.S. economy
has grown at an average annual rate of 2.9 percent. That is more than an entire percentage
point above its estimated growth potential – a pace of economic activity consistent with a
non-inflationary rate of utilization of labor and capital resources.¶ That growth rate has made
it possible to create jobs for nearly 3 million people, and to reduce the unemployment rate
from 6.7 percent to 5.3 percent since the first quarter of last year.¶ Remarkably, these significant
gains in output, demand and employment were obtained under conditions of perfect price stability. During
the last twelve months, the U.S. consumer price inflation was driven down from 2.1 percent to 0.3
percent. True, most of that decline was due to the 23 percent drop in the price of energy, and to the dollar's trade-weighted
appreciation of more than 20 percent. But that is not a flash in the pan; both of these rather exceptional events seem set to
continue. There is an apparently growing excess supply of energy commodities, while the euro and the yen are undermined by
extremely easy monetary policies and intractable structural difficulties.¶ Read MoreIt will take Texans a while to pay off their debt¶
A strong dollar is a powerful influence on price stability because its exchange rate directly
impacts activity and price formation in U.S. import and export sectors (about one-third of the economy)
– and much beyond. For example, a 10 percent decline of our import prices over the last twelve months not only made cheaper
foreign goods and services, but it also kept prices down in our import-competing industries.
No impact to economic decline – prefer new data
Daniel Drezner 14, IR prof at Tufts, The System Worked: Global Economic Governance during
the Great Recession, World Politics, Volume 66. Number 1, January 2014, pp. 123-164
The final significant outcome addresses a dog that hasn't barked: the effect of the Great
Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple
analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a
tool for staying in power.42 They voiced genuine concern that the global economic downturn
would lead to an increase in conflict—whether through greater internal repression,
diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict. Violence in the
Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy
movement fueled impressions of a surge in global public disorder. The aggregate data suggest
otherwise , however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has concluded that "the average
level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007."43 Interstate
violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis, as have military
expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has
not triggered any increase in violent conflict, as Lotta Themner and Peter Wallensteen
conclude: "[T]he pattern is one of relative stability when we consider the trend for the past five
years."44 The secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not
been reversed. Rogers Brubaker observes that "the crisis has not to date generated the surge in
protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected."43
Russia drilling and spilling collapses bio-d
Adams, 14
Emily E. Adams, Staff Researcher at Earth Policy Institute, “Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic
is a Bad Investment,” 9/17/14, http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2014/update125
// IS
Currently, about 10 percent of the world’s oil and one-quarter of its natural gas production
come from the Arctic region, which has warmed by more than 2 degrees Celsius since the mid1960s. Countries that border the Arctic Ocean are staking claims to expand their rights beyond
the traditional 200-mile exclusive economic zone in anticipation of future oil and gas prospects.
According to current estimates, the United States has the largest Arctic oil resources, both on
and offshore. Russia comes in second for oil, but it has the most natural gas. Norway and
Greenland are virtually tied for third largest combined oil and gas resources. Canada comes in
fifth, with almost equal parts oil and natural gas. In developing these resources, Russia is
leading the pack . Production has started at almost all of the 43 large oil and natural gas fields
that have been discovered in the Russian Arctic, both on land and offshore. Russia drew its
first oil from an offshore rig in Arctic waters in December 2013 . On August 9, 2014,
ExxonMobil and Russia’s Rosneft together began drilling Russia’s northernmost oil well
offshore of Siberia. Russia’s Novatek is working with France’s Total and the China National
Petroleum Corp to develop a liquefied natural gas plant in the Arctic. However, tightening U.S.
and European sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis threaten the future of these joint
ventures. Norway—where the oil and gas industry accounts for almost a third of government
revenues—currently boasts the only operating liquefied natural gas facility north of the Arctic
Circle, operated by Statoil in the Barents Sea. Along with Italy’s Eni, Statoil is also involved with
the development of the Goliat oil field, expected to come online in 2015. This will be the first oil
production in the richly endowed Barents Sea, bordered by Norway and Russia. To the north and
west, Greenland eagerly auctioned off drilling licenses first in the late 1970s and more recently
in the 2000s, but so far all of its wells have turned up dry. Canada had exploratory drilling in its
Arctic territory in the 1970s and 1980s, but this dropped off in the 1990s. Since then, only one
offshore exploratory well has been drilled, in 2005–06, but it was subsequently abandoned. One
impediment to further development is the lack of infrastructure to bring the fossil fuels to
market, which often requires large resource finds in order to finance its construction. In Alaska,
the onshore Prudhoe Bay oil field—one of North America’s largest—has served this role.
Discovered in 1967, it was large enough to finance construction of the TransAlaska Pipeline.
Once that was built, development of smaller nearby oil fields became commercially viable. Royal
Dutch Shell has come the closest to developing Alaska’s offshore oil. As oil prices rose in the
2000s, so did Shell’s interest. Then Shell’s plans were delayed by court cases and a U.S.
government moratorium on Arctic activity following BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico. Further delays followed the damage to a Shell containment dome, which is designed
to catch oil in the event of a spill, during testing in Puget Sound in Washington State. In 2012,
Shell had a stop-start drilling season, interrupted by drifting icebergs, which was capped off by
one of its drill rigs running aground in a heavy storm. The company opted to skip drilling entirely
in 2013. In early 2014, a federal court ruled that the U.S. government made a fundamental
mistake when calculating the impact of oil and gas development on the Arctic environment.
Therefore Shell’s licenses to drill were invalid and it missed another drilling season. Thus far,
Shell does not have a drop of oil to show for the $5 billion it spent on its recent efforts off of
Alaska, yet it has taken the first steps to try again in 2015. As Shell has seen, operating in the
Arctic brings great risks. The shrinking Arctic sea ice allows waves to become more powerful .
The remaining ice can be more easily broken up into ice floes that can collide with vessels or
drilling platforms . Large icebergs can scour the ocean floor, bursting pipes or other buried
infrastructure . Much of the onshore infrastructure is built on permafrost—frozen ground—
that can shift as the ground thaws from regional warming, threatening pipe ruptures .
Already, official Russian sources estimate that there have been more than 20,000 oil spills
annually from pipelines across Russia in recent years. Arctic operations are far away from
major emergency response support. The freezing conditions make it unsafe for crews to be
outside for extended periods of time. Even communication systems are less reliable at the far
end of the Earth. Why take such risks to pursue these dirty fuels when alternatives to oil and gas
are there for the taking?
Alt cause: FAA regulations prevent drones in agriculture
Kelsey D. Atherton, 2-19-2015, "What Does The Drone Industry Think Of The FAA’s New
Rules?," Popular Science, http://www.popsci.com/what-does-drone-industry-think-faas-newrules
David Dvorak: A strict interpretation of the FAA’s definition of visual line of sight in the
proposed rules could be prohibitive to businesses, such as those in the precision agriculture
industry, that are looking to cover or image large land areas. I think that the FAA could relax
its definition of visual line of sight and maintain an equivalent level of safety.¶ Chris Miser:
What’s missing from the new rule is more leniency for public safety operations, like the ability
to operate at night as well as other scenarios.¶ Bradley Ward: Right now the FAA requires all of
the pilots to have a Class 3 medical certificate, and there’s no discussion of medical
qualifications in the proposed new rule. That’s going to open it up to a lot of people that aren’t
physically qualified to fly a manned airplane. They can finally get into aviation and fly an
unmanned aircraft, which is kinda what the industry’s been asking for for a long time. In a lot of
cases with a small UAS there are no rudder pedals. The operator doesn’t physically need to have
legs, so why does he have to meet the same medical requirements to fly a manned airplane with
passengers on board to fly a small UAS? You don’t have to be physically qualified to fly
passengers around in a manned airplane to fly a small UAS. That’s changed, and I see it as good
news.¶ New FAA Regulations Could Prevent Drone Deliveries¶ Illustration by Graham Murdoch¶
What does it all mean?¶ The industry representatives we spoke with all shared confidence that
these new rules were on the whole good for the industry. Having a clear legal framework means
individual drone companies won’t have to apply for specific exemptions from the FAA in order
to operate, the way they do currently.¶ Optimistic as people were, all expressed some hesitation
about the rules. Chris Miser has previously used his company’s drones in emergency response.
The current rules, which don’t allow drone operation before sunrise or after sunset, limit
drone flights for emergency operations. David Dvorak is concerned the line-of-sight
restrictions could limit drones' use in agriculture. Others are withholding comment until
they’ve submitted input to the FAA.¶ Comment on the proposed rules just opened up, so there’s
plenty of time for existing and prospective drone companies to weigh in, and then even more
time after that to see how the FAA incorporates this input. The rules won't become law until
mid-to-late 2016 at the earliest, though 2017 is a safer bet. The legal framework for the future
of drone business is coming at the speed of government
Biodiversity loss doesn’t cause extinction – other species will adapt
NPR 7 (5/30/2007, Donald J. Dodds M.S. P.E., President of the North Pacific Research, “The Myth of
Biodiversity,” northpacificresearch.com/downloads/The_myth_of_biodiversity.doc CS)
Notice next that at
least ten times biodiversity fell rapidly; none of these extreme reductions in
biodiversity were caused by humans. Around 250 million years ago the number of genera was
reduce 85 percent from about 1200 to around 200, by any definition a significant reduction in biodiversity. Now
notice that after this extinction a steep and rapid rise of biodiversity. In fact, if you look closely at the curve, you will find that
every mass-extinction was followed by a massive increase in biodiversity. Why was that? Do you
suppose it had anything to do with the number environmental niches available for exploitation? If you do, you are right.
Extinctions are necessary for creation. Each time a mass extinction occurs the world is filled
with new and better-adapted species. That is the way evolution works, its called survival of the fittest.
Those species that could not adapted to the changing world conditions simply disappeared and better species evolved. How efficient
is that? Those that could adapt to change continued to thrive. For example, the cockroach and the shark have been around well over
300 million years. There is a pair to draw to, two successful species that any creator would be proud to produce. To
date these
creatures have successful survived six extinctions, without the aid of humans or the EPA.
Agriculture production growing- GMOs
Malone 7/26 (JD Malone: Reporter for Columbus Dispatch- The Columbus Dispatch is
Columbus, Ohio's hometown newspaper and Central Ohio's source for breaking news,
“Genetically modified seeds are changing agriculture,” 7/26/15,
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/07/26/1-gmo-future.html)
GMOs are plants that have genes spliced from other organisms in the hope that their
beneficial traits will transfer. Corn, cotton, potatoes, apples, plums, soybeans, papaya, sugar beets, alfalfa, canola, flax,
tobacco and squash are among the GMO plants approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. So far, GMOs mostly enhance a
plant’s defenses, giving resistance or immunity to pests and herbicides.¶ Opponents, some of whom are very strident in their
protests, say GMOs haven’t been proven safe, that the long-term effects of eating GMOs are unknown and that growing GMOs
promotes the use of pesticides.¶ “One of the biggest questions or uneasiness is, ‘Are they safe?’ There is a perception that they have
not been well tested, and that is inaccurate,” said Margaret Smith, professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University.
“There has been quite a bit of testing.”¶ Smith points to a
2014 report that pooled the results of more than
1,700 recent studies on GMOs — about a decade’s worth of research — that concluded that
there is no evidence of danger to humans.¶ “I feel comfortable,” she said. “I don’t think there is any credible
evidence of concern at this time.Ӧ Most scientists agree with Smith. The Pew Research Center released a poll in January that asked
several questions of scientists connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. More agreed that GMOs
are safe to eat (88 percent) than agreed that climate change is mostly caused by human activity (87 percent) or that childhood
vaccines should be required (86 percent).¶ Smith added that skepticism is healthy. “Just like they say on Wall Street, past
performance is not a guarantee of future return. We shouldn’t stop worrying. ... Our regulatory system and evaluations have worked
well, and we need to continue to be thoughtful and careful.”¶ Making the switch¶ For Davis, the science is settled.¶ He believes
GMOs make his farm more sustainable and profitable and his crops safer for consumers and farmers. Since he’s used them, he said,
he no longer has to blanket his cornfields indiscriminately with insecticide. ¶ “When I started, the bag (of insecticide) itself had a skull
and crossbones on it,” he said. “Does that tell you how harmful it was? It was poison.”¶ According
to a report published
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2014, the use of insecticide on corn declined 90
percent between 1995 and 2010. The USDA also said the active ingredient in RoundUp — glyphosate — is less toxic
than the herbicides it replaced.¶ Davis bought his first GMO 23 years ago — RoundUp-resistant soybeans. Since then, subsequent
hybrids with the trait have boosted his yield by 50 percent.¶ “The hardest thing to swallow was the price of the technology,” he
said.¶ The GMO soybean cost double that of the variety it replaced. He didn’t regret it, and he’s never looked back. He started
planting GMO corn about 12 years ago.¶ “It was well worth it,” Davis said. Before GMOs, he spent $50 to $60 an acre on chemicals
to control weeds and insects. RoundUp cost just $4 to $5 an acre, he said.¶ His corn
yields jumped as well. Davis
reaped 150 bushels of corn per acre pre-GMO; today, he tops 220 bushels an acre. It’s a leap
in efficiency that would have been science fiction to a teenage Davis, who joined the family farm when he graduated from
Buckeye Valley High School in 1978.¶ “I never thought I’d see 200-bushel corn in my lifetime,” Davis said. “Never. Not in my wildest
dreams.”¶ Benefits, problems¶ According to the USDA, more
than 90 percent of corn and soybeans grown in
the U.S. are genetically engineered.¶ “When you see an adoption as quickly as GMO corn and soybeans, it is an
obvious benefit,” said Michael Langemeier, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. “That means that there has to
be some very strong advantages. The yield increases have been pretty big.Ӧ Some farmers still choose to go non-GMO, and all
organic crops are non-GMO, but those farmers are aiming for specialty markets, Langemeier said.¶ “They are able to market it to
people willing to pay for it,” he said.¶ Well-known companies do pay for it. Chipotle has pledged to rid its food of GMOs, and Whole
Foods is rolling out mandatory labeling of products containing GMOs. Snowville Creamery in Meigs County pays its dairy farmers
more to use non-GMO feeds when supplementing their grass-fed cows.
Drones fail – overheating, weather, and radar solves
Scutti, 14
Susan Scutti, graduated from Yale, reporter for Medical Daily and contributes on occasion to
Newsweek magazine. “Drones Track Spread Of Infectious Disease Through Ecological Pattern
Recognition,” Medical Daily, 10/22/14, http://www.medicaldaily.com/drones-track-spreadinfectious-disease-through-ecological-pattern-recognition-307687 // IS
Along with real-time surveys, drones offer other benefits. Compared to satellites, UAVs sidestep
cloud contamination and low spatial resolution, yet they similarly can produce “stereo” images
used for 3D visualizations and generation of digital elevation models. However, UAVs also have
limitations unkown to satellites; they cannot fly in all weather conditions, and high
temperatures may cause them to overheat. Finally, drones are not yet capable of gathering
data provided by remote-sensing methods such as radar.
While scientists explore the benefits of UAVs, others lie awake at night worrying about their
expanding use and what this means for nations
Alt cause – water scarcity
Martelle, 11/3/13 – Veteran journalist Scott Martelle has written books on the Ludlow
Massacre and the Red Scare clampdown on civil liberties, directly quoting the WRI (Scott,
“Climate Change to Cut Global Food Production, Increase Water Demand,” TruthDig,
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/climate_change_to_cut_global_food_producti
on_increase_water_demand)// IS’14
The second report, by the nonprofit World Resources Institute, warns that more than a quarter
of the planet’s food production comes from “highly water-stressed areas,” according to Salon’s
coverage of the study. “That includes half of irrigated cropland, which itself is responsible for
40 percent of the global food supply,” Salon says, defining water stress as a region in which 40
percent or more of the renewable water supply is used up each year. The WRI sees significant
global stresses, which you can assess here using the organization’s interactive Web tool. The
tension between crop production and available water supply is already great, as agriculture
currently accounts for more than 70 percent of all human water withdrawal. But the real
problem is that this tension is poised to intensify. The 2030 Water Resources Group forecasts
that under business-as-usual conditions, water demand will rise 50 percent by 2030. Water
supplies, however, will not—and physically cannot—grow in parallel. Agriculture will drive
nearly half of that additional demand, because global calorie production needs to increase 69
percent to feed 9.6 billion people by 2050. The food-water tension won’t just be felt by
agriculture, either. Agriculture’s growing thirst will squeeze water availability for municipal
use, energy production, and manufacturing. With increasing demand in all sectors, some
regions of the world, such as northern China, are already scrambling to find enough water to
run their economies.
Countries will cooperate over food
Burger et al. 10 -Development Economics, Corresponding author, Wageningen University (Kees, “Governance of the world
food system and crisis prevention” http://www.stuurgroepta.nl/rapporten/Foodshock-web.pdf ) //SQR
Both European water and agricultural policies are based on the belief that there will always be cheap food aplenty on the world
market. A recent British report 23 reflects this optimism. Although production is now more prone to world market price shocks, their
effects on farm incomes are softened by extensive income supports (van Eickhout et al. 2007). Earlier, in a 2003 report, a European
group of agricultural economists wrote: Food
security is no longer a prime objective of European food and
agricultural policy. There is no credible threat to the availability of the basic ingredients of
human nutrition from domestic and foreign sources. If there is a food security threat it is the
possible disruption of supplies by natural disasters or catastrophic terrorist action. The main response
necessary for such possibilities is the appropriate contingency planning and co-ordination
between the Commission and Member States (Anania et al. 2003). Europe, it appears, feels rather sure of itself, and
does not worry about a potential food crisis. We are also not aware of any special measures on standby.
Nevertheless a fledgling European internal security has been called into being that can be deployed should (food) crises strike. The
Maastricht Treaty (1992) created a quasi-decision-making platform to respond to transboundary threats. Since 9/11 the definition of
what constitutes a threat has been broadened and the protection capacity reinforced. In the Solidarity Declaration of 2003 member
states promised to stand by each other in the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or human-made calamity (the European
Security Strategy of 2003). Experimental
forms of cooperation are tried that leave member-state
sovereignty intact, such as pooling of resources. The EU co-operates in the area of health and food safety but its
mechanisms remain decentrslised by dint of the principle of subsidiarity. The silo mentality between the European directorates is
also unhelpful, leading to Babylonian confusion. Thus, in the context of forest fires and floods the Environment DG refers to ‘civil
protection’. The European Security and Defence Policy( ESDP) of 2006, which is hoped to build a bridge between internal and
external security policy, on the other hand refers to ‘crisis management’, while the ‘security’ concept mainly pertains to pandemics
(Rhinard et al. 2008: 512, Boin et al. 2008: 406).
No terror impact---super unlikely
Schneidmiller 9 (Chris, Experts Debate Threat of Nuclear, Biological Terrorism, 13 January 2009,
http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20090113_7105.php)
There is an "almost vanishingly small" likelihood that terrorists would ever be able to acquire and
detonate a nuclear weapon, one expert said here yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 2, 2008). In even the most likely scenario of nuclear terrorism, there are
20 barriers between extremists and a successful nuclear strike on a major city, said John Mueller, a
political science professor at Ohio State University. The process itself is seemingly straightforward but exceedingly
difficult -- buy or steal highly enriched uranium, manufacture a weapon, take the bomb to the target site and
blow it up. Meanwhile, variables strewn across the path to an attack would increase the complexity of the effort, Mueller argued. Terrorists would
have to bribe officials in a state nuclear program to acquire the material, while avoiding a sting by authorities or a scam by the
sellers. The material itself could also turn out to be bad. "Once the purloined material is purloined, [police are] going to be chasing after you. They are also going to put on
a high reward, extremely high reward, on getting the weapon back or getting the fissile material back," Mueller said during a panel discussion at a two-day Cato Institute
conference on counterterrorism issues facing the incoming Obama administration. Smuggling the material out of a country would mean relying on criminals who "are very
good at extortion" and might have to be killed to avoid a double-cross, Mueller said. The
terrorists would then have to find scientists and
willing to give up their normal lives
engineers
to manufacture a bomb, which would require an expensive and sophisticated machine shop.
Finally, further technological expertise would be needed to sneak the weapon across national borders to its destination point and conduct a successful detonation, Mueller
likelihood
of successfully passing through each obstacle, in sequence, would be roughly one in 3 1/2
billion, he said, but for argument's sake dropped it to 3 1/2 million. "It's a total gamble. This is a very expensive and difficult thing to do," said Mueller, who addresses
said. Every obstacle is "difficult but not impossible" to overcome, Mueller said, putting the chance of success at no less than one in three for each. The
the issue at greater length in an upcoming book, Atomic Obsession. "So unlike buying a ticket to the lottery ... you're basically putting everything, including your life, at
Other scenarios are even less probable, Mueller said. A
nuclear-armed state is "exceedingly unlikely" to hand a weapon to a terrorist group, he argued:
"States just simply won't give it to somebody they can't control." Terrorists are also not likely to be
able to steal a whole weapon, Mueller asserted, dismissing the idea of "loose nukes." Even Pakistan, which today is perhaps
stake for a gamble that's maybe one in 3 1/2 million or 3 1/2 billion."
the nation of greatest concern regarding nuclear security, keeps its bombs in two segments that are stored at different locations, he said (see GSN, Jan. 12). Fear of an
"extremely improbable event" such as nuclear terrorism produces support for a wide range of homeland security activities, Mueller said. He argued that there has been a
major and costly overreaction to the terrorism threat -- noting that the Sept. 11 attacks helped to precipitate the invasion of Iraq, which has led to far more deaths than
academic and governmental
discussions of acts of nuclear or biological terrorism have tended to focus on "worst-case assumptions about
terrorists' ability to use these weapons to kill us." There is need for consideration for what is probable rather than simply what is possible, he said. Friedman
took issue with the finding late last year of an experts' report that an act of WMD terrorism would "more likely than not" occur
in the next half decade unless the international community takes greater action. "I would say that the report, if you read it, actually offers
no analysis to justify that claim, which seems to have been made to change policy by
generating alarm in headlines." One panel speaker offered a partial rebuttal to Mueller's presentation. Jim Walsh, principal research
scientist for the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he agreed that nations would almost
certainly not give a nuclear weapon to a nonstate group, that most terrorist organizations have no interest in
seeking out the bomb, and that it would be difficult to build a weapon or use one that has been
stolen.
.
the original event. Panel moderator Benjamin Friedman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said
No impact to disease – they either burn out or don’t spread
Posner 05 – Senior Lecturer at University of Chicago (Richard A, “Catastrophe: the dozen most significant
catastrophic risks and what we can do about them.”, Winter,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_11/ai_n29167514/pg_2?tag=content;col1)//WL
Yet the
fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000
years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction
events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox,
and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a
biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an
evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill
their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in
its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of
a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less
today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited
the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an
infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one.
Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a
lust time.
2NC: Alt Cause FAA regulations
FAA regulations restricts growth, and competition
Ed Pilkington, 9-30-2014, "What's keeping America's private drone industry grounded?,"
Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/29/drone-testers-faa-aviationfrustration-grows
But despite the excitement around drones as the next chapter in aviation history, there is also
growing frustration about the ponderous speed at which the new automated technology is
being integrated into the national airspace. Under current Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) regulations, almost all commercial use of the unmanned planes is strictly prohibited On
a two-day tour of the Northern Plains test site organised by the North Dakota department of
commerce, the coordinator of the site, the Guardian heard aviation experts and UAS pioneers
repeatedly express their frustration at the “glacial speeds” at which the FAA is moving towards
integrating drones into America’s skies. Becklund said he was so concerned about the slow rate
of progress that he feared that the US could jeopardize its technological and commercial
leadership in unmanned aerial vehicles.¶ “I worry that the rest of the world is moving ahead
faster than we are,” he said. “We have a lot of interest, the phone is ringing off the hook,
companies want to fly their unmanned airplanes, but if a company comes to the test site and
wants to know how it can go ahead and commercialise its aircraft, we can’t really tell them.
There’s something not quite adding up.”¶ He added: “It’s going to be a frustratingly long wait for
the industry in this country. We are going to have to push to maintain leadership in this area –
it’s easy for people to go to Canada.”¶ Drones FAA¶ ‘The FAA is just rolling its eyes over this’.
Photograph: University of North Dakota¶ Benjamin Trapnell, an expert in unmanned aeronautics
at the University of North Dakota, which is a key partner in the UAS test site, said: “The FAA is
just rolling its eyes over this – they want to see it all go away. But that’s not going to happen.
We’ve got this huge increase in technology, and the question is: can we catch up with it under a
bureaucratic system that moves with glacial speeds.Ӧ Congress has set the FAA the task of
coming up with rules and standards that would safely allow drone traffic through American skies
by September 2015 at the latest. But at the rate things are going, few expect that deadline to be
met.¶ Advertisement¶ The six drone test sites – the others are in Alaska, Nevada, New York,
Texas and Virginia – were set up by the FAA as part of its mission to meet Congress’s mandate.
They would act as research arms assisting the FAA to solve a maddeningly difficult riddle: how to
unleash the extraordinary potential of drones in US society by allowing them to fly among
passenger planes in America’s busy airways, without jeopardizing the country’s unsurpassed
record for air safety.¶ The need for a solution to the riddle appears increasingly urgent with
every day that passes, as has been vividly illustrated by a spate of recent incidents. Last week, a
Dutch tourist was ordered by a federal judge to pay $3,200 after he crashed his drone into the
Grand Prismatic Spring, a famous hot spring in Yellowstone national park, Wyoming. In May, a
New York musician was fined for “reckless endangerment” after he crash-landed in a Manhattan
sidewalk just feet away from a pedestrian.¶ As individuals and businesses increasingly embrace
drones as they come down in size and cost, the FAA has tried to hold back the tide by sending
out cease and desist letters to people caught using the planes without authorization. But such
are the attractions of the devices for outlets such as real estate companies, wedding
photographers and hobbyists flying drones through fireworks displays that increasingly people
are going ahead and using the devices even without FAA approval.¶ Meanwhile, companies who
have done everything they are supposed to do, and are abiding by FAA rules, are hurting
because they cannot recoup the investment they have made.¶ That includes companies like
Field of View, an innovative start-up in Grand Forks that has designed a drone package specially
geared to the large-scale farmer. It uses state-of-the-art aerial photography to detect plant
health, irrigation and development almost to the level of the individual leaf. That could help
farmers save thousands of dollars in fertiliser, water and lost crops - as well as helping the
environment.¶ Yet right now Field of View cannot exploit the potential of its product: farmers
are not allowed to fly drones over their fields. At least, not in the US. So it does roaring trade
instead with Canada, parts of South America, South Africa, the Czech Republic, France, and
elsewhere. “A lot of other countries are marching ahead,” said chief executive David Dvorak.¶
Drones FAA¶ North Dakota was chosen because of its perfect characteristics for drone testing.
Photograph: University of North Dakota¶ Last week the FAA announced with much fanfare that it
was permitting six Hollywood and TV production studios to forge ahead with drones for aerial
filming. Though the announcement was warmly welcomed by the movie industry, which has
long been chomping at the bit to use drones, the concession has no bearing on the bigger
picture of how to integrate UAVs into the national airspace. The film production companies will
only be allowed to fly in closed studio spaces where there is no risk of encountering any manned
aircraft.¶ With companies and individuals pushing hard to be allowed to use the technology, and
the FAA straining to hold them back, the North Dakota test site finds itself in the middle of the
fray. The state was chosen by the FAA as one of the six test sites because it is perfectly suited to
its task: it has one of the lowest population densities in the US; its Plains are pancake flat,
perfect for take-off and landing; its unencumbered open skies afford maximum visibility; it has a
world-class aviation research community at the University of North Dakota; and it also has major
military drone installations at Grand Forks air force base.¶ These advantages combine to make
North Dakota a veritable drone Nirvana. But still, the Northern Plains test site is struggling.¶
Advertisement¶ Part of the problem is the suffocating nature of FAA paperwork, which is
paradoxically even more onerous for the testers than for other drone operators. Every
unmanned aircraft that the site flies has to be approved in advance through an FAA-granted
“certificate of authorization” that can take weeks or months to obtain, and there must be at
least three people present at the exercise including an FAA-certified pilot.¶ Becklund is clearly
deeply frustrated by the constraints put on his team. Asked by reporters whether the rules
governing the test site were a little overboard, he replied: “You’re talking to an F-16 pilot –
when I’m flying I’m using every finger, talking on two radios, operating weapons, flying in
formation. So yes, there could be some changes there, we need to simplify this.Ӧ Another
hurdle is the lack of any federal funding, which forces the test site to rely on companies
donating their time and equipment. “That’s one of the frustrations I have here: we are
completely at the mercy of external sources of research funding that may or may not have any
direct connection to actual airspace integration,” Becklund said.¶ In turn, that skews the type of
research the test site can carry out. Instead of focusing on how to merge drones into the
national airspace - for instance, by testing sense and avoid technology that stops drones
crashing into other aircraft or objects - the researchers must focus on the priorities of its
funders, like precision agriculture.¶ Even if it did have capacity to carry out tests more relevant to
the issue of drone integration, North Dakota would be at a loss to know which experiments to
concentrate on, as the FAA has so far given no guidance. “Right at this second the FAA hasn’t
actually given us clear research areas to work on,” Becklund said. “They say that’s coming.”¶ In a
statement, the FAA said it was working to speed up the process of securing drone flight permits,
or COAs, and was “continuously looking for ways to streamline the overall process.” It added
that it was also in discussions with all the official drone test sites “to discuss how the test site
program is progressing and ways to work out any issues.Ӧ An FAA spokesman stressed that the
agency’s overwhelming priority was safety. “Integration of unmanned aircraft into the national
airspace will be done incrementally,” he said.¶ Becklund’s fear that the US could be left behind in
the global drone scramble was underlined this week by news that DHL has begun deliveries in
Germany using a “parcelcopter”. The move leaves major US companies, who have all been
intensively developing their strategies, standing and watching. Google, Amazon and Fedex are
all looking to launch drone delivery services but are stymied under the FAA prohibition.¶
Brendan Schulman, a New York-based expert on drone law, said that in his view Becklund’s fear
that America might lose its edge had already come to pass. “If you are a company with a
promising product there’s no way to develop it – you need to take it to Canada or the UK, or
Australia where the regulatory environment is not so unfriendly. There’s no way for America
to remain competitive.”
2NC: Status Quo Solves
New FAA regulations solve the aff
Jansen 15 – Bart Jansen covers transportation primarily at the Federal Aviation Administration, the Transportation Security Administration, the
National Transportation Safety Board and Congress. (“FAA unveils drone rules; Obama orders policy for agencies,” USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/15/faa-drone-rule/23440469/, February 16, 2015, Quay)
The Federal Aviation Administration released Sunday its long-awaited proposal for governing
small commercial drones, setting a plan for remote-controlled aircraft to share the skies with passenger planes. The FAA
proposal would allow drones weighing up to 55 pounds to fly within sight of their remote
pilots during daylight hours. The aircraft must stay below 500 feet in the air and fly less than 100 mph. People flying drones would
need to be at least 17 years old, pass an aeronautics test and be vetted by the Transportation Security
Administration, but a certificate wouldn't require the flight hours or medical rating of a
private pilot's license. " We have tried to be flexible in writing these rules," FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said.
"We
want to maintain today's outstanding level of aviation safety without placing an undue
regulatory burden on an emerging industry ." The FAA asked for 60 days of public comment on its proposal for commercial
drones, but industry experts expect the analysis of comments could take 18 months or longer before the rules are completed. In another action
Sunday, President Obama
signed a presidential memorandum governing how federal agencies will
use drones of all sizes. The memo, which has the same legal effect as an executive order, requires agencies to publish
within one year how to access their policies about drones, particularly about the collection, retention and
dissemination of information. The goal is to ensure that uses don't violate the First Amendment or
discriminate against people based on ethnicity, race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.
And the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration will
begin developing a framework for privacy and transparency in commercial use of drones, which the
administration hopes trade groups will ultimately adopt. While surveillance of the southern border of the United States is one of the most publicized
federal uses of drones, the aircraft
are expected to be deployed for a variety of other purposes. Drones
"are a potentially transformative technology in diverse fields such as agriculture, law enforcement, coastal security,
military training, search and rescue, first responder medical support, critical infrastructure inspection and many others," according to a White House
statement. "The
administration is committed to promoting the responsible use of this technology,
strengthening privacy safeguards and ensuring full protection of civil liberties ." The FAA proposal and
the presidential memo represent the latest progress in integrating drones into U.S. airspace.
Status quo solves—new research partnership
Dillow 15 – Clay Dillow has been contributing to Fortune since 2013, writing frequently about technology, aerospace, and defense. (“FAA's
relaxed drone rules could mean big changes for industry,” Fortune, http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/faa-drone-rules/, May 8, 2015, Quay)
Rumours that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) may relax its restrictions on commercial
drones that fly outside of the operator’s line of sight received the official stamp of credibility at the Association for
Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s annual trade show. Speaking to reporters and industry representatives at the event, FAA chief
Michael Huerta signaled the agency’s openness to approving beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS)
operations and announced a couple of research projects aimed at demonstrating their safety. The agency
will take part in three new research projects with industry partners in the months ahead. Two of the
projects will be aimed at better characterizing BVLOS operations, demonstrating the technologies underpinning
such flights while also establishing safety and performance data the agency can integrate into its rule-making process. Such drone operations
are currently prohibited under the commercial drone rules unveiled by the FAA in February and
in each of the so-called Section 333 exemptions the agency has granted to companies on a case-by-case basis authorizing them to fly drones
commercially. The
news is a significant sign from the FAA, which has been increasingly (yet cautiously)
working with companies and industry groups to provide drone regulations the industry can
live with. BVLOS operations have been something of a sticking point thus far. Industry groups contend that companies
can’t fully unlock the real economic benefits drones impart—or compete with more permissive regulatory
environments overseas—without the ability to operate beyond visual line of sight. The Air Line Pilots Association
currently opposes such operations, deeming them unnecessarily risky. In the past, Amazon has been particularly vocal in its support of integrating
BVLOS operations into the FAA’s general commercial drone rules. A patent application published April 30 details the company’s plans for drone
delivery, which would require operators—and eventually autonomous piloting software—to dispatch drones over long distances to deposit parcels. But
the research projects and partners selected by the FAA are indicative of the much more
realistic—and arguably more important—impact drones will have on the industry in the near term. The FAA has
granted North Carolina-based PrecisionHawk, a manufacturer of fixed-wing platforms, permission to conduct research on BVLOS precision agriculture
operations. BNSF railroad will research ways that BVLOS drone use can improve the way the transportation giant inspects and manages its rail
infrastructure and rolling stock. (A third research project will allow CNN to explore news-gathering methods but will not explore BVLOS operations.)
These kinds of applications—such
as infrastructure inspection, precision agriculture and wide-area
surveillance—are the real, or at least immediate, future of commercial BVLOS drones. The industry remains
worried that if the FAA fails to open up its skies to BLVOS commercial opportunities, U.S. companies could be left behind. “BVLOS technology has
already matured to the point that BVLOS operations are now permitted in some other countries such as the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Sweden
and Norway where BVLOS operations have been conducted for years with high levels of safety,” the Small UAV Coalition, an industry lobby backed by
such companies as Google, Amazon, and PrecisionHawk wrote in a recent letter to FAA Administrator Huerta. These research partnerships don’t come
with any funding from the FAA, but they do allow PrecisionHawk and BNSF Railroad to gather data and prove to the FAA that BVLOS operations can be
conducted safely and in ways that impart a meaningful economic impact. If they can do so, legal BVLOS
operations may not be so
far in following. “We anticipate receiving valuable data from each of these trials that could
result in FAA-approved operations in the next few years,” Huerta said in his address at AUVSI, which is a far cry from
the hard “no” companies received from the FAA up until now.
2NC: Public Support
The public support drones—polls
USN 12 – US News. (“Poll: Americans OK with some domestic drones -- but not to catch speeders,”
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/13/12205763-poll-americans-ok-with-some-domestic-drones-but-not-to-catch-speeders?lite, June 13,
2012, Quay)
Americans overwhelmingly support the use of drones for patrolling U.S. borders, tracking
down criminals and aiding search-and-rescue missions, but they don’t want the unmanned craft used to issue speeding
tickets, according to a poll. The Monmouth University Polling Institute of New Jersey said it tested the four scenarios in anticipation of a
national push that, according to estimates from the Federal Aviation Administration, could see up to 30,000 drones
patrolling U.S. skies within a decade. The FAA, under orders from Congress in a bill signed into law Feb. 14 by President
Barack Obama, is expediting the expansion of domestic drone use. And that’s OK with most
Americans , the poll found. “Americans clearly support using drone technology in special circumstances, but they are a bit leery of
more routine use by local law enforcement agencies,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement. The
FAA issued 61 drone authorizations between November 2006 and June 30, 2011, including 13 for local police agencies and one for a state police
agency. About 20 went to colleges and universities and others went to federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security, through the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, in 2012 offered about $830 million in grants to states and cities for emergency preparedness. Drones could be funded
under several of its programs. The
Monmouth University poll of 1,708 people called June 4-6 has a margin of error of
2.4 percent, the Institute said. Its chief findings: More than half of Americans, 56 percent, had read “some”
or a “great deal” about the U.S. military use of drones. The rest, about 44 percent, read “just a little
or none at all.” About two out of three Americans, or 67 percent, oppose the use of drones to issue speeding tickets. About 23 percent support
it. 64 percent support the use of drones to control illegal immigration on the nation’s borders. 80
percent support the use of drones to help with search and rescue missions. 67 percent support
the use of drones to track down runaway criminals. 64 percent are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about
their privacy if U.S. law enforcement uses drones with high-tech cameras.
2NC: Alt Causes to Backlash
The public is scared of civilian drones, not federal drones—the plan can’t solve
that
AP 13 – The Associated Press. (“Looking to break into private market, drone industry worries about backlash,” The Daily News,
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/drone-industry-worries-privacy-backlash-article-1.1302461, March 29, 2013, Quay)
With military budgets shrinking, drone
makers have been counting on the civilian market to spur the
industry's growth. But there's an ironic threat to that hope: Success on the battlefield may contain
the seeds of trouble for the more benign uses of drones at home. The civilian unmanned aircraft
industry worries that it will be grounded before it can really take off because of fear among the public
that the technology will be misused . Also problematic is a delay in the issuance of
government safety regulations that are needed before drones can gain broad access to U.S. skies. Some companies that
make drones or supply support equipment and services say the uncertainty has caused them to put U.S. expansion
plans on hold , and they are looking overseas for new markets. "Our lack of success in
educating the public about unmanned aircraft is coming back to bite us," said Robert Fitzgerald, CEO of The
BOSH Group of Newport News, Va., which provides support services to drone users. " The U.S. has been at the lead of this
technology a long time," he said. "If our government holds back this technology, there's the freedom to
move elsewhere ... and all of a sudden these things will be flying everywhere else and competing with
us." Since January, drone-related legislation has been introduced in more than 30 states, largely in response to privacy concerns. Many of the bills are
focused on preventing police from using drones for broad public surveillance, as well as targeting individuals for surveillance without sufficient grounds
to believe they were involved in crimes. Law enforcement is expected to be one of the bigger initial markets for civilian drones. Last month, the FBI
used drones to maintain continuous surveillance of a bunker in Alabama where a 5-year-old boy was being held hostage. In Virginia, the state General
Assembly passed a bill that would place a two-year moratorium on the use of drones by state and local law enforcement. The measure is supported by
groups as varied as the American Civil Liberties Union on the left and the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation on the right. Gov. Bob McDonnell is
proposing amendments that would retain the broad ban on spy drones but allow specific exemptions when lives are in danger, such as for search-and
rescue operations. The legislature reconvenes on April 3 to consider the amendments. "Any legislation that restricts the use of this kind of capability to
serve the public is putting the public at risk," said Steve Gitlin, vice president of AeroVironment, a leading maker of smaller drones, including some no
bigger than a hummingbird Seattle abandoned its drone program after community protests in February. The city's police department had purchased
two drones through a federal grant without consulting the city council. Drones
"clearly have so much potential for saving
lives, and it's a darn shame we're having to go through this right now," said Stephen Ingley, executive director of the Airborne Law Enforcement
Association. "It's frustrating." In some states economic concerns have trumped public unease. In Oklahoma, an anti- drone bill was shelved at
the request of Republican Gov. Mary Fallin, who was concerned it might hinder growth of the state's drone industry. The North Dakota state Senate
killed a drone bill in part because of concern that it might impede the state's chances of being selected by the Federal Aviation Administration as one of
six national drone test sites, which could generate local jobs. A bill that would have limited the ability of state and local governments to use drones died
in the Washington legislature. The measure was opposed by The Boeing Co., which employs more than 80,000 workers in the state and which has a
subsidiary, Insitu, that's a leading military drone manufacturer. Although
the Supreme Court has not dealt directly
with drones, it has OK'd aerial surveillance without warrants in drug cases in which officers in a
plane or helicopter spotted marijuana plants growing on a suspect's property. But in a case involving the use of
ground-based equipment, the court said police generally need a warrant before using a thermal imaging
device to detect hot spots in a home that might indicate that marijuana plants are being grown there. In Congress, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., cochairman of the House's privacy caucus, has introduced a bill that prohibits the Federal Aviation Administration from issuing drone licenses unless the
applicant provides a statement explaining who will operate the drone, where it will be flown, what kind of data will be collected, how the data will be
used, whether the information will be sold to third parties and the period for which the information will be retained. Sentiment for curbing domestic
drone use has brought the left and right together perhaps more than any other recent issue. "The
thought of government drones
buzzing overhead and constantly monitoring the activities of law-abiding citizens runs
contrary to the notion of what it means to live in a free society," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said at a recent hearing of the Senate
Judiciary Committee. Privacy advocates acknowledge the many good uses of drones . In Mesa County, Colo., for
example, an annual landfill survey using manned aircraft cost about $10,000. The county recently performed the same survey using a drone for about
$200. But
drones' virtues can also make them dangerous , they say. Their low cost and ease of
use may encourage police and others to conduct the kind of continuous or intrusive surveillance that might
otherwise be impractical. Drones can be equipped with high-powered cameras and listening
devices, and infrared cameras that can see people in the dark. "High-rise buildings, security fences or even
the walls of a building are not barriers to increasingly common drone technology," Amie Stepanovich, director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Council's surveillance project, told the Senate panel. Civilian drone use is limited to
government agencies and public universities that have received a few hundred permits from the
FAA. A law passed by Congress last year requires the FAA to open U.S. skies to widespread drone flights by 2015, but the agency is behind schedule and
it's doubtful it will meet that deadline. Lawmakers and industry officials have complained for years about the FAA's slow progress. The FAA estimates
that within five years of gaining broader access about 7,500 civilian drones will be in use. Sen. Rand
Paul, R-Ky., recently drew attention to the
a Senate filibuster, demanding to know whether the president has
authority to use weaponized drones to kill Americans on American soil. The White House said
no, if the person isn't engaged in combat. But industry officials worry that the episode could temporarily set
domestic use of drones when he staged
back civilian drone use . "The opposition has become very loud," said Gitlin of AeroVironment, "but we are
confident that over time the benefits of these solutions ( drones) are going to far outweigh the concerns, and they'll become part of normal life in the
future."
2NC: No Econ Impact
Global economic governance institutions guarantee resiliency
Daniel W. Drezner 12, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University,
October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,”
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf
Prior to 2008, numerous foreign policy analysts had predicted a looming crisis in global economic governance. Analysts only
reinforced this perception since the financial crisis, declaring that we live in a “G-Zero” world. This paper takes a closer look at the
global response to the financial crisis. It reveals a more optimistic picture. Despite initial shocks
that were actually more severe than the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance structures
responded quickly and robustly. Whether one measures results by economic outcomes, policy outputs, or institutional
flexibility, global economic governance has displayed surprising resiliency since 2008. Multilateral
economic institutions performed well in crisis situations to reinforce open economic policies, especially in
contrast to the 1930s. While there are areas where governance has either faltered or failed, on the whole, the system has worked.
Misperceptions about global economic governance persist because the Great Recession has disproportionately affected the core
economies – and because the efficiency of past periods of global economic governance has been badly overestimated. Why the
system has worked better than expected remains an open question. The rest of this paper explores the possible role that the
distribution of power, the robustness of international regimes, and the resilience of economic ideas might have played.
No economy impact – empirics disprove
Barnett 9 – Thomas P.M. Barnett (senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a contributing editor/online columnist
for Esquire magazine) August 2009 “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis” http://www.aprodex.com/thenew-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of
scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression
leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging
markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's
first truly
worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security
landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be
clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the
Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the
15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the RussiaGeorgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the
most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long
struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over
the various databases, then, we see a
most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed
terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South
Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to
global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and
Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and
following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with
allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere
else we find serious instability we
pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for
example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: * No significant uptick in
mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); *
The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); * Not a single state-onstate war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); * No great
improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all
that diplomacy); * A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable
given the strain); and *
No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or
supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western
hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India
stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous
world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented
"stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic
caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis?
Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly
friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate
damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there
was no great slide into
"trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward
free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was
clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as
al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting
fundamentalism. At
the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently
frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited
-- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve
currency. Naturally, plenty
of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the
beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world
of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging
interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's
fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven
the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those
lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the
Internet is for.
Statistics prove nothing about their economy impact
Bazzi and Blattman, 11 -- Bazzi is a grad student at the Department of Economics at
University of California San Diego and Christopher Blattman is an assistant professor of political
science and economics at Yale (Samuel and Christopher, November 2011 “Economic Shocks and
Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices”
http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d
7bd4)//AA
VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The state is not a prize?—Warlord
politics and the state prize logic lie at the center of the most influential models of conflict, state development, and political
transitions in economics and political science. Yet we
see no evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even
when looking at the friendliest cases: fragile and unconstrained states dominated by
extractive commodity revenues. Indeed, we see the opposite correlation: if anything, higher
rents from commodity prices weakly 22 lower the risk and length of conflict. Perhaps shocks are the
wrong test. Stocks of resources could matter more than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with
emerging evidence that war onset is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves (Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui
2010) we regard the state prize logic of war with skepticism.17 Our
main political economy models may need a
new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot be taken for evidence of absence. Many of our conflict onset and ending
results include sizeable positive and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity price shocks are highly influential in income and should
provide a rich source of identifiable variation in instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more abundant, and plausibly
exogenous independent variable than price volatility. Moreover,
other time-varying variables, like rainfall and
foreign aid, exhibit robust correlations with conflict in spite of suffering similar empirical
drawbacks and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the
absence of evidence seriously. Do resource revenues drive state capacity?—State prize models assume that rising
revenues raise the value of the capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of revenues on self-defense. We saw
that a growing empirical political science literature takes just such a revenue-centered approach, illustrating that resource boom
times permit both payoffs and repression, and that stocks of lootable or extractive resources can bring political order and stability.
This countervailing effect is most likely with transitory shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not. Our
findings are partly consistent with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most sensitive to changes in the
extractive commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect household incomes more directly. The relationship only
holds for conflict intensity, however, and is somewhat fragile. We do not see a large, consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup
risk when prices fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to cancel
one another out. Opportunity cost: Victory by default?—Finally, the inverse relationship between prices and war intensity is
consistent with opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted above, the relationship between intensity and
extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state capacity view. Moreover, we shouldn’t mistake an inverse relation
between individual aggression and incomes as evidence for the opportunity cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with
psychological theories of stress and aggression (Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of relative deprivation and
anomie (Merton 1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be needed to distinguish between these mechanisms. Other reasons for
a null result.—Ultimately, however, the fact that commodity price shocks
have no discernible effect on new
conflict onsets, but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that political stability might be less sensitive to
income or temporary shocks than generally believed. One possibility is that successfully mounting an
insurgency is no easy task. It comes with considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the
counterfactual is still conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If
a nation
is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war, then other shocks may trigger war even
in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in debunking the myth that price shocks led to fiscal
collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19 B. A general problem of publication bias? More generally, these
findings should heighten our concern with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our
results run against a number of published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly
because of select samples, misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most
importantly, alternative measures of instability. Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the
majority of published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a published
finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of
tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and models;
and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical significance. The cross-national
study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most worryingly, almost no paper looks at
alternative dependent variables or publishes systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis
(2006) have shown that the majority of published conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not
the time-varying shocks that have grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a “file drawer problem” (Rosenthal 1979).
Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the results; but if results are
not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be
done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it is published. If not, back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the
consequences are dire: a lower threshold of evidence for initially significant results than
ambiguous ones.20
Predictions are false- economic decline doesn’t cause conflict
Barnett 09 (Thomas P.M., chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire, worked in US national security
circles since the end of the Cold War, “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis”, World Politics Review,
9/24/09, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/4213/the-new-rules-security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis)
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts
of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading
to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and
emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how
globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the
international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by
GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict
between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began
in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war"
begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony
of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in
an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we
see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the
recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the
only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are
both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to
global economic trends.
Economic crisis doesn’t lead to conflict
Zakaria 09 (Fareed, was the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, “The Secrets of
Stability”, Newsweek, 12/11/09, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/12/11/the-secrets-of-stability.html)
Others predicted that these economic shocks would lead to political instability and violence in
the worst-hit countries. At his confirmation hearing in February, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair,
cautioned the Senate that "the financial crisis and global recession are likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emergingmarket nations over the next year." Hillary Clinton endorsed this grim view. And she was hardly alone. Foreign Policy ran a cover
Of one thing everyone was sure: nothing would
ever be the same again. Not the financial industry, not capitalism, not globalization. One year later, how much
has the world really changed? Well, Wall Street is home to two fewer investment banks (three, if you count Merrill
story predicting serious unrest in several emerging markets.
Lynch). Some regional banks have gone bust. There was some turmoil in Moldova and (entirely unrelated to the financial crisis) in
Iran. Severe problems
remain, like high unemployment in the West, and we face new problems caused by responses to the
overall, things look nothing like they did in the 1930s. The
predictions of economic and political collapse have not materialized at all. A key measure of
fear and fragility is the ability of poor and unstable countries to borrow money on the debt markets. So
consider this: the sovereign bonds of tottering Pakistan have returned 168 percent so far this year. All
this doesn't add up to a recovery yet, but it does reflect a return to some level of normalcy. And that rebound
has been so rapid that even the shrewdest observers remain puzzled. "The question I have at the back of
crisis—soaring debt and fears of inflation. But
my head is 'Is that it?' " says Charles Kaye, the co-head of Warburg Pincus. "We had this huge crisis, and now we're back to business
as usual?"
WWII examples are wrong
Ferguson, 6 -- Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University (Niall, “The Next War of the World”,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/the_next_war_of_the_world.html)//AA
Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern
historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story
leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered.
Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor
did all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between
economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods
of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe,
and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.
2NC: No Bio-d Impact
Empirics disprove biodiversity loss impacts - their authors are hysterics
Campbell 11 Hank Campbell is the creator of Science 2.0, a community of research professors, post-docs, science book
authors and Nobel laureates collaborating over scientific projects. "I Wouldn't Worry About The Latest Mass Extinction Scare,"
Science 2.0, March 8, http://www.science20.com/science_20/i_wouldnt_worry_about_latest_mass_extinction_scare-76989
You've seen it everywhere by now - Earth's sixth
mass extinction: Is it almost here? and other articles discussing an article in Nature
(471, 51–57 doi:10.1038/nature09678) claiming the end of the world is nigh. ¶ Hey, I like to live in important times. So do most people. And something so important
it has only happened 5 times in 540 million years, well that is really special. But
is it real? ¶ Anthony Barnosky, integrative biologist at the University of
California at Berkeley and first author of the paper, claims that if currently threatened species, those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered, and
vulnerable, actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in 3-22 centuries. ¶ Wait, what?? That's a lot of helping
If you know anything about species and extinction,
you have already read one paragraph of my overview and seen the flaws in their model. Taking a few extinct
mammal species that we know about and then extrapolating that out to be extinction hysteria right now if we don't do
something about global warming is not good science. Worse, an integrative biologist is saying evolution does not happen. Polar bears did not exist
forever, they came into existence 150,000 years ago - because of the Ice Age. ¶ Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore
told a global warming skepticism site, “I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they
published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this
theme” and "The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer
review process has become corrupted.” ¶ Well, how did it make it through peer review? Read this bizarre justification of their
verbs confusing what should be a fairly clear issue, if it were clear. ¶
methodology; "If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and
assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the
greater extinctions occurred when Europeans visited the Americas and
in a much shorter time. And since we don't know how many species there are now, or have ever been, if someone makes a model and claims
tens of thousands of species are going extinct today, that sets off cultural alarms. It's not science, though. ¶ If only 1% of species have
gone extinct in the groups we really know much about, that is hardly a time for panic,
especially if some 99 percent of all species that have ever existed we don't know anything
about because they...went extinct. And we did not. ¶ It won't keep some researchers, and the mass
media, from pushing the panic button. Co-author Charles Marshall, also an integrative biologist at UC-Berkeley wants to keep the
mass extinction realm." ¶ Well,
panic button fully engaged by emphasizing that the small number of recorded extinctions to date does not mean we are not in a crisis. "Just because the magnitude
is low compared to the biggest mass extinctions we've seen in half a billion years doesn't mean they aren't significant." ¶
It's a double negative,
bad logic and questionable science, though.
Biodiversity is resilient and inevitable
Sagoff 8 Mark, Senior Research Scholar @ Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy @ School
of Public Policy @ U. Maryland, Environmental Values, “On the Economic Value of Ecosystem
Services”, 17:2, 239-257, EBSCO
What about the economic value of biodiversity? Biodiversity represents nature's greatest largess or
excess since species appear nearly as numerous as the stars the Drifters admired, except that
"scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than
how many species there arc on Earth."70 Worldwide the variety of biodiversity is
effectively infinite ; the myriad species of plants and animals, not to mention microbes
that arc probably more important, apparently exceed
our ability to count or identify them. The "next"
or "incremental" thousand species taken at random would not fetch a market price
because another thousand are immediately available, and another thousand after that.
No one has suggested an economic application, moreover, for any of the thousand species listed as threatened in the
United States.77 To defend these species - or the next thousand or the thousand after that - on economic grounds is to
trade convincing spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical arguments for bogus, pretextual, and disingenuous economic ones.78 As
David Ehrenfeld has written,
We do not know how many [plant] species are needed to keep the planet green and
healthy, but it seems very unlikely to be anywhere near the more than quarter of a
million we have now. Even a mighty dominant like the American chestnut, extending over half a continent, all but
disappeared without bring¬ing the eastern deciduous forest down with it. And if we turn to the invertebrates, the source of
nearly all biological diversity, what
biologist is willing to find a value - conventional or ecological - for all
600,000-plus species of beetles?7*
The disappearance in the wild even of agriculturally useful species appears to have no
effect on production. The last wild aurochs, the progenitor of dairy and beef cattle,
went extinct in Poland in 1742, yet no one believes the beef industry is threatened. The
genetic material of crop species is contained in tens of thousands of landraces and cultivars in use
- rice is an example - and does not depend on the persistence of wild ancestral types. Genetic
engineering can introduce DNA from virtually any species into virtually any other
-
which allows for the unlimited creation of biodiversity.
A neighbor of mine has collected about 4,000 different species of insects on his two-acre property in Silver Spring, Maryland.
These include 500 kinds of Lepidoptera (mostly moths) - half the number another entomologist found at his residence.80
When you factor in plants and animals, the amount of "backyard biodiversity" in suburbs is astounding and far greater than
you can imagine.8' Biodiversity has
no value "at the margin" because nature provides far
more of it than anyone could possibly administer. If one kind of moth flies off, you can
easily attract hundreds of others.
2NC: Squo Solves Food Sec
Tech development solves
Thompson 5/13/11 –senior fellow for The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and professor emeritus at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Robert, “Proving Malthus Wrong, Sustainable agriculture in 2050”
http://scienceblogs.com/tomorrowstable/2011/05/proving_malthus_wrong_sustaina.php)//SQR
Tools available today, including plant breeding and biotechnology, can make presently unusable soils
productive and increase the genetic potential of individual crops - enhancing drought and
stress tolerance, for example - while also producing gains in yields. Existing tools can also internalize plants'
resistance to disease, and even improve a plant's nutritional content - meaning consumers can get more
nutritional value without increasing their consumption. Furthermore, modern high-productivity agriculture
minimizes farmers' impact on the environment. Failure to embrace these technologies will result in further
destruction of remaining forests. Adoption of technologies that produce more output from fewer
resources has been hugely successful from an economic standpoint: prior to the price spike in 2008, there
was a 150-year downward trend in the real price of food. The jury is still out on whether the long-term downward trend will resume,
prices will flatten out on a new higher plateau, or they will trend upward in the future. The key is investing in research in the public
and private sectors to increase agricultural productivity faster than global demand grows. Long ago, British scholar Thomas
Malthus predicted that the human population would eventually outgrow its ability to feed
itself. However, Malthus has been proven wrong for more than two centuries precisely because
he underestimated the power of agricultural research and technology to increase productivity
faster than demand. There is no more reason for Malthus to be right in the 21st century than
he was in the 19th or 20th - but only if we work to support, not impede, continued agricultural
research and adoption of new technologies around the world.
New tech and adaption solve food shortages
Michaels 11 Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the CATO Institute. "
Global Warming and Global Food Security," June 30, CATO,
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/global-warming-global-food-security
. Serial adoption of new technologies produces a
nearly constant increase in yields. Greater fertilizer application, improved response to
fertilizer, better tractor technology, better tillage practices, old-fashioned genetic
selection, and new-fashioned genetic engineering all conspire to raise yields, year after
year.¶ Weather and climate have something to do with yields, too. Seasonal rainfall can
vary a lot from year-to-year. That's "weather." If dry years become dry decades (that's
"climate") farmers will switch from corn to grain sorghum, or, where possible, wheat.
Breeders and scientists will continue to develop more water-efficient plants and
agricultural technologies, such as no-till production.¶ Adaptation even applies to the home
garden. The tomato variety "heat wave" sets fruit at higher temperatures than traditional cultivars.¶ However, Gillis claims that "[t]he rapid growth in farm output
that defined the late 20th century has slowed" because of global warming.¶ His own figures show this is wrong. The increasing trend in world
crop yields from 1960 to 1980 is exactly the same as from 1980 to 2010. And per capita
grain production is rising, not falling.
While doing my dissertation I learned a few things about world crops
Supply and demand means farmers will make more food – empirically true
Zubrin 5/13/11 —Fellow with the Center for Security Policy B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester (1974),
and a masters degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics, a masters degree in Nuclear Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering
(Robert, “WHY IT’S WRONG TO AGREE WITH THE MALTHUSIANS ABOUT ETHANOL”
http://www.ilcorn.org/daily-update/182-why-it-rsquo-s-wrong-to-agree-with-the-malthusians-about-ethanol/) //SQR
In fact, Lester
Brown is wrong about the alleged famine-inducing potential of the ethanol program for
has been repeatedly wrong about the alleged famine-inducing potential
of population growth. There is not a fixed amount of grain in the world. Farmers produce in
response to demand. The more customers, the more grain. Not only that, but the larger the potential
market, the greater the motivation for investment in improved techniques. This is why, despite the fact that the world
population has indeed doubled since Lester Brown, Paul Ehrlich, and the other population
control zealots first published their manifestos during the 1960s, people worldwide are eating
much better today than they were then. In the case of America’s corn growing industry, the beneficial effect of a
exactly the same reason he
growing market has been especially pronounced, with corn yields per acre in 2010 (165 bushels per acre) being 37 percent higher
than they were in 2002 (120 bushels per acres) and more than four times as great as they were in 1960 (40 bushels per acre.)
2NC: No Food Sec Impact
No war over food
Chang 2/21/11 Graduated Cornell Law School (Gordon, “Global Food Wars”
http://blogs.forbes.com/gordonchang/2011/02/21/global-food-wars/ )//SQR
In any event, food-price increases have apparently been factors in the unrest now sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. The
poor spend up to half their disposable income on edibles, making rapid food inflation a cause of concern for dictators, strongmen,
and assorted autocrats everywhere. So even if humankind
does not go to war over bad harvests, Paskal may be
is not the first time in human
history that food shortages looked like they would be the motor of violent geopolitical
change. Yet amazing agronomic advances, especially Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution in
the middle of the 20th century, have consistently proved the pessimists wrong. In these days
when capitalism is being blamed for most everything, it’s important to remember the power
of human innovation in free societies—and the efficiency of free markets.
right when she contends that climate change may end up altering the global map. This
2NC: No Terror Impact
No risk of nuclear terror – assumes every warrant
Mueller 10 (John, professor of political science at Ohio State, Calming Our Nuclear Jitters, Issues in Science and Technology, Winter,
http://www.issues.org/26.2/mueller.html)
Politicians of all stripes preach to an anxious, appreciative, and very numerous choir when they, like President
Obama, proclaim atomic terrorism to be “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” It is the
problem that, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, currently keeps every senior leader awake at night. This is hardly a new
anxiety. In 1946, atomic bomb maker J. Robert Oppenheimer ominously warned that if three or four men could smuggle in units
for an atomic bomb, they could blow up New York. This was an early expression of a pattern of
dramatic risk inflation that has persisted throughout the nuclear age. In fact, although expanding fires and fallout might increase the
effective destructive radius, the blast of a Hiroshima-size device would “blow up” about 1% of the city’s
area—a tragedy, of course, but not the same as one 100 times greater. In the early 1970s, nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor proclaimed the atomic
terrorist problem to be “immediate,” explaining at length “how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it into a
bomb.” At the time he thought it was already too late to “prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then,” or “in another ten or
fifteen years, it will be too late.” Three decades after Taylor, we
continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their
“easy” task. In contrast to these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire
and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes, they, unlike
generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful .
The most plausible route for terrorists, according to most experts, would be to manufacture an atomic device themselves from purloined fissile
material (plutonium or, more likely, highly enriched uranium). This task, however, remains a daunting one, requiring that a considerable series of
difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright armed
theft of fissile material is exceedingly unlikely not
only because of the resistance of guards, but because chase would be immediate. A more promising
approach would be to corrupt insiders to smuggle out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a
host of greedy confederates, including brokers and money-transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them
or, either out of guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is useless. Insiders might also consider the possibility that
once the heist was accomplished, the terrorists would, as analyst Brian Jenkins none too delicately puts it, “have every incentive to cover their trail,
beginning with eliminating their confederates.” If
terrorists were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of
relevant material, they would then probably have to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar
terrain and probably while being pursued by security forces. Crossing international borders would be facilitated by
following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they appear and are often under the
watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators. If border personnel became suspicious of the commodity being
smuggled, some of them might find it in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward money that would probably be
offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft had been discovered. Once
outside the country with their precious booty,
terrorists would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a
bomb and then to populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians,
machinists, and administrators. The group would have to be assembled and retained for the monumental
task while no consequential suspicions were generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and
sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Members of the bomb-building team would also have to be utterly devoted to
the cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and certainly their careers at high risk, because
after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would probably become the targets of an intense worldwide dragnet operation. Some observers
have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material. But Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel
Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerland‘s Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the
task “could hardly be
accomplished by a subnational group.” They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches
and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to
redesign. They also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the
technical requirements in several fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of nuclear weapons
research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a similar argument, pointing out that uranium is “exceptionally difficult to machine” whereas
“plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed.“ Stressing
the “daunting problems associated with material purity, machining, and a host of other issues,” Younger concludes, “to think that a terrorist group,
working in isolation with an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies” could fabricate a bomb “is farfetched at best.” Under
the best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take months or even a year or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in
utter secrecy. In addition, people in the area, including criminals, may observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going
of technicians unlikely to be locals. If the effort to build a bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would then have to be
transported to and smuggled into the relevant target country where it would have to be received by collaborators who are at once totally dedicated
and technically proficient at handling, maintaining, detonating, and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives. The financial costs of this extensive
and extended operation could easily become monumental. There would be expensive equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay
off. Some operatives might work for free out of utter dedication to the cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of a considerable
array of criminals and opportunists, each of whom has every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high as possible. Any criminals competent
and capable enough to be effective allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see boundless opportunities for extortion and psychologically
equipped by their profession to be willing to exploit them. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group
could, if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each case is “not impossible.” But although it may not be impossible to
surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small. Table 1 attempts to
catalogue the barriers that must be overcome under the scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them,
would-be atomic terrorists would effectively be required to go though an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do, they will undoubtedly
conclude that their prospects are daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. It is possible to calculate the chances for success.
Adopting probability estimates that purposely and heavily bias the case in the terrorists’ favor—for example,
assuming the terrorists have a 50% chance of overcoming each of the 20 obstacles—the chances that a concerted effort would be successful comes out
to be less than one in a million. If one assumes, somewhat more realistically, that their chances at each barrier are one in three, the
cumulative odds that they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in well over three
billion. Other routes would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb are even more problematic.
They are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-minded nuclear state for delivery abroad because the
risk would be high, even for a country led by extremists, that the bomb (and its source) would be discovered
even before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor would not approve, including on the donor itself. Another
concern would be that the
terrorist group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence. The terrorist
group might also seek to steal or illicitly purchase a “loose nuke“ somewhere. However, it seems probable that none
exist. All governments have an intense interest in controlling any weapons on their territory
because of fears that they might become the primary target. Moreover, as technology has developed, finished bombs have been
out-fitted with devices that trigger a non-nuclear explosion that destroys the bomb if it is tampered with.
And there are other security techniques: Bombs can be kept disassembled with the component parts stored in separate highsecurity vaults, and a process can be set up in which two people and multiple codes are required not only to use the
bomb but to store, maintain, and deploy it. As Younger points out, “only a few people in the world have the knowledge to
cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon.” There could be dangers in the chaos that would emerge if a nuclear state were
to utterly collapse; Pakistan is frequently cited in this context and sometimes North Korea as well. However, even under such conditions,
nuclear weapons would probably remain under heavy guard by people who know that a purloined bomb might be used
in their own territory. They would still have locks and, in the case of Pakistan, the weapons would be
disassembled. The al Qaeda factor The degree to which al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that seems to want to target the
United States, has pursued or even has much interest in a nuclear weapon may have been
exaggerated. The 9/11 Commission stated that “al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least ten years,” but the only
substantial evidence it supplies comes from an episode that is supposed to have taken place about 1993 in Sudan, when al Qaeda members may have
sought to purchase some uranium that turned out to be bogus. Information about this supposed venture apparently comes entirely from Jamal al Fadl,
who defected from al Qaeda in 1996 after being caught stealing $110,000 from the organization. Others, including the man who allegedly purchased
the uranium, assert that although there were various other scams taking place at the time that may have served as grist for Fadl, the
uranium
episode never happened. As a key indication of al Qaeda’s desire to obtain atomic weapons, many have focused on a set of
conversations in Afghanistan in August 2001 that two Pakistani nuclear scientists reportedly had with Osama bin Laden and three other al Qaeda
officials. Pakistani intelligence officers characterize the discussions as “academic” in nature. It seems that the discussion was wide-ranging and
rudimentary and that the scientists provided no material or specific plans. Moreover, the scientists probably were
incapable of
providing truly helpful information because their expertise was not in bomb design but in the
processing of fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities of a nonstate group. Kalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the apparent planner of the 9/11 attacks, reportedly says that al Qaeda’s bomb efforts never went beyond
searching the Internet. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts from the CIA and the Department of Energy examined
documents and other information that were uncovered by intelligence agencies and the media in Afghanistan. They uncovered no credible information
that al Qaeda had obtained fissile material or acquired a nuclear weapon. Moreover, they found no evidence of any radioactive material suitable for
weapons. They did uncover, however, a “nuclear-related” document discussing “openly available concepts about the nuclear fuel cycle and some
weapons-related issues.” Just a day or two before al Qaeda was to flee from Afghanistan in 2001, bin Laden supposedly told a Pakistani journalist, “If
the United States uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us, we might respond with chemical and nuclear weapons. We possess these weapons as a
deterrent.” Given the military pressure that they were then under and taking into account the evidence of the primitive or more probably nonexistent
nature of al Qaeda’s nuclear program, the
reported assertions, although unsettling, appear at best to be a desperate
bluff. Bin Laden has made statements about nuclear weapons a few other times. Some of these pronouncements can be seen to be threatening, but
they are rather coy and indirect, indicating perhaps something of an interest, but not acknowledging a capability. And as terrorism specialist Louise
Richardson observes, “Statements
claiming a right to possess nuclear weapons have been
misinterpreted as expressing a determination to use them. This in turn has fed the exaggeration of the threat we
face.” Norwegian researcher Anne Stenersen concluded after an exhaustive study of available materials that, although “it is likely that al Qaeda
central has considered the option of using non-conventional weapons,” there is “little evidence that such ideas ever
developed into actual plans, or that they were given any kind of priority at the expense of more traditional types of terrorist attacks.”
She also notes that information on an al Qaeda computer left behind in Afghanistan in 2001 indicates that only $2,000 to $4,000 was
earmarked for weapons of mass destruction research and that the money was mainly for very crude work
on chemical weapons. Today, the key portions of al Qaeda central may well total only a few hundred people, apparently assisting the
Taliban’s distinctly separate, far larger, and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan. Beyond this tiny band, there are thousands of sympathizers
and would-be jihadists spread around the globe. They mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare
each other to actually do something. Any
“threat,” particularly to the West, appears, then, principally to derive from selfselected people, often isolated from each other, who fantasize about performing dire deeds. From time to time
some of these people, or ones closer to al Qaeda central, actually manage to do some harm. And occasionally, they may even be able to pull off
something large, such as 9/11. But in most cases, their
capacities and schemes, or alleged schemes, seem to be far less
dangerous than initial press reports vividly, even hysterically, suggest. Most important for present purposes,
however, is that any notion that al Qaeda has the capacity to acquire nuclear weapons, even if it
wanted to, looks farfetched in the extreme. It is also noteworthy that, although there have been plenty of terrorist attacks in
the world since 2001, all have relied on conventional destructive methods. For the most part, terrorists seem to be heeding the advice found in a memo
on an al Qaeda laptop seized in Pakistan in 2004: “Make use of that which is available … rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over
that which is not within your reach.” In fact, history
consistently demonstrates that terrorists prefer weapons
that they know and understand, not new, exotic ones. Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran and once its deputy
intelligence officer for transnational threats, warns, “We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have
exaggerated. In fact, we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed, and miserable
opponents that they are.” al Qaeda, he says, has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing, and leading a terrorist
organization, and although the group has threatened attacks with nuclear weapons, “ its capabilities are far inferior to its
desires.” Policy alternatives The purpose here has not been to argue that policies designed to inconvenience the atomic terrorist are necessarily
unneeded or unwise. Rather, in contrast with the many who insist that atomic terrorism under current conditions is rather likely— indeed,
exceedingly likely—to come about, I have contended that it is hugely unlikely. However, it is important to consider not only the likelihood
that an event will take place, but also its consequences. Therefore, one must be concerned about catastrophic events even if their probability is small,
and efforts to reduce that likelihood even further may well be justified. At
some point, however, probabilities become so low
that, even for catastrophic events, it may make sense to ignore them or at least put them on the back burner; in short, the
risk becomes acceptable. For example, the British could at any time attack the United States with their submarine-launched missiles and
kill millions of Americans, far more than even the most monumentally gifted and lucky terrorist group. Yet the risk that this potential calamity might
take place evokes little concern; essentially it is an acceptable risk. Meanwhile, Russia, with whom the United States has a rather strained relationship,
could at any time do vastly more damage with its nuclear weapons, a fully imaginable calamity that is substantially ignored. In constructing what he
calls “a case for fear,” Cass Sunstein, a scholar and current Obama administration official, has pointed out that if there is a yearly probability of 1 in
100,000 that terrorists could launch a nuclear or massive biological attack, the risk would cumulate to 1 in 10,000 over 10 years and to 1 in 5,000 over
20. These odds, he suggests, are “not the most comforting.” Comfort, of course, lies in the viscera of those to be comforted, and, as he suggests, many
would probably have difficulty settling down with odds like that. But there
of these people would
attempt.
must be some point at which the concerns even
ease. Just perhaps it is at one of the levels suggested above: one in a million or one in three billion per
No impact to nuclear terrorism – it doesn’t escalate to extinction.
Jenkins 13 – editor of Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (Holman, “Is Blackmail, Whoever Is Behind It”, APR
January, 19, 2013 http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-216605/)//VP
Terrorism in our world is a paradox. Terrorism creates huge problems for politicians and
statesmen even if, objectively, the cost and casualties have no impact on the functioning of our
civilization. The average American is in more danger from a taco salad. Yet we intuit the stakes
nonetheless.President Obama was pilloried by some for saying to Bob Woodward that “we can absorb a terrorist
attack.” Not only can we absorb an attack and keep functioning as a society and democracy,
but even in the worst case of a nuclear attack our civilization would probably keep going.Alas,
another point has to be made. As
events have played out, the Iraq war appears not to have persuaded
rogue regimes that pursuing terror weapons, especially nuclear weapons, is fatal to their
interests. If anything, the Iraq war may have done the opposite.
2NC: No Disease Impact
Infectious diseases can’t cause extinction – population density mitigates
virulence through resistance
Wynne Parry 11, 2/2/11, Live Science Staff Writer, “Article: Theory About Mammals and
Fungus Explains Bat Plague”, <http://www.livescience.com/11705-theory-mammals-fungusexplains-bat-plague.html>
Even highly virulent infectious disease does not cause extinctions – because as
population density decreases, so does transmission, and the remaining
individuals are more resistant. In addition, at the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs weren't the only ones to
be decimated. Marine animals were affected, as were many species of flowering plant, according to Douglas Robertson, of
the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado.
vaguely plausible that
all these
"It is not even
extinctions , let alone just the various dinosaur species extinctions, were all
caused by some pathogen," Robertson wrote in an e-mail.
Diseases burn out – prevents spread
Morse 4 - Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and virologist at Columbia University (Stephen S,
“Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: A Global Problem”, May 2004,
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/morse.html)//WL
A pandemic is a very big epidemic. It requires a number of things. There
are many infections that get introduced
because they kill too quickly or they
don’t have a way to get from person to person. They are a terrible tragedy, but also, in a
sense, it is a lucky thing that they don’t have an efficient means of transmission. In some cases, we
from time to time in the human population and, like Ebola, burn themselves out
may inadvertently create pathways to allow transmission of infections that may be poorly transmissible, for example, spreading HIV
through needle sharing, the blood supply, and, of course, initially through the commercial sex trade. The disease is not easily
transmitted, but we provided, without realizing it, means for it to spread. It is now pandemic in spite of its relatively inefficient
transmission. We also get complacent and do not take steps to prevent its spread. A disease like influenza is a different story. It
spreads very efficiently from person to person. The right strain of influenza with the right combination of biological properties to
spread well and be novel to the human population and also perhaps to come at the right time in the right place could make it easily
pandemic. So, there are many ways to become a pandemic. Luckily, it’s
not an easy thing to do.
Government responses solve
Zakaria 9 - Editor of Newsweek, BA from Yale, PhD in pol sci, Harvard (Fareed, “The Sky Isn’t
Falling,” 5/16/9, Newsweek, http://www.newsweek.com/id/197922)//WL
It certainly looks like another example of crying wolf. After bracing ourselves for a global pandemic, we've suffered something more
like the usual seasonal influenza. Three weeks ago the World Health Organization declared a health emergency, warning countries to
"prepare for a pandemic" and said that the only question was the extent of worldwide damage. Senior officials prophesied that
millions could be infected by the disease. But as of last week, the WHO had confirmed only 4,800 cases of swine flu, with 61 people
having died of it. Obviously, these low numbers are a pleasant surprise, but it does make one wonder, what did we get wrong? Why
did the predictions of a pandemic turn out to be so exaggerated? Some people blame an overheated media, but it would have been
difficult to ignore major international health organizations and governments when they were warning of catastrophe. I think there
is a broader mistake in the way we look at the world. Once we see a problem, we can describe it in great detail,
extrapolating all its possible consequences. But we can rarely anticipate the human response to that crisis.
Take swine flu. The virus had crucial characteristics that led researchers to worry that it could
spread far and fast. They described—and the media reported—what would happen if it went
unchecked. But it did not go unchecked. In fact, swine flu was met by an extremely vigorous
response at its epicenter, Mexico. The Mexican government reacted quickly and massively,
quarantining the infected population, testing others, providing medication to those who
needed it. The noted expert on this subject, Laurie Garrett, says, "We should all stand up and scream, 'Gracias, Mexico!' because
the Mexican people and the Mexican government have sacrificed on a level that I'm not sure as Americans we would be prepared to
do in the exact same circumstances. They
shut down their schools. They shut down businesses,
restaurants, churches, sporting events. They basically paralyzed their own economy. They've suffered billions of
dollars in financial losses still being tallied up, and thereby really brought transmission to a halt." Every time one of these
viruses is detected, writers and officials bring up the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 in
which millions of people died. Indeed, during the last pandemic scare, in 2005, President George W. Bush claimed that
he had been reading a history of the Spanish flu to help him understand how to respond. But the world we live in today
looks nothing like 1918. Public health-care systems are far better and more widespread than
anything that existed during the First World War. Even Mexico, a developing country, has a
first-rate public-health system—far better than anything Britain or France had in the early
20th century.
China
Alt cause – public backlash caused by perception of America using drones in
foreign areas.
Benjamin Medea Benjamin, s an American political activist and author of the book Drone
Warfare” July 9, 2014, “Good Drone, Bad Drone: How to Fix the Drone PR Problem”
http://time.com/2970027/drones-pr-problem/
It’s no wonder the drone industry doesn’t like the word “drone.” Thanks to the work of human
rights activists in exposing the ugly side of how Predator and Reaper drones kill innocent people
overseas, “drones” can evoke a one-word reaction similar to the word “sweatshops”: yuck! Then
there’s the transnational campaign to ban fully autonomous drones, a campaign that’s instilling public
fear about a brave, new world where kill decisions are increasingly made by machines. Add to the mix the specter of
drones being used by government agencies here at home to increase Big Brother’s ability to invade our
privacy, and you have a reaction to drones that isn’t just disgust and fear, but defiance. ¶ After
Congress passed legislation in 2012 calling for the opening of U.S. airspace to drones by 2015, dozens of states began cobbling
together legislation. Some bills restrict law enforcement agencies from gathering information on the public without a court order;
others prohibit the weaponization of domestic drones. Cities began passing “no-drone resolutions” restricting the use of their
airspace. The small town of Deer Trail, Colo., garnered national attention when it contemplated providing a bounty for shooting
down a drone. Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano pronounced that the first American who shoots down a drone that
comes too close to his children in his backyard will be an American hero. Matt Rosendale, a Montana state senator running for
Congress, unveiled an ad where he points his rifle at a hovering drone and declares that he is ready to “stand tall for freedom.”¶
The drone industry reacted to its image problem with a disastrous campaign to simply drop
the hot-potato term “drone” and instead use cumbersome names like “unmanned aerial systems,”
“unmanned aerial vehicles,” “remotely piloted aircraft” or, worse yet, their acronyms (UASs, UAVs, RPAs). At the 2013
annual D.C. gathering of the drone lobby, the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI),
presenters continually pleaded with attendees to drop the term “drone.” The wireless password for
the attending journalists was a not-so-subtle “dontsaydrones.”¶ AUVSI President Michael Toscano got in trouble
during a March 2013 Senate hearing when he lectured the senators that they shouldn’t use the
term “drone” because of its hostile connotation. Senator Leahy fired back, “I appreciate you telling us what we
should call them, but why don’t you leave that decision to us. We’ll decide what we’ll call them and you call them whatever you like
to call them.”
No states are actually pushing for a ban on private drone use, just law
enforcement, meaning that status quo would solve the entire plan.
Wells C. Bennett, 2014, "Civilian Drones, Privacy, and the Federal-State Balance," Brookings
Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/civilian-drones-and-privacy
Meanwhile, state legislators mostly have their sights set on a particular class of drone—that
flown by governments. The past few years have seen a raft of proposed and enacted laws,
principally or exclusively aimed at restricting drone surveillance by public officials. Some
states, like Florida, Utah, and Montana, generally preclude police from using drones, unless
officers obtain a judicial warrant founded on probable cause or confront an emergency.5
Virginia probably takes the gold medal in this regard, having banned, with some exceptions, all
public drone operation by state personnel until July 2015.6 We can guess the reasons behind
the government-centric approach: the state’s unique power to imprison; the Constitution’s
traditional protections against public rather than private action; and the fact that, like much in
the realm of technica, the drone was initially developed for government applications and only
afterwards transitioned to private ones. Drones had been a staple of military activities abroad
for years, long before Congress even thought about widespread civilian operations. And, owing
to the FAA’s current licensing scheme, drone pilots are frequently police or border security
officers.7 It thus makes intuitive sense to prioritize policymaking for public aircraft—which the
states largely have done that so far.8
Private actors will soon operate drones in equal if not greater numbers than the government.
Turns case – increased US perception in SCS triggers China to militarize
Blanchard 07/30/15 (Ben Blanchard, correspondent for Reuters, Thu Jul 30, 2015 “China
says U.S. 'militarizing' South China Sea”, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/30/ussouthchinasea-china-usa-idUSKCN0Q415N20150730
China's Defence Ministry on Thursday accused the United States of "militarizing" the South China
Sea by staging patrols and joint military drills there, ramping up the rhetoric ahead of a key
regional security meeting in Malaysia next week.¶ China has repeatedly urged Washington not to
take sides in the escalating maritime dispute over the area, where the Asian giant last year stepped up its
creation of artificial islands, alarming neighbors and provoking U.S. criticism.¶ Washington has demanded China halt land
reclamation and militarization of the disputed area and pursue a peaceful resolution according to international law.¶ China
has
been angered by U.S. navy and air force forays through waters it claims as its own, especially
this month, when U.S. Navy Admiral Scott Swift said he joined a routine surveillance flight.¶ The
United States has also stepped up military contacts, including drills, with regional allies such as the Philippines, which also has claims
in the South China Sea.¶ The
United States was hyping up the "China threat" and attempting to sow
discord between China and other claimant countries, Defence Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun told a
news briefing.¶ "China is extremely concerned at the United States' pushing of the militarization of
the South China Sea region," he said.¶ "What they are doing can't help but make people wonder
whether they want nothing better than chaos."¶ For a long time, the United States had carried
out frequent, widespread, close-in surveillance of China, by sending ships and aircraft to the region, he added.¶
"Recently they have further increased military alliances and their military presence , frequently
holding joint drills."
No risk of China - Japan escalation
Moss13 (Trefor Moss, Reporter for The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2013 “7 Reasons China
and Japan Won't Go To War” http://thediplomat.com/2013/02/7-reasons-china-and-japanwont-go-to-war/?allpages=yes)
But if Shinzo Abe is gambling with the region’s security, he is at least playing the odds. He is calculating that Japan can pursue a more
muscular foreign policy without triggering a catastrophic backlash from China, based on the numerous constraints that shape
Chinese actions, as well as the interlocking structure of the globalized environment which the two countries co-inhabit. Specifically,
there are seven reasons to think that war is a very unlikely prospect, even with a more
hawkish prime minister running Japan:¶ 1. Beijing’s nightmare scenario. China might well win a
war against Japan, but defeat would also be a very real possibility. As China closes the book on its
“century of humiliation” and looks ahead to prouder times, the prospect of a new, avoidable humiliation
at the hands of its most bitter enemy is enough to persuade Beijing to do everything it can to prevent
that outcome (the surest way being not to have a war at all). Certainly, China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, does not want to
go down in history as the man who led China into a disastrous conflict with the Japanese. In that
scenario, Xi would be doomed politically, and, as China’s angry nationalism turned inward, the Communist Party probably wouldn’t
survive either.¶ 2. Economic
interdependence. Win or lose, a Sino-Japanese war would be disastrous for
both participants. The flagging economy that Abe is trying to breathe life into with a $117 billion stimulus package would take
a battering as the lucrative China market was closed off to Japanese business. China would suffer, too, as Japanese companies pulled
out of a now-hostile market, depriving up to 5 million Chinese workers of their jobs, even as Xi Jinping looks to double per capita
income by 2020. Panic
in the globalized economy would further depress both economies, and
potentially destroy the programs of both countries’ new leaders.¶ 3. Question marks over the PLA’s
operational effectiveness.The People’s Liberation Army is rapidly modernizing, but there are concerns about how effective it would
prove if pressed into combat today – not least within China’s own military hierarchy. New Central Military Commission ViceChairman Xu Qiliang recently told the PLA Daily that too many PLA exercises are merely for show, and that new elite units had to be
formed if China wanted to protect its interests. CMC Chairman Xi Jinping has also called on the PLA to improve its readiness for “real
combat.” Other weaknesses within the PLA, such as endemic corruption, would similarly undermine the leadership’s confidence in
committing it to a risky war with a peer adversary.¶ 4. Unsettled
politics. China’s civil and military leaderships
remain in a state of flux, with the handover initiated in November not yet complete. As the new leaders find
their feet and jockey for position amongst themselves, they will want to avoid big foreign-policy
distractions – war with Japan and possibly the U.S. being the biggest of them all.¶ 5. The unknown quantity of U.S.
intervention. China has its hawks, such as Dai Xu, who think that the U.S. would never intervene in an Asian conflict on behalf
of Japan or any other regional ally. But this view is far too casual. U.S. involvement is a real enough possibility to
give China pause, should the chances of conflict increase.¶ 6. China’s policy of avoiding military
confrontation. China has always said that it favors peaceful solutions to disputes, and its actions have tended to bear this out.
In particular, it continues to usually dispatch unarmed or only lightly armed law enforcement ships to maritime flashpoints, rather
than naval ships. There
have been calls for a more aggressive policy in the nationalist media, and from some
military figures; but Beijing has not shown much sign of heeding them. The PLA Navy made a more active
intervention in the dispute this week when one of its frigates trained its radar on a Japanese naval vessel. This was a dangerous and
provocative act of escalation, but once again the Chinese action was kept within bounds that made violence unlikely (albeit,
needlessly, more likely than before).¶ 7. China’s socialization. China has spent too long telling the world that it poses no threat to
peace to turn around and fulfill all the China-bashers’ prophecies. Already, China’s reputation in Southeast Asia has taken a hit over
its handling of territorial disputes there. If it were cast as the guilty party in a conflict with Japan –which already has the sympathy of
many East Asian countries where tensions China are concerned – China would see regional opinion harden against it further still.
This is not what Beijing wants: It seeks to influence regional affairs diplomatically from within, and to realize “win-win” opportunities
with its international partners.¶ In light of these constraints, Abe should be able to push back against China – so long as he doesn’t
go too far. He was of course dealt a rotten hand by his predecessor, Yoshihiko Noda, whose bungled nationalization of the
Senkaku/Diaoyu islands triggered last year’s plunge in relations. Noda’s misjudgments raised the political temperature to the point
where neither side feels able to make concessions, at least for now, in an attempt to repair relations.¶ However, Abe can make the
toxic Noda legacy work in his favor. Domestically, he can play the role of the man elected to untangle the wreckage, empowered by
his democratic mandate to seek a new normal in Sino-Japanese relations. Chinese assertiveness would be met with a newfound
Japanese assertiveness, restoring balance to the relationship. It is also timely for Japan to push back now, while its military is still a
match for China’s. Five or ten years down the line this may no longer be the case, even if Abe finally grows the stagnant defense
budget.¶ Meanwhile, Abe
is also pursuing diplomatic avenues. It was Abe who mended Japan’s ties
with China after the Koizumi years, and he is now trying to reprise his role as peacemaker, having
dispatched his coalition partner, Natsuo Yamaguchi, to Beijing reportedly to convey his desire for a new dialogue. It is hardly
surprising, given his daunting domestic laundry list, that Xi Jinping should have responded encouragingly to the Japanese olive
branch.¶ In
the end, Abe and Xi are balancing the same equation: They will not give ground on sovereignty
have no interest in a war – in fact, they must dread it. Even if a small skirmish
between Chinese and Japanese ships or aircraft occurs, the leaders will not order additional forces to join the
battle unless they are boxed in by a very specific set of circumstances that makes escalation the only facesaving option. The escalatory spiral into all-out war that some envisage once the first shot is fired is
certainly not the likeliest outcome, as recurrent skirmishes elsewhere – such as in Kashmir, or along the ThaiCambodian border – have demonstrated.
issues, but they
2NC: Alt Cause
Backlash against the state is mainly because of the public’s opinion on foreign
drones
Green 13 (Miranda Green, 03.09.13 “On the Home Front, Drones Are Quickly Shot Down by
States” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/09/on-the-home-front-drones-arequickly-shot-down-by-states.html)
What states are trying to do for the most part is make sure that when you are using a drone for a search, you are subjected to the
same limitations that an officer would have when showing up to a house to conduct a search,” says Allie Bohm, policy strategist with
the American Civil Liberties Union.¶ Bohm said states, both red and blue, are
rallying against the excessive use of
drones due to a “visceral reaction” to the idea of something unseen watching you from above. She said
the freedom to live life outside the confines of a “surveillance society” is a unifying American value.¶ “The idea should be
that one can use drones to say, fight a forest fire or water the crops on one’s farm or conduct environmental
surveying,” she says. “But as soon as you are going to take evidence collected by a drone and use
that in court, there should be a check to make sure … that it wasn’t a fishing expedition.”¶ Yet most legislators and
law enforcement are more lenient when it comes to using drones in emergency situations. In cases of search and rescue missions,
kidnappings and environmental disasters like earthquakes and fires, many say the technology should be available to police—without
a warrant.¶ Law-enforcement agencies say
drones have gotten a bad reputation because of the
images of war they evoke and that citizens overlook the benefits they can offer.¶ “They’re
commonly associated, unfortunately, with the larger technology and large wingspan units used by the
military overseas… we are using the small units that are no larger than a radio-controlled car,” says Capt. Angelo
Nieves of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in Florida.
2NC: Turns case
Chinese government specifically provoked by US aerial surveillance
Sciutto 05/20 (Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent, May 26, 2015, Exclusive:
China warns U.S. surveillance plane, http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/20/politics/south-china-seanavy-flight/)
Above the South China Sea (CNN) The Chinese navy issued warnings eight times as a U.S.
surveillance plane on Wednesday swooped over islands that Beijing is using to extend its zone
of influence.¶ The series of man-made islands and the massive Chinese military build-up on
them have alarmed the Pentagon, which is carrying out the surveillance flights in order to
make clear the U.S. does not recognize China's territorial claims. The militarized islands have
also alarmed America's regional allies.¶ Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told CNN's
Erin Burnett Wednesday night that the confrontation indicates there is "absolutely" a risk of
the U.S. and China going to war sometime in the future.¶ READ: China cautions U.S. Navy on
patrols¶ A CNN team was given exclusive access to join in the surveillance flights over the
contested waters, which the Pentagon allowed for the first time in order to raise awareness
about the challenge posed by the islands and the growing U.S. response.¶ CNN was aboard the
P8-A Poseidon, America's most advanced surveillance and submarine-hunting aircraft, and
quickly learned that the Chinese are themselves displeased by the U.S. pushback.¶ RELATED:
Behind the scenes: A secret Navy flight over China's military buildup¶ "This is the Chinese navy
... This is the Chinese navy ... Please go away ... to avoid misunderstanding," a voice in English
crackled through the radio of the aircraft in which CNN was present.¶ This is the first time the
Pentagon has declassified video of China's building activity and audio of Chinese challenges of a
U.S. aircraft.¶ The aircraft flew at 15,000 feet in the air at its lowest point, but the U.S. is
considering flying such surveillance missions even closer over the islands, as well as sailing U.S.
warships within miles of them, as part of the new, more robust U.S. military posture in the
area.¶ Soon after the Chinese communication was heard, its source appeared on the horizon
seemingly out of nowhere: an island made by China some 600 miles from its coastline.¶ The
South China Sea is the subject of numerous rival -- often messy -- territorial claims over an area
that includes fertile fishing grounds and potentially rich reserves of undersea natural resources.
China is increasingly showing that even far from its mainland, it sees itself as having jurisdiction
over the body of water.
2NC: No China-Japan
Experts agree no chance of conflict between China and Japan
Sieg 12 (LINDA SIEG, 09/23/12 , Japan, China military conflict seen unlikely despite strain,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/23/us-china-japan-confrontationidUSBRE88M0F220120923)
Hawkish Chinese commentators have urged Beijing to prepare for military conflict with Japan as
tensions mount over disputed islands in the East China Sea, but most experts say chances the Asian rivals will
decide to go to war are slim.¶ A bigger risk is the possibility that an unintended maritime clash results in deaths and
boosts pressure for retaliation, but even then Tokyo and Beijing are expected to seek to manage the row before it becomes a fullblown military confrontation.¶ "That's the real risk - a maritime incident leading to a loss of life. If
a Japanese or Chinese
were killed, there would be a huge outpouring of nationalist sentiment," said Linda Jakobson,
director of the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney.¶ ADVERTISING¶ ¶ "But I still cannot
seriously imagine it would lead to an attack on the other country. I do think rational minds would prevail,"
she said, adding economic retaliation was more likely.¶ A feud over the lonely islets in the East China Sea
flared this month after Japan's government bought three of the islands from a private owner, triggering violent protests in
China and threatening business between Asia's two biggest economies.¶ Adding to the tensions, China sent more
than 10 government patrol vessels to waters near the islands, known as the Diaoyu in China and the
Senkaku in Japan, while Japan beefed up its Coast Guard patrols. Chinese media said 1,000 fishing boats have set sail for the area,
although none has been sighted close by.¶ Despite
the diplomatic standoff and rising nationalist sentiment in China
especially, experts agree neither Beijing nor Tokyo would intentionally escalate to a military
confrontation what is already the worst crisis in bilateral ties in decades.¶ U.S. PRESSURE¶ "The chances of a military
conflict are very, very slim because neither side wants to go down that path," said former People's
Liberation Army officer, Xu Guangyu, now a senior consultant at a government-run think tank in Beijing.¶
Pressure from the United States, which repeated last week that the disputed isles were covered by a 1960 treaty
obliging Washington to come to Japan's aid if it were attacked, is also working to restrain both sides, security experts
said.¶ "I very seriously do not think any of the involved parties - Japan, China and including the United States because of its defense
treaty (with Japan) - want to see a military conflict over this dispute," said the Lowy Institute's Jakobson.¶ "They don't want to risk it,
they don't seek it and they do not intend to let it happen."¶ Still, the possibility of a clash at sea remains.¶ While
the
presence of the Chinese surveillance ships - none of which is a naval vessel - and Japan Coast Guard
ships in the area might appear to set the stage for trouble, military experts said each side would try
to steer clear of the other.¶ "The bad news is that China sent ships to the area. The good news is that they are official
ships controlled by the government," said Narushige Michishita at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.¶
"This
is good news because they are not likely to engage in aggressive action because that
would really exacerbate the situation and turn it into a major crisis," said Michishita.¶ The Chinese ships,
he said, had another mission besides asserting China's claims to the islands and nearby waters.¶ "My guess is that some (Chinese)
official patrol boats are there to watch out for fishing boats ... to stop them from making problems," Michishita said.¶ FISHING
BOATS WILD CARD¶ Military
specialists say the Chinese patrol vessels are well disciplined as are the
Japan Coast Guard ships, while the two sides have grown accustomed to communicating.¶ "Both sides are ready,
but both sides are very well under control," said a former senior Japanese military official.¶ What worries
observers most is the risk that a boat carrying Chinese fishermen slips through or activists try to land, sparking clashes with Japan's
Coast Guard that result in deaths - news of which would spread like wildfire on the Internet.¶ In 1996, a Hong Kong activist drowned
in the nearby waters.¶ Diplomatic and economic relations chilled sharply in 2010 after Japan arrested a Chinese trawler captain
whose boat collided with a Japan Coast Guard vessel. This time, tensions are already high and China is contending with a tricky oncein-a-decade leadership change while Japan's ruling party faces a probable drubbing in an election expected in months.¶ "Two
rational governments of major countries would not intentionally decide to enter into a major
war with each other over a few uninhabited rocks," said Denny Roy, an Asia security expert at the East-West
Center in Hawaii.¶ "But unfortunately, you can arrive at war in ways other than that - through unintended escalation, in which both
countries start out at a much lower level, but each of them think that they must respond to perceived provocation by the other side,
both very strongly pushed into it by domestic pressure. That seems to be where we are now and it is difficult to see how countries
can get out of that negative spiral."¶ Others, however, were more confident that an unplanned clash could be kept from escalating
into military conflict.¶ "That's not really a major possibility, because there are still broad channels of communication between the
two sides, and they would help prevent that happening. Both sides could still talk to each other," said former senior PLA officer Xu.¶
"Even
before anything happened, you would also have the U.N Secretary General and others
stepping in to ensure that the situation does not get out of control."
Judiciary
1NC
The president doesn’t control drone policy
Glennon ’14, Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University. (1/11/14, Michael J. Glennon, Harvard National Security Journal,
http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf, vol.5)
The drone policy has been a case in point. Nasr has described how the Trumanite network not
only prevailed upon President Obama to continue its drone policy but succeeded in curtailing
discussion of the policy’s broader ramifications:
When it came to drones there were four formidable unanimous voices in the Situaton Room:
the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Pentagon, and the White House’s
counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates . . . was fully
supportive of more drone attacks. Together, Brennan, Gates, and the others convinced Obama
of both the urgency of counterterrorism and the imperative of viewing America’s engagement
with the Middle East and South Asia through that prism. Their bloc by and large discouraged
debate over the full implications of this strategy in national security meetings.392
Specifically, the Supreme Court leans hard to the right on surveillance and
privacy protection – empirical serial policy failure proves that the plan will be
fail
Rosenberg 5 (Dr. Gerald Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer in
Law, University of Chicago, B.A., Dartmouth College, 1976; M.A., Oxford University, 1979; J.D.,
1983, University of Michigan; Ph.D., 1985, Yale University, “Courting Disaster: Looking for
Change in All the Wrong Places”, 54 Drake Law Review 795 (2005),
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2922&context=journal_article
s) //RL
In the 1960s and 1970s, while government at all levels took steps to¶ harass civil rights and
antiwar activists, the Court became somewhat more¶ protective of political dissent. 67
However, the level of protection must not¶ be overstated. It was also the case that the federal
government engaged in¶ massive surveillance of the lawful political actions of countless
Americans,¶ and the Supreme Court upheld the program in 1972 in Laird v. Tatum . 68¶ Those
who publicly dissented against the war in Vietnam, and even those¶ who did not-such as
parents, relatives, and friends of protesters-ran the¶ risk of government surveillance and
harassment. 69 One must also¶ remember that it was not until 1965 that the U.S. Supreme
Court first¶ invalidated a congressional act on First Amendment free speech grounds.70¶ 64.
See Herbert H. Hyman, England and America: Climates of Tolerance and¶ Intolerance- 1962, in
THE RADICAL RIGHT 227, 231 (Daniel Bell ed., 1963) (writing¶ about the United Kingdom, but his
statements apply to France as well).¶ 65. Robert A. Dahl, Epilogue to POLITICAL OPPOSITIONS IN
WESTERN¶ DEMOCRACIES 387,391 (Robert A. Dahl ed., 1966).¶ 66. MARTIN SHAPIRO, FREEDOM
OF SPEECH: THE SUPREME COURT AND¶ JUDICIAL REVIEW 109 (1966).¶ 67. See generally
ROSENBERG, supra note 4 (examining social change in the¶ 1960s and 1970s and both the courts'
role and governmental reactions).¶ 68. Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972); see generally
Developments in the Law:¶ The National Security Interest and Civil Liberties, 85 HARV. L. REV.
1133, 1133 (1972)¶ (discussing the extent of government surveillance).¶ 69. See INTELLIGENCE
ACTIVITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS, S. REP.¶ No. 94-755, at 165-82 (1976) (discussing
the overbroad scope of domestic intelligence¶ gathering by the federal government).¶ 70.
Lamont v. Postmaster Gen., 381 U.S. 301, 307 (1965) (invalidating an act¶ requiring addressees
to affirmatively notify post office of their desire to receive foreign¶ communist political
propaganda).¶ [Vol. 54¶ HeinOnline -- 54 Drake L. Rev. 804 2005-2006¶ Courting Disaster¶ And, of
course, historically, the First Amendment was entirely useless in¶ protecting the speech rights
of African-Americans. 7¶ '¶ Given the Court's historic support of governmental repression of¶
dissident speech, how did criticism of the Vietnam War flourish, and how¶ has muted criticism
of the War in Iraq been protected? The answer is that¶ both elites and regular citizens were
divided over both wars, increasing the¶ political costs of repression. When elite elected
officials and media¶ organizations (such as The New York Times and the Washington Post)
take¶ up the cause of political dissent it is likely to be better protected than when¶ such elite
support is missin g. In such situations there will be both fewer¶ governmental attempts at
repression and less judicial support for them.¶ This suggests, however, that it is political support,
not judicial action, which¶ protects political dissent.¶ Perhaps no case more powerfully and
poignantly illustrates the¶ Court's unwillingness to protect even the most fundamental civil
liberties¶ and civil rights as Korematsu v. United States. 72 In this World War II era¶ case, the
Court upheld the conviction of Mr. Korematsu for remaining in a¶ military control area in
violation of an executive order requiring all persons¶ of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast be
evacuated from the area.73 As¶ commentators have repeatedly pointed out, none of the
112,000-120,000¶ people subject to the order, including approximately 70,000 U.S. citizens,¶
were charged with a crime. 74 No evidence was presented that they had¶ violated any laws
and no hearings were held. Yet they were all shipped to¶ what were in essence prisoner-ofwar camps, where they remained¶ throughout the war. It is hard to imagine a more blatant
violation of civil¶ liberties. Indeed, in 1988 Congress agreed, enacting legislation giving all¶ living
survivors of the camps a $20,000 payment.75 In addition, Congress¶ offered an apology: "For
these fundamental violations of the basic civil¶ liberties and constitutional rights of these
individuals of Japanese ancestry,¶ the Congress apologizes on behalf of the Nation. ' 76¶ 71. See,
e.g., Dred Scott, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417 (1856) (declining to¶ extend the privileges and
immunities of citizens to African-Americans because "it¶ would give them the full liberty of
speech in public and in private upon all subjects").¶ 72. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214
(1944).¶ 73. Id. at 215-16.¶ 74. See PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED: REPORT OF THE COMMISSION
ON¶ WARTIME RELOCATION AND INTERNMENT OF CIVILIANS 2-3 (1982); PETER IRONS,¶ JUSTICE
AT WAR 297 (1983); Eugene V. Rostow, The Japanese American Cases-A¶ Disaster, 54 YALE L.J.
489, 496-97 (1945).¶ 75. 50 U.S.C. app. § 1989b-4 (2000).¶ 76. 50 U.S.C. app. § 1989a(a) (2000).¶
20061 805¶ HeinOnline -- 54 Drake L. Rev. 805 2005-2006¶ Drake Law Review¶ As with civil rights,
this brief history shows that historically the Court¶ has supported repressive majorities against
vulnerable minorities. Civil¶ liberties have only been protected when there was more than a
minimum¶ of elite and popular support for them. Looking to the Court to protect¶ core
freedoms has not worked historically. Elliott Richardson put the¶ point well, writing more than
half a century ago:¶ The great battles for free expression will be won, if they are won, not¶ in
courts but in committee rooms and protest-meetings, by editorials¶ and letters to Congress,
and through the courage of citizens¶ everywhere. The proper function of courts is narrow.
The rest is our¶ responsibility
Legal precedents are ineffective; debate is never-ending
Pierre Schlag, 1985, "Rules and Standards,"
https://lawweb.colorado.edu/profiles/pubpdfs/schlag/schlagUCLALR.pdf
Every student of law has at some point encountered the “bright line rule” and the “flexible
standard.” In one torts casebook, for instance, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo
find themselves on opposite sides of a railroad crossing dispute. They disagree about what
standard of conduct should define the obligations of a driver who comes to an unguarded
railroad crossing. Holmes offers a rule: The driver must stop and look. Cardozo rejects the rule
and instead offers a standard: The driver must act with reasonable caution. Which is the
preferable approach? Holmes suggests that the requirements of due care at railroad crossings
are clear and, therefore, it is appropriate to crystallize these obligations into a simple rule of
law. Cardozo counters with scenarios in which it would be neither wise nor prudent for a driver
to stop and look. Holmes might well have answered that Cardozo’s scenarios are exceptions and
that exceptions prove the rule. Indeed, Holmes might have parried by suggesting that the
definition of a standard of conduct by means of a legal rule is predictable and certain, whereas
standards and juries are not. This dispute could go on for quite some time. But let’s leave the
substance of this dispute behind and consider some observations about its form. First, disputes
that pit a rule against a standard are extremely common in legal discourse. Indeed, the battles
of legal adversaries (whether they be judges, lawyers, or legal academics) are often joined so
that one side is arguing for a rule while the other is promoting a standard. And this is true
regardless of whether the disputes are petty squabbles heard in traffic court or cutting edge
controversies that grace the pages of elite law reviews. As members of the legal community,
we are forever involved in making arguments for or against rules or standards. This brings us
to a second observation: The arguments we make for or against rules or standards tend to be
pretty much the same regardless of the specific issue involved. The arguments are patterned
and stereotyped; the substantive context in which the arguments arise hardly seems to
influence their basic character. The arguments are drearily predictable, almost routine; they
could easily be canned for immediate consumption in a Gilbert’s of legal reasoning. But if we
accept these two observations, the implications are far from dreary or routine. On the contrary,
it follows that much of legal discourse (including the very fanciest law-talk) might be nothing
more than the unilluminating invocation of “canned” pro and con arguments about rules and
standards. This prospect is neither dreary nor routine; it is, however, somewhat humbling. Lest
undue humility get the upper hand, there are two major ways of avoiding this vexing
embarrassment. First, we can argue that the two observations above are wrong. Unfortunately,
I happen to think that they are in some sense correct-and part of this Article is devoted to
supporting this contention. Second, we can argue that even if the observations are correct,
there is more wisdom or rationality or sense (or other good stuff) to the rules v. standards
dispute than first meets the eye. In other words, even if rules v. standards disputes are
stereotyped, almost caricatured, forms of argument, there may be more substance to these
arguments about form than we might have guessed. But I don’t think so: Ultimately, all the
more promising conventional ways of understanding the rules v. standards dispute will turn out
to be located within the bounds of that dispute. The conventional forms of legal thought allow
us no place outside of the rules v. standards dichotomy from where we can make sense of the
dispute. In the end, no explanation (or all explanations) of the rules v. standards dispute is left
standing. The attempt to tie form to substance is just so much form.
Their impact card is laughable- It’s in the context of jurisprudence and the
military-industrial complex- There is absolutely no argument as to why a court
ruling on drone policy is necessary to prevent military adventurism
2NC
2NC: Exec Has No Control
Domestic surveillance is congressional authority – not presidential
Kitrosser 8 Heidi Kitrosser, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota Law School. I am
grateful to the organizers of the symposium for which this paper was written, particularly David
Gans, Michael Herz, and Kevin Stack. I also owe many thanks to former Vice President Walter
Mondale for a fascinating and inspiring discussion about congressional oversight of national
security activities. Finally, I am very grateful to Professor Suzanne Thorpe of the University of
Minnesota Law Library for her research assistance and to University of Minnesota co-deans Guy
Charles and Fred Morrison for their continued support. January, 2008, 29 Cardozo L. Rev. 1049
Opponents of the warrantless surveillance program dispute the administration's statutory and
constitutional points. On the statutory front, opponents argue that the general language of the
AUMF does not override FISA's specific requirements for electronic surveillance. n23 They further
note that FISA provides a fifteen-day exemption from its requirements following a congressional
declaration of war and that FISA was amended several times after the AUMF's passage. Both the
fifteen-day exemption and the post-AUMF amendments would be superfluous, opponents
argue, had the AUMF implicitly overridden FISA. n24 On the constitutional points, opponents
argue that Congress and the President share powers in both military and domestic affairs, that
domestic surveillance falls well within Congress' legislative powers, and that the President
thus must conduct any operations within FISA's parameters.
n25
The president complies with congressional authority
Dellapenna ‘6, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law; B.B.A., University of
Michigan (1965); J.D., Detroit College of Law (1968); LL.M. in Public International & Comparative
Law, George Washington University (1969); LL.M. (Environmental Law), Columbia University
(1974). (Fall 2006, Joseph W. Dellapenna, ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law,
“PRESIDENTIAL AUTHORITY AND THE WAR ON TERROR”, Lexis)
Presidential exercises of unilateral authority did not end with Youngstown Sheet and Tube, but
Presidents thereafter tended to involve Congress in their more controversial actions. In
Vietnam, the Presidents did not claim sweeping authority independently of Congress,
although they came to be accused of abusing the powers conferred by Congress n93 and of
lying to Congress to obtain authorization for the war. n94 Unity between the political branches
did not hold. Congress repealed the authorization in 1971 n95 and took steps to bar
continuation of the War. n96 Congress also enacted legislation to limit the exercise of
presidential authority as commander-in-chief (the War Powers Resolution of 1973 n97) and to
assure judicial and congressional oversight of intelligence gathering within and without the
United States (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act n98). Presidents have never been happy
with these restraints, consistently [*38] insisting that they are not bound by them, n99 yet
Presidents have complied with them. n100 President Bush's report to Congress on the actions
taken to respond to the 9/11 attacks exhibits the typical Presidential posture: compliance with
the War Powers Resolution's procedures while insisting that he is not bound by it.
2NC: Courts Don’t Solve
Courts don’t solve- inability to hear cases about the underlying issue and
decreasing public support
Rosenberg 08 (Gerald N. Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer in
Law at UChicago, The Hollow Hope 2nd edition published 2008 , Kindle location 231)
The view of courts as unable to produce significant social reform has a distinguished pedigree reaching back to the founders.
Premised on the institutional structure of the American political system and the procedures and belief systems created by American
law, it suggests that the
conditions required for courts to produce significant social reform will
seldom exist. Unpacked, packed, the Constrained Court view maintains that courts will generally not be effective producers of
significant social reform for three reasons: the limited nature of constitutional rights, the lack of judicial
independence, and the judiciary's inability to develop appropriate policies and its lack of
powers of implementation. The Limited Nature of Rights The Constitution, and the set of beliefs that
surround it, is not unbounded. Certain rights are enshrined in it and others are rejected. In
economic terms, private control over the allocation and distribution of resources, the use of property, is protected (Miller 1968).
"Rights" to certain minimums, mums, or equal shares of basic goods, are not. Further, judicial
discretion is bound by
the norms and expectations of the legal culture. These two parameters, believers in the
Constrained Court view suggest, present a problem for litigators pressing the courts for
significant social reform because most such litigation is based on constitutional claims that rights are being denied.; An
individual or group comes into a court claiming it is being denied some benefit, fit, or
protection from arbitrary and discriminatory action, and that it is entitled to this benefit or
that protection. Proponents of the Constrained Court view suggest that this has four
important consequences for social reformers. First, they argue, it limits the sorts of claims that can
be made, for not all social reform goals can be plausibly presented in the name of
constitutional rights. For example, there are no constitutional rights to decent housing, adequate levels
of welfare, or clean air, while there are constitutional rights to minimal governmental interference in the use of one's property. This
may mean that "practically significant but legally irrelevant policy matters may remain beyond the purview of the court" (Note 1977,
436). Further, as Gordon (1984, 111) suggests, "the legal forms we use set limits on what we can imagine as practical outcomes."
Thus, the nature of rights in the U.S. legal system, embedded in the Constitution, may
constrain the courts in producing significant social reform by preventing them from hearing
many claims. A second consequence from the Constrained Court perspective is that, even where claims can be
made, social reformers must often argue for the establishment of a new right, or the
extension of a generally accepted right to a new situation. In welfare rights litigation, for
example, the Court was asked to find a constitutional right to welfare (Krislov 1973). This need to push
the courts to read the Constitution in an expansive or "liberal" way creates two main difficulties. Underlying these
difficulties is judicial awareness of the need for predictability in the law and the politically
exposed nature of judges whose decisions go beyond the positions of electorally accountable
officials. First, the Constitution, lawyers, judges, and legal academics form a dominant legal culture that at any given time accepts
some rights and not others and sets limits on the interpretation and expansion of rights. Judicial discretion is bound by
the beliefs and norms of this legal culture, and decisions that stray too far from them are likely
to be reversed and severely criticized. Put simply, courts, and the judges that compose them, even if sympathetic to
social reform form plaintiffs, may be unwilling to risk crossing this nebulous yet real boundary.' Second, and perhaps more
important, is the role of precedent and what Justice Traynor calls the "continuity scripts of the
law" (Traynor 1977, 11). Traynor, a justice of the California Supreme Court for twenty-five years, Chief Justice from 1964 to 1970,
and known as a judge open to new ideas, wrote of the "very caution of the judicial process" (1977, 7). Arguing that "a judge must
plod rather than soar," Traynor saw that the "greatest judges" proceed "at the pace of a tortoise that steadily makes advances
though it carries the past on its back" (1977, 7, 6). Constrained
by precedent and the beliefs of the dominant
legal culture, judges, the Constrained Court view asserts, are not likely to act as crusaders.
Third, supporters of the Constrained Court view note, as Scheingold (1974) points out, that to
claim a right in court is to
accept the procedures and obligations of the legal system. These procedures are designed, in
part, to make it difficult for courts to hear certain kinds of cases. As the Council for Public Interest Law
(CPIL) puts it, doctrines of standing and of class actions, the so-called political question doctrine, the need to
have a live controversy, and other technical doctrines can "deter courts from deciding cases
on the merits" (CPIL 1976, 355) and can result in social reform groups being unable to present their
best arguments, or even have their day in court. Once in court, however, the legal process tends to dissipate
significant social reform by making ing appropriate remedies unlikely. This can occur, McCann (1986, 200) points out, because policybased litigation aimed at significant social reform is usually "disaggregate(di ... into discrete conflicts among limited actors over
specific individual entitlements." Remedial decrees, it has been noted, "must not confuse what is socially or judicially desirable with
what is legally required" (Special Project 1978, 855). Thus, litigation
seldom deals with "underlying issues and
problems" and is "directed more toward symptoms than causes" (Harris and Spiller 1976, 26). Finally, it
has long been argued that framing issues in legally sound ways robs them of "political and purposive
appeal" (Handler 1978, 33). In the narrow sense, the technical nature of legal argument can denude issues of emotional,
widespread appeal. More broadly, there is the danger that litigation by the few will replace political
action by the many and reduce the democratic nature of the American polity. James Bradley Thayer,
writing in 1901, was concerned that reliance on litigation would sap the democratic process of its
vitality. He warned that the "tendency of a common and easy resort" to the courts, especially
in asking them to invalidate acts of the democratically accountable branches, would "dwarf
the political capacity of the people" (Thayer 1901, 107). This view was echoed more recently by McCann, who found
that litigation-prone activists' "legal rights approach to expanding democracy has significantly
narrowed their conception of political action itself" (McCann 1986, 26). Expanding the point, McCann argued
that "legal tactics not only absorb scarce resources that could be used for popular mobilization
... [but also] make it difficult to develop broadly based, multiissue grassroots roots
associations of sustained citizen allegiance" (McCann 1986, 200). For these reasons, the Constrained Court view
suggests that the nature of rights in the U.S. constrains courts from being effective producers of significant social reform. Thus,
Constraint I: The bounded nature of constitutional rights prevents courts from hearing or
effectively acting on many significant social reform claims, and lessens the chances of popular
mobilization.
Court’s don’t solve- lack of enforcement power
Rosenberg 08 (Gerald N. Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer in
Law at UChicago, The Hollow Hope 2nd edition published 2008 , Kindle location 266)
For courts, or any other institution, to effectively produce significant social reform, they must
have the ability to develop appropriate policies and the power to implement them. This, in turn,
requires a host of tools that courts, according to proponents of the Constrained Court view, lack. In particular, successful
implementation requires enforcement powers. Court decisions, requiring people to act, are
not self-executing. But as Hamilton pointed out two centuries ago in The Federalist Papers (1787-88), courts lack such
powers. Indeed, it is for this reason more than any other that Hamilton emphasized the
courts' character as the least dangerous branch. Assuaging fears that the federal courts would
be a political threat, Hamilton argued in Federalist 78 that the judiciary "has no influence over
either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the
society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but
merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments" (The
Federalist Papers 1961, 465). Unlike
Congress and the executive branch, Hamilton argued, the federal
courts were utterly dependent on the support of the other branches and elite actors. In other
words, for Court orders to be carried out, political elites, electorally accountable, must support
them and act to implement them. Proponents of the Constrained Court view point to historical recognition of this
structural "fact" of American political life by early Chief Justices John Jay and John Marshall, both of whom were acutely aware of
the Court's limits.12 President Jackson recognized these limits, too, when he reputedly remarked about a decision with which he did
not agree, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." More recently, the
unwillingness of state
authorities to follow court orders, and the need to send federal troops to Little Rock,
Arkansas, to carry them out, makes the same point. Without elite support port (the federal
government in this case), the Court's orders would have been frustrated. While it is clear that courts
can stymie change (Paul 1960), though ultimately not prevent it (Dahl 1957; Nagel 1965; Rosenberg 1985), the Constitution,
in the eyes of the Constrained Court view, appears to leave the courts few tools to insure that
their decisions are carried out. If the separation of powers, and the placing of the power to enforce court decisions in
the executive branch, leaves courts practically powerless to insure that their decisions are supported by elected and administrative
officials, then they are heavily dependent on popular support to implement their decisions. If American citizens are aware of Court
decisions, and feel duty-bound to carry them out, then Court orders will be implemented. However, proponents
of the
Constrained Court view point out that survey data suggest that the American public is
consistently uninformed of even major Supreme Court decisions and thus not in a position to
support them (Adamany 1973; Daniels 1973; Dolbeare 1967; Goldman and Jahnige 1976). If the public or political
elites are not ready or willing to make changes, the most elegant legal reasoning will be for
naught. This constraint may be particularly powerful with issues of significant social reform. It is
likely that as courts deal with issues involving contested values, as issues of significant social reform do almost by definition, they
will generate opposition. In turn, opposition may induce a withdrawal of the elite and public
support crucial for implementation. Thus, proponents of the Constrained Court view suggest that the contested
nature of issues of significant social reform makes it unlikely that the popular support
necessary for implementation mentation will be forthcoming.
2NC: No Legal Precedent
Legal precedents ultimately fail due to debate
Pierre Schlag, 1985, "Rules and Standards,"
https://lawweb.colorado.edu/profiles/pubpdfs/schlag/schlagUCLALR.pdf
A conclusion in a law review article is usually a tidy summation of what has transpired during the
course of the reading. The virtue of a conclusion is that it ties together all the various strands of
the article and synthesizes the various parts into a sensible bit of legal wisdom, complete,
finished, and, in appearance at least, unassailable. There is something comical about this ritual.
For if we are convinced of anything, it is that there are no conclusions, that things go on, and
that everything will always be revised. A conclusion here would be particularly ironic. After all,
this Article is about a dialectic I claim is omnipresent, yet bereft of any synthesis. What to say?
Here are a couple of possibilities: The mainstream message is that much of our legal
argumentation seems to track a dialectic that is incapable of resolution. The steps in this
argumentation are patterned and predictable. We cannot be sure whether the argumentation
reflects anything of substance or not. Therefore, it behooves us to be on our guard when we
find ourselves making these arguments and to consider whether they truly do reflect concerns
of substance or not. The danger of the dialectic is that we may think we are discovering
something about substance, when in fact we are only discovering something about form. A less
mainstream conclusion might go like this. Much of legal argument tracks the dialectic. This
dialectic cannot be anchored in matters of substance. Indeed, the very attempt to explain this
aspect of form in terms of substance succeeds in doing quite the reverse: It puts us on the
road to explaining substance by means of form. The short of it is that much of legal
argumentation is simply an exercise in the formalistic mechanics of a dialectic which doesn’t
go anywhere. The point of further study ought to be to ascertain why and how it is that we
allow such silly games to have such serious consequences.
No legal weight behind precedents
Neil Duxbury, 10-28-2005, "The Authority of Precedent: Two Problems,"
https://www.mcgill.ca/files/legal-theory-workshop/Neil-Duxbury-McGill-paper.pdf
The proposition that laws bind, while unlikely to startle anybody, is one which legal
philosophers rightly accord serious attention. The binding force of legal rules, the classical
legal positivist claims, is attributable to the fact that they are backed by sanctions emanating
from a habitually-obeyed authoritative source. Hans Kelsen repeatedly emphasized in process
of developing his so-called Pure Theory of Law that these rules or norms are not moral norms:
morality merely condones conduct conforming to, and disapproves of conduct contravening, its
norms, whereas law is a coercive order which seeks to attach sanctions to behavior which
opposes its norms. In this respect, he noted ‘the Pure Theory of Law continues in the tradition of
nineteenth-century positivist legal theory’ – the theory according to which, in the words of John
Austin, ‘[t]he binding virtue of a law lies in the sanction annexed to it.’ It is well known that this
theory of law as coercive orders was dismantled by H. L. A. Hart in The Concept of Law. Yet,
before the theory had come under Hart’s scrutiny, at least one of its shortcomings was starkly
highlighted by the doctrine of stare decisis. As any law student knows, stare decisis is the idea
that precedents ought to be adhered to when, in later cases, the material facts are the same.
The doctrine brings with it numerous difficulties – not least that of determining which cases
are materially alike. But the difficulty which stare decisis posed for classical legal positivism was
very specific. Though a decision of a court must (unless successfully appealed) be accepted by
the litigants, and though it may establish a precedent which is more generally binding on the
citizenry, it is not immediately clear what it means to say – even though we often do say – that
the decision binds future courts. Cross and Harris, in Precedent in English Law, observe that
‘[t]he peculiar feature of the English doctrine of precedent is its strongly coercive nature.’
English judges, unlike their counterparts in many other jurisdictions, ‘must have regard to’ the
previous decisions of higher courts, and ‘are sometimes obliged to follow a previous case
although they have what would otherwise be good reasons for not doing so.’ As a piece of
doctrinal description, this statement is unremarkable. But from the perspective of classical legal
positivism, it poses a serious difficulty. For what does it mean to say that precedents bind? The
answer seems to be that precedents bind because judges consider themselves to be bound by
them.
No punishment for not following precedent
Neil Duxbury, 10-28-2005, "The Authority of Precedent: Two Problems,"
https://www.mcgill.ca/files/legal-theory-workshop/Neil-Duxbury-McGill-paper.pdf
Yet if precedents bind, must there not be an identifiable sanction applicable to a judge who
refuses to respect stare decisis? ‘If a judge persistently and vociferously declined to follow
cases by which he was bound’, Cross and Harris reply, it is possible that steps would be taken
to remove him from his office, but it would be a mistake to think in terms of such drastic
sanctions for the judge’s obligation to act according to the rules of precedent. Those rules are
rules of practice, and, if it is thought to be desirable to speak of a sanction for the obligation to
comply with them, it is sufficient to say that non-compliance might excite adverse comment
from other judges. Needless to say, there are not many examples of such comment in the law
reports because the obligation to follow a practice derives its force from the fact that the
practice is followed with a high degree of uniformity. The idea of the doctrine of precedent
creating an occasion for judicial lawbreaking is treated by Cross and Harris with near
bewilderment. The question of what ought to be done about a judge who flagrantly abuses the
doctrine does not tax them for the simple reason that judges do not behave thus. Although a
formal sanction could be applied to a judge for eschewing precedent, the likelihood of this
occurring is remote because concerns about reputation and fear of informal criticism motivate
judges to treat precedents as binding upon them. There is nothing naïve about Cross and
Harris’s assessment. The ‘rules’ of precedent are prudential rules; judges apply them so as to
maintain a system of case-law rather than fear breaking them in case they are punished.
Where judges do not wish to follow a precedent it is commonly assumed that they will either
distinguish the precedent from the present case or, when permissible, overrule the precedent
on the basis of an especially compelling reason or set of reasons. Neither judges nor jurists pay
much attention to the question of what should happen to the judge who is manifestly
disrespectful towards and neglectful of precedent, probably because that judge rarely if ever
exists outside fictional literature. For the classical legal positivist, however, the idea that
precedents bind future decision makers is intelligible only if there is stipulated a sanction which
will be prima facie applicable to those decision makers when they ignore precedents.
2NC: No Impact
(INSERT PREFERRED RANT ABOUT HOW RIDICULOUS THEIR IMPACT CARD IS)
No military adventurism- New ideologies prove decline in willingness to
intervene internationally
Wagner 3/16 (Richard Wagner: Professor of Psychology, Florida State University, “The Decline
of Military Adventurism in the Conservative Big Tent,” 3/16/15,
http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/5/1/2158244015575556)
The non-interventionist (often of a libertarian-conservative persuasion) usually contends that enemies of the
United States are so because they have been provoked. They contend that Al-Qaeda, for example, attacked on
September 11, 2001, in response to the strong U.S. military presence in the Middle East. As Ron Paul so famously said in a 2008
Presidential Debate, “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over
there” (Ron Paul, 2007, Republican Presidential Debate). These non-interventionists were largely exiled from the
conservative big tent during much of the Bush administration, but they have
been slowly welcomed back due in part
to the Republican electoral defeats of 2006 and 2008. The Tea Party, which has re-mobilized grassroots conservatives,
emerged initially as a Ron Paul movement in 2007 but became a major force early into Obama’s presidency
with the backing of conservative opinion leaders and funds. Regardless of what happens to the Tea Party itself, these Paulitelibertarians have grown substantially over the last 5 years, particularly with younger conservatives.¶ The
cautious realists
are often on the same side of foreign policy with the non-interventionists, but for very different
reasons. Realists will commonly reject the non-interventionist view that other people and other nations will only be a danger to us if
we harm them. This would completely ignore the balance of power that is at the core of realist foreign policy. However, a cautious
realist will usually avoid direct military intervention, believing that military adventurism is imprudent. Cautious
realists
certainly support a strong national defense, believing that enemies need not be provoked to
wish us harm, but that they will not cause us harm if it is not in their best interest. Unlike the
strict non-interventionists, the cautious realists recognize the balance of power in
international politics. Nuclear proliferation is certainly compatible with this philosophy, as no two nuclear powers have ever
gone to war with each other directly. There have been many proxy wars, such as the infamous Vietnam War, but never a direct war
between two nuclear powers. Cautious realists also are more likely than non-interventionists to support military intervention to aid
an ally, or to contain a rival great power. Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. relied on this approach to foreign policy to contain and
ultimately defeat the Soviet Union, and to liberate Kuwait and weaken Hussein’s Iraq. Due to Reagan’s popular status in the memory
of nearly all American conservatives, there has been significant debate over Reagan’s foreign policy legacy. Given the context of the
Cold War, however, and the clear opportunities Reagan had to call for more significant military adventurism, Reagan’s foreign policy
was a cautious one. . Pat Buchanan seems to sway between isolationism and this kind of cautious realism. His recent views on ISIS,
focused on containment and limited U.S. involvement, fit well into this cautious realist category (Buchanan, 2014). Many war weary
grassroots conservatives also fit here as well.¶ The
non-interventionists and cautious realists make up the
dovish wing of the conservative big tent. It is made up of libertarians, paleoconservatives, and
center-right pragmatists such as Senator Tom Coburn. Although their reasoning differs, they usually prefer nonintervention. The interventionists are likewise divided into an idealist and realist wing.
Solvency
1NC
There is no enforcement of drone regulation
Kinane 15
Ed Kinane, activist with the Upstate Drone Action, 2-17-2015, "‘Concerns over domestic drones:
spying, civil liberties’ abuse & accidents’," RT English, http://www.rt.com/op-edge/233043commercial-drones-intelligence-agencies-abuse//SRawal
I think we should be very concerned about the abuse of the drones for surveillance. Already
we have US intelligence agencies like the FBI, NSA gathering enormous amounts of surveillance
data with very little control over them. And we’ve seen that our intelligence agencies don’t
necessarily respect out laws regarding these matters. Trying to enforce regulations is very
difficult especially when you go up against the NSA, the National Security Administration, or the
FBI, or Homeland Security. There is very little in the way of enforcement. The FAA, the Federal
Aviation Administration, is already stretched very thin. And it’s not their function to be
enforcing the rules and regulations, and they don’t have the means to do it. It is a very risky
situation we’re going into…We would have many drones in the air probably... how do we know
which ones are doing what? It would give very good cover to spy drones because we’re just used
to spy drones because we’re just used to seeing drones in the air. So we don’t think of it when
we see drones that really are performing functions that are very inappropriate for them.
Plan fails- law enforcement would move to powerful aerial surveillance
cameras
Timberg 14
Craig Timberg, national technology reporter for The Post, 2-5-2014, "Get the feeling you’re being
watched? These eyes in the sky can track every person, vehicle in an area for hours.," Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyonein-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd844629433ba3_story.html//SRawal
DAYTON, Ohio — Shooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape.
Hair color, bullet wounds, even
the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles
above. But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second
by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to
meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it
included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last
beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead. “I’ve witnessed 34 of these,” said Ross McNutt, the genial president of Persistent Surveillance
Systems, which collected the images of the killing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a specially outfitted Cessna. “It’s like opening up a murder mystery in
the middle, and you need to figure out what happened before and after.” As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional
surveillance cameras,
a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track
every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although
these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that
police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track
their movements. Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in
demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician,
who commissioned the flights over Ciudad Juárez .
Defense contractors are developing similar technology for the
military, but its potential for civilian use is raising novel civil liberties concerns. In Dayton,
where Persistent Surveillance Systems is based, city officials balked last year when police
considered paying for 200 hours of flights, in part because of privacy complaints.
Businesses will use drones for surveillance
Ray Henry, 7-6-2015, "Utility companies look to use drones for surveillance, equipment
inspection," SecurityInfoWatch, http://www.securityinfowatch.com/news/14026747/utilitycompanies-look-to-use-drones-for-surveillance-equipment-inspection
Power companies across the United States are testing whether small drones can spot trouble
on transmission lines or inspect equipment deep inside hard-to-reach power plant boilers.
That's just for starters. Researchers and industry executives predict the drones could provide
security surveillance to deter vandalism on remote gear and make it safer for utility workers to
climb poles and towers. One of the country's largest power companies, Southern Co., says it
hopes drones can eventually identify storm damage in the Southeast and allow it to increase
its routine inspections. About a dozen utility or service companies have sought permission to
use drones for similar purposes.
2NC
2NC: Police Circumvent
Drone use would continue- local police and commercial drones
Nelson 15
Steven Nelson, reporter at U.S. News & World Report, 2-24-2015, "FAA Wants Local Cops to Be
Drone Police," US News & World Report,
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/02/24/faa-wants-local-cops-to-be-dronepolice//SRawal
See this peeking in your window? You can't shoot it, a federal official said Tuesday . State and federal officials droned on
Tuesday about rules for increasingly popular unmanned aircraft. Federal Aviation Administration official Mark
Bury told dozens of state attorneys general at an event in the nation's capital that his agency needs help enforcing federal rules on drones. “We’re
hoping that moving forward we’ll be able to enlist the assistance of local law enforcement in
gathering information about operations of unmanned aircraft that violate our regulations,” said
Bury, the FAA’s assistant chief counsel for regulations, during a panel discussion. “ We simply don’t have the manpower," he
said. Last week, the FAA released proposed rules for commercial drones under 55 pounds. If adopted , the rules would require
licenses – issued after knowledge tests and valid for two years – to use the aircraft and
mandate that operators keep the drones within eyesight and under 500 feet. Some rules are already in
place that affect use of small drones. Temporary air restrictions above stadiums hosting large events, for
example, already apply. Drones can perform an ever-expanding list of tasks, and safeguards for privacy and public safety are only now
catching up. Many possible applications of drones aren't regulated. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who
repeatedly solicited new hunting buddies during this week’s National Association of Attorneys General meeting, asked about using the aircraft to
pursue prey. Bury
told Hood the FAA considered the issue but doesn't have a strong regulatory
interest. “From [the FAA’s] perspective, if installation of a weapon, camera, whatever … if safe
operation is not implicated, we don’t really have an interest,” he said.
The police keeps the new powerful aerial surveillance secret
Smith 14
Ms. Smith, 4-15-2014, "Record and rewind: Cops quietly test aerial surveillance to track crime,"
Network World, http://www.networkworld.com/article/2226742/microsoft-subnet/record-andrewind--cops-quietly-test-aerial-surveillance-to-track-crime.html//SRawal
Because America apparently isn't enough of a surveillance society, and aerial surveillance only works if it is "looking at
the right spot," cops have been testing a new wide-area surveillance system that can watch,
record and rewind every outdoor activity that happens in a city, every person, every car and
every crime. It "is something of a time machine - the entire city is filmed and recorded in real time," reported The Center for Investigative
Reporting (CIR). "Imagine Google Earth with a rewind button and the ability to play back the movement of cars and people as they scurry about the
city." Retired Air Force veteran Ross McNutt
previously helped build a wide-area surveillance system that
provided the military with a "360-degree eye in the sky" to "hunt down bombing suspects in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Although it wouldn't seem like there's a huge need to hunt down terrorists from above in the United States, McNutt, the creator of Ohio-based
Persistent Surveillance Systems, decided
law enforcement in the U.S. also needed such "gaming-changing"
surveillance capabilities. Instead of needing such powerful surveillance to track suspected terrorists, the Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department used it to track necklace-snatchers, thieves similar to pursesnatchers, except they were stealing necklaces. PSS high-resolution surveillance cameras were fitted to the belly of small
plane, giving the police the power to literally watch the entire city of Compton, CA. CIR said of the sample image : "Persistent
Surveillance Systems’ technology captures in real time a necklace snatching and the getaway
car that was involved." Those aerial cameras can "record a 25-square-mile patch of Earth constantly-for up to six hours." Although the
aerial surveillance isn't as powerful as the unblinking, all-seeing 1.8-gigapixel camera of DARPA's ARGUS-IS, McNutt believes that in a few years, the
technology will be able to cover an area about "as large as the entire city of San Francisco." He
told Gizmodo that his PSS system is like a "live version of Google Earth, only with TiVo capabilities." "Our whole system costs less than the price of a
single police helicopter and costs less for an hour to operate than a police helicopter," McNutt told CIR. "But at the same time, it watches 10,000 times
the area that a police helicopter could watch." Why hadn't the citizens of Compton heard of the aerial surveillance? L.A.
County Sheriff's
Sgt. Doug Iketani told CIR, "The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the
public. A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order
to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush."
2NC: Businesses Circumvent
Business use drones
Whitlock 14
Craig Whitlock, covers the Pentagon and national security. He has reported for The Washington Post since
1998, 10-16-2014, "FAA rules might allow thousands of business drones," Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/faa-releases-proposed-rules-for-domesticdrone-use/2015/02/15/6787bdce-b51b-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html//SRawal
Thousands of businesses could receive clearance to fly drones two years from now under
proposed rules that the Federal Aviation Administration unveiled Sunday, a landmark step that will make
automated flight more commonplace in the nation’s skies. Meanwhile, the White House on Sunday issued presidential directive that will require federal
agencies for the first time to publicly disclose where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from
aerial surveillance. Together, the
FAA regulations and the White House order provide some basic rules of
the sky that will govern who can fly drones in the United States and under what conditions,
while attempting to prevent aviation disasters and unrestrained government surveillance. The
FAA’s draft rules would make it relatively simple for real estate agents, aerial photographers,
police departments, farmers and anyone else to fly small drones for work purposes. Operators
would need to pass a written proficiency test, register the drone and pay about $200 in fees — but would not have to obtain a
regular pilot’s license or demonstrate their flying skills. The long-awaited regulations — the FAA had been
drawing them up for several years — are expected to lead to a revolution in commercial
aviation. But they must first undergo a lengthy period of public review and comment that is projected to take at least until early 2017. Once the
rules are finalized, the FAA estimates that more than 7,000 businesses will obtain drone permits
within three years.
And these businesses and corporations will sell the info to the government
Boghasian 03
Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild and co-host of the civil liberties radio
show Law and Disorder, "The Business of Surveillance,” Vol. 39, No. 3, AMERICAN BAR PUBLICATIONHuman Rights,
http://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2013_vol_39/may_2013_n2_
privacy/the_business_of_surveillance.html, 2003//SRawal
Corporations routinely and readily hand over customers’ private personal data, absent
warrants, to government agencies often without legal justification or beyond what was
requested. The NSA has collected records of phone calls of millions of individuals with data
provided by AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. Despite reports citing abuses of the Patriot Act from the Justice Department Office
of the Inspector General, such data collection is authorized by legislation signed by Presidents Bush and
Obama. Bush issued an executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor phone calls, e-mails, Internet activity, text messaging, and other
communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the United States, even if the other end of the communication lies within the
United States, without a warrant or other express approval. This executive order was issued pursuant to congressional passage of the Authorization for
Use of Military Force, presumably on the grounds that if the president can order targeted assassinations, there is no reason why lesser intrusions
should be limited. Several
former officials and telecommunications workers have indicated that the
NSA program extends beyond the surveillance of those suspected to be linked to foreign
terrorists. A significant disclosure came in 2005 when former technician Mark Klein revealed
that AT&T was cooperating with the NSA. The firm had installed a fiber optic splitter at a San
Francisco facility that made copies of Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers, and gave
them to the NSA.