NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
NSA Negative
NSA Negative ....................................................................................................................................... 1
1NC – Frontline Privacy [1/6] ......................................................................................................... 3
#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions....................................................................................... 9
#2 Privacy Losses are Inevitable extensions .............................................................................. 11
#3 Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions ............................................................................. 12
#4 Security Consequences come before Privacy- extensions .................................................... 14
#5 Posner – Balancing Good—Extensions .................................................................................. 16
#6 Mass Surveillance Decreases Discrimination- extension ....................................................... 18
Answers to: Privacy is a Right ..................................................................................................... 20
Answers to: Surveillance Violates 4th Amendment ....................................................................... 22
Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom [1/2] .............................................................................. 23
Answer to Surveillance has chilling effect .................................................................................... 25
Answers to Surveillance is Tyranny ............................................................................................. 26
Surveillance Protects Rights ........................................................................................................ 27
1NC Frontline – Economy Advantage [1/5] .................................................................................. 28
Turn - NSA Spying helps Cybersecurity Sector [1/2] ................................................................... 33
#1 Foreign Business hurt more- extension .................................................................................. 35
#2/4 Businesses won’t leave cloud - extension............................................................................ 36
Cloud Sector Growing now .......................................................................................................... 38
#3 Surveillance does not affect business decisions- extensions.................................................. 39
No Losses – Increased Security .................................................................................................. 41
#5- Data localization is inevitable- extension ............................................................................... 42
#6 Economic decline doesn’t cause war- extension .................................................................... 43
1NC Frontline – Internet Freedom [1/5] ....................................................................................... 45
#1 Internet doesn’t spur Democracy- extensions ......................................................................... 50
#2 Profit motive - extensions........................................................................................................ 51
#3 International Surveillance Matters more.................................................................................. 52
#4 The US is not a Model ............................................................................................................ 54
#5 Democracy doesn’t solve war- extension................................................................................ 55
1NC Frontline – Solvency [1/5] .................................................................................................... 57
1
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
USA Freedom Act Solves Violations ............................................................................................ 62
Oversight works now.................................................................................................................... 63
Amount of Surveillance is Limited ................................................................................................ 64
NSA will Circumvent Restrictions [1/2] ......................................................................................... 65
1NC – Topicality Domestic Surveillance ...................................................................................... 67
2NC Topicality – Domestic Interpretation..................................................................................... 69
1NC Terrorism DA Link ................................................................................................................ 73
Link Terrorism- 702 and Prism ..................................................................................................... 74
Link Terrorism – Online Surveillance ........................................................................................... 75
Link Terrorism – Delay ................................................................................................................. 77
Terrorism – Answers to “Too much Data” [1/2] ............................................................................ 78
Politics Disad Link ........................................................................................................................ 80
Executive Action Better ................................................................................................................ 81
2
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
1NC – Frontline Privacy [1/6]
1. The NSA is not a rogue agency, there has been no abuse of surveillance.
Lowry, Editor, the National Review, 2015
(Rich, , 5-27-2015, "Lowry: NSA data program faces death by bumper sticker," Salt Lake Tribune,
http://www.sltrib.com/csp/mediapool/sites/sltrib/pages/printfriendly.csp?id=2557534)
You can listen to orations on the NSA program for hours and be outraged by its violation of
our liberties, inspired by the glories of the Fourth Amendment and prepared to mount the barricades
to stop the NSA in its tracks — and still have no idea what the program actually does. That’s what
the opponents leave out or distort, since their case against the program becomes so much less
compelling upon fleeting contact with reality. The program involves so-called metadata, information
about phone calls, but not the content of the calls — things like the numbers called, the time of the
call, the duration of the call. The phone companies have all this information, which the NSA acquires
from them. What happens next probably won’t shock you, and it shouldn’t. As Rachel Brand of the
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board writes, “It is stored in a database that may be
searched only by a handful of trained employees, and even they may search it only after a
judge has determined that there is evidence connecting a specific phone number to
terrorism.” The charge of domestic spying is redolent of the days when J. Edgar Hoover targeted
and harassed Martin Luther King Jr. Not only is there zero evidence of any such abuse, it isn’t
even possible based on the NSA database alone. There are no names with the numbers. As
former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy points out, whitepages.com has more personal identifying
information. The NSA is hardly a rogue agency. Its program is overseen by a special panel of
judges, and it has briefed Congress about its program for years.
3
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
1NC – Frontline Privacy [2/6]
2. Privacy invasions are inevitable. They will continue to grow, Moore’s law proves.
Seemann, freelance writer focusing on technology, 2015,
(Michael, “ Digital Tailspin Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden” The Network Notebooks series
March 2015 http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NN09_Digital_Tailspin_SP.pdf)
That the NSA was eavesdropping on satellite phone connections worldwide was known as
early as 2000. Its global network of radio stations and radar domes was called ‘Echelon’. The
European Parliament called for an investigation, but when the enquiry commission submitted its
report on September 5, 2001, it was overshadowed by the events of 9/11 a few days later. Apart from
Echelon leaving deep traces in the collective memory of nerd culture, virtually nothing happened –
this was a scandal that was to remain without political consequence. Even ‘post-Snowden’, no
political, technical, or legal solutions to surveillance are forthcoming. On the contrary,
surveillance will likely keep on spreading, parallel to the datafication of the world. What was
monitored at the time of Echelon was the same as it is today: everything. Only before, ‘everything’
was less extensive by several orders of magnitude. What can be put under surveillance will be put
under surveillance, i.e. the digitized areas of life. These areas are subject to Moore’s Law,
meaning that their capacities will double every 18 to 24 months. The digital tailspin has only
just begun. And it will continue to sink into every nook and cranny of daily life, leaving no
corner undigitized. So when in ten years’ time the latest eavesdropping operations of intelligence
are revealed, we might hear of brain scanners, or of sensors tapping into our bloodstreams. Either
way, people will shrug it off, or maybe not even that, as their thoughts on the issue will be
publicly available anyway.
4
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
1NC – Frontline Privacy [3/6]
3. Privacy is not absolute, corporations and big data make violations of privacy inevitable.
Goldsmith, Professor at Harvard Law 2015
Jack, School, The Ends of Privacy, The New Rambler, Apr. 06, 2015 (reviewing Bruce Schneier, Data
and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)). Published
Version http://newramblerreview.com/images/files/Jack- Goldsmith_Review-of-Bruce-Schneier.pdf
The truth is that consumers love the benefits of digital goods and are willing to give up
traditionally private information in exchange for the manifold miracles that the Internet and big
data bring. Apple and Android each offer more than a million apps, most of which are built upon this
model, as are countless other Internet services. More generally, big data promises huge
improvements in economic efficiency and productivity, and in health care and safety. Absent
abuses on a scale we have not yet seen, the public’s attitude toward giving away personal
information in exchange for these benefits will likely persist, even if the government requires
firms to make more transparent how they collect and use our data. One piece of evidence for
this is that privacy-respecting search engines and email services do not capture large market shares.
In general these services are not as easy to use, not as robust, and not as efficacious as their
personal-data-heavy competitors.
Schneier understands and discusses all this. In the end his position seems to be that we should
deny ourselves some (and perhaps a lot) of the benefits big data because the costs to privacy
and related values are just too high. We “have to stop the slide” away from privacy, he says,
not because privacy is “profitable or efficient, but because it is moral.” But as Schneier also
recognizes, privacy is not a static moral concept. “Our personal definitions of privacy are both
cultural and situational,” he acknowledges. Consumers are voting with their computer mice and
smartphones for more digital goods in exchange for more personal data. The culture increasingly
accepts the giveaway of personal information for the benefits of modern computerized life.
This trend is not new. “The idea that privacy can’t be invaded at all is utopian,” says Professor
Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. “There are amounts and kinds of information which previously
were not given out and suddenly they have to be given out. People adjust their behavior and
conceptions accordingly.” That is Fried in the 1970 Newsweek story, responding to an earlier
generation’s panic about big data and data mining. The same point applies today, and will apply
as well when the Internet of things makes today’s data mining seem as quaint as 1970s-era
computation.
5
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
1NC – Frontline Privacy [4/6]
4. Must weigh the consequences of policy decisions — especially when responding to
terrorism.
Isaac , Professor of political science at Indiana, 2002
Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the
Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University-Bloomington, 2002 (“Ends, Means, and
Politics,” Dissent, Volume 49, Issue 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via
EBSCOhost, p. 35-37)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have
taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The
concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three
fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement
of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then
it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their
supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not
simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. [end page 35] This
is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially
immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent
injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended
consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of
action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it
is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the
twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally
important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects
in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It
alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political
effectiveness.
6
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
1NC – Frontline Privacy [5/6]
5. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If mass surveillance is good policy, it is justified.
Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on the United States Court
of Appeals, 2006
(Richard A, was named the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century by The Journal of Legal
Studies, 2006 “Wire Trap,” New Republic, February 6th, Available Online at
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/104859/wire-trap)
The revelation by The New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) is conducting a
secret program of electronic surveillance outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) has sparked a hot debate in the press and in the blogosphere. But there is
something odd about the debate: It is aridly legal. Civil libertarians contend that the program is
illegal, even unconstitutional; some want President Bush impeached for breaking the law. The
administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does violate
FISA (the administration denies that it does), then, to that extent, the law is unconstitutional. This
legal debate is complex, even esoteric. But, apart from a handful of not very impressive anecdotes
(did the NSA program really prevent the Brooklyn Bridge from being destroyed by blowtorches?),
there has been little discussion of the program’s concrete value as a counter-terrorism
measure or of the inroads it has or has not made on liberty or privacy.
Not only are these questions more important to most people than the legal questions; they are
fundamental to those questions. Lawyers who are busily debating legality without first trying
to assess the consequences of the program have put the cart before the horse. Law in the
United States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy. In analyzing all but
the simplest legal questions, one is well advised to begin by asking what social policies are at
stake. Suppose the NSA program is vital to the nation’s defense, and its impingements on civil
liberties are slight. That would not prove the program’s legality, because not every good thing is
legal; law and policy are not perfectly aligned. But a conviction that the program had great merit
would shape and hone the legal inquiry. We would search harder for grounds to affirm its
legality, and, if our search were to fail, at least we would know how to change the law--or how to
change the program to make it comply with the law--without destroying its effectiveness. Similarly, if
the program’s contribution to national security were negligible--as we learn, also from the
Times, that some FBI personnel are indiscreetly whispering--and it is undermining our civil
liberties, this would push the legal analysis in the opposite direction.
Ronald Dworkin, the distinguished legal philosopher and constitutional theorist, wrote in The New
York Review of Books in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that “we cannot allow our
Constitution and our shared sense of decency to become a suicide pact.” He would doubtless
have said the same thing about FISA. If you approach legal issues in that spirit rather than in the
spirit of ruat caelum fiat iusticia (let the heavens fall so long as justice is done), you will want to
know how close to suicide a particular legal interpretation will bring you before you decide
whether to embrace it. The legal critics of the surveillance program have not done this, and
the defenders have for the most part been content to play on the critics’ turf.
7
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
1NC – Frontline Privacy [6/6]
6. Surveillance increases democratic accountability and makes discriminatory bias
impossible.
Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,
William H., 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance
Broad-based surveillance distributes its burdens widely, which may be fairer.
For democratic accountability, panopticon-style surveillance has an underappreciated
advantage. It may more easily accommodate transparency. Electronic surveillance is governed
by fully specified algorithms. Thus, disclosure of the algorithms gives a full picture of the
practices. By contrast, when government agents are told to scan for suspicious behavior, we
know very little about what criteria they are using. Even if we require the agents to articulate their
criteria, they may be unable to do so comprehensively. The concern is not just about good faith, but
also about unconscious predisposition. Psychologists have provided extensive evidence of
pervasive, unconscious bias based on race and other social stereotypes and stigma.
Algorithm-governed electronic surveillance has no such bias.
8
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions
(___)
(__)The NSA is well-regulated and constrained by judicial oversight.
Cohen, fellow at The Century Foundation, 2015
(Michael A. 6-3-2015, "NSA Surveillance Debate Drowned Out on Both Sides by Fear Tactics," World
Politics Review, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15905/nsa-surveillance-debate-drownedout-on-both-sides-by-fear-tacticsa)
The arguments of NSA opponents have, for two years, relied on hypothetical, trumped-up fears
of the government ransacking our private information. These concerns have been raised even
though, from all appearances, the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities are reasonably wellregulated and constrained by judicial oversight. NSA opponents like to point out that a recent
court decision determined that the bulk records collection program was illegal, which ignores the
many other court decisions that accepted its legality. More important, it ignores the decisions of the
secret FISA Court, which ordered the NSA not to scrap collection programs that were
determined to be operating unconstitutionally, but rather to make changes to them to get them
in line with constitutional constraints.
9
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions
(___)
(__) There’s no evidence of abuse of surveillance powers.
Simon, fellow at The Century Foundation, 2013,
(David, 7/3/13, "We are shocked, shocked...," http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/)
I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that
they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And
it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone,
somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely
because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net
that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce — witness
those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure — and sometimes for law
enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this
dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the
Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.
The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and
greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law
enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist.
The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety
needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate
personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.
And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S.
big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal
wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that
occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening.
As happens the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it
hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused —
particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic
surveillance of any kind.
10
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#2 Privacy Losses are Inevitable extensions
(___)
(__)Privacy is eroding now because of technological innovation.
Stalder, Sociology Professor at Queens University, 2009
(Felix, "Privacy is not the Antidote to Surveillance." Surveillance & Society 1.1 (2009): 120-124.)
The standard answer to these problems the call for our privacy to be protected. Privacy, though, is a
notoriously vague concept. Europeans have developed on of the most stringent approaches where
privacy is understood as ‘informational self-determination’. This, basically, means that an individual
should be able to determine the extent to which data about her or him is being collected in any given
context. Following this definition, privacy is a kind of bubble that surrounds each person, and the
dimensions of this bubble are determined by one's ability to control who enters it and who doesn't.
Privacy is a personal space; space under the exclusive control of the individual. Privacy, in a way, is
the informational equivalent to the (bourgeois, if you will) notion of "my home is my castle." As
appealing and seemingly intuitive as this concept is, it plainly doesn't work. Everyone agrees
that our privacy has been eroding for a very long time – hence the notion of the "surveillance
society" – and there is absolutely no indication that the trend is going to slow down, let alone
reverse. Even in the most literal sense, the walls of our castles are being pierced by more and more
connections to the outside world. It started with the telephone, the TV and the Internet, but imagine
when your fridge begins to communicate with your palm pilot, updating the shopping list as you run
out of milk, and perhaps even sending a notice to the grocer for home delivery. Or maybe the stove
will alert the fire department because you didn't turn off the hot plate before rushing out one
morning.6
A less futuristic example of this connectivity would be smoke detectors that are connected to alarm
response systems. Outside the home, it becomes even more difficult to avoid entering into
relationships that produce electronic, personal data. Only the most zealous will opt for standing in
line to pay cash at the toll both every day, if they can just breeze through an electronic gate instead.
This problem is made even more complicated by the fact that there are certain cases in which we
want "them" to have our data. Complete absence from databanks is neither practical nor
desirable. For example, it can be a matter of life and death to have instant access to
comprehensive and up-to-date health-related information about the people who are being
brought into the emergency room unconscious. This information needs to be too detailed and
needs to be updated too often – for example to include all prescriptiondrugs a person is currently
using – to be issued on, say, a smartcard held by the individual, hence giving him or her full control
over who accesses it. To make matters worse, with privacy being by definition personal, every
single person will have a different notion about what privacy means. Data one person might
allow to be collected might be deeply personal for someone else. This makes it very difficult to
collectively agree on the legitimate boundaries of the privacy bubble.
11
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#3 Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions
(___)
(__)Privacy can’t be restored – technological and corporate invasions happen all the time.
Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studeies, 2014
(James Andrew “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - Center For Strategic &
International Studies - Strategic Technologies Program – December http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate)
On average, there are 16 tracking programs on every website.4 This means that when you visit
a website, it collects and reports back to 16 companies on what you’ve looked at and what you
have done. These programs are invisible to the user. They collect IP address, operating system
and browser data, the name of the visiting computer, what you looked at, and how long you
stayed. This data can be made even more valuable when it is matched with other data collections.
Everything a consumer does online is tracked and collected. There is a thriving and largely
invisible market in aggregating data on individuals and then selling it for commercial purposes.
Data brokers collect utility bills, addresses, education, arrest records (arrests, not just convictions). All
of this data is recorded, stored, and made available for sale. Social networking sites sell user data in
some anonymized form so that every tweet or social media entry can be used to calculate market
trends and refine advertising strategies. What can be predicted from this social media data is
amazing—unemployment trends, disease outbreaks, consumption patterns for different groups,
consumer preferences, and political trends. It is often more accurate than polling because it reflects
peoples’ actual behavior rather than the answer they think an interviewer wants to hear. Ironically,
while the ability of U.S. agencies to use this commercial data is greatly restricted by law and policy,
the same restrictions do not apply to foreign governments. The development of the Internet would
have been very different and less dynamic if these business models had not been developed.
They provide incentives and financial returns to develop or improve Internet services. There is
an implicit bargain where you give up privacy in exchange for services, but in bargains between
service providers and consumers, one side holds most of the cards and there is little
transparency. But the data-driven models of the Internet mean that it is an illusion to think that
there is privacy online or that NSA is the only entity harvesting personal data.
12
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#3 Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions
(___)
(__)Corporations commit much worse privacy violations.
Lowry, Editor, the National Review, 2015,
(Rich, , 5-27-2015, "Lowry: NSA data program faces death by bumper sticker," Salt Lake Tribune,
http://www.sltrib.com/csp/mediapool/sites/sltrib/pages/printfriendly.csp?id=2557534)
In the context of all that is known about us by private companies, the NSA is a piker. Take the
retailer Target, for example. According to The New York Times, it collects your “demographic
information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live
in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved
recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit.” Of course,
the Fourth Amendment applies to the government, not private entities like Target. The amendment
protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”
If the NSA were breaking into homes and seizing metadata that people had carefully hidden
away from prying eyes, it would be in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment. But no one
is in possession of his or her own metadata. Even if the NSA didn’t exist, metadata would be
controlled by someone else, the phone companies. The Supreme Court has held that you don’t
have an expectation of privacy for such information in the possession of a third party. One
frightening way to look at mail delivery is that agents of the state examine and handle the
correspondence of countless of millions of Americans. They aren’t violating anyone’s Fourth
Amendment rights, though, because no one expects the outside of their envelopes to be
private.
13
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#4 Security Consequences come before Privacy- extensions
(___)
(__)Terrorism and fear chill speech and democracy more than surveillance.
Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,
(William H, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance
With low crime rates and small risks of terrorism in the United States, privacy advocates do
not feel compelled to address the potential chilling effect on speech and conduct that arises
from fear of private lawlessness, but we do not have to look far to see examples of such an effect
abroad and to recognize that its magnitude depends on the effectiveness of public law enforcement.
To the extent that law enforcement is enhanced by surveillance, we ought to recognize the
possibility of a warming effect that strengthens people’s confidence that they can act and
speak without fear of private aggression.
(__) Security is more important than privacy because if people aren’t secure the right to
privacy is meaningless.
Himma, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University, 2007
Kenneth Einar,. "Privacy versus security: Why privacy is not an absolute value or right." San Diego L.
Rev. 44 (2007): 857.
The last argument I wish to make in this essay will be brief because it is extremely well known and
has been made in a variety of academic and nonacademic contexts. The basic point here is that no
right not involving security can be meaningfully exercised in the absence of efficacious
protection of security. The right to property means nothing if the law fails to protect against
threats to life and bodily security. Likewise, the right to privacy has little value if one feels
constrained to remain in one's home because it is so unsafe to venture away that one
significantly risks death or grievous bodily injury. This is not merely a matter of describing
common subjective preferences; this is rather an objective fact about privacy and security interests. If
security interests are not adequately protected, citizens will simply not have much by way of
privacy interests to protect. While it is true, of course, that people have privacy interests in
what goes on inside the confines of their home, they also have legitimate privacy interests in a
variety of public contexts that cannot be meaningfully exercised if one is afraid to venture out
into those contexts because of significant threats to individual and collective security-such as
would be the case if terrorist attacks became highly probable in those contexts. It is true, of
course, that to say that X is a prerequisite for exercising a particular right Y does not obviously entail
that X is morally more important than Y, but this is a reasonable conclusion to draw. If it is true that Y
is meaningless in the absence of X, then it seems clear that X deserves, as a moral matter, more
stringent protection than Y does. Since privacy interests lack significance in the absence of
adequate protection of security interests, it seems reasonable to infer that security interests
deserve, as a moral matter, more stringent protection than privacy interests.
14
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#4 Security Consequences come before Privacy- extensions
(___)
(__)Privacy rights are not absolute, security and preserving life is more important.
Himma, 2007
Kenneth Einar, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. "Privacy versus
security: Why privacy is not an absolute value or right." San Diego L. Rev. 44 (2007): 857.
From an intuitive standpoint, the idea that the right to privacy is an absolute right seems utterly
implausible. Intuitively, it seems clear that there are other rights that are so much more
important that they easily trump privacy rights in the event of a conflict. For example, if a
psychologist knows that a patient is highly likely to commit a murder, then it is, at the very
least, morally permissible to disclose that information about the patient in order to prevent the
crime-regardless of whether such information would otherwise be protected by privacy rights.
Intuitively, it seems clear that life is more important from the standpoint of morality than any of
the interests protected by a moral right to privacy. Still one often hears-primarily from academics
in information schools and library schools, especially in connection with the controversy regarding
the USA PATRIOT Act-the claim that privacy should never be sacrificed for security, implicitly
denying what I take to be the underlying rationale for the PATRIOT Act. This also seems
counterintuitive because it does not seem unreasonable to believe we have a moral right to
security that includes the right to life. Although this right to security is broader than the right to life,
the fact that security interests include our interests in our lives implies that the right to privacy trumps
even the right to life-something that seems quite implausible from an intuitive point of view. If I have
to give up the most private piece of information about myself to save my life or protect myself
from either grievous bodily injury or financial ruin, I would gladly do so without hesitation.
There are many things I do not want you to know about me, but should you make a credible
threat to my life, bodily integrity, financial security, or health, and then hook me up to a lie detector
machine, I will truthfully answer any question you ask about me. I value my privacy a lot, but I
value my life, bodily integrity, and financial security much more than any of the interests
protected by the right to privacy.
15
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#5 Posner – Balancing Good—Extensions
(___)
(__)The counter-terror benefits of mass surveillance outweigh privacy and the Constitution.
Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on the United States Court
of Appeals, 2006
(Richard A. “Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis,” Washington Post, December 21st,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001053.html
The goal of national security intelligence is to prevent a terrorist attack, not just punish the
attacker after it occurs, and the information that enables the detection of an impending attack
may be scattered around the world in tiny bits. A much wider, finer-meshed net must be cast
than when investigating a specific crime. Many of the relevant bits may be in the e-mails,
phone conversations or banking records of U.S. citizens, some innocent, some not so
innocent. The government is entitled to those data, but just for the limited purpose of
protecting national security.The Pentagon's rush to fill gaps in domestic intelligence reflects the
disarray in this vital yet neglected area of national security. The principal domestic intelligence agency
is the FBI, but it is primarily a criminal investigation agency that has been struggling, so far with
limited success, to transform itself. It is having trouble keeping its eye on the ball; an FBI official is
quoted as having told the Senate that environmental and animal rights militants pose the biggest
terrorist threats in the United States. If only that were so. Most other nations, such as Britain,
Canada, France, Germany and Israel, many with longer histories of fighting terrorism than the United
States, have a domestic intelligence agency that is separate from its national police force, its
counterpart to the FBI. We do not. We also have no official with sole and comprehensive
responsibility for domestic intelligence. It is no surprise that gaps in domestic intelligence are
being filled by ad hoc initiatives.We must do better. The terrorist menace, far from receding,
grows every day. This is not only because al Qaeda likes to space its attacks, often by many
years, but also because weapons of mass destruction are becoming ever more accessible to
terrorist groups and individuals.
16
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#5 Posner – Balancing Good—Extensions
(___)
(__) NSA data collection does not violate rights since computers filter the massive amount of
data for key signals before a human ever sees the data.
Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on the United States Court
of Appeals, 2006
(Richard A. “Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis,” Washington Post, December 21st,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001053.html
These programs are criticized as grave threats to civil liberties. They are not. Their
significance is in flagging the existence of gaps in our defenses against terrorism. The
Defense Department is rushing to fill those gaps, though there may be better ways. The collection,
mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy.
But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of
their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses,
phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading
privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any
intelligence officer. The data that make the cut are those that contain clues to possible threats to
national security. The only valid ground for forbidding human inspection of such data is fear that they
might be used to blackmail or otherwise intimidate the administration's political enemies. That danger
is more remote than at any previous period of U.S. history. Because of increased political
partisanship, advances in communications technology and more numerous and competitive media,
American government has become a sieve. No secrets concerning matters that would interest
the public can be kept for long. And the public would be far more interested to learn that public
officials were using private information about American citizens for base political ends than to learn
that we have been rough with terrorist suspects – a matter that was quickly exposed despite efforts at
concealment. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it difficult to conduct surveillance
of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents unless they are suspected of being involved in
terrorist or other hostile activities. That is too restrictive. Innocent people, such as unwitting
neighbors of terrorists, may, without knowing it, have valuable counterterrorist information.
Collecting such information is of a piece with data-mining projects such as Able Danger.
17
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#6 Mass Surveillance Decreases Discrimination- extension
(___)
(__)Mass surveillance is less discriminatory because it targets everyone equally.
Hadjimatheou, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, 2014
(Katerina, Security Ethics Group, “The Relative Moral Risks of Untargeted and Targeted Surveillance”
Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2014) 17:187–207 DOI 10.1007/s10677-013-9428-1)
There are good reasons to think that both the extent to which surveillance treats people like suspects
and the extent to which it stigmatises those it affects increases the more targeted the measure of
surveillance. As has already been established, stigmatisation occurs when individuals are
marked out as suspicious. Being marked out implies being identified in some way that
distinguishes one from other members of the wider community or the relevant group. Being
pulled out of line for further search or questioning at an airport; being stopped and searched on
a busy train platform while other passengers are left alone; having one’s travel history, credit card,
and other records searched before flying because one fits a profile of a potential terroristthese are all examples of being singled out and thereby marked out for suspicion. They are all
stigmatising, because they all imply that there is something suspicious about a person that
justifies the intrusion.
In contrast, untargeted surveillance such as blanket screening at airports, spot screening of all
school lockers for drugs, and the use of speed cameras neither single people out for scrutiny
nor enact or convey a suspicion that those surveilled are more likely than others to be
breaking the rules. Rather, everybody engaged in the relevant activity is subject to the same
measure of surveillance, indiscriminately and irrespective of any evidence suggesting
particular suspiciousness. Such evidence may well emerge from the application of untargeted
surveillance, and that evidence may then be used to justify singling people out for further, targeted
surveillance. But untargeted surveillance itself affects all people within its range equally and
thus stigmatises none in particular.
18
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
#6 Mass Surveillance Decreases Discrimination- extension
(___)
(__)Mass surveillance solves discrimination.
Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,
William H. Simon, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance
More generally, broad-reach electronic mechanisms have an advantage in addressing the
danger that surveillance will be unfairly concentrated on particular groups; targeting criteria,
rather than reflecting rigorous efforts to identify wrongdoers, may reflect cognitive bias or group
animus. Moreover, even when the criteria are optimally calculated to identify wrongdoers, they may
be unfair to law-abiding people who happen to share some superficial characteristic with wrongdoers.
Thus, law-abiding blacks complain that they are unfairly burdened by stop-and-frisk tactics,
and law-abiding Muslims make similar complaints about anti-terrorism surveillance.
Such problems are more tractable with broad-based electronic surveillance. Because it is
broad-based, it distributes some of its burdens widely. This may be intrinsically fairer, and it
operates as a political safeguard, making effective protest more likely in cases of abuse. Because it
is electronic, the efficacy of the criteria can be more easily investigated, and their effect on lawabiding people can be more accurately documented. Thus, plaintiffs in challenges to stop-and-frisk
practices analyze electronically recorded data on racial incidence and “hit rates” to argue that the
criteria are biased and the effects racially skewed. Remedies in such cases typically require more
extensive recording.
19
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answers to: Privacy is a Right
(___)
(__)Their understanding of privacy rights as personal will fail because it’s impossible in
modern society.
Stalder, 2009,
Felix. Department of Sociology, Queens University "Privacy is not the Antidote to Surveillance."
Surveillance & Society 1.1 (2009): 120-124.
So rather than fight those connections – some of which are clearly beneficial, some of which are
somewhat ambiguous, and some are clearly disconcerting – we have to reconceptualize what these
connections do. Rather than seeing them as acts of individual transgression (X has invaded Y’s
privacy) we have to see them part of a new landscape of social power. Rather than continuing
on the defensive, by trying to maintain an ever-weakening illusion of privacy, we have to shift
to the offensive and start demanding accountability of those whose power is enhanced by the
new connections. In a democracy, political power is, at least ideally, tamed by making the
government accountable to those who are governed, not by carving out areas in which the law
doesn't apply. It is, in this perspective, perhaps no co-incidence that many of the strongest
privacy advocates (at least in the US) lean politically towards libertarianism, a movement
which includes on its fringe white militias which try to set up zones liberated from the US
government. In our democracies, extensive institutional mechanisms have been put into to
place to create and maintain accountability, and to punish those who abuse their power. We need
to develop and instate similar mechanisms for the handling of personal information – a
technique as crucial to power as the ability to exercise physical violence – in order to limit the
concentration of power inherent in situations that involve unchecked surveillance. The current
notion of privacy, which frames the issue as a personal one, won't help us accomplish that.9
However, notions of institutionalized accountability will, because they acknowledge surveillance as a
structural problem of political power. It's time to update our strategies for resistance and develop
approaches adequate to the actual situation rather than sticking to appealing but inadequate
ideas that will keep locking us into unsustainable positions.
20
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answers to: Privacy is a Right
(___)
(__)There should not be a universal ethical rule against surveillance, the context matters.
Stoddart, 2014
Eric. School of Divinity, University of St Andrews "Challenging ‘Just Surveillance Theory’: A Response
to Kevin Macnish’s ‘Just Surveillance? Towards a Normative Theory of Surveillance’." Surveillance &
Society 12.1 (2014): 158-163.
I am sorry to say that I find Macnish's aim of a normative ethics of surveillance to be an
unnecessary goal. I could be persuaded that a radically revised model of practical reasoning based
on the Just War Tradition might have saliency for investigative strategies involving surveillance
technologies. However, 'surveillance' is much too all-encompassing a term to be the subject of
its own ethics. There can be no 'ethics of surveillance' but there may be norms appropriate for
particular contexts of surveillance. This means examining specific domains in which
surveillance is deployed, along with other strategies, to address concerns or challenges. For
example, the ethics of surveillance in elderly care or the ethics of surveillance in education are
valuable discussions to be had. My point is that it ought to be the ethics of elderly care that is
foregrounded within which we would be seek to understand the ethical deployment of surveillance
mechanisms.
21
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answers to: Surveillance Violates 4th Amendment
(___)
(__)NSA programs don’t violate the Fourth Amendment because the information has been
given to a third-party.
Herman & Yoo, 2014
Yoo, John, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute and Arthur Herman. senior fellow at Hudson Institute. "A Defense of
Bulk Surveillance." National Review 65 (2014): 31-33.
Considering the millions of phone numbers making billions of phone calls that year and every year,
these levels of surveillance can hardly be considered a major intrusive system. But what
about the program’s constitutionality and alleged violation of the Fourth Amendment? The
Fourth Amendment does not protect some vague and undefined right to privacy. Instead, it
declares: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause.” The Constitution protects only the privacy of the “person,” the
home, and “papers and effects,” which are usually located in the home. It does not reach
information or things that we voluntarily give up to the government or to third parties outside
of the home or our persons. The Fourth Amendment also does not make such information
absolutely immune—it is still subject to search if the government is acting reasonably or has a
warrant. These basic principles allow the government to search through massive databases of
call and e-mail records when doing so is a reasonable measure to protect the nation’s
security, which is its highest duty.
22
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom [1/2]
(__) Surveillance doesn’t harm freedom or autonomy, because they aren’t reliant on digital
communication.
Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015
(Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics &
International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.
The second harm Greenwald sees surveillance posing is personal in nature. Surveillance is said to
undermine the very essence of human freedom because the “range of choices people
consider when they believe that others are watching is . . . far more limited than what they might
do when acting in a private realm.”16 Internet-based surveillance is viewed as especially damaging in
this respect because this is “where virtually everything is done” in our day, making it the place “where
we develop and express our very personality and sense of self.” Hence, “to permit surveillance to
take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and
even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.”17
This claim too seems overstated in two respects. First, it exaggerates the extent to which our
self-development hinges upon electronic communication channels and other related activities
that leave electronic traces. The arrival of the Internet certainly opens new vistas, but it does not
entirely close earlier ones. A person who fears what her browsing habits might communicate to
the authorities can obtain texts offline. Similarly, an individual who fears transmitting materials
electronically can do so in person, as Snowden did when communicating with Greenwald.
There are costs to communicating in such “old-fashioned” ways, but these costs are neither
new nor prohibitive. Second, a substantial part of our self-development takes place in public.
We become who we are through personal, social, and intellectual engagements, but these
engagements do not always have to be premised on anonymity. Not everyone wants to hide
all the time, which is why public engagement—through social media or blogs, for instance—is
such a central aspect of the contemporary Internet.
(__) Surveillance doesn’t destroy freedom, we’re doing fine.
Seemann, freelance writer focusing on technology, 2015,
(Michael, “ Digital Tailspin Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden” The Network Notebooks series
March 2015 http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NN09_Digital_Tailspin_SP.pdf)
Our digital lives have been monitored, not just occasionally or recently, but continuously for
the past ten years. That means that if total surveillance were as much a risk to personal
freedom and individuality as digital rights activists have been suggesting for a long time, no
one in the Western hemisphere would be able to feel free or individualistic any more. In other
words, the question of whether we can live with total surveillance has already been answered
in a way that is by no means hypothetical, but decidedly empirical: yes, we can, and we have
been doing so for more than ten years.
23
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom [2/2]
(___)
(__) The claims about authoritarianism are hyperbolic and paranoid. All law enforcement
practice might be used improperly, but accountability checks the worst practices.
Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,
William H. Simon, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance
The third trope of the paranoid style is the slippery slope argument. The idea is that an innocuous
step in a feared direction will inexorably lead to further steps that end in catastrophe. As The Music
Man (1962) puts it in explaining why a pool table will lead to moral collapse in River City, Iowa,
“medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle.” In this spirit, Daniel Solove in Nothing to
Hide (2011) explains why broad surveillance is a threat even when limited to detection of
unlawful activity. First, surveillance will sometimes lead to mistaken conclusions that will harm
innocent people. Second, since “everyone violates the law sometimes” (think of moderate speeding
on the highway), surveillance will lead to over-enforcement of low-stakes laws (presumably by
lowering the costs of enforcement), or perhaps the use of threats of enforcement of minor misconduct
to force people to give up rights (as for example, where police threaten to bring unrelated charges in
order to induce a witness or co-conspirator to cooperate in the prosecution of another). And finally,
even if we authorize broad surveillance for legitimate purposes, officials will use the
authorization as an excuse to extend their activities in illegitimate ways. Yet, slippery slope
arguments can be made against virtually any kind of law enforcement. Most law enforcement
infringes privacy. (“Murder is the most private act a man can commit,” William Faulkner wrote.) And
most law enforcement powers have the potential for abuse. What we can reasonably ask is,
first, that the practices are calibrated effectively to identify wrongdoers; second, that the burden
they put on law-abiding people is fairly distributed; and third, that officials are accountable for the
lawfulness of their conduct both in designing and in implementing the practices.
24
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answer to Surveillance has chilling effect
(__)Surveillance does not eliminate dissent, empirical examples demonstrate the opposite.
Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015
(Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics &
International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.
Greenwald identifies two major harms. The first is political in nature. Mass surveillance is said
to stifle dissent because “a citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a
compliant and fearful one.” Compliance occurs because, anticipating being shamed or condemned for
nonconformist behavior, individuals who know they are being watched “think only in line with what is
expected and demanded.”13 Even targeted forms of surveillance are not to be trusted, Greenwald
argues, because the “indifference or support of those who think themselves exempt invariably allows
for the misuse of power to spread far beyond its original application.”14
These claims strike me as overblown. The more extreme claim, that surveillance furthers
thought control, is neither logical nor supported by the facts. It is logically flawed because
accusing someone of trying to control your mind proves that they have not succeeded in doing so. On
a more practical level, the fate met by states that have tried to perfect mass control—the Soviet
Union and the German Democratic Republic, for example—suggests that surveillance cannot
eliminate dissent. It is also not clear that surveillance can undermine dissident movements as easily
as Greenwald posits. The United States' record, he writes, “is suffused with examples of groups and
individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and
activism—Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists.”15
These cases are certainly troubling, but it hardly needs pointing out that surveillance did not prevent
the end of segregation, retreat from Vietnam, and the rise of environmental consciousness. This
record suggests that dissident movements that have public opinion on their side are not
easily intimidated by state surveillance (a point reinforced by the Arab Spring).
Surveillance may make it harder for individuals to associate with movements on the far ends
of the political spectrum. But why must a liberal democracy refrain from monitoring extremist
groups such as neo-Nazis and anarchists? There is the danger that officials could label as
“extreme” legitimate movements seeking to challenge the prevailing order. Yet the possibility that
surveillance programs could expand beyond their original ambit does not constitute a good
reason to end surveillance altogether. A more proportionate response is to see that
surveillance powers are subject to oversight.
25
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Answers to Surveillance is Tyranny
(___)
(__)The argument that NSA surveillance enables tyranny is wrong. The data exists inevitably
and if you are concerned about the risk of a tyrant taking over, there are much bigger issues
than privacy to be concerned about.
Etzioni, Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University, 2014
(Amitai, Intelligence and National Security (2014): NSA: National Security vs. Individual Rights,
Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2013.867221)
Part VI: The Coming Tyrant?
A common claim among civil libertarians is that, even if little harm is presently being inflicted by
government surveillance programs, the infrastructure is in place for a less-benevolent leader to
violate the people’s rights and set us on the path to tyranny. For example, it has been argued
that PRISM ‘will amount to a “turnkey” system that, in the wrong hands, could transform the
country into a totalitarian state virtually overnight. Every person who values personal freedom,
human rights and the rule of law must recoil against such a possibility, regardless of their political
preference’.177 And Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been ‘careful to point out that he is concerned
about the possible abuses of some future, Hitler-like president’.178 A few things might be said in
response.
First, all of the data that the government is collecting is already being archived (at least for
short periods – as discussed above) by private corporations and other entities. It is not the case
that PRISM or other such programs entail the collection of new data that was not previously
available.
Second, if one is truly concerned that a tyrant might take over the United States, one obviously
faces a much greater and all-encompassing threat than a diminution of privacy. And the
response has to be similarly expansive. One can join civic bodies that seek to shore up
democracies, or work with various reform movements and public education drives, or ally with
groups that prepare to retreat to the mountains, store ammunition and essential foods, and
plan to fight the tyrannical forces. But it makes no sense to oppose limited measures to
enhance security on these grounds.
26
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Privacy Rights
Surveillance Protects Rights
(___)
(__)Private abuse of digital information is worse and only surveillance can stop that.
Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,
William H. Simon, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance
The critics’ preoccupation with the dangers of state oppression often leads them to overlook
the dangers of private abuse of surveillance. They have a surprisingly difficult time coming up
with actual examples of serious harm from government surveillance abuse. Instead, they tend
to talk about the “chilling effect” from awareness of surveillance.
By contrast, there have been many examples of serious harm from private abuse of personal
information gained from digital sources. At least one person has committed suicide as a
consequence of the Internet publication of video showing him engaged in sexual activity. Many
people have been humiliated by the public release of a private recording of intimate conduct,
and blackmail based on threats of such disclosure has emerged as a common practice. Some
of this private abuse is and should be illegal. But the legal prohibitions can only be enforced if the
government has some of the surveillance capacities that critics decry. Illicit recording and
distribution can only be restrained if the wrongdoers can be identified and their actions
effectively restrained. Less compromising critics would deny government these capacities.
27
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Economy Advantage [1/5]
1. Cannot solve foreign businesses -- companies based outside of the US won’t be protected.
Mackinnon, Director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America Foundation, 2014
(Rebecca, 5-19-2014, "Saving Privacy," No Publication, http://bostonreview.net/forum/savingprivacy/rebecca-mackinnon-response-saving-privacy)
While Internet companies are essential to the U.S. economy, not all of their work is done
domestically. Their future business success depends on overseas markets, but access to
those markets depends in turn on the trust of non-American users and customers. This
creates a challenge for legal reform. If the consequences of insufficiently accountable NSA
surveillance only concerned Americans, then Hundt’s law-based solution—combined with
commitments by companies and the U.S. government to support encryption and the right of Internet
users to be anonymous—would probably do the trick. But U.S. companies have global
“constituencies,” a term I prefer to “users” for reasons I explain in my 2012 book Consent of the
Networked. NSA surveillance—and surveillance by most other governments via corporate-run
platforms and networks—affects people around the world who have no leverage over U.S.
lawmakers. At the same time, other countries can place before U.S. companies obstacles that
American laws are powerless to overturn. So while legal reform in the United States is
necessary, we also need parallel processes across the democratic world. The Freedom Online
Coalition, a group of twenty-two democracies, has begun to take positive steps in this regard, and the
international human rights community is pushing for such reforms.
28
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Economy Advantage [2/5]
2. The benefits of cloud computing are too valuable to corporations to pass up, NSA spying
doesn’t matter.
Perez, Assistant News Editor PC World, 2013
(Juan Carlos, 12-5-2013, "Why CIOs stick with cloud computing despite NSA snooping scandal,"
PCWorld, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2069681/why-cios-stick-with-cloud-computing-despite-nsasnooping-scandal.html)
Stealthy monitoring of computer systems and communications by governments currently
doesn’t rank among the top IT security concerns for many IT leaders. “Every CIO will tell you
we worry every minute of every day about security, privacy, redundancy, operational
continuity, disaster recovery and the like,” said Michael Heim, Whirlpool’s corporate vice
president and global CIO. “We’re probably the most paranoid guys on the planet.” Jacques
Marzin, director of Disic, France’s interministerial IT and communications directorate, said the NSA
scandal confirmed the known risks associated with the use of public cloud services. “We are
of course concerned about any third party access to our data although we have limited usage of
public clouds,” he said. However, having everything behind the firewall also carries risks. CIOs
worry about the cost and complexity of running servers on their own premises and the
potential loss of competitiveness if rivals are taking advantage of the benefits of cloud
computing. ”At the end of the day, the capabilities and economics around the cloud
computing model are so compelling that when you artificially try to not take advantage of
them you impact your ability to compete, because others will take advantage of them,” Heim
said. Whirlpool recently decided to move about 30,000 employees from an on premises IBM Lotus
Notes system to the Google Apps public cloud email and collaboration suite. ”We believe we have a
very good plan in place to make sure we’re just as compliant and secure, if not more so, than
we were before,” Heim said.
29
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Economy Advantage [3/5]
3. Fears of tech industry losses due to the NSA scandal were overblown.
Henderson, Editor and Chief at the Whir, 2015
(Nicole, 4-10-2015, "Impact of NSA Surveillance on US Cloud Providers Not as Bad as We Thought:
Forrester," Data Center Knowledge, http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/impact-nsasurveillance-us-cloud-providers-not-bad-thought-forrester )
It’s been two years since Edward Snowden leaked details of the NSA’s PRISM surveillance
program, and although analysts predicted an exodus from US-based cloud and hosting
services in response to the revelations, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way, a new report
finds.
Forrester released a new report last week that suggests concerns around international
customers severing ties with US-based hosting and cloud companies “were overblown.”
“Lost revenue from spending on cloud services and platforms comes to just over $500 million
between 2014 and 2016. While significant, these impacts are far less than speculated, as more
companies reported taking control of security and encryption instead of walking away from US
providers,” Forrester’s principal analyst serving security and risk professionals Edward Ferrara said
in a blog post.
4. The cloud industry is growing despite NSA spying.
Finley, writer with Wired Business, 2014
(Klint, 2-27-2014, "Amazon’s Cloud Keeps Growing Despite Fears of NSA Spying," WIRED,
http://www.wired.com/2014/02/amazon-cloud-size/)
When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting
digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost
U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and
countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well. People
would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers, the argument went, rather than
host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA. But it looks like the
cloud industry is still growing. And in very big way. The world’s largest cloud computing
services — services where you can run software and store data without buying your own
hardware — are run by Amazon, and according to a new study from independent researcher
Huan Liu, Amazon’s operation grew by a whopping 62 percent over the past two years. What’s
more, the study shows that growth has been steady since June 2013, when the Snowden
revelations first hit the news. In fact, there’s been a surge since December of last year.
30
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Economy Advantage [4/5]
5. Multiple factors generate internet fragmentation, not just surveillance: dominance of
international bodies and cyber crime.
Patrick, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 2014
(Stewart, “The Obama Administration Must Act Fast to Prevent the Internet’s Fragmentation,” The
Internationalist, 2-26-2014, http://blogs.cfr.org/patrick/2014/02/26/the-obama-administration-must-actfast-to-prevent-the-internets-fragmentation/
Since the dawn of the digital age, the United States had consistently supported an open,
decentralized, and secure cyber domain that remains largely in private hands. Even before the
Snowden disclosures, that vision was under threat, thanks to disagreements among
governments on three fundamental issues. First, some world leaders are questioning whether
the ITU( International Telecommunications Union) ought to play a more active role in
regulating cyberspace. To the degree that the Internet is “governed,” the primary regulatory body
remains ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), an independent,
nonprofit corporation based in Los Angeles. The outsized role of ICANN—and the widespread
perception of U.S. (and broader Western) control over the Internet—has long been a sore point for
authoritarian states, as well as many developing countries, which would prefer to move cyber
governance to the intergovernmental ITU. A second threat to the open Internet has been a surge
in cyber crime—and disagreement over how to hold sovereign jurisdictions accountable for
criminality emanating from their territories. Estimates of the magnitude of cyber crime range from
large to astronomical. In 2012, NSA director general Keith Alexander put the annual global cost at $1
trillion. Most cyber crime is undertaken by nonstate actors against private sector targets for
motives of financial gain. But national authorities have also been involved in economic espionage,
both directly and through proxies. The most infamous case involves a unit of China’s People’s
Liberation Army, which allegedly has been at the forefront of Chinese hacking efforts to steal
industrial secrets and technology from leading U.S. companies.
31
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Economy Advantage [5/5]
6. Economic collapse doesn’t cause war
Drezner, Law Professor at Tufts, 2012,
(Daniel, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked”, October 2012,
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_TheIrony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)
The final 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.37 Whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a
ratcheting up of great power conflict, there were genuine concerns that the global economic
downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the
South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in
global public disorder.
The aggregate data suggests otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has
constructed a “Global Peace Index” annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from the 2012
report is that “The average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in
2007.”38 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; the secular decline in violence that
started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.39 Rogers Brubaker concludes, “the
crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that
might have been expected.”40
None of these data suggest that the global economy is operating swimmingly. Growth remains
unbalanced and fragile, and has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational capital flows remain depressed
compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a drying up of cross-border interbank lending in
Europe. Currency volatility remains an ongoing concern. Compared to the aftermath of other postwar
recessions, growth in output, investment, and employment in the developed world have all lagged
behind. But the Great Recession is not like other postwar recessions in either scope or kind;
expecting a standard “V”-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst characterized the
post-2008 global economy as in a state of “contained depression.”41 The key word is “contained,”
however. Given the severity, reach and depth of the 2008 financial crisis, the proper
comparison is with Great Depression. And by that standard, the outcome variables look
impressive. As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This Time is Different: “that its
macroeconomic outcome has been only the most severe global recession since World War II – and
not even worse – must be regarded as fortunate.”42
32
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
Turn - NSA Spying helps Cybersecurity Sector [1/2]
(__) NSA spying helps the cybersecurity sector.
Menn, Reporting for Reuters, 2013
(Joseph, Reuters, “ANALYSIS-Despite fears, NSA revelations helping U.S. tech industry,” Reuters
15 September 2013 Factiva)
BOON FOR ENCRYPTION SECTOR
As for the upside, so far only a minority of people and businesses are tackling encryption on
their own or moving to privacy-protecting Web browsers, but encryption is expected to get
easier with more new entrants. Snowden himself said that strong encryption, applied correctly, was
still reliable, even though the NSA has cracked or circumvented most of the ordinary, built-in security
around Web email and financial transactions. James Denaro, a patent attorney with security training
in Washington, was already using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a complicated system for encrypting
email, before the Snowden leaks. Afterward, he adopted phone and text encryption as well to protect
client information. "One of the results we see from Snowden is an increased awareness across
the board about the incredible cyber insecurity," Denaro said. Some early adopters of encryption
have senior jobs inside companies, and they could bring their habits to the office and eventually
change the technology habits of the whole workplace, in the same way that executive fondness for
iPhones and iPads prompted more companies to allow them access to corporate networks. "Clients
are now inquiring how they can protect their data overseas, what kinds of access the states
might have and what controls or constraints they could put in with residency or encryption,"
said Gartner researcher Lawrence Pingree, formerly chief security architect at PeopleSoft, later
bought by Oracle. Richard Stiennon, a security industry analyst and author, predicted that
security spending will rise sharply. A week ago, Google said it had intensified encryption of
internal data flows after learning about NSA practices from Snowden's files, and consultants are
urging other big businesses to do the same. Stiennon said that after more companies encrypt, the
NSA and other agencies will spend more to break through, accelerating a lucrative cycle.
"They will start focusing on the encrypted data, because that's where all the good stuff is,"
Stiennon said. Already, in a fiscal 2013 federal budget request from the intelligence community
published this month by the Washington Post, officials wrote that investing in
"groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" was a top priority. (Reporting by Joseph Menn;
Editing by Jonathan Weber and Ken Wills)
33
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
Turn - NSA Spying helps Cybersecurity Sector [2/2]
(__) Cybersecurity is a massive growth sector, its key to the economy.
Sorcher, deputiy editor at The Christian Science Monitor, 2015
(Sara, 5-3-2015, "The cyber gold rush," Christian Science Monitor,
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0503/The-cyber-gold-rush
While California’s Silicon Valley is the technology capital of America, cities and states across
the country are now vying to dominate the next big economic frontier – the booming market
for securing what actually lies within the nation’s electronic networks. From California to Texas
to Florida, public and private groups are positioning themselves to win millions in federal contracts
and from venture capital firms. Some are going to extraordinary lengths to build what they call “a
cybersecurity ecosystem.” They are commissioning economic-impact studies, hatching tax-incentive
packages, and hiring PR firms to devise branding strategies. They are investing in start-ups with
money from state coffers. With as many as 300,000 cybersecurity jobs in the United States
going unfilled last year alone, according to security company Symantec, they are also crafting
academic programs for public universities to win research grants and generate the next
generation of highly skilled workers poised to make six-figure salaries – and stay local. The
nation has seen all this before, of course. The cyber gold rush is part of an enduring attempt by
cities and states to tap the next great emerging industry in the name of economic salvation.
From the birth of the automobile and steel industries, through the aerospace, computer, and biotech
eras, communities have sought to ride industrial cycles to prosperity and middle-class comfort. Some
were successful. Some weren’t. Now cybersecurity promises to produce a similar spreadsheet of
winners and losers – with a few notable differences. Unlike the actual gold rush in California in the
mid-1800s, or the clustering of manufacturing industries in the Northeast and upper Midwest decades
later, the cybersecurity gold rush is not dependent on the availability of natural resources. And unlike
the automobile industry, an ability to build physical structures or sprawling factories to dominate the
competition through mass production will not determine which city becomes the epicenter of data
protection. Economists note the start-up cost to be a cybersecurity hub – even with pricey data
centers – is far less than, say, the relative cost of what it took to create assembly lines in the early
1900s. Yet the potential return for cities is substantial. In 2011, the global cybersecurity market
hit $67 billion. It is projected to grow to as high as $156 billion by 2019, according to Markets and
Markets, a Dallas-based research firm. The need for cybersecurity is likely only to grow as more
giants such as Sony Pictures Entertainment, Target, and Home Depot are hacked; consumers
demand better security; and businesses grow more aware of the potential cost to their sales
and reputation if they do not provide it. On a consumer level, the way people interact with
technology in their homes and on their bodies will also drive the market. Networking giant Cisco
predicts there will be some 50 billion devices and objects connected to the Internet by 2020. Already,
smart watches track your heart rate, and thermostats in your home can be controlled remotely by
cellphone apps. This burgeoning Internet of Things drives a pressing need to protect the increasingly
personal data people put online. “This is one of the fastest growing industries – not just in the
tech sector, but in the world,” says Peter Singer, a strategist who focuses on cybersecurity at the
New America think tank in Washington. And no one has yet claimed it, Mr. Singer says. “What’s the
next Silicon Valley for cybersecurity?”
34
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#1 Foreign Business hurt more- extension
(___)
(__) Foreign, not domestic, surveillance is what is driving data pull out – restrictions on
domestic surveillance will only further this exodus.
Chander and Le, Director and Research Fellow at California International Law Center, 2015
(Anupam and Uyên P,. “Data Nationalism,” Emory Law Journal, Vol. 64:677,
http://law.emory.edu/elj/_documents/volumes/64/3/articles/chander-le.pdf
First, the United States, like many countries, concentrates much of its surveillance efforts
abroad. Indeed, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is focused on gathering information
overseas, limiting data gathering largely only when it implicates U.S. persons.174 The recent NSA
surveillance disclosures have revealed extensive foreign operations.175 Indeed, constraints
on domestic operations may well have spurred the NSA to expand operations abroad. As the
Washington Post reports, “Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the
NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight.”176 Deterred by a 2011 ruling by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court barring certain broad domestic surveillance of Internet and
telephone traffic,177 the NSA may have increasingly turned its attention overseas. Second, the
use of malware eliminates even the need to have operations on the ground in the countries in
which surveillance occurs. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports that the NSA has
infiltrated every corner of the world through a network of malicious malware.178 A German computer
expert noted that “data was intercepted here [by the NSA] on a large scale.”179 The NRC
Handelsblad suggests that the NSA has even scaled the Great Firewall of China,180 demonstrating
that efforts to keep information inside a heavily secured and monitored ironclad firewall do not
necessarily mean that it cannot be accessed by those on the other side of the earth. This is a
commonplace phenomenon on the Internet, of course. The recent enormous security breach of
millions of Target customers in the United States likely sent credit card data of Americans to servers
in Russia, perhaps through the installation of malware on point-of-sale devices in stores.
(__) They can’t solve foreign surveillance which is the critical factor for the tech industry,
international clients won’t be protected – the USA freedom act proves.
Kuranda, Associate Editor at Computer Reseller News covering security, 2015
(Sarah. 6-2-2015, "Solution Providers: New NSA Controls Fall Short Of Restoring Trust In Cloud
Services," CRN, http://www.crn.com/news/security/300077006/solution-providers-new-nsa-controlsfall-short-of-restoring-trust-in-cloud-services.htm)
Grealish said the bill appeared to "bolster" trust in cloud services in the U.S., but failed to
extend that trust over the border. "It appears that the new bills do nothing to prevent U.S.
authorities, via the appropriate legal mechanisms, to gain access to cloud-based data of
foreign enterprises operating in U.S. cloud services, so businesses operating outside of the
U.S. will have to continue to deal with conflicting regional laws and regulations if they are
contemplating moving data across their borders to the U.S," Grealish said. The U.S.A. Freedom
Act is now on its way to President Obama, who said he will sign it into law.
35
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#2/4 Businesses won’t leave cloud - extension
(___)
(__) Upside of cloud computing is bigger than any NSA risk for businesses.
Kim, Contributing Editor for Techzone360, 2014
(Gar, 7-11-2014, "What is Impact of Spy Scandal on U.S. Cloud Computing Business?,"
Techzone360, http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2014/07/11/383598-whatimpact-spy-scandal-us-cloud-computing-business.htm
One might argue the impact of the spying scandal is hard to quantify, as it will be expressed primarily
as a loss of new sales to competitors based elsewhere, and perhaps slower growth than might
otherwise have been the case.
On the other hand, there are counterbalancing trends at work. U.S. enterprises and smaller
businesses are shifting information technology spending from “premises” to “cloud” sources.
So, despite any potential sales headwinds created by the spying threats, business customer
spending on cloud services seems destined to grow, irrespective of new security threats. After
all, many customers could conclude, the upside is greater than the potential downside. Spend is
shifting from internal to external, in direction of cloud services, says Arthur Gruen, principal at
Wilkofsky Gruen Associates. It is hard to see new machine to machine apps being abandoned
because security issues now loom larger. Instead, entities are likely to pursue M2M apps because
there are clear business advantages, and simply spend more money on security.
(__) Cloud companies have increased revenues after Snowden leaks – Customers aren’t
leaving.
Verton, , Editorial Director - FedScoop, 2014
(Dan 11-3-2014, "Is the post-Snowden cloud apocalypse real?," FedScoop,
http://fedscoop.com/happened-post-snowden-cloud-predictions
When news broke last year of the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program,
which enabled direct access to the servers of some of the nation's largest Internet companies,
industry executives and analysts immediately warned that U.S.-based cloud providers would
lose hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue as European and other foreign organizations moved
their data elsewhere. But so far, the mass exodus from U.S.-based cloud providers doesn't
appear to have materialized. Not only have the biggest players in the U.S. cloud market
reported increases in foreign revenues and users, many have outlined aggressive international
expansion plans for cloud services and data centers, according to Securities and Exchange
Commission filings reviewed by FedScoop. In a series of telephone and email interviews, however,
analysts and industry executives paint a more complex picture of the post-Snowden cloud market.
Although anecdotal evidence remains strong that European companies and governments are
more wary of U.S. cloud providers, the length of cloud contract commitments and the
resources necessary to move to the cloud have led organizations to focus more on security
and data localization rather than a mass abandonment of the biggest U.S. cloud providers.
36
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#2/4 Businesses won’t leave cloud - extension
(___)
(__) There’s no alternative to American cloud companies, they won’t lose business.
Menn, Reporting for Reuters, 2013
(Joseph, Reuters, “ANALYSIS-Despite fears, NSA revelations helping U.S. tech industry,” Reuters
15 September 2013 Factiva)
FEW GOOD ALTERNATIVES
There are multiple theories for why the business impact of the Snowden leaks has been so
minimal. One is that cloud customers have few good alternatives, since U.S. companies have
most of the market and switching costs money. Perhaps more convincing, Amazon, Microsoft and
some others offer data centers in Europe with encryption that prevents significant hurdles to snooping
by anyone including the service providers themselves and the U.S. agencies. Encryption, however,
comes with drawbacks, making using the cloud more cumbersome. On Thursday, Brazil's president
called for laws that would require local data centers for the likes of Google and Facebook. But former
senior Google engineer Bill Coughran, now a partner at Sequoia Capital, said that even in the worstcase scenario, those companies would simply spend extra to manage more Balkanized systems.
Another possibility is that tech-buying companies elsewhere believe that their own
governments have scanning procedures that are every bit as invasive as the American
programs.
37
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
Cloud Sector Growing now
(___)
(__) Trust in cloud computing has increased, not decreased in the aftermath of Snowden.
Kim, Contributing Editor for Techzone360, 2014
(Gar, 7-11-2014, "What is Impact of Spy Scandal on U.S. Cloud Computing Business?,"
Techzone360, http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2014/07/11/383598-whatimpact-spy-scandal-us-cloud-computing-business.htm
Ironically, an earlier Lieberman Software study in November 2012 – prior to the Snowden
revelations – found 48% of respondents were discouraged from using the cloud because of
fear of government snooping, while 86% said they preferred to keep sensitive data on their own
network, rather than the cloud. "These findings indicate that trust in the security of the cloud has
increased over the past year," Lieberman Software says. To be sure, a few US firms reported an
initial sales dip after the Snowden revelations. One can point to a few instances where firms such
as Cisco have reported significant sales slowdowns, but the Edward Snowden revelations
might not have been the primary and principal cause of the sales dips.
38
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#3 Surveillance does not affect business decisions- extensions
(___)
(__) Losses much lower than expected.
Ferrara, Analyst at Forrester Research, 2015
Ed Ferrara, , 4-1-2015, "Forrester Research : Research : Government Spying Will Cost US Vendors
Fewer Billions Than Initial Estimates," Forrester ,
https://www.forrester.com/Government+Spying+Will+Cost+US+Vendors+Fewer+Billions+Than+Initial
+Estimates/fulltext/-/E-res122149
Is Edward Snowden's unveiling of the US National Security Agency's PRISM spying program
ruining the fates of US cloud, hosting, and outsourcing businesses as international customers
walk away from any vendor within the agency's reach? Forrester's first survey of these
customers about the effects of PRISM suggests a significant financial impact, but not to the
degree speculated in 2013. Our analysis of the pullback by non-US enterprise spending on USbased cloud and outsourcing vendors suggests an overall three-year loss in potential revenues of $47
billion. Traditional outsourcers are feeling the brunt of this impact. Lost revenue from spending on
cloud services and platforms comes to just over $500 million between 2014 and 2016. While
significant, these impacts are far less than speculated, as more companies reported taking
control of security and encryption instead of walking away from US providers. US-based CIOs
need not worry that the fallout of PRISM will cripple US cloud vendors, and CIOs outside the
US should understand that there are options besides avoiding these US vendors.
39
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#3 Surveillance does not affect business decisions- extensions
(___)
(__) NSA surveillance does not affect actual corporate decisions.
Perez, Assistant News Editor PC World, 2013
(Juan Carlos, 12-5-2013, "Why CIOs stick with cloud computing despite NSA snooping scandal,"
PCWorld, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2069681/why-cios-stick-with-cloud-computing-despite-nsasnooping-scandal.html)
Explosive revelations in the past six months about the U.S. government’s massive cyberspying activities have spooked individuals, rankled politicians and enraged privacy
watchdogs, but top IT executives aren’t panicking—yet. So far, they are monitoring the issue,
getting informed and taking steps to mitigate their risk in various ways. But the alarming reports
haven’t prompted them to roll back their decisions to host applications and data in the cloud.
That’s the consensus from about 20 high-ranking IT executives interviewed in North America
and Europe about the effect that the U.S. National Security Agency’s snooping practices have
had on their cloud computing strategy. The news broke in June, after former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden began leaking the earth-shaking secrets to the media. Many of the IT executives
interviewed say that they’re not thrilled with the situation, and that it has made them more careful
about cloud computing plans and deployments, prompting them to review agreements with vendors,
double-check best practices and tighten security controls. However, these IT executives haven’t
been completely surprised by the revelations. Whether by overt means or through covert
operations, it’s well known that governments engage in surveillance of telecommunications
and Internet traffic. ”Government surveillance hasn’t changed our opinion about cloud
computing. The cloud model is attractive to us, and I was never that naive to think that this
type of government monitoring wasn’t going on,” said Kent Fuller, director of enterprise
infrastructure services at BCBG MaxAzria Group, a Los Angeles-based women’s fashion designer
and seller that uses Microsoft’s Office 365 public cloud suite primarily for employee email.
40
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
No Losses – Increased Security
(___)
(__) Companies have increased security and encryption to keep customers, they haven’t lost
business.
Verton, 2014
Dan Verton Editorial Director, Editorial Director - FedScoop, 11-3-2014, "Is the post-Snowden cloud
apocalypse real?," FedScoop, http://fedscoop.com/happened-post-snowden-cloud-predictions
"With or without the Snowden controversy, security is still the biggest hurdle for cloud
adoption, particularly in the enterprise segment," Poon said. "Industry verticals that are still subject to
stringent regulatory requirements, they are unlikely to offload workloads to third-party public cloud
providers. The typical, preferred model we see so far is private cloud deployment — a dedicated
private cloud with physical isolation (both on-net / off-net), followed by virtual private cloud [and]
hybrid cloud." The new demands being placed on cloud providers by European customers may
be manageable, but they are also an added cost, Neivert said. "Much of the [Snowden] fallout is
also hidden in the cost line, not the revenue line," he said, referring to emerging requirements
to store data locally and add new encryption requirements.
41
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#5- Data localization is inevitable- extension
(__) Data localization was not caused by Snowden’s NSA revelations.
Fontaine, President of the Center for a New American Security, 2014
(Richard, "Bringing Liberty Online Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden
Era." Center for a New American Security (9/2014).http://www.cnas.org/internetfreedom#.VaClavlViko
A cautionary note is in order when interpreting the reactions to the Snowden affair. Some
developments – such as data localization requirements and worries about a splintering
Internet – predated the revelations and have been accelerated rather than prompted by them.
Autocratic governments also drew lessons from the technology-fueled Arab Spring, resulting
in actions aimed at limiting Internet freedom. Other white-hot responses cooled when rhetoric
turned to action. Brazil’s new “Marco Civil” Internet law, approved in April 2014, left out a number of
the strongest responses that had been widely debated in the run-up to its adoption. The EU did not
go through with its threatened Safe Harbor data-exchange boycott. And for all of the worries about
laws that would require the local storage of users’ data, few countries have actually passed
them. Nevertheless, the potential for such fallout remains.
(__) Much broader questions drive international conflicts over “internet freedom,” the plan
can’t solve.
Nocetti, Research Fellow at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), 2015
(Julien, “Contest and conquest: Russia and global internet governance”. International Affairs, 91:
111–130. doi: 10.1111/1468-2346.12189)
It is not surprising that it is the younger nation-states that seem to be the most strongly committed to
a neo-Westphalian approach to internet governance. In many respects, the battle over the vision of
internet governance cannot be characterized entirely accurately as between authoritarian,
undemocratic states and liberal, freedom-loving states; it is also, and indeed more centrally, a
conflict between long-established, cosmopolitan states and newer states that do not yet feel
safe in their sovereignty. Russia fits into the latter category, as a relatively young nation-state
that has been experiencing, since the chaotic 1990s transition to a free market economy and
pluralism, a potent feeling of insecurity. This feeling stems in part from the complex interactions
between state authorities and the media ecosystem since the 1980s, when Soviet leaders tolerated
increased access to previously suppressed information, thus opening the ‘information gates’ to the
masses. In the 2000s, with Russia striving to recover its full sovereignty and struggling against the
‘permeability’ of its neighbourhood, Putin gradually saw the information revolution—driven by
the considerable growth in (domestic) internet access—as one of the most pervasive
components of US expansionism in the post-Soviet sphere, most notably in Russia itself.
Russia's policy on global internet governance issues therefore cannot be separated from a
domestic political context in which digital technologies are increasingly used for purposes of
contention by an active and articulate ‘netizen’ middle class.
42
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#6 Economic decline doesn’t cause war- extension
(___)
(__) No war from economic collapse- the Great Recession proves.
Barnett, Chief Analyst at Wikistrat, 2009
(Thomas P.M., 8/24/9, “ The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis”,
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/4213/the-new-rules-security-remains-stable-amidfinancial-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 RussiaGeorgia 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.
43
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#6 Economic decline doesn’t cause war- extension
(___)
(__) Decline doesn’t cause war
Jervis, Columbia international affairs professor, 2011
(Robert, “Forces in Our Times”, Survival, 25.4, December, ebsco)
Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of
interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the
members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one
example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the
current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine
democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. While these
dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the
members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that
economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states
that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil
wars. Rather it is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism
become discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of
political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could
prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only
become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a
pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial
crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such
a sharp economic down-turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution
shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict, it will not make war
thinkable.
44
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Internet Freedom [1/5]
1. Internet freedom does not spur democracy, the best empirical data proves that expansion of
access to the web does not create democracy.
Geelmuyden and Weidmann, both professors in the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at University of Konstanz, 2015.
(Espen and Nils B "Empowering activists or autocrats? The Internet in authoritarian regimes." Journal
of Peace Research 52.3 (2015): 338-351.)
In doing so, we distinguish regimes that worry about public opinion and those that do so to a lesser
extent. If the former are more likely to expand, this should be due to the fact that modern
communication technology, in particular the Internet, is not immune to government interference.
Rather, as illustrated in the examples above, autocratic regimes benefit from these technologies
through ample opportunities to censor and influence public opinion and to track members of
the opposition. Our first empirical analysis confirms this suspicion: regimes that are concerned
about public opinion – and go to great lengths to censor it – are more likely to expand the Internet. In
our second analysis, we turn to the question of how Internet expansion affects changes towards
democracy. Here, we fail to find any evidence that the Internet is linked to positive changes in
democracy scores. When looking more closely at democratic and autocratic changes from 2006
to 2010, the data indicate that movements toward democracy are more frequent in countries
with low Internet penetration. No country in the low penetration group experienced autocratic
change in this period, while six countries in the high penetration group did. Our findings shed
considerable doubt on the frequently held assumption that the Internet universally, and
unconditionally, fosters freedom and democracy. Autocrats are likely aware of the
tremendous potential this technology has for creating and maintaining a tightly controlled
sphere of public opinion. Looking back at mankind’s first two decades of experience with Internet
technology, our results suggest that in the wrong hands, Internet, cell phones, and other
modern means of communication can serve evil purposes.
45
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Internet Freedom [2/5]
2. Internet Freedom is not free, the American push for governance of the internet is about
profits, not human rights.
Powers and Jablonski, Assistant Professor of Communication and a Fellow at Georgia State
University, 2015
(Shawn and Michael, “Introduction: Geopolitics and the Internet ” The Real Cyber War: The Political
Economy of Internet Freedom. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Project MUSE. Web.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of Google’s role in the internet freedom movement.
While the company routinely espouses the economic and political benefits of a free flow of
information between people and countries, there is little evidence that this is the reason it
pursues greater global connectivity. Numerous examples of Google’s compliance with law
enforcement agencies in both democratic and authoritarian countries suggest that its desire for
freedom of expression is certainly not driving its global business strategy. Instead, a more
compelling explanation for Google’s interest in internet freedom and connectivity is the simple fact
that its survival (in the political economy sense of the word) depends on getting more and more
people online to use its complimentary services. Connecting commodification and structuration,
chapter 4 focuses on the economics of internet connectivity and the fight over which international
institutions are responsible for the regulation of digital information flows. We suggest that, at a basic
level, U.S. internet policy can be boiled down to getting as many people using the network of
networks as possible, while protecting the status quo legal, institutional, and economic
arrangements governing connectivity and exchanges online. From the global infrastructure facilitating
exchanges of data to the creation of unique content and services online, American companies are
dominant, extraordinarily profitable, and, in most cases, well ahead of foreign competition.
Building on chapters 2 and 3, chapter 4 traces how economic logic continues to drive U.S. policy as
well as U.S. negotiating strategy in the international arena. From this perspective the real cyber
war is not over offensive capabilities or cybersecurity but rather about legitimizing existing
institutions and norms governing internet industries in order to assure their continued market
dominance and profitability.
46
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Internet Freedom [3/5]
3. The aff can’t solve internet freedom because it doesn’t stop surveillance of foreign targets,
which is what matters to the rest of the world.
Fontaine, President of the Center for a New American Security, 2014
(Richard, "Bringing Liberty Online Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden
Era." Center for a New American Security (9/2014).http://www.cnas.org/internetfreedom#.VaClavlViko
Despite the international outrage, and both public and private criticism of U.S. surveillance
policies, the U.S. government has continued its Internet freedom–related activities, albeit at a
lower public volume. In early 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry, addressing the Freedom Online
Coalition conference in Estonia, called for an “open, secure, and inclusive Internet.”33 U.S. Internet
freedom programming continues: the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and
Labor alone planned to expend roughly $18 million in 2014 on anti-censorship technology, secure
communications, technology training and rapid response to bloggers under threat.34 In June, the
United States sponsored a successful U.N. Human Rights Council resolution reaffirming that the
same rights that people have offline, including freedom of expression, must be protected online,
regardless of frontiers.35 While continuing to execute the Internet freedom agenda, U.S. officials
have attempted to reconcile their government’s surveillance practices with its expressed desire for
greater online freedom. This is challenging, to say the least. U.S. officials draw a critical distinction
between monitoring communications for purposes of protecting national security and
surveillance aimed at repressing political speech and activity. While this distinction is intuitive
to many Americans, it is likely to be lost on many others, particularly where autocratic
regimes consider domestic political dissent to be a national security threat. At its bluntest, the
American position is that it is legitimate, for example, for the U.S. government, but not for the
Chinese government, to surveil Chinese citizens. This is and will remain a tough sell.
47
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Internet Freedom [4/5]
4. The US isn’t modeled and domestic surveillance isn’t key
Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University 2015
(John,. “Surveillance laws are being rewritten post-Snowden, but what will really change?; The ripples
from the revelations of NSA surveillance can be felt around the world - but intelligence and lawenforcement agencies will carry on regardless,” Lexis Nexis, 6/17/2015)
At one level it's a significant moment: one in which - as a Guardian leader writer put it - "an outlaw
rewrites the law". And in a few other countries, notably Germany, Snowden's revelations do
seem to be having a demonstrable impact - as witnessed, for example, by the Bundestag's inquiry
into NSA surveillance within the Federal Republic. These are non-trivial outcomes, but we
shouldn't get carried away. The revelations have had close to zero effect on the way the
British security agencies - and their political masters - go about things. And now that the Tories
are liberated from the tiresome obsession of the Lib Dems with privacy and human rights, who knows
what Theresa May and the spooks are cooking up? (The relevant passage in the Queen's speech
merely says that "new legislation will modernise the law on communications data".) On the other
side of the Atlantic, although the USA Freedom Act does introduce a number of reforms, the
surveillance landscape remains largely unchanged. Americans' phone records will still be
hoovered up - but now by the telephone companies, not the NSA - and access to them will require a
warranting process. And elements of transparency around government surveillance and the
operations of the secret Fisa court will be introduced. So while there is some good news for
American citizens in the new legislation, the position for the rest of the world is that nothing
changes. The US retains the right to snoop on us in any way it pleases - and of course to spy on any
US citizen who has the misfortune to exchange a phone call or an email message with us. Edward
Snowden's revelations have thus brought about some amelioration in the domestic
surveillance regime within the US, but so far they have done little to protect those who live
outside that benighted realm and quaintly regard privacy as a basic human right.
48
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
1NC Frontline – Internet Freedom [5/5]
5. Democracy doesn’t prevent war.
Goldstein, professor emeritus of international relations at American University,2011
(Joshua, is and author of Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide,
Sept/Oct 2011, “Think Again: War. World peace could be closer than you think”, Foreign Policy)
"A More Democratic World Will Be a More Peaceful One." Not necessarily. The well-worn observation
that real democracies almost never fight each other is historically correct, but it's also true that
democracies have always been perfectly willing to fight nondemocracies. In fact, democracy can
heighten conflict by amplifying ethnic and nationalist forces, pushing leaders to appease
belligerent sentiment in order to stay in power. Thomas Paine and Immanuel Kant both believed
that selfish autocrats caused wars, whereas the common people, who bear the costs, would be loath
to fight. But try telling that to the leaders of authoritarian China, who are struggling to hold in
check, not inflame, a popular undercurrent of nationalism against Japanese and American
historical enemies. Public opinion in tentatively democratic Egypt is far more hostile toward
Israel than the authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarak ever was (though being hostile and
actually going to war are quite different things). Why then do democracies limit their wars to nondemocracies rather than fight each other? Nobody really knows As the University of Chicago's
Charles Lipson once quipped about the notion of a democratic peace, "We know it works in practice.
Now we have to see if it works in theory!" The best explanation is that of political scientists Bruce
Russett and John Oneal, who argue that three elements -- democracy, economic interdependence
(especially trade), and the growth of international organizations -- are mutually supportive of each
other and of peace within the community of democratic countries. Democratic leaders, then, see
themselves as having less to lose in going to war with autocracies.
49
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#1 Internet doesn’t spur Democracy- extensions
(___)
(__) The internet does not create democracy.
Morozov, senior editor at The New Republic, 2009
(Evgeny, “How dictators watch us on the web,” 11-18-09.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/how-dictators-watch-us-on-the-web)
Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or
institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups. Instead it often
flows to groups who, if anything, are nastier than the regime. Social media’s greatest assets—
anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.
(__) No evidence that the internet actually spurs democratization
Aday et al., associate professor of media and public affairs and international affairs at The
George Washington University, 2010
(Sean, “Blogs And Bullets: new media in contentious politics”,
http://www.usip.org/files/resources/pw65.pdf)
New media, such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have played a major role in episodes of
contentious political action. They are often described as important tools for activists seeking to
replace authoritarian regimes and to promote freedom and democracy, and they have been
lauded for their democratizing potential. Despite the prominence of “Twitter revolutions,” “color
revolutions,” and the like in public debate, policymakers and scholars know very little about
whether and how new media affect contentious politics. Journalistic accounts are inevitably
based on anecdotes rather than rigorously designed research. Although data on new media
have been sketchy, new tools are emerging that measure linkage patterns and content as well as
track memes across media outlets and thus might offer fresh insights into new media. The impact of
new media can be better understood through a framework that considers five levels of analysis:
individual transformation, intergroup relations, collective action, regime policies, and external
attention. New media have the potential to change how citizens think or act, mitigate or
exacerbate group conflict, facilitate collective action, spur a backlash among regimes, and
garner international attention toward a given country. Evidence from the protests after the Iranian
presidential election in June 2009 suggests the utility of examining the role of new media at each of
these five levels. Although there is reason to believe the Iranian case exposes the potential benefits
of new media, other evidence—such as the Iranian regime’s use of the same social network tools
to harass, identify, and imprison protesters—suggests that, like any media, the Internet is not a
“magic bullet.” At best, it may be a “rusty bullet.” Indeed, it is plausible that traditional media
sources were equally if not more important. Scholars and policymakers should adopt a more
nuanced view of new media’s role in democratization and social change, one that recognizes
that new media can have both positive and negative effects.
50
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#2 Profit motive - extensions
(___)
(__) “Internet freedom” is about the expansion of American economic power, not human
rights.
Kiggins, Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Oklahoma, 2012
(Ryan D. "US Identity, Security, and Governance of the Internet." Cyberspaces and Global Affairs
eds: Jake Perry, Professor Sean S Costigan p 189.)
My study is able to demonstrate how agents shape structures through ideas. I am also able to show
how ideas held by U.S. policy-makers concerning the appropriate normative structure for
global politics and the global economy were shaped by concerns over the economic
performance of the U.S. economy and especially over the relative position of U.S. high-technology
companies in the emerging digital economy of the twenty-first century. Foremost on the minds of
U.S. policymakers was spurring job creation for U.S. high-technology workers. Job creation,
preserving the relative dominance of U.S. high-technology companies, and positioning the Internet
as a platform for the global expansion of commerce and freedom are important cogs in
broader U.S. national security policy. Policy-makers within the U.S. government engaged in a
well-planned and executed strategy to discursively construct the Internet as the lynchpin for
future global and domestic economic growth. Within that discourse, the idea of freedom
played the starring role.
51
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#3 International Surveillance Matters more
(___)
(__) Limits on domestic surveillance will not solve American leadership, they don’t limit
foreign surveillance and aren’t credible because its all secret.
Fontaine, President of the Center for a New American Security, 2014
(Richard, "Bringing Liberty Online Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden
Era." Center for a New American Security (9/2014).http://www.cnas.org/internetfreedom#.VaClavlViko
Secretary Kerry has defended the Obama administration’s reforms to signals intelligence
collection, saying that they are based on the rule of law, conducted pursuant to a legitimate purpose,
guided by proper oversight, characterized by greater transparency than before and fully consistent
with the American vision of a free and open Internet.36 In March 2014, Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State Scott Busby addressed the linkage between surveillance and Internet freedom and
added two principles to Kerry’s – that surveillance should not be arbitrary but rather as
tailored as possible, and that decisions about intelligence collection priorities should be informed by
guidance from an authority outside the collection agency.37 In addition, the U.S. government has
taken other steps to temper the international reaction. For example, the Department of Commerce
opted to relinquish its oversight of ICANN – the organization that manages domain name registries –
to the “global Internet community.”38
Such moves are destined to have only a modest effect on foreign reactions. U.S. surveillance will
inevitably continue under any reasonably likely scenario (indeed, despite the expressions of
outrage, not a single country has said that it would cease its surveillance activities). Many of the
demands – such as for greater transparency – will not be met, simply due to the clandestine
nature of electronic espionage. Any limits on surveillance that a government might announce
will not be publicly verifiable and thus perhaps not fully credible. Nor will there be an
international “no-spying” convention to reassure foreign citizens that their communications
are unmonitored. As it has for centuries, statesponsored espionage activities are likely to remain
accepted international practice, unconstrained by international law. The one major possible shift in
policy following the Snowden affair – a stop to the bulk collection of telecommunications
metadata in the United States – will not constrain the activity most disturbing to foreigners;
that is, America’s surveillance of them. At the same time, U.S. officials are highly unlikely to
articulate a global “right to privacy” (as have the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and
some foreign officials), akin to that derived from the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment, that
would permit foreigners to sue in U.S. courts to enforce such a right.39 The Obama
administration’s January 2014 presidential directive on signals intelligence refers, notably, to the
“legitimate privacy interests” of all persons, regardless of nationality, and not to a privacy “right.”40
52
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#3 International Surveillance Matters More
(___)
(__) The aff can’t solve credibility, curtailing domestic surveillance won’t solve surveillance of
people around the world.
Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015
(Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics &
International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.
So far I have focused on the limited credibility of domestic oversight. If we accept the view that all
persons, regardless of citizenship, have privacy rights, then there is a further set of difficulties
to overcome. To begin with, we lack an established set of norms that overseers can utilize to
regulate international surveillance. Such norms will not be easy to generate given competing
conceptions of privacy (China, for instance, is unlikely to consent to a norm that forbids it from
operating its so-called Great Firewall). We also confront grave enforcement difficulties. It is hard
to see who could fairly adjudicate between the interests of a particular state (for example, the
United States) and a foreign national (for example, an Iraqi). It is hard to foresee support for an
international regulatory body. Not only the United States but also countries such as China and
Russia are likely to balk at sharing intelligence with an international regulator whose internal
controls may be less robust than theirs and whose members may be drawn from rival states.
Yet if compliance with international norms were allowed to be voluntary, then little would prevent
foreign powers from monitoring peoples and organizations as they see fit. In this event, curtailing
the NSA's surveillance operations would not remedy the loss of privacy experienced by
persons around the world, since their communications would still be monitored by other
nations.
(__) Foreign and domestic surveillance affect soft power
Champion, writes editorials on international affairs, 2014
(Marc, “U.S. soft power takes a hit in wake of report,” The Japan Times, 12/16/14,
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/12/16/commentary/world-commentary/u-s-soft-power-takesa-hit-in-wake-of-report/#.VYhSy9NVjZF)
A second area where the U.S. is suffering severe damage to its image is from the National
Security Agency’s claim to have the collection of Internet metadata from citizens anywhere
and everywhere. As with the U.S. renditions policy, America’s closest allies collude in this
collection effort and have suffered a public backlash as a result. Again, the publics of these
countries aren’t wholly naive: They know that governments spy on other governments, as well as on
criminals and terrorists. Indeed, they mostly support spying on terrorists. But the NSA revelations
were disruptive, because they created the perception that the U.S. was using its dominance of
the Internet to collect data on ordinary citizens across the globe. Again, according to the Pew
global survey, majorities disapprove of the U.S. monitoring foreign citizens in all except five
countries (one of which was the U.S.). Americans should hardly be surprised: More than 60 percent
of them find it unacceptable for the U.S. to spy on its own citizens — so why would Germans or
Italians feel otherwise?
53
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#4 The US is not a Model
(___)
(__) Countries don’t model U.S. policy – it’s a myth.
Moravcsik, - Professor of Government and Director of the European Union Program at Harvard
, 2005
(Andrew, University, January 31, 2005, Newsweek, “Dream On, America,” lexis)
The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share
America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic
achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration
and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows
from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and
international institutions--globalization, in a word.
Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from. AntiAmericanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established
their own distinctive ways--none made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The
European Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural
diversity and respect for international law--a model that's caught on quickly across the former
nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or
Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate
culture. "First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S.
multinational, "then we overtake."
54
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#5 Democracy doesn’t solve war- extension
(___)
(__) Democratic peace theory false- competing interests
Larison, columnist for The Week. PhD in history from the University of Chicago, 20 12.
(Daniel Larison. April 17, 2012. “Democratic Peace Theory Is False”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/democratic-peace-theory-is-false/
Rojas’ claim depends entirely on the meaning of “genuine democracy.” Even though there are
numerous examples of wars between states with universal male suffrage and elected governments
(including that little dust-up known as WWI), the states in question probably don’t qualify as “genuine”
democracies and so can’t be used as counter-examples. Regardless, democratic peace theory
draws broad conclusions from a short period in modern history with very few cases before the
20th century. The core of democratic peace theory as I understand it is that democratic
governments are more accountable to their populations, and because the people will bear the
costs of the war they are going to be less willing to support a war policy. This supposedly keeps
democratic states from waging wars against one another because of the built-in electoral and
institutional checks on government power. One small problem with this is that it is rubbish.
Democracies in antiquity fought against one another. Political equality and voting do not
abolish conflicts of interest between competing states. Democratic peace theory doesn’t
account for the effects of nationalist and imperialist ideologies on the way democratic nations
think about war. Democratic nations that have professional armies to do the fighting for them are
often enthusiastic about overseas wars. The Conservative-Unionist government that waged the
South African War (against two states with elected governments, I might add) enjoyed great
popular support and won a huge majority in the “Khaki” election that followed. As long as it
goes well and doesn’t have too many costs, war can be quite popular, and even if the war is
costly it may still be popular if it is fought for nationalist reasons that appeal to a majority of
the public. If the public is whipped into thinking that there is an intolerable foreign threat or if
they believe that their country can gain something at relatively low cost by going to war, the
type of government they have really is irrelevant. Unless a democratic public believes that a
military conflict will go badly for their military, they may be ready to welcome the outbreak of a war
that they expect to win. Setting aside the flaws and failures of U.S.-led democracy promotion for
a moment, the idea that reducing the number of non-democracies makes war less likely is just
fantasy. Clashing interests between states aren’t going away, and the more democratic states
there are in the world the more likely it is that two or more of them will eventually fight one
another.
55
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Internet Freedom
#5 Democracy doesn’t solve war- extension
(___)
(__) Democracy doesn’t prevent the main threats to peace
Ostrowski, columnist at Lew Rockwell, 2002
(James, Staff – Rockwell, “The Myth of Democratic Peace, Spring, http://www.lewrockwell.com/
ostrowski/ostrowski72.html)
Spencer R. Weart alleges that democracies rarely if ever go to war with each other. Even if this
is true, it distorts reality and makes people far too sanguine about democracy’s ability to
deliver the world’s greatest need today – peace. In reality, the main threat to world peace
today is not war between two nation-states, but (1) nuclear arms proliferation; (2) terrorism;
and (3) ethnic and religious conflict within states. As this paper was being written, India, the
world’s largest democracy, appeared to be itching to start a war with Pakistan, bringing the world
closer to nuclear war than it has been for many years. The United States, the world’s leading
democracy, is waging war in Afghanistan, which war relates to the second and third threats noted
above – terrorism and ethnic/religious conflict. If the terrorists are to be believed – and why would
they lie?─they struck at the United States on September 11th because of its democraticallyinduced interventions into ethnic/religious disputes in their parts of the world.
i
56
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
1NC Frontline – Solvency [1/5]
1. The affirmative is unnecessary, the USA freedom act solved the abusive parts of NSA
surveillance.
Kaplan, American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner, PhD in Political Science from MIT, 2015,
(Fred, 6-1-2015, "The USA Freedom Act Won’t Harm National Security," Slate Magazine,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/don_t_worry_about_the_patriot
_act_expiring_the_usa_freedom_act_won_t_hurt.2.html)
So does the new law have any significance whatever? Can it properly be called a reform law? Yes,
for three main reasons. First, it adopts another of the Obama commission’s recommendations:
requiring the appointment of a privacy advocate on the FISA Court. This may make the court
hearings—which are held in secret—less of a rubber-stamp exercise. Second, it requires
periodic declassification review of the court’s rulings (another commission recommendation),
which may lead to greater accountability.Third, and most significant, the very removal of
metadata from NSA headquarters substantially reduces the potential for abuse. The Obama
commission found no evidence that the NSA has used metadata analysis to go after political
opponents—or, for that matter, any target other than suspected members or associates of three
specific terrorist organizations. It is worth noting that Snowden’s documents have revealed no such
evidence, either. However, one can imagine what Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover might have done
with the technology that the NSA has at its disposal—and it’s hardly a farfetched notion that the likes
of Nixon or Hoover could again ascend to national power. The NSA has set its metadata-search
algorithms to trace terrorists, but there’s no physical reason why they couldn’t be set to search for
domestic drug traffickers, criminals, political enemies, or troublemakers of whatever category some
rogue director might choose. (Currently the NSA is crawling with lawyers, who assiduously follow
reporting requirements, but one can imagine a climate in which a director might tear down this whole
apparatus.) Removing the metadata from the NSA removes the temptation, or opportunity, for
abuse. Given the fears tapped by Snowden’s disclosures, and some harrowing chapters of
20th-century American history, this is a very good thing. And it’s been accomplished with no
compromise of national security.
57
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
1NC Frontline – Solvency [2/5]
2. The NSA’s actions taken under Section 702 have sufficient oversight in the status quo.
Cordero, Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law, 2014,
(Carrie, The Brookings Institution A Debate One Year After Snowden: The Future Of U.S.
Surveillance Authorities Washington, D.C. Thursday, June 5, 2014
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/06/05-debate-snowden-future-us-surveillance-nsa#/full-event/)
So, the driving question becomes what problem is it that we’re actually trying to solve
because some of the reforms that are currently on the table are wildly out of sync with the
actual information that has been revealed. And it’s also worth noting that there have been
significant harms from the disclosures, including operational, economic, and political harms.What has
not been revealed is that there is any type of systematic, deliberate, strategic-level misuse or
abuse of NSA’s authorities, and what we also have learned is that there is actually a
significant amount of oversight and accountability that exists over NSA’s activities, and this
involves oversight of all three branches of government. It involves federal judges who sit on the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, inspectors general, compliance offices, and so when we
want to think about what might be meaningful reform going forward, one area that we can focus on is
ensuring that those oversight and accountability mechanisms continue to be well-funded, well-staffed,
and are continually evaluated for their effectiveness. We also can focus on making sure that
there’s more information made publicly available regarding how those oversight mechanisms
monitor what’s going on.
58
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
1NC Frontline – Solvency [3/5]
3. Domestic communications are a tiny fraction of data collected by the NSA.
Etzioni, Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University, 2014
(Amitai, Intelligence and National Security (2014): NSA: National Security vs. Individual Rights,
Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2013.867221)
Critics contend that these standards and procedures are far from rigorous and do not
satisfactorily ensure that targeted persons are not American citizens or residents.127 Numbers
are difficult to come by, as the intelligence community maintains that it is ‘not reasonably possible to
identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been
reviewed under the authority’ of the FISA Amendments Act that authorizes PRISM.128 John D.
Bates, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has noted that, given the
scale of the NSA’s data collection, ‘the court cannot know for certain the exact number’ of
wholly domestic communications collected under the act.129
Critics cite an NSA internal audit dated May 2012, which found 2776 incidents in the preceding
12months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of protected
communications. Most of these incidents were unintended, many involved failures of due
diligence or violations of operating procedures. However, ‘the most serious incidents included a
violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3000 Americans and
greencard holders.’
Other reports show that (1) these violations make up just a tiny fraction of 250 million
communications that are collected by the NSA each year;130 (2) practically all were
inadvertent, mostly technical mistakes e.g., syntax errors when making database queries 131
or the programming error that interchanged the Washington DC area code 202 with the
international dialing code for Egypt which is 20; 132 (3) measures were taken to reduce error
rate; 133 (4) wilful violations of privacy led to termination of the offending employees;134 and
(5) the NSA was responsive to internal audits and deferred to court guidance – which shows
that oversight works.135
59
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
1NC Frontline – Solvency [4/5]
4. Circumvention Turn - NSA Surveillance is much more than a single program, the aff is just
playing a game of “Whack-A-Mole.” Surveillance will just pop up with another name.
Howell & Zeisberg, Professor of American Politics at the University of Chicago & Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, 2015
(William & Sydney; 7-1-2015, "Executive Secrecy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/howell-zeisberg-executive-secrecy
Consider too the development of new computing systems underwriting the surveillance
state. Like most legal scholars, Kitrosser focuses her attention on the kinds of information the
federal government can collect and the purposes to which this information can be put. But she does
not adequately grapple with the sheer size and breadth of the new capacities that underlie the
collection and analysis of information. As Arnold reports, the Department of Defense is working
on a “global information grid” with the power to store and process “possibly yottabytes” of
data—that is, 1024 bytes, or 100,000 gigabytes, which amounts to 500 quintillion pages of text.
An apparatus of this scale presents a dazzling array of opportunities for mischief. It is as if the
government has created an unimaginably large game of Whack-a-Mole: while checking may be
an effective way to suppress one troubling program, the existence of this grid will create
constant opportunities for new information gathering regimes. For example, although President
Barack Obama openly supported the recent restrictions on the NSA implemented by the 2015
Freedom Act, other legislation provides opportunities for him and his successors to continue
collecting such data. Through FISA legislation (the legal basis for PRISM and other
surveillance and data programs) and Executive Order 12333 (which provides authority for NSA
foreign surveillance, and may encompass domestic communications data that travel outside
the U.S), presidents will be able to continue programs of mass surveillance despite the
Freedom Act—a fact lamented by stalwart critics such as Rand Paul.
Moreover, Kitrosser’s framework may call in vain upon legislators and judges to exert independence
and oversight they would just as soon disavow. The FISA Court’s record of granting 99 percent or
more of the warrants that the government requests—including, according to a Snowden leak,
permitting the NSA to compel a Verizon company to turn over daily information on every
phone call made, foreign or domestic—demonstrates that courts may be only too willing to
cooperate with the executive.
60
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
1NC Frontline – Solvency [5/5]
5. The NSA will simply come up with new legal authorities and technology to continue
surveillance.
Waldman, contributor Washington Post, 2015,
(Paul., 6-3-2015, "A reality check on the future of government spying," Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/06/03/a-reality-check-on-the-future-ofgovernment-spying/
And let’s not forget that the NSA and other government agencies are certain — not possible,
not likely, but certain — to come up with new ways to spy on Americans as new technologies
become available. Just as the NSA did with the bulk phone data collection, they’ll probably take a
look at earlier laws and decide that there’s a legal basis for whatever new kind of surveillance
they want to begin — and that it’s best if the public didn’t know about it. Indeed, just this week
an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that the FBI is using aircraft with advanced
cameras to conduct investigations without warrants. That’s a relatively mundane use of technology,
but there will always be new tools and capabilities coming down the pike, and the impulse will
always be to put them into operation, then figure out afterward if it’s legally justifiable. The
story of the bulk telephone data collection tells us that the only thing likely to restrain the
expansion of government surveillance is public exposure. If you’re hoping that politicians who
care about privacy will do it on their own, you’re likely to be disappointed.
61
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
USA Freedom Act Solves Violations
(__) USA Freedom Act increases transparency and limits the NSA’s worst programs.
Nakashima, National Security Reporter for the Washington Post, 2015,
(Ellen, 6-1-2015, "Congressional action on NSA is a milestone in the post-9/11 world," Washington
Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congressional-action-on-nsa-is-amilestone-in-the-post-911-world/2015/06/02/f46330a2-0944-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html)
The USA Freedom Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday,
marks the first piece of legislation to rein in surveillance powers in the wake of disclosures two
years ago by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and the national debate he catalyzed. It comes
as Obama is winding down the nation’s wars overseas and as fears of another terrorist attack on the scale of
Sept. 11, 2001, no longer galvanize and unify lawmakers in the same way they once did. Today, Congress and
the nation are much more divided about the proper balance between liberty and security. The inability of the
Senate for weeks to resolve the issue, forcing the lapse of three surveillance powers at midnight Sunday,
reflected the fissures between those who think that the terrorist threat is as potent as ever and those who
believe that the government has overreached in its goal to keep Americans safe. With the passage of the
USA Freedom Act, though, Congress has answered Obama’s call to end the National Security
Agency’s bulk storage of Americans’ phone data while preserving a way for the agency to obtain
the records of terrorism suspects. “The Senate’s passage of the USA Freedom Act today is a
huge win for national security and the Fourth Amendment,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a lead
sponsor of the bill. At the same time, the legislation doesn’t end the surveillance debate or go as far as some
members of the president’s liberal base or the libertarian right would like. Some lawmakers have vowed to
press for further changes to protect citizens’ privacy and enhance transparency. “The fight to protect
Americans’ constitutional rights against government overreach is not over,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who
has long called for an end to secret surveillance law, said in a statement. He added: “Everybody who has
supported our fight for surveillance reform over the last two years is responsible for our victory today and I’m
looking forward to working with a bipartisan coalition to push for greater reforms in the future.” The bill’s
passage is a milestone in the post-9/11 world. “For the first time since 9/11, Congress has
placed significant limits on the government’s ability to spy on Americans,” said Elizabeth
Goitein, a national security expert at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for
Justice. But the bill’s significance, some analysts say, will become apparent only with time. “Is it the
beginning of a recalibration of intelligence policy, or is it the most that Congress can accomplish and
the end of the reform process?” said Steven Aftergood, a national security and transparency expert at
the Federation of American Scientists. “We won’t really know that until we get further down the line.”
Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel, said the law is a landmark — but not a good one. “It is
going to make the National Security Agency risk-averse in ways that the CIA has occasionally been
risk-averse,” he said. “They followed the rules. They believed they were following the rules, and they
got punished nonetheless.” The USA Freedom Act not only ends NSA bulk collection but also
narrows the collection of other types of records under the USA Patriot Act and other
intelligence authorities. It increases transparency in surveillance court decisions and provides
the opportunity for a public advocate in normally closed court hearings. It also reinstates the
three lapsed authorities, while amending one of them.
62
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
Oversight works now
(__) Oversight of section 702 is working now.
Cordero,Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law , 2014
Carrie F., 6-13-2014, "Fear vs. Facts: Exploring the Rules the NSA Operates Under," Cato Unbound,
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/13/carrie-f-cordero/fear-vs-facts-exploring-rules-nsa-operatesunder
It is worth exploring. Here is how oversight of the Section 702 surveillance works, as one
example, since it has been the subject of a significant part of the debate of the past year. Section
702 was added to FISA by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It authorizes the NSA to acquire
the communications, for foreign intelligence purposes, of non-U.S. persons reasonably
believed to be outside the United States. These are persons with no Constitutional protections,
and yet, because the acquisition requires the assistance of a U.S. electronic communications
provider, there is an extensive approval and oversight process. There is a statutory framework.
Specifically, the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence jointly approve
certifications. According to declassified documents, the certifications are topical, meaning, the way the
statute is being implemented, the certifications are not so specific that they identify individual targets; but they
are not so broad that they cover any and everything that might be foreign intelligence information. The
certifications are filed with the FISC, along with targeting and minimization procedures. Targeting procedures
are the rules by which NSA selects valid foreign intelligence targets for collection. Minimization procedures are
rules by which NSA handles information concerning U.S. persons. The FISC has to approve these
procedures. If it does not approve them, the government has to fix them. The Court reviews
these procedures and processes annually. The Court can request a hearing with government
witnesses (like senior intelligence officials, even the NSA Director, if the judge wanted or needed to
hear from him personally) or additional information in order to aid in its decisionmaking process.
Information about the 702 certifications is reported to the Congressional intelligence
committees.Once the certifications are in effect, attorneys from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National
Security Division and attorneys and civil liberties officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
(ODNI) review the NSA’s targeting decisions and compliance with the rules. They conduct reviews at least
every 90 days. During that 90-day period, oversight personnel are in contact with NSA operational and
compliance personnel. Compliance incidents can be discovered in one of at least two ways: the
NSA can self-report them, which it does; or the DOJ and ODNI oversight personnel may
discover them on their own. Sometimes the NSA does not report a compliance incident in the
required timeframe. Then the time lag in reporting may become an additional compliance incident.
The DOJ and ODNI compliance teams write up semi-annual reports describing the results of their
reviews. The reports are approved by the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence and
provided to the FISC and to Congress. According to the one report that has been declassified so
far, in August 2013, for a six-month period in 2012, the rate of error for the NSA’s compliance
under Section 702 collection was .49% - less than half of one percent. If we subtract the
compliance incidents that were actually delays in reporting, then the noncompliance rate falls
to between .15-.25% - less than one quarter of one percent. Hardly an agency run amok.
63
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
Amount of Surveillance is Limited
(__) The program under Section 702 does not collect a large amount of data.
Dempsey, Member of the President’s Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 2014
(James X, , 7-10-2014, "Take it from a civil liberties watchdog: not everything is bulk surveillance,"
Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/10/nsa-privacy-civil-liberties-oversightboard)
Our report on the so-called "702 program" provides probably the most complete accounting of
any national security surveillance program published by any country in the world. In my
personal view, many details about the program could have been made public before Edward
Snowden's leaks without hindering the intelligence agencies in doing their job. Indeed, they should
have been. There are huge benefits, in terms of democratic legitimacy, to the public knowing
what its government is doing. We found that the 702 program does not scan internet
communications for keywords. It targets specific individuals using specific identifiers such as
email addresses and phone numbers. We saw a demonstration of the government's targeting
process. We reviewed sample targeting decisions. We considered how data is filtered before it enters
the government's coffers. In sum, what we found is not a bulk collection program.
(__)Collection under Section 702 is miniscule.
Dickerson, Harvard Law student and former editor Harvard National Security Journal, 2015
(Julie, 2-17-2015, "Harvard National Security Journal – Meaningful Transparency: The Missing
Numbers the NSA and FISC Should Reveal," Harvard National Security Journal,
http://harvardnsj.org/2015/02/meaningful-transparency-the-missing-numbers-the-nsa-and-fisc-shouldreveal/
Under § 702 of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the NSA uses information from U.S. electronic
communication service providers to target non-Americans outside the United States for
documented foreign intelligence purposes. The NSA collects more than 250 million internet
communications under this power each year. While a large absolute number, it is unclear what
percent of total internet communications these § 702 communications constitute. The NSA has
revealed that the internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day, the NSA touches
1.6% of that data in its foreign intelligence mission, and the NSA only selects 0.025% of that
data for review. The net result is that NSA analysts look at a mere 0.00004% of the world’s traffic.
These percentages of total data traffic, though indicative that the percent of § 702
communications collected is likely miniscule, do not map perfectly onto percentages of total
communications.
64
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
NSA will Circumvent Restrictions [1/2]
(__) Limits on NSA surveillance fail, they will simply seek other ways to collect the data,
which may be more intrusive.
Pozen, Associate Professor, Columbia Law School, 2015
(David,. Privacy-Privacy Tradeoffs (June 28, 2015). University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming.
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=
Restated in more general and prescriptive terms, the suggested tradeoff is that tighter limits on
what sorts of data the NSA can electronically collect or mine at the front end might lead to
looser—and more privacy-invasive—investigatory practices at the back end. Beyond the
automated “sifting” function identified by Posner, a variety of mechanisms could conceivably produce
such a result. In the absence of bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act,
for instance, the NSA might seek to identify suspected foreign terrorists’ American associates
in a less surgical manner, through ever-widening wiretaps instead of link analysis and contact
chaining. 71
Tighter limits on what may be acquired under any particular authority, such as Section 215,
could push NSA officers to submit broader warrant applications to the FISC 72 or to make
greater use of other legal authorities, as by expanding the targeting of non-U.S. persons under
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on the hope or expectation that this would
yield more “incidental” collection of U.S. persons’ communications.73 Barriers to domestic
acquisition could likewise lead to more aggressive “privacy shopping,” whereby the NSA
relies on foreign partners to obtain data it cannot lawfully or efficiently obtain on its own.74
In short, it is not implausible to think that collection limits could backfire; or that the more (meta)data
the NSA has at its disposal, the less it will need officers to review intercepted communications. Big
Data analytics can take over, to some extent, from old-fashioned listening and reading. And if one
deems the latter to be an especially or uniquely significant privacy problem, one can arrive at
the unsettling paradox of preferring that the NSA “collect it all”75 on privacy grounds.
65
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Solvency
NSA will Circumvent Restrictions [2/2]
(__) Empirically, Presidents have done anything to avoid restrictions on their authority.
Howell & Zeisberg, Professor of American Politics at the University of Chicago & Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, 2015
(William & Sydney, 7-1-2015, "Executive Secrecy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/booksideas/howell-zeisberg-executive-secrecy)
But presidents, Arnold reminds us, had no desire to toil in the light of day for all to see. If
Congress longed for an information revolution, presidents responded with policy
retrenchment. Rather than bend to Congress’s wishes, subsequent presidents—Democrats
and Republicans alike—went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their activities, defy the clear
intent of statutory law, suppress scientific information—in short, to circumvent, hedge, and deny
at nearly every turn. “A complete history of the era,” Arnold says, “reveals episode after episode of
evasive maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and outright defiance.”
In their effort to work around the legal architecture of the sunshine era, presidents have not
merely lurked in the shadows. Arnold catalogs a multitude of cases in which presidents, long
before September 11, 2001, developed formal procedures with the express intent of evading the
watchful eyes of Congress and the courts. Presidents have repeatedly asserted the authority to
classify information that, by all rights, ought to be the subject of public deliberation. Through national
security directives and Office of Legal Counsel memos, they have propagated secret laws that are not
subject to the checks that Madison and his intellectual descendants considered so vital.
(__) Circumvention of laws banning surveillance is empirically proven.
Ackerman, national security editor for the Guardian US, 2015,
(Spencer,. 6-1-2015, "Fears NSA will seek to undermine surveillance reform," Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-congress-secret-law)
Yet in recent memory, the US government permitted the NSA to circumvent the Fisa court
entirely. Not a single Fisa court judge was aware of Stellar Wind, the NSA’s post-9/11
constellation of bulk surveillance programs, from 2001 to 2004. Energetic legal tactics
followed to fit the programs under existing legal authorities after internal controversy or
outright exposure. When the continuation of a bulk domestic internet metadata collection program
risked the mass resignation of Justice Department officials in 2004, an internal NSA draft history
records that attorneys found a different legal rationale that “essentially gave NSA the same authority
to collect bulk internet metadata that it had”. After a New York Times story in 2005 revealed the
existence of the bulk domestic phone records program, attorneys for the US Justice
Department and NSA argued, with the blessing of the Fisa court, that Section 215 of the
Patriot Act authorized it all along – precisely the contention that the second circuit court of
appeals rejected in May.
66
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality
1NC – Topicality Domestic Surveillance
1. Interpretation - Domestic surveillance is surveillance that physically takes place on the
surveilling state’s territory, which is distinct from foreign surveillance which is in surveillance
across state borders and surveillance entirely overseas.
Deeks,Associate Professor, University of Virginia Law School, 2015
Ashley.. "An International Legal Framework for Surveillance." Virginia Journal of International Law 55
(2015): 2014-53.
As a result, this Article is focused on the category of spying that consists of foreign surveillance.
“Foreign surveillance” here refers to the clandestine surveillance by one state during peacetime
of the communications of another state’s officials or citizens (who are located outside the
surveilling state’s territory) using electronic means, including cyber-monitoring,
telecommunications monitoring, satellites, or drones. Foreign surveillance is comprised of
two types of surveillance: “transnational surveillance” and “extraterritorial surveillance.”13
Transnational surveillance refers to the surveillance of communications that cross state
borders, including those that begin and end overseas but incidentally pass through the collecting
state. Extraterritorial surveillance refers to the surveillance of communications that take place
entirely overseas. For example, if Australia intercepted a phone call between two French
nationals that was routed through a German cell tower, this would be extraterritorial
surveillance. In contrast, surveillance that takes place on the surveilling state’s territory
(“domestic surveillance”) against either that state’s nationals or any other individual
physically present in that state generally would be regulated by the ICCPR, as discussed
below.14 This Article focuses predominately on transnational and extraterritorial surveillance, arguing
that states should close the gap between the ways in which they regulate the two.
2. Violation – The NSA collection of internet traffic under 702 is foreign surveillance the
communications of at least one party are outside the US.
Simcox 2015
Robin Simcox is a Research Fellow at The Henry Jackson Society “Surveillance After Snowden
Effective Espionage in an Age of Transparency” 5/26/2015 Henry Jackson Society
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2015/05/26/surveillance-after-snowden-effective-espionage-in-an-ageof-transparency/
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) governs the interception of communications – for the specific purpose
of acquiring foreign intelligence information – of those based outside the US. It is widely
considered to be more integral to the NSA’s work than that of Section 215.
67
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality
1NC – Topicality Domestic Surveillance
3. The Affirmative interpretation is bad for debate
Limits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their interpretation makes the
topic too big. They make the domestic limit meaningless. All surveillance becomes topical by
their standards.
4. Topicality is a Voting Issue because the opportunity to prepare promotes better debating
68
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality
2NC Topicality – Domestic Interpretation
(___)
(__) Domestic Surveillance must be entirely within the territorial boundaries of a state.
Forcese, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, 2011
(Craig. Canada"Spies Without Borders: International Law and Intelligence Collection." Journal of
National Security Law and Policy 5 (2011).)
Likewise, electronic surveillance may have a domestic, foreign, and transnational nexus. As
noted, a domestic wiretap may be the source of intelligence. In another scenario, one state
may covertly monitor communications arising in another state from a listening facility housed
in the first state’s embassy in the second state’s capital. In addition, signals emanating from the
territory of one state may be intercepted on the territory of another.
The range of geographic permutations on spying is laid out in table 1. For the purposes of this
paper, I shall use the terms “territorial” to describe purely domestic spying, “extraterritorial”
to describe purely foreign spying and “transnational” to describe spying that straddles state
borders.
Table 1: Geography of Spying
Human intelligence
Electronic surveillance
Territorial
Collection of
information by a state
agent from people and
their associated
documents and media
sources that takes
place within the state.
Extraterritorial
Collection of
information by a state
agent from people and
their associated
documents and media
sources that takes
place on the territory of
another the state.
Transnational
Collection of
information by a state
agent from people and
their associated
documents and media
sources in which the
source (but not the
agent) is located on the
territory of another
state.
Interception of
communications or
actions passed by
radio, wire, or other
electromagnetic,
photo-electronic and/or
photooptical means
and of electromagnetic
radiations in which
both the
communication and the
interception takes
place within the state.
69
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality
2NC Topicality – Domestic Interpretation Good
(___)
(__) The distinction between domestic and foreign is the critical question in determining how
to handle surveillance. Their blurring of this distinction means we don’t learn about the law.
Freiwald, Professor, University of San Francisco School of Law., 2008
Susan. "Electronic Surveillance at the Virtual Border." Mississippi Law Journal 78 (2008): 2009-15.
While the FISA scheme is a creature of Congress, it must conform to constitutional constraints.26 As
Part II discusses, Fourth Amendment precedents require the judiciary to oversee executive
branch surveillance of purely “domestic” surveillance.27 But the Fourth Amendment has
much less, if anything, to say about executive branch conduct of purely “foreign”
surveillance.28 One could defensibly arrange the scenarios along a spectrum from most
“domestic,” and therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment, to most “foreign,” and
therefore least protected.
Rather than viewing the Fourth Amendment as providing decreasing judicial oversight as the
character of the electronic surveillance becomes increasingly foreign, however, one could instead
view Fourth Amendment protection as being all or nothing. In other words, one could view the
Fourth Amendment as providing strict regulation for purely domestic investigations and no
regulation for purely foreign investigations because the latter are governed by executive
branch discretion. Then one would view the rules for cases that fall in the middle as designed to
determine whether to treat the investigation as domestic or foreign. Under this view, in cases that are
neither clearly domestic nor clearly foreign, the judge’s role would be to review the executive’s
decision to deprive the target of judicial oversight of the surveillance that the Fourth Amendment
mandates. The executive makes such a determination when a target effectively acts in the interest of
a foreign power; in such a case, the executive may be said to “exile” that target if she is a U.S.
Person.29
In this analysis, the virtual border plays a key role. On this side of the virtual border, domestic
targets enjoy extensive judicial review of executive branch surveillance, pursuant to the dictates
of the Fourth Amendment.30 On the other side, foreign targets are subject to whatever
electronic surveillance the executive branch chooses to conduct in the exercise of its foreign
affair powers.31 Foreign targets have no right to complain about surveillance techniques in
our courts, though they may of course raise their complaints in their own courts.32
70
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality
2NC Topicality – Clear Definition Good
(___)
(__) Clear definition of domestic surveillance is critical to good policy making.
Yoo and Sulmasy, Associate Professor of Law, United States Coast Guard Academy and
Professor of Law, University of California–Berkeley 2007,
(John and Glenn, “Counterintuitive: Intelligence Operations and International Law”. Michigan Journal
of International Law, Vol. 28, 2007; UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 1030763. Available
at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1030763)
Domestically, so many components and issues comprise “intelligence” that it remains difficult
to pin down a specific definition.22 Mark Lowenthal, an expert in intelligence gathering, has
noted that “[v]irtually every book written on the subject of intelligence begins with a
discussion of what the author believes ‘intelligence’ to mean, or at least how the he or she
intends to use the term. This editorial fact tells us much about the field of intelligence.”23 Even those
who have spent years in the field find the term vague.24 Any international convention on the
peacetime conduct of intelligence collection would prove unsuccessful at the very least
because of difficulties in defining exactly what it would seek to regulate. Defining intelligence
and intelligence gathering often derives from such vague subject terms as
counterintelligence, business intelligence, foreign intelligence, espionage, maritime
intelligence, space-related intelligence, signals intelligence, and human intelligence. These
subject terms themselves then need an established universal definition and further
simplification in order to reduce the ambiguity associated with attempts to regulate the
practice. Currently, the United States defines intelligence as a body of evidence and the conclusions
drawn from it. It is often derived from information that is concealed or not intended to be available for
use by the inquirer.”25 This vague and overly broad definitional statement reveals the problems
with actually articulating what intelligence is and what it is not. Without a clear definition of
the term (from the United States or any other state for that matter), we should not expect
regulation of intelligence activities at the international level.
71
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Topicality
2NC Topicality – NSA is Foreign Surveillance
(___)
(__) The NSA is a Foreign Intelligence agency.
De, General Counsel, National Security Agency, 2014,
(Rajesh , 10-16-2014, "The NSA and Accountability in an Era of Big Data," Journal Of National
Security Law & Policy,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1547942293/D7CD0D4112B54FC9PQ/2?accountid=10422)
As noted earlier, NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. Executive Order 12333 defines foreign
intelligence as "information relating to the capabilities, intentions, or activities of foreign
governments or elements thereof, foreign organizations, foreign persons, or international
terrorists." This language largely mirrors that which Congress adopted in the National Security
Act of 1947. FISA contains a more intricate definition of foreign intelligence information for the
specific purposes of that statutory scheme, but all support the same overall conclusion - NSA's
mission is neither open-ended, nor is it discretionary. NSA may only collect signals
intelligence for a foreign purpose.
(__) Section 702 collects communications of non-Americans outside of the US.
Dickerson, Harvard Law student and former editor Harvard National Security Journal, 2015
(Julie, 2-17-2015, "Harvard National Security Journal – Meaningful Transparency: The Missing
Numbers the NSA and FISC Should Reveal," Harvard National Security Journal,
http://harvardnsj.org/2015/02/meaningful-transparency-the-missing-numbers-the-nsa-and-fisc-shouldreveal/
Under § 702 of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the NSA uses information from U.S. electronic
communication service providers to target non-Americans outside the United States for
documented foreign intelligence purposes. The NSA collects more than 250 million internet
communications under this power each year. While a large absolute number, it is unclear what
percent of total internet communications these § 702 communications constitute. The NSA has
revealed that the internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day, the NSA touches
1.6% of that data in its foreign intelligence mission, and the NSA only selects 0.025% of that
data for review. The net result is that NSA analysts look at a mere 0.00004% of the world’s traffic.
These percentages of total data traffic, though indicative that the percent of § 702
communications collected is likely miniscule, do not map perfectly onto percentages of total
communications.
72
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
1NC Terrorism DA Link
(__) Link –Section 702 is the most valuable NSA surveillance program, it has prevented
multiple terror attacks.
Taylor, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, 2014
(Stuart, “The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists”, April 28, 2014
http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/big-snoop)
Yet there's no denying that PRISM's mining of emails and other Internet messages has
produced a mother lode of useful information. An internal NSA document leaked by Snowden
described the program as "the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief" and the
NSA's "leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly one in seven [of all the intelligence
community's secret] reports."
More to the point, PRISM has often contributed to the collection of actionable intelligence used
in the fight against terrorism. Even Wyden, the NSA's strongest congressional critic,
acknowledges as much. He and his ally on the surveillance issue, Senator Mark Udall (D-Colo.),
said in a joint statement last summer that "multiple terrorist plots have been disrupted at least
in part because of information obtained under Section 702."
73
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
Link Terrorism- 702 and Prism
(__) Surveillance under section 702 is crucial to detect and act on threats of terrorism.
Hines, defense council member of the Truman National Security Project, 2013
(Pierre “Here’s how metadata on billions of phone calls predicts terrorist attacks”
http://qz.com/95719/heres-how-metadata-on-billions-of-phone-calls-predicts-terrorist-attacks, June
19th, 2013)
Yesterday, when NSA Director General Keith Alexander testified before the House Committee
on Intelligence, he declared that the NSA’s surveillance programs have provided “critical leads
to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events.” FBI Deputy Director Sean Boyce elaborated
by describing four instances when the NSA’s surveillance programs have had an impact: (1)
when an intercepted email from a terrorist in Pakistan led to foiling a plan to bomb of the New
York subway system; (2) when NSA’s programs helped prevent a plot to bomb the New York
Stock Exchange; (3) when intelligence led to the arrest of a U.S. citizen who planned to bomb
the Danish Newspaper office that published cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad;
and (4) when the NSA’s programs triggered reopening the 9/11 investigation. So what are the
practical applications of internet and phone records gathered from two NSA programs? And how can
“metadata” actually prevent terrorist attacks? Metadata does not give the NSA and intelligence
community access to the content of internet and phone communications. Instead, metadata is more
like the transactional information cell phone customers would normally see on their billing
statements—metadata can indicate when a call, email, or online chat began and how long the
communication lasted. Section 215 of the Patriot Act provides the legal authority to obtain “business
records” from phone companies. Meanwhile, the NSA uses Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act to authorize its PRISM program. According the figures provided by Gen.
Alexander, intelligence gathered based on Section 702 authority contributed in over 90% of the
50 cases. One of major benefits of metadata is that it provides hindsight—it gives intelligence
analysts a retrospective view of a sequence of events. As Deputy Director Boyce discussed, the
ability to analyze previous communications allowed the FBI to reopen the 9/11 investigation and
determine who was linked to that attack. It is important to recognize that terrorist attacks are not
orchestrated overnight; they take months or years to plan. Therefore, if the intelligence
community only catches wind of an attack halfway into the terrorists’ planning cycle, or even
after a terrorist attack has taken place, metadata might be the only source of information that
captures the sequence of events leading up to an attack. Once a terrorist suspect has been
identified or once an attack has taken place, intelligence analysts can use powerful software to sift
through metadata to determine which numbers, IP addresses, or individuals are associated with the
suspect. Moreover, phone numbers and IP addresses sometimes serve as a proxy for the
general location of where the planning has taken place. This ability to narrow down the
location of terrorists can help determine whether the intelligence community is dealing with a
domestic or international threat.
74
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
Link Terrorism – Online Surveillance
(__) Surveillance of internet communication is critical to stop terrorism.
De, General Counsel, National Security Agency, 2014,
(Rajesh , 10-16-2014, "The NSA and Accountability in an Era of Big Data," Journal Of National
Security Law & Policy,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1547942293/D7CD0D4112B54FC9PQ/2?accountid=10422)
NSA performs its mission in an ever more rapidly evolving operational environment, one
characterized by persistent change in both the nature of our adversaries and their communications.
Foreign threats are no longer limited to traditional nation state actors, or even widelyrecognized terrorist groups like al Qaeda and its affiliates. Moreover, adversaries today
communicate through means more operationally simple yet technically sophisticated than
ever before. As you know better than most, these changes are taking place against a backdrop
of increasingly complex, dynamic, and voluminous communications data flows around the
globe. Industry and academic estimates regularly chart the growth of such trends, often in metrics of
such dizzying scale that they can become mind numbing: as of 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of data
are created each day; more data crosses the internet every second today than was stored on
the entire internet 20 years ago; global mobile traffic grew 70 percent in 2012, reaching 885
petabytes per month; and it is estimated that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed
the world's population in 2013. Scale, however, is merely one of the challenges for a signals
intelligence agency like NSA-trends toward greater mobility and the increasing adoption of internetbased encryption pose additional challenges as well.
Perhaps the most alarming trend is that the digital communications infra- structure is
increasingly also becoming the domain for foreign threat activity. In other words, it is no longer
just a question of "collecting" or even "connecting" the dots in order to assess foreign threats
amidst more and more digital noise, it is also a question of determining which of the so-called
"dots" may constitute the threat itself. As President Obama has recognized, "the cyber threat to
our nation is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face."
75
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
Link Terrorism – Online Surveillance
(__) Blocking intelligence from using the internet is a huge risk- terrorists use the internet.
Cordero, Director of National Security Studies Center at Georgetown University Law, 2013
(Carrie, "Continued Oversight of US Government Surveillance Authorities: Hearing Before the S.
Committee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., December 11, 2013 (Statement by Professor Carrie F.
Cordero, Geo. UL Center)." (2013).
Some will argue that Congress should outlaw bulk collection under FISA, based on the “power of
metadata” argument as well as arguments about our changing expectation of privacy in light of the
methods of modern communications. But everyday Americans, or friends in foreign nations, are
not the only people using the Internet to communicate. We all - - regular people, government
leaders, as well as those who pose national security threats such as terrorists, terrorist
financiers and facilitators, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, spies, sophisticated hackers,
and cyber intruders - - use the Internet, computers, and smart phones to communicate. And so
just as regular people should not be expected to turn off their modern communications and
revert to old fashioned modes of communication, neither should the Intelligence Community
or law enforcement resort to pen, paper and index cards to conduct national security collection
or investigations. It is just as unrealistic to expect citizens to unplug, as it is to expect or
require the NSA or FBI to use 20th century collection, analytic or investigative techniques or
methods to protect the nation from 21st century threats.
76
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
Link Terrorism – Delay
(__) The plan results in a huge amount of paperwork for the NSA – makes them really slow
Cordero, Director of National Security Studies Center at Georgetown University Law, 2013
(Carrie, "Continued Oversight of US Government Surveillance Authorities: Hearing Before the S.
Committee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., December 11, 2013 (Statement by Professor Carrie F.
Cordero, Geo. UL Center)." (2013).
In light of recent unauthorized disclosures, concerns have also been expressed regarding the
NSA’s collection targeting or pertaining to foreign persons located outside the United States.
Suggestions have been made that U.S. foreign intelligence collection should recognize some sort of
privacy right for non-U.S. persons. In fact, the U.S. Intelligence Community has a recent history of
affording Constitutional protections to persons who are not entitled to them. Congress made a
deliberate decision with the passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to end that practice. And
for good reason: prior to 2007, the U.S. government was, in fact, going through incredible hoops
to acquire certain communications of foreign terrorist targets overseas. Two parallel processes
caused this to happen. The first was described in a written statement for the record by the Director of
National Intelligence before this Committee in September 2007
“…[P]rior to Congress passing the Protect America Act last month, in a significant number of
cases, IC agencies were required to make a showing of probable cause in order to target for
surveillance the communications of a foreign intelligence target located overseas. Then, they
needed to explain that probable cause finding in documentation, and obtain approval of the
FISA Court to collect against a foreign terrorist located in a foreign country. Frequently, although not
always, that person's communications were with another foreign person located overseas. In such
cases, prior to the Protect America Act, FISA’s requirement to obtain a court order, based on a
showing of probable cause, slowed, and in some cases prevented altogether, the Government's
ability to collect foreign intelligence information, without serving any substantial privacy or civil
liberties interests.”
In other words, the Intelligence Community, because of the requirements of the FISA statute prior to
2007, found itself in a position where it was seeking individual probable cause-based orders from the
FISC to target terrorists overseas. When the government needed to obtain certain
communications of a terrorist target, located in, as examples, Pakistan or Yemen, it was
preparing a full application to the FISC, with a detailed factual showing providing probable
cause that the target was an agent of a foreign power, and obtaining the signatures of a high
ranking national security official and the Attorney General, and then submitting that application to
the FISC for approval. This extensive process, in addition to being unnecessary from a
Constitutional perspective, was a crushing force on the system.
77
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
Terrorism – Answers to “Too much Data” [1/2]
(__) The NSA needs all of the data – its like taking out 200 pieces of a 1000 piece puzzle, it
becomes a lot harder to understand the picture when you eliminate data.
Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studeies, 2014
(James Andrew “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - Center For Strategic &
International Studies - Strategic Technologies Program – December http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate)
This effort takes place over months and involves multiple intelligence, law enforcement, and
military agencies, with more than a dozen individuals from these agencies collaborating to build up a
picture of the bomb-maker and his planned attack. When the bomb-maker leaves the Middle East to
carry out his attack, he is prevented from entering the United States. An analogy for how this works
would be to take a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, randomly select 200 pieces, and provide them to
a team of analysts who, using incomplete data, must guess what the entire picture looks like.
The likelihood of their success is determined by how much information they receive, how
much time they have, and by experience and luck. Their guess can be tested by using a range of
collection programs, including communications surveillance programs like the 215 metadata program.
What is left out of this picture (and from most fictional portrayals of intelligence analysis) is the
number of false leads the analysts must pursue, the number of dead ends they must walk down,
and the tools they use to decide that something is a false lead or dead end. Police officers are familiar
with how many leads in an investigation must be eliminated through legwork and query before an
accurate picture emerges. Most leads are wrong, and much of the work is a process of
elimination that eventually focuses in on the most probable threat. If real intelligence work were
a film, it would be mostly boring. Where the metadata program contributes is in eliminating possible
leads and suspects.
(__) There’s not too much data – computer processing power solves the problem.
Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015
(Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics &
International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.
Greenwald also raises objections from a national security perspective. He warns that mass
surveillance undermines national security because “it swamps the intelligence agencies with
so much data that they cannot possibly sort through it effectively.”11 He also questions the
efficacy of communications surveillance, arguing that it has little to show in terms of success in
combating terrorism. But these criticisms are equally unpersuasive. It is certainly possible that a
surveillance program could generate so much raw data that an important piece of information
is overlooked. But in such a case the appropriate response would not be to shut down the
program but rather to bulk up the processing power and manpower devoted to it. Finally, both
the President's Review Group and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have examined the
efficacy of the NSA's programs. Both report that the NSA's foreign surveillance programs have
contributed to more than fifty counterterrorism investigations, leading them to conclude that the NSA
“does in fact play an important role in the nation's effort to prevent terrorist attacks across the
globe.”12
78
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Terrorism Disadvantage
Terrorism – Answers to “Too much Data” [2/2]
(__) Bulk data is critical to eliminate false positives.
Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014
(James Andrew “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - Center For Strategic &
International Studies - Strategic Technologies Program – December http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate)
Assertions that a collection program contributes nothing because it has not singlehandedly
prevented an attack reflect an ill-informed understanding of how the United States conducts
collection and analysis to prevent harmful acts against itself and its allies. Intelligence does not
work as it is portrayed in films—solitary agents do not make startling discoveries that lead to
dramatic, last-minute success (nor is technology consistently infallible). Intelligence is a team sport.
Perfect knowledge does not exist and success is the product of the efforts of teams of dedicated
individuals from many agencies, using many tools and techniques, working together to assemble
fragments of data from many sources into a coherent picture. Analysts assemble this mosaic from
many different sources and based on experience and intuition. Luck is still more important than
anyone would like and the alternative to luck is acquiring more information. This ability to blend
different sources of intelligence has improved U.S. intelligence capabilities and gives us an
advantage over some opponents.
Portrayals of spying in popular culture focus on a central narrative, essential for storytelling but deeply
misleading. In practice, there can be many possible narratives that analysts must explore
simultaneously. An analyst might decide, for example, to see if there is additional confirming
information that points to which explanation deserves further investigation. Often, the contribution
from collection programs comes not from what they tell us, but what they let us reject as false.
In the case of the 215 program, its utility was in being able to provide information that allowed
analysts to rule out some theories and suspects. This allows analysts to focus on other, more
likely, scenarios.
79
NSA Negative
NAUDL 2015-16
Politics Disadvantage
Politics Disad Link
(__) The plan is unpopular because PRISM works, Congress got rid of metadata in the USA
Freedom act because it was ineffective.
National Journal, 2015,
(Dustin Volz is a staff correspondent for National Journal covering tech policy. Dustin is a graduate of
Arizona State University. Lauren Fox is a staff correspondent for National Journal. She graduated
from the University of Oregon. 6-3-2015, "The War Over NSA Spying Is Just Beginning,"
nationaljournal, http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/the-war-over-nsa-spying-is-just-beginning20150603)
The momentum to end the NSA's phone dragnet snowballed over the past year and a half as
two review panels deemed it ineffective. President Obama pledged to end it "as it currently exists"
and a federal appeals court deemed it illegal. But further reforms—such as to the Internet
surveillance program known as PRISM, which Snowden also revealed—are likely to be
tougher sells in Congress. For PRISM especially, that's in part because the program is
considered more useful and because it deals primarily with surveillance of foreigners. U.S.
tech companies that are subject to PRISM, including Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, have called for
changes to the program. Yet when asked about whether he would work to take down PRISM,
even Wyden bristled at the question. "I am going to keep it to the three that I am going to
change," Wyden said. Even reformers outside the confines of the Senate recognize that
ending PRISM is a complicated pursuit. "It is not going to be quite as easy to drum up the
same support," says Liza Goitein, codirector for the Liberty & National Security Program at the
Brennan Center for Justice.
80
NSA Negative
MDL and NAUDL 2015-16
Executive Action
Executive Action Better
(__) The President should limit NSA programs on their own. Congressional limits are too
inflexible and link to the Terrorism disad.
Cordero, Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law, 2014,
(Carrie, The Brookings Institution A Debate One Year After Snowden: The Future Of U.S.
Surveillance Authorities Washington, D.C. Thursday, June 5, 2014
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/06/05-debate-snowden-future-us-surveillance-nsa#/full-event/)
MS. CORDERO: One additional point on the President’s initiative. So, there have been policy
directives. The President issued a new order in January that does place additional limits on
the collection. That is completely within the President’s authority and is appropriate and so
forth.
Where I think this debate over the last year is now taking a turn is now the President can make
those determinations, and if it determines that those policy decisions are having an adverse
impact on national security and he needs to adjust them, he currently has the flexibility to do
that.
The problem with some of the legislative proposals that are currently on the table is that they
will outlaw certain activity, and it will be in law if bulk collection, for example, is outlawed, can’t
be conducted under the FISA statute. And that’s where we risk the potential to create an
environment that nobody in the legal community or the national security community wants to
revisit, which is the environment that we faced in the pre-9/11 days and right after where the
law, the statutes, had become so outdated with respect to the way the technology occurred
and the threats that we were facing that the Executive needed to act on Executive authority
alone. And unfortunately some of the proposals that are currently on the table risk putting us down
that path in the years to come.
(__) The President can unilaterally end the programs.
Brand, member of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 2015
(Rachel L. 5-20-2015, "Opinion: What Congress gets wrong about NSA surveillance practices,"
Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/PasscodeVoices/2015/0520/Opinion-What-Congress-gets-wrong-about-NSA-surveillance-practices
The debate about this program is important, and reasonable people differ on whether its benefits
outweigh its privacy impacts. But if the goal is to do away with this program, legislation is
unnecessary. The president could unilaterally end the program today without any action by
Congress. This would be simpler and have fewer unintended consequences than passing
legislation that permanently removes this investigative tool from the toolbox and tinkers with
a number of other important counterterrorism tools.
81