Opening Packet – HSS -2015 – 1AC
document - Freedom Act Aff
Constructing your 1AC
Opening notes to students
How to build a 1AC from this file
One of our major goals at camp is to teach many different aspects that pop-up in contemporary
surveillance debates.
At first, this can be daunting as this document has a lot of moving parts. But hopefully the first few
pages of this file will make it all a little less overwhelming.
Here are some tips:
First – start by choosing a plan text
There are ten options included. Some options are more strategic than others. We will discuss the
upsides and downsides of each in lab time.
When choosing a plan text, one big question you’ll want to consider is whether to have a “narrow” plan
text (tackling a small number of current surveillance practices) or a “broader” plan text (tackling several or all current
surveillance practices).
Second – read (only) one of the two “inherency and solvency” options
There’s one if your plan is broad… and another one if your plan is narrow. Most of the time, this will be
presented in the opening portion of the 1AC – before you read the advantages (but that’s up to you).
Third – Here’s list of the advantages in the packet.
No one will have time to read all of the advantages in an 8 minute 1AC, so you’ll need to pick and choose
your favorites. Some advantages have “longer” and “shorter” version to assist with time allocation.
Other advantages have different impact modules. At camp, consider mixing it up and reading different
advantages and modules in the various practice debates.
Conceptually, here is a good way to think about the 1AC advantage options:
 Quality of Life advantages
o Privacy advantage – longer version
o Privacy advantage – shorter version
o Bigotry advantage – longer version
o Bigotry advantage – shorter version
 The Journalism advantage – designed to give an nice angle if you think your opponent may
go for the Kritik.
 Advantages involving US image:
o India advantage – financial markets impact
o India advantage – cyber impact
o India advantage – Democracy impact
o Global Internet Advantage – economy impact
o Global Internet Advantage – democracy impact
Please note that a few of the cards in the India and Global Internet Advantages overlap. If you are
reading both of those advantages in the same 1AC, take a moment to double-check and confirm that
you are not reading the same piece of evidence more than once.
Glossary and Important Note
Note to students
The next page presents a glossary.
Glossaries are often important for topic familiarization – but especially so for this year’s topic. Here’s
why:
There are many different ways that the Aff could argue that current laws protecting against surveillance
are insufficient.
I will use the example of the USA FREEDOM Act. The Freedom Act became a Law very recently – it
passed on June 2nd, 2015. It was designed to enhance privacy protection against federal surveillance. In
order to pass the Congress, the Freedom Act went through many changes. Many privacy advocates
argue that the “new” Freedom Act fails – especially in relation to the original version of the bill.
In some instances, the author of an article will rattle off four or five different reasons that they feel the
current Freedom Act will not work. Then, in another article, a different author may rattle off a different
laundry list of five items where three items overlap with evidence you’ve already read – but two items
do not.
For debaters, this presents three concerns:
First – unnecessary duplication.
The Affirmative doesn’t want to read a 3rd card saying the Freedom Act fails “because it lacks sufficient
Pen Register protections”. Once will usually be enough.
Second – strategic consistency.
Affirmatives will want to avoid reading inherency cards that say “Freedom Act fails due to lack of Pen
Register protections” if the version of the Affirmative plan being read fails to change Pen Register
protections.
Third – confusion.
Honestly, there are so many laws and investigative tools about privacy that this can all turn into
acronym soup. A familiarized Affirmative might be able to digest it all – but it could be puzzling to an
unfamiliar judge or to a new novice on the team.
Organizationally, I cooked-up with the following solution:
For each piece of evidence in “Inherency Solvency” backline section, I use a set of acronyms in the F6
header (the “block header” – but not in the F7 tag).
Hopefully, this allows the student quickly differentiate between the different reasons why the Freedom
Act fails. But, it should also avoid situations where the student is verbally presenting five confusing
acronyms into the tag of a 2AC card.
In order to understand what each acronym means, I have placed a “Glossary” on the next page.
Glossary
If the F6 block header has one or more of the following acronyms, here is what it referencing:
The USA FREEDOM ACT – A recently passed bill that stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by
Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act”. The Act
implemented many reforms – but most prominently it (arguably) ended the ability of federal intelligence
agencies to store certain phone data (“phone metadata” – see below). Instead, it required phone
companies, not government agencies, to hold on to that data. Federal intelligence agencies can search
the phone company records if they granted a warrant authorizing their request. The Affirmative in this
packet will argue that current Freedom Act is insufficient and that the original draft of the Freedom Act
provided better safeguards.
The PATRIOT ACT – Its official title is the USA PATRIOT Act – an acronym that stands for "Uniting and
Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
of 2001". The Patriot Act is an act of Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush in
October of 2001. It is widely viewed as a reaction to the events of September 11th, 2001. The Patriot Act
does many, many things – but, on this topic, it is perhaps most relevant because it increased the
authority of intelligence agencies to engage in surveillance.
EO 12333 – This stands for “Executive Order” 12333. It was signed by President Ronald Reagan and
established broad new surveillance authorities for the intelligence community, outside the scope of
public law. It was amended three times by President George W. Bush. These cards will argue that the
Status Quo fails because EO 12333 creates a loophole permitting excessive surveillance.
FAA or “FAA-Section 702” – “FAA” stands for the “FISA Amendments Act of 2008”. This an acronym
within an acronym. So, a little backstory:
o
o
o
The F.I.S.A. is an acronym standing for The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
That act does many things – but is most apt to come-up because it created a separate
set of "secret courts" called the “FISC” (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts). Its
hearings are closed to the public – but it handles many requests for surveillance
warrants from federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The F.I.S.A. law itself passed in 1978 – but it has often been amended since then.
One reason that the FAA of 2008 comes up is Section 702 of the FAA. Section 702
authorizes PRISM (explained below). Section 702 is designed to gather intelligence on
foreign citizens, but is often accused of gathering intelligence on US citizens. Many
argue that because Section 702 is understood to permit gathering information “about” a
foreign person, it can be used to gather information regarding US persons.
Language – argues that the Status Quo fails because the language or definitions of current laws are not
strict enough. Here, the Affirmative would usually argue that when language has “wiggle room” federal
agencies will seek to gain as much intelligence a possible – often at the expense of privacy. The most
common example of insufficient language is “SST” – which is explained below.
Meta-data. Metadata is traditionally defined as “data about data.” Translation: The NSA probably isn’t
listening to your phone calls or reading your email. Instead, the metadata program givs intelligence
access to information about phone calls. That includes the phone numbers of both caller and recipient,
the number of any calling cards used, the time and duration of calls and the international mobile
subscriber identity (a unique identifier embedded in a phone SIM card) number. Email metadata
includes each message’s to, from, cc and timestamp information. It also includes the IP address each
email was sent from, which reveals where a computer is located. Status quo metadata programs do not
allow the Government to listen in on phone calls or read emails. The information acquired does not
include the content of any communications or the identity of any subscriber.
Minimization – argues that the Status Quo fails because so-called “super-minimization” procedures are
not in place. Super-minimization requires intelligence agencies to delete all information gathered on
persons that are subsequently determined to have not been relevant to the federal investigation at
hand. Absent these super-minimization protections, intelligence agencies could arguably retain that
information and use it in different investigations.
Multiple Authorities - argues that the Status Quo fails because of several different programs that
authorize surveillance. These cards are probably best run in conjunction with an Affirmative plan that
seeks to ban or eliminate many surveillance programs.
NSL’s - National Security Letters. These cards will argue that the Status Quo fails because the FBI
currently has the authority to issue NSL’s. These letters are served on communications service providers
(like phone or internet companies) by the FBI to compel provision of communication or Internet activity.
An NSL cannot demand the content of a call, but can compel provision of metadata. Recipients of NSLs
may be subject to a gag order that forbids them from revealing the letters' existence to the public. No
approval from a judge is required for the FBI to issue an NSL, but the recipient of the NSL can still
challenge the nondisclosure requirement in federal court.
Pen Register or Trap and Trace device - A device that decodes or records electronic information – like
outgoing numbers from a telephone. A “pen register” technically was a device that recorded data from
telegraph machines. But the term has survived and applies to modern communication. These cards will
argue that the Status Quo fails because the law provides insufficient protection against bulk collection of
data obtained from “Pen Register or Trap and Trace” devices.
PRISM – PRISM is a US surveillance program under which the National Security Agency (NSA) collects
Internet communications from at least nine major US Internet companies. PRISM requests for internet
data are authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (see FAA or “FAA-Section
702” – above). The program is intended to identity foreign citizens – but the program is often accused of
inadvertently gathering intelligence on US citizens. According to The Washington Post, US intelligence
analysts search PRISM data using terms intended to identify targets whom the analysts suspect with at
least 51 percent confidence to not be U.S. citizen.
Signal Args – these cards speak to the image or perception of the law as seen by the US public or foreign
countries.
SST - “Specific Selector Terms”. These cards will argue that the Status Quo fails because the law allows
searches to be conducted with “broad selector terms” – like a zip code, an area code, or the IP address
of a web hosting service that hosts thousands of web sites. These broad searches stumble onto much
more data. Some privacy advocates want to demand an SST – which would require searches that are
much more narrow (i.e. an individual’s name).
***For summer camp students – I also want to talk about two more programs.
(please take notes here:)
1AC Inherency and Solvency Section
1AC Version if the plan is narrow
Contention One
Contention One – the Status Quo fails, and the Aff solves.
The Freedom Act recently became Law. This new Freedom Act won’t substantially
reduce bulk surveillance. Safeguards from the original Freedom Act are needed.
New York Times ‘15
(editorial board of New York Times – The Opinion Pages of New York Times – “More Excuses on the Patriot Act “ - May 1st http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/opinion/more-excuses-on-the-patriot-act.html?smid=fb-share&_r=2)
Software designers
have a term — “minimal viable product” — to describe early versions of things like iPhone
apps that they can rush to market. The idea is to get something out and refine it as they go along. That’s the
argument being made for a measure in Congress that would modify the Patriot Act to make it somewhat harder
for the government to conduct mass surveillance of Americans without regard to whether they
committed any misdeeds. Sure, there are compromises, Americans are told, but we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The bill is a
“critical first step toward reining in” surveillance by the National Security Agency and is a basis for more reform, said Human Rights Watch.
Constitution is not Candy Crush.
Except the
The same idea — let’s do what we can and improve it later — was used to shove the original Patriot
Act through Congress. It was used to justify the inadequate changes later made to the act, many of which made it more intrusive on Americans’ rights. In 2008, we
got a “reform” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, that provided retroactive cover for the illegal surveillance of innocent Americans conducted
under President George W. Bush behind the false flag of counterterrorism. The
new bill, the USA Freedom Act, was passed by the House Judiciary
contain useful changes to
Committee on Thursday in a 25-to-2 vote and sent to the floor for what seems like near-certain approval. It does
Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was cynically misinterpreted by the Bush administration to cover the collection of millions of telephone records in the
United States and elsewhere. Section 215 will expire on June 1 if Congress does not act, but that is unlikely. The new bill would narrow the kinds of records,
including so-called metadata from phone calls, that the intelligence agencies can collect without bothering to obtain a warrant even from the obliging FISA court,
which virtually always grants one. It adds transparency measures related to government surveillance programs, and provides for more oversight of those programs.
But many of those provisions are weaker than in earlier versions of the bill , and weaker than they
need to be. The House committee rejected amendments designed to provide greater safeguards for civil liberties — including one from a Republican that
would have required the government to get a warrant before searching collected communications for information about Americans. The
bill does not
end the bulk collection of surveillance data under Section 215. Rather, it limits those
operations, which, in addition to eroding the Bill of Rights, have been shown to be worthless in protecting America. The American Civil Liberties Union
believes the
bill doesn’t sufficiently tighten the definition of the terms used to justify data
collection , or properly limit the retention of information about people who are not
suspected of wrongdoing, or require meaningful disclosure of so-called “backdoor” searches of databases by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. It does not appoint an advocate to argue before the FISA court on behalf of civil liberties; instead, it simply appoints a panel of experts to advise the
court, where only the government is allowed to present a case, in secret.
The new Freedom Act fails. Pen register, super-minimization, and SST standards from
the original draft of the Freedom Act would solve.
Greene ‘15
(et al; David Greene, Senior Staff Attorney and Civil Liberties Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. David is also an
adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he teaches classes in First Amendment and media law
and an instructor in the journalism department at San Francisco State University. David has significant experience litigating First
Amendment issues in state and federal trial and appellate courts and is one of the country's leading advocates for and
commentators on freedom of expression in the arts. “ACLU v. Clapper and the Congress: How The Second Circuit’s Decision
Affects the Legislative Landscape” - Electronic Frontier Foundation - May 11, 2015 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/aclu-v-clapper-and-congress-how-second-circuits-decision-affects-legislative)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Clapper has determined that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond
what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court unequivocally rejected the government’s secret
reinterpretation of Section 215. Among many important findings, the court found that Section 215’s authorization of the collection of business
records that are “relevant to an authorized investigation” could not be read to include the dragnet collection of telephone records. The court
also took issue with the fact that this strained application of the law was accomplished in secret and approved by the secret and one-sided
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). EFF filed amicus briefs in this case in both the district and circuit courts, and we
congratulate our colleagues at the ACLU on this significant victory. The Second Circuit’s opinion stands as a clear sign that the courts are ready
to step in and rule that mass surveillance is illegal. That’s great news. The
significant change
Second Circuit’s decision , however, also marks a
in the context of the ongoing legislative debate in Congress. Above all, it is clear that
Congress must do more to rein in dragnet surveillance by the NSA. Clean Reauthorization First, the Second
Circuit’s opinion should stop the idea of a "clean reauthorization" (a reauthorization with no reforms) of Section
215, which is set to expire June 1. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr
introduced S. 1035, a bill that would extend the current language of Section 215 through 2020, thereby continuing the mass spying rubberstamped by the FISA Court. The morning of the Second Circuit decision, both Senators took to the Senate floor to vehemently defend the bulk
collection program and push for a clean reauthorization. But a clean reauthorization is much more complicated now. Congress can’t pretend
that the Second Circuit's narrow reading of “relevant to an authorized investigation” doesn’t exist. It’s likely that if Congress merely does a
“clean” reauthorization of Section 215, then the district court in ACLU v. Clapper will enjoin the government from using Section 215 as
authorization for the call records dragnet, because the district court is bound by the Second Circuit decision. However, if a reauthorization
made it clear that Congress intended to reject the Second Circuit’s narrow reading of the law, it could cause further confusion and the
government could argue that Congress has fully embraced the dragnet. We’re encouraging people to call Congress and tell their lawmakers to
reject Senator McConnell's clean reauthorization in order to avoid the risk that Congress might reject the Second Circuit’s decision
USA Freedom Act Must Be Strengthened
In light of the Second Circuit’s decision, EFF
The
asks Congress to
strengthen its proposed reform of Section 215, the USA Freedom Act. Pending those improvements, EFF is withdrawing our
support of the bill. We’re urging Congress to roll the draft back to the stronger and meaningful reforms
included in the 2013 version of USA Freedom and affirmatively embrace the Second Circuit’s opinion on the limits of Section
215. Most importantly, the Second Circuit’s correct interpretation of the law should be expressly embraced by Congress in order to
avoid any confusion going forward about what the key terms in the statute mean, especially the terms “relevant” and
“investigation.” This recognition could be in the bill itself or, less preferably, in legislative history. The House Judiciary Committee has already
included such language in its report to the full House of Representatives, but now the Senate must include the language in the bill or in its own
legislative history. This easy task will make sure that the law is not read as rejecting the Second Circuit’s reading and will help ensure
that the USA Freedom Act actually accomplishes its goal of ending bulk collection. The House Report
on USA Freedom, issued today, takes a step forward by stating that: Congress’ decision to leave in place the ‘‘relevance’’ standard for Section
501 orders should not be construed as Congress’ intent to ratify the FISA Court’s interpretation of that term. These changes restore meaningful
limits to the ‘‘relevance’’ requirement of Section 501, consistent with the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v.
Clapper. Ensuring that the Senate doesn't move away from the legislative history should be a top priority as the bill moves forward. But that’s
the bare minimum Congress must do. The Second Circuit, and especially Judge Sack’s concurrence, noted a lack of both transparency and a true
adversary in the FISA Court. The 2014 and 2013 USA Freedom Act had stronger FISA Court reforms, particularly around the creation of a special
advocate who would argue against the government in the FISA Court. The Second Circuit’s opinion also emphasizes that typical subpoenas seek
only records of "suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects." Under the current USA Freedom
Act, the government can collect records of a "second hop,"—the numbers, and associated metadata, that have been in contact with the
numbers collected initially—without any additional authorization. The bill should be changed so that the government must file another
application for any further records it wants to collect. Automatically obtaining a "second hop" is unacceptable because it sweeps in too many
current USA Freedom Act is also out-of-sync with the court’s narrow view of
permissible collection of records because it lacks a rigorous definition of the " specific selection
term" the government can use to identify the records it wants to collect. This can be addressed by two
changes: (1) drawing upon last year's definition in the USA Freedom Act ; and, (2) closing down potential
loopholes like the definition of "address" or the use of a "person" to include a corporate person. Restoring Important Parts
of 2013’s USA Freedom Act This is also an opportunity and a new context for Congress to address the
shortcomings of the new ly introduced USA Freedom Act that we previously wrote about. Congress should put
people’s records. The
back key provisions that were dropped along the way as well as remove those that were introduced at the behest of the
intelligence community. First,
the "super minimization" procedures , which were key privacy
procedures that mandated the deletion of any information obtained about a person not connected to
the investigation, should be reintroduced. Key provisions establishing a higher legal standard and
compliance assessment for the use of pen register/trap-and-trace devices , legal standing to sue the government
over surveillance practices, and the original transparency provisions allowing government and corporate disclosure of surveillance orders
should also be resuscitated.
1AC Version if the plan broader (and “ends”
surveillance)
Contention One
Contention One – the Status Quo fails, and the Aff solves.
The Freedom Act recently became Law. The new Freedom Act won’t substantially
reduce surveillance. Pen register, super-minimization, and SST standards from the
original draft of the Freedom Act are needed.
Greene ‘15
(et al; David Greene, Senior Staff Attorney and Civil Liberties Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. David is also an
adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he teaches classes in First Amendment and media law
and an instructor in the journalism department at San Francisco State University. David has significant experience litigating First
Amendment issues in state and federal trial and appellate courts and is one of the country's leading advocates for and
commentators on freedom of expression in the arts. “ACLU v. Clapper and the Congress: How The Second Circuit’s Decision
Affects the Legislative Landscape” - Electronic Frontier Foundation - May 11, 2015 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/aclu-v-clapper-and-congress-how-second-circuits-decision-affects-legislative)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Clapper has determined that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond
what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court unequivocally rejected the government’s secret
reinterpretation of Section 215. Among many important findings, the court found that Section 215’s authorization of the collection of business
records that are “relevant to an authorized investigation” could not be read to include the dragnet collection of telephone records. The court
also took issue with the fact that this strained application of the law was accomplished in secret and approved by the secret and one-sided
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). EFF filed amicus briefs in this case in both the district and circuit courts, and we
congratulate our colleagues at the ACLU on this significant victory. The Second Circuit’s opinion stands as a clear sign that the courts are ready
to step in and rule that mass surveillance is illegal. That’s great news. The
significant change
Second Circuit’s decision , however, also marks a
in the context of the ongoing legislative debate in Congress. Above all, it is clear that
Congress must do more to rein in dragnet surveillance by the NSA. Clean Reauthorization First, the Second
Circuit’s opinion should stop the idea of a "clean reauthorization" (a reauthorization with no reforms) of Section
215, which is set to expire June 1. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr
introduced S. 1035, a bill that would extend the current language of Section 215 through 2020, thereby continuing the mass spying rubberstamped by the FISA Court. The morning of the Second Circuit decision, both Senators took to the Senate floor to vehemently defend the bulk
collection program and push for a clean reauthorization. But a clean reauthorization is much more complicated now. Congress can’t pretend
that the Second Circuit's narrow reading of “relevant to an authorized investigation” doesn’t exist. It’s likely that if Congress merely does a
“clean” reauthorization of Section 215, then the district court in ACLU v. Clapper will enjoin the government from using Section 215 as
authorization for the call records dragnet, because the district court is bound by the Second Circuit decision. However, if a reauthorization
made it clear that Congress intended to reject the Second Circuit’s narrow reading of the law, it could cause further confusion and the
government could argue that Congress has fully embraced the dragnet. We’re encouraging people to call Congress and tell their lawmakers to
reject Senator McConnell's clean reauthorization in order to avoid the risk that Congress might reject the Second Circuit’s decision
USA Freedom Act Must Be Strengthened
In light of the Second Circuit’s decision, EFF
The
asks Congress to
strengthen its proposed reform of Section 215, the USA Freedom Act. Pending those improvements, EFF is withdrawing our
support of the bill. We’re urging Congress to roll the draft back to the stronger and meaningful reforms
included in the 2013 version of USA Freedom and affirmatively embrace the Second Circuit’s opinion on the limits of Section
215. Most importantly, the Second Circuit’s correct interpretation of the law should be expressly embraced by Congress in order to
avoid any confusion going forward about what the key terms in the statute mean, especially the terms “relevant” and
“investigation.” This recognition could be in the bill itself or, less preferably, in legislative history. The House Judiciary Committee has already
included such language in its report to the full House of Representatives, but now the Senate must include the language in the bill or in its own
legislative history. This easy task will make sure that the law is not read as rejecting the Second Circuit’s reading and will help ensure
that the USA Freedom Act actually accomplishes its goal of ending bulk collection. The House Report
on USA Freedom, issued today, takes a step forward by stating that: Congress’ decision to leave in place the ‘‘relevance’’ standard for Section
501 orders should not be construed as Congress’ intent to ratify the FISA Court’s interpretation of that term. These changes restore meaningful
limits to the ‘‘relevance’’ requirement of Section 501, consistent with the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v.
Clapper. Ensuring that the Senate doesn't move away from the legislative history should be a top priority as the bill moves forward. But that’s
the bare minimum Congress must do. The Second Circuit, and especially Judge Sack’s concurrence, noted a lack of both transparency and a true
adversary in the FISA Court. The 2014 and 2013 USA Freedom Act had stronger FISA Court reforms, particularly around the creation of a special
advocate who would argue against the government in the FISA Court. The Second Circuit’s opinion also emphasizes that typical subpoenas seek
only records of "suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects." Under the current USA Freedom
Act, the government can collect records of a "second hop,"—the numbers, and associated metadata, that have been in contact with the
numbers collected initially—without any additional authorization. The bill should be changed so that the government must file another
application for any further records it wants to collect. Automatically obtaining a "second hop" is unacceptable because it sweeps in too many
current USA Freedom Act is also out-of-sync with the court’s narrow view of
permissible collection of records because it lacks a rigorous definition of the " specific selection
term" the government can use to identify the records it wants to collect. This can be addressed by two
changes: (1) drawing upon last year's definition in the USA Freedom Act ; and, (2) closing down potential
loopholes like the definition of "address" or the use of a "person" to include a corporate person. Restoring Important Parts
of 2013’s USA Freedom Act This is also an opportunity and a new context for Congress to address the
shortcomings of the new ly introduced USA Freedom Act that we previously wrote about. Congress should put
people’s records. The
back key provisions that were dropped along the way as well as remove those that were introduced at the behest of the
intelligence community. First,
the "super minimization" procedures , which were key privacy
procedures that mandated the deletion of any information obtained about a person not connected to
the investigation, should be reintroduced. Key provisions establishing a higher legal standard and
compliance assessment for the use of pen register/trap-and-trace devices , legal standing to sue the government
over surveillance practices, and the original transparency provisions allowing government and corporate disclosure of surveillance orders
should also be resuscitated.
The current Freedom Act is too narrow. It’s limited to phone collection and not other
bulk collection programs.
Kopstein ‘15
Joshua Kopstein is a journalist and researcher. His work focuses on Internet law and disorder, surveillance and government
secrecy. He has written pieces for Slate Magazine and The New Yorker. “USA Freedom Act gives NSA everything it wants — and
less” - Al Jazeera America’s The Scrutineer – June 2nd – http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2015/6/2/usa-freedomact-gives-nsa-everything-it-wants--and-less.html
Obama signed the Freedom Act into law later
this evening. While far from what most would recognize as “reform,” at the end of the day, the bill is probably more of a victory for transparency than it is for privacy. That's because the Freedom Act has
focused almost exclusively on ending one single National Security Agency program under one single authority: The
secret bulk collection of Americans' phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, revealed almost exactly two years ago by Edward Snowden. Section 215
and two other “emergency” post-9/11 surveillance provisions briefly lapsed Sunday night after the Senate failed to reauthorize them. The new law replaces the NSA’s bulk data
The Senate adopted the House version of the bill, which had been watered down at the behest of intelligence agencies, and President
collection with a program that requires telecom companies to retain the data and grant access to
intelligence agencies through more targeted court orders. The other surveillance powers — roving wiretaps and the so-called lone wolf provision — remained
unused even as surveillance hawks raised apocalyptic warnings about letting them expire. Two independent White House panels have found that the metadata collection program has never helped to foil a terrorist plot. A major
appellate court decision also ruled the program was illegal, and that it merely served to create a “vast data bank” of extremely sensitive information — specifically, phone numbers and when and how often they were called —
about millions of innocent Americans. In other words,
the bulk phone records program was on its way out no matter what. The court
ruling could have been a big opportunity to push for an end to all domestic bulk collection
not just phone records. But additional privacy protections had been negotiated away in the House,
under the Patriot Act,
and Senate advocates were not given a chance to add them back. The result renders the Freedom Act a
missed opportunity to address countless other NSA authorities, such as Executive Order 12333 and Section
702 of the F ISA A mendments A ct, ones we know (again, thanks to Snowden) continue to collect many other types of data.
The new Freedom Act will fail – definitions are too watered-down to check mass
surveillance. The original Freedom Act solves.
Tummarello ‘14
Internally quoting Harley Geiger, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology and Kevin Bankston, policy
director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. Kate Tummarello is a technology reporter for POLITICO
Pro. Previously, she has written about technology for The Hill, Communications Daily and Roll Call. She's a graduate of Hamilton
College, where she studied public policy. “NSA reform legislation 'watered down'?” - The Hill - 05/20/14 http://thehill.com/policy/technology/206686-privacy-advocates-pull-support-for-watered-down-usa-freedom
Privacy advocates who have pushed for legislation to reform U.S. government surveillance are backing
away from a House bill that they say has been "watered down" as it heads to the floor. Though the original
legislation intended to end sweeping surveillance programs, the bill the House will vote on as early as this week
allows for “mass surveillance on a slightly smaller scale,” according to Harley Geiger, senior counsel at
the Center for Democracy and Technology. The bill — the USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Patriot Act author Rep. James
Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) — was
originally written to prohibit the U.S. government's sweeping surveillance
program. But after moving through the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, where it saw some changes but retained the support of privacy
advocates, last minute negotiations between House leadership and the Obama administration have left the bill with weakened language
when it comes to banning mass surveillance , advocates say. On Tuesday, Sensenbrenner filed a manager’s amendment at the
House Rules Committee to be considered on the floor in place of the bill that passed the Judiciary and Intelligence committees. Sensenbrenner’s
amendment still prohibits bulk collection but would allow government officials to search for records using “a
discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the Government to limit the scope of the
information or tangible things sought.” While the standard in Sensenbrenner's amendment is more specific than the one under current law, it leaves
too much room for interpretation, as opposed to earlier versions of the bill , Geiger said. It may keep the
intelligence community from sweeping surveillance on a national level, but “it is ambiguous enough to allow for large scale
collection,” he said. “Ambiguity is what got us into this mess in the first place,” he said, referring to a controversial National
Security Agency program that collected information about Americans’ phone calls. The U.S. government determined that data about
all Americans’ phone calls was “relevant” to intelligence investigations under current surveillance
laws and, therefore, could be collected. "We cannot in good conscience support this weakened version
of the USA Freedom Act, where key reforms — especially those intended to end bulk collection and increase
transparency — have
been substantially watered down ," Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open
Technology Institute, said. Bankston said his group is "gravely disappointed that, rather than respecting the wishes of the unanimous Judiciary and Intelligence
committees, the House leadership and the Obama Administration have chosen to disrupt the hard-fought compromise that so many of us were willing to support
just two weeks ago." Geiger also expressed frustration at the way last minute negotiations have led to a weaker bill. He pointed
to bipartisan support
for the original USA Freedom Act and the international backlash that came after last year’s revelations
about U.S. surveillance. “Despite all of that, the bill has been watered down to provide only mild reform,”
he said.
Plan text options
Choose a plan text that you like
Plan options
Plan Option #1:
The United States federal government should pass the original version of the USA FREEDOM Act
(H.R.3361)
Plan Option #2:
The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by
strengthening the USA FREEDOM Act to:
 require use of a “specific selection term” to satisfy the “reasonable, articulable suspicion
standard”
 require that information collected through “pen register or trap and trace devices” via
emergency authorizations be subject to the same procedural safeguards as non-emergency
collections.
 require “super minimization" procedures that delete information obtained about a person not
connected to the investigation.
Plan Option #3:
Regarding its monitoring of United States persons, the United States federal government should:
 require use of a “specific selection term” to satisfy current “reasonable, articulable suspicion
standards”
 require that information collected through “pen register or trap and trace devices” via
emergency authorizations be subject to the same procedural safeguards as non-emergency
collections.
 require “super minimization" procedures that delete information obtained about a person not
connected to the investigation
Plan Option #4:
Bulk collection of domestic metadata by United States federal intelligence agencies should cease.
Plan Option #5:
In the absence of an individually-tailored warrant obtained via use of a specific selector term, federal
intelligence agencies should cease collection of domestic phone, internet, email, and-or associated
electronic records.
Plan Option #6:
In the absence of an individually-tailored warrant obtained via use of a specific selector term, federal
intelligence agencies should cease collection of domestic phone, internet, email, and associated
electronic records. This should include, but not be limited to, ending the monitoring of United States
persons under Sections 214 and 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act; Executive Order 12333; and Section 702 of
the FISA Amendments Act.
Plan Option #7:
The United States Supreme Court should hold that domestic surveillance conducted by federal
intelligence agencies cannot meet the “reasonable, articulable suspicion standard” without having used
a “specific selection term” and that domestic surveillance conducted by federal intelligence agencies is
in violation of the 4th Amendment if:
 it collects information through “pen register or trap and trace devices” via emergency
authorizations that were not subject to the same procedural safeguards as non-emergency
collections; and-or
 if it fails to delete information obtained about a person not connected to the investigation.
Plan Option #8:
The United States Supreme Court should hold that domestic surveillance conducted by federal
intelligence agencies violates the 4th Amendment if it collects domestic phone, internet, email, and-or
associated electronic records in the absence of an individually-tailored warrant obtained via use of a
“specific selector term”.
Plan Option #9:
The United States federal government should hold that domestic surveillance conducted by federal
intelligence agencies violates the 4th Amendment if it collects domestic phone, internet, email, and-or
associated electronic records in the absence of an individually-tailored warrant obtained via use of a
“specific selector term”.
Plan Option #10:
The United States Supreme Court should hold that no statute presently authorizes federal intelligence
agencies to engage in bulk collection of domestic phone, internet, email, and-or associated electronic
records.
1AC - Privacy Advantage
Privacy Advantage – 1AC, longer version
Privacy Advantage – longer version
Contention # ____ is Privacy
Privacy outweighs.
- Utilitarian impact calc is skewed; and
- Reject Surveillance as a structural matter of power – even when its
“reformed”, innocents are powerless unless neutral oversight’s in place.
Solove ‘7
Daniel Solove is an Associate Professor at George Washington University Law School and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He
is one of the world’s leading expert in information privacy law and is well known for his academic work on privacy and for
popular books on how privacy relates with information technology. He has written 9 books and more than 50 law review
articles – From the Article ““I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy” - San Diego Law Review, Vol.
44, p. 745 - GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289 – available from download at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
It is time to return to the
nothing to hide argument . The reasoning of this argument is that when it comes to
government surveillance or use of personal data, there is no privacy violation if a person has nothing sensitive,
embarrassing, or illegal to conceal. Criminals involved in illicit activities have something to fear, but for the vast majority of
people, their activities are not illegal or embarrassing. Understanding privacy as I have set forth reveals the flaw of the nothing to hide argument at its roots. Many
commentators who respond to the argument attempt a direct refutation by trying to point to things that people would want to hide. But the problem with the
nothing to hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. Agreeing
with this assumption concedes far
too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide. As Bruce
Schneier aptly notes, the nothing to hide argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a
wrong.”75 The deeper problem with the nothing to hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy. But understanding
privacy as a plurality of related problems demonstrates that concealment of bad things is just one among many problems caused by government programs such as
the NSA surveillance and data mining. In the categories in my taxonomy, several problems are implicated. The
NSA programs involve problems of
information collection, specifically the category of surveillance in the taxonomy. Wiretapping involves audio surveillance of people’s conversations.
Data mining often begins with the collection of personal information, usually from various third parties that possess people’s data. Under current Supreme Court
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, when the government gathers data from third parties, there is no Fourth Amendment protection because people lack a
“reasonable expectation of privacy” in information exposed to others.76 In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court concluded that there is no reasonable
expectation of privacy in bank records because “[a]ll of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information
voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.”77 In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that people
lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they “know that they must convey numerical information to the phone company,”
and therefore they cannot “harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret.”78 As I have argued extensively elsewhere, the lack of
Fourth Amendment protection of third party records results in the government’s ability to access an extensive amount of personal information with minimal
limitation or oversight.79 Many scholars have referred to information collection as a form of surveillance. Dataveillance, a term coined by Roger Clarke, refers to the
“systemic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons.”80 Christopher Slobogin has
referred to the gathering of personal information in business records as “transaction surveillance.”81 Surveillance
can create chilling effects
on free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.82 Even
surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them. The value of protecting against
chilling effects is not measured simply by focusing on the particular individuals who are deterred from
exercising their rights. Chilling effects harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of
viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity. The nothing to hide
argument focuses primarily on the information collection problems associated with the NSA programs. It contends that limited surveillance of lawful activity will not
chill behavior sufficiently to outweigh the security benefits. One can certainly quarrel with this argument, but one of the difficulties with chilling effects is that it is
often very hard to demonstrate concrete evidence of deterred behavior.83 Whether the NSA’s surveillance and collection of telephone records has deterred people
from communicating particular ideas would be a difficult question to answer. Far too often, discussions of the NSA surveillance and data mining define the problem
The NSA programs are
problematic even if no information people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited
solely in terms of surveillance. To return to my discussion of metaphor, the problems are not just Orwellian, but Kafkaesque.
behavior, but rather
a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of
personal data and its exclusion of the protagonist from having any knowledge or participation in the process. The harms consist of those created by
bureaucracies—indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability. One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges
from the combination of small bits of seemingly innocuous data.84 When combined, the information becomes much more telling about a person. For the person
who truly has nothing to hide, aggregation is not much of a problem. But in the stronger, less absolutist form of the nothing to hide argument, people argue that
certain pieces of information are not something they would hide. Aggregation, however, means that by combining pieces of information we might not care to
conceal, the government can glean information about us that we might really want to conceal. Part of the
allure of data mining for the
government is its ability to reveal a lot about our personalities and activities by sophisticated means of analyzing data. Therefore,
without greater transparency in data mining, it is hard to claim that programs like the NSA data mining program will not
reveal information people might want to hide, as we do not know precisely what is revealed. Moreover, data mining aims to be predictive
of behavior, striving to prognosticate about our future actions. People who match certain profiles are deemed likely to engage in a similar pattern of behavior. It is
quite difficult to refute actions that one has not yet done. Having nothing to hide will not always dispel predictions of future activity. Another
problem in
the taxonomy, which is implicated by the NSA program, is the problem I refer to as exclusion.85 Exclusion is the problem caused when people are
prevented from having knowledge about how their information is being used, as well as barred from being able to access and correct errors in that data. The NSA
program involves a massive database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, the very existence of the program was kept secret for years.86 This kind
of information processing, which forbids people’s knowledge or involvement, resembles in some ways a kind of due process problem. It is a structural problem
involving the way people are treated by government institutions. Moreover, it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent
should the Executive Branch and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant
power over citizens? This
issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to
hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government. A related problem involves “secondary use.” Secondary
use is the use of data obtained for one purpose for a different unrelated purpose without the person’s consent. The Administration has said little about how long
the data will be stored, how it will be used, and what it could be used for in the future. The potential future uses of any piece of personal information are vast, and
without limits or accountability on how that information is used, it is hard for people to assess the dangers of the data being in the government’s control. Therefore,
the problem with the nothing to hide argument is that it focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems—the disclosure of personal information or
surveillance—and not others. It assumes a particular view about what privacy entails, and it sets
important to distinguish here between two ways of
the terms for debate in a manner that is often unproductive. It is
justifying a program such as the NSA surveillance
and data mining program. The first
way is to not recognize a problem. This is how the nothing to hide argument works—it denies even the existence of a problem. The second manner of justifying such
a program is
to acknowledge the problems but contend that the benefits of the NSA program outweigh
the privacy harms . The first justification influences the second, because the low value given to privacy is based upon a narrow view of the problem.
The key misunderstanding is that the nothing to hide argument views privacy in a particular way—as a form of secrecy, as
the right to hide things. But there are many other types of harm involved beyond exposing one’s
secrets to the government. Privacy problems are often difficult to recognize and redress because they create a panoply of types of harm. Courts,
legislators, and others look for particular types of harm to the exclusion of others, and their narrow focus blinds them to seeing other kinds of harms. One of the
difficulties with the nothing to hide argument
is that it looks for a visceral kind of injury as opposed to a
structural one . Ironically, this underlying conception of injury is shared by both those advocating for greater privacy protections and those arguing
in favor of the conflicting interests to privacy. For example, law professor Ann Bartow argues that I have failed to describe
privacy harms in a compelling manner in my article, A Taxonomy of Privacy, where I provide a framework for understanding the manifold different privacy
problems.87 Bartow’s primary complaint is that my taxonomy “frames privacy harms in dry, analytical terms that fail to sufficiently identify and animate the
compelling ways that privacy violations can negatively impact the lives of living, breathing human beings beyond simply provoking feelings of unease.”88 Bartow
claims that the taxonomy
does not have “enough dead bodies” and that privacy’s “lack of blood and death,
or at least of broken bones and buckets of money, distances privacy harms from other categories of tort law. Most
privacy problems lack dead bodies. Of course, there are exceptional cases such as the murders of Rebecca Shaeffer and Amy Boyer. Rebecca
Shaeffer was an actress killed when a stalker obtained her address from a Department of Motor Vehicles record.90 This incident prompted Congress to pass the
Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994.91 Amy Boyer was murdered by a stalker who obtained her personal information, including her work address and Social
Security number, from a database company.92 These examples aside, there is not a lot of death and gore in privacy law. If this is the standard to recognize a
problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized. Horrific cases are not typical, and the purpose of my taxonomy is to explain why most privacy problems are
still harmful despite this fact. Bartow’s objection is actually very similar to the nothing to hide argument. Those
advancing the nothing to hide
argument have in mind a particular kind of visceral privacy harm, one where privacy is violated only when something deeply embarrassing or
discrediting is revealed. Bartow’s
quest for horror stories represents a similar desire to find visceral privacy harms. The problem is that not all
privacy harms are like this. At the end of the day, privacy
is not a horror movie, and demanding more palpable harms will be difficult in many cases.
Yet there is still a harm worth addressing, even if it is not sensationalistic.
In many instances, privacy is
threatened not by singular egregious acts, but by a slow series of relatively minor acts which gradually begin to add up. In this way, privacy problems resemble
certain environmental harms which occur over time through a series of small acts by different actors. Bartow wants to point to a major spill, but gradual pollution by
a multitude of different actors often creates worse problems. The law frequently struggles with recognizing harms that do not result in embarrassment, humiliation,
or physical or psychological injury.93 For example, after the September 11 attacks, several airlines gave their passenger records to federal agencies in direct
violation of their privacy policies. The federal agencies used the data to study airline security.94 A group of passengers sued Northwest Airlines for disclosing their
personal information. One of their claims was that Northwest Airlines breached its contract with the passengers. In Dyer v. Northwest Airlines Corp., the court
rejected the contract claim because “broad statements of company policy do not generally give rise to contract claims,” the passengers never claimed they relied
upon the policy or even read it, and they “failed to allege any contractual damages arising out of the alleged breach.”95 Another court reached a similar
conclusion.96 Regardless of the merits of the decisions on contract law, the cases represent a difficulty with the legal system in addressing privacy problems. The
disclosure of the passenger records represented a “breach of confidentiality.”97 The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of
individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is
maintained in relationships between businesses and their customers. The problem of secondary use is also implicated in this case.98 Secondary use involves data
collected for one purpose being used for an unrelated purpose without people’s consent. The airlines gave passenger information to the government for an entirely
different purpose beyond that for which it was originally gathered. Secondary use problems often do not cause financial, or even psychological, injuries. Instead, the
harm is one of power imbalance. In Dyer, data was disseminated in a way that ignored airline passengers’ interests in the data despite promises made in the privacy
policy. Even if the passengers were unaware of the policy, there is a social value in ensuring that companies adhere to established limits on the way they use
personal information. Otherwise, any stated limits become meaningless, and companies have discretion to boundlessly use data. Such a state of affairs can leave
nearly all consumers in a powerless position. The harm, then, is less one to particular individuals than it is a structural harm. A similar problem surfaces in another
case, Smith v. Chase Manhattan Bank.99 A group of plaintiffs sued Chase Manhattan Bank for selling customer information to third parties in violation of its privacy
policy, which stated that the information would remain confidential. The court held that even presuming these allegations were true, the plaintiffs could not prove
any actual injury: [T]he “harm” at the heart of this purported class action, is that class members were merely offered products and services which they were free to
decline. This does not qualify as actual harm. The complaint does not allege any single instance where a named plaintiff or any class member suffered any actual
harm due to the receipt of an unwanted telephone solicitation or a piece of junk mail.100 The court’s view of harm, however, did not account for the breach of
confidentiality. When
balancing privacy against security, the privacy harms are often characterized in terms of
injuries to the individual, and the interest in security is often characterized in a more broad societal way. The
security interest in the NSA programs has often been defined improperly. In a Congressional hearing, Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales stated: Our enemy is listening, and I cannot help but wonder if they are not shaking their heads in amazement at the thought that anyone would
imperil such a sensitive program by leaking its existence in the first place, and smiling at the prospect that we might now disclose even more or perhaps even
unilaterally disarm ourselves of a key tool in the war on terror.101 The balance between privacy and security is often cast in terms of whether a particular
government information collection activity should or should not be barred. The
issue, however, often is not whether the NSA or other government
agencies should be allowed to engage in particular forms of information gathering; rather, it is what kinds of
oversight and accountability we want in place when the government engages in searches and seizures. The government can
employ nearly any kind of investigatory activity with a warrant supported by probable cause. This is a mechanism of oversight—it
forces government officials to justify their suspicions to a neutral judge or magistrate before engaging in the tactic. For
example, electronic surveillance law allows for wiretapping, but limits the practice with judicial supervision, procedures to minimize the breadth of the wiretapping,
and requirements that the law enforcement officials report back to the court to prevent abuses.102 It is these procedures that the Bush Administration has ignored
by engaging in the warrantless NSA surveillance. The question is not whether we want the government to monitor such conversations, but whether the Executive
Branch should adhere to the appropriate oversight procedures that Congress has enacted into law, or should covertly ignore any oversight. Therefore, the security
interest should not get weighed in its totality against the privacy interest. Rather, what should get weighed is the extent of marginal limitation on the effectiveness
of a government information gathering or data mining program by imposing judicial oversight and minimization procedures. Only in cases where such procedures
will completely impair the government program should the security interest be weighed in total, rather than in the marginal difference between an unencumbered
program versus a limited one. Far too
often, the balancing of privacy interests against security interests takes place in a
manner that severely shortchanges the privacy interest while inflating the security interests . Such is the
logic of the nothing to hide argument. When
examined
the argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions
can see how it shifts the debate to its terms , in which it draws power from its
unfair advantage. It is time to pull the curtain on the nothing to hide argument. Whether explicit or not, conceptions of privacy underpin
and challenged, we
nearly every argument made about privacy, even the common quip “I’ve got nothing to hide.” As I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, understanding privacy
as a pluralistic conception reveals that we are often talking past each other when discussing privacy issues. By focusing more specifically on the related problems
under the rubric of “privacy,” we can better address each problem rather than ignore or conflate them. The nothing to hide argument speaks to some
problems, but not to others. It represents
a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding
consideration of the other problems often raised in government surveillance and data mining
programs. When engaged with directly, the nothing to hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But
when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond
surveillance and disclosure, the nothing to hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say.
Put privacy before security. The ballot should create a side constraint where ends
don’t justify the means. This is especially applies to data collection in the absence of
probable cause.
Albright ‘14
Logan Albright is the Research Analyst at FreedomWorks, and is responsible for producing a wide variety of written content for
print and the web, as well as conducting research for staff media appearances and special projects. He received his Master’s
degree in economics from Georgia State University. “The NSA's Collateral Spying” – Freedom Works - 07/08/2014 http://www.freedomworks.org/content/nsas-collateral-spying
In short, the report, based on information obtained by Edward Snowden, reveals that during the course of its ordinary, otherwise legal surveillance operations,
the NSA also collected data on large numbers of people who were not specifically targeted. The agency
calls this practice “incidental surveillance.” I call it “collateral spying.” The report found that, on average, 9 out of every 10 people
spied on were not the intended target. The NSA has the legal authority to obtain a warrant based on
probable cause in order to surveil an individual. No one is disputing that. But when this targeting results
in collateral spying on vast numbers of innocents, in the absence of probable cause and the corresponding warrants, that is a
major problem. The NSA has asserted that such incidental data collection is inevitable, and to a certain extent that’s likely true. It is
should obviously be
minimized as far as possible , and at the very least the information should be immediately
purged from government databases , not stored for years on end. In any case, the whole situation is indicative of
understandable that in some situations the NSA may learn information about people other than the direct target, but this
the agency’s cavalier attitude towards individual rights. While
national security is a concern we all share, the ends do not justify
the means when those means involve violate the constitutional protections afforded to citizens by our nation’s founders. It is
not okay to violate the rights of an innocent in the process of achieving a broader goal, even
if that goal is noble. The way the NSA has been behaving is Machiavellian in the most literal sense. In his 16th century
political treatise, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli recognized a harsh reality of politics that still plagues us half a millennium later, writing, “A prince wishing to keep
his state is very often forced to do evil.” Taking Machiavelli’s advice as a
green light for immoral behavior has been the problem with
governments throughout history, a problem the founding fathers sought to avoid by setting down precise guidelines for what the government could and could not
do in the form of a Constitution. The disregard of these rules, and the
argument that there should be a national security
exception to the Fourth Amendment, undermines the entire purpose of the American experiment, and restores the European-style
tyrannies the revolutionaries fought against.
Even within a utilitarian framework, privacy outweighs for two reasons:
First – Structural bias. Their link inflates the security risk and their impact’s an
epistemologically wrong.
Solove ‘8
Daniel Solove is an Associate Professor at George Washington University Law School and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He
is one of the world’s leading expert in information privacy law and is well known for his academic work on privacy and for
popular books on how privacy relates with information technology. He has written 9 books and more than 50 law review
articles – From the Article: “Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate” - University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 74, p. 343,
2008 - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=990030
Data mining is one issue in a larger debate about security and privacy. Proponents of data mining justify it as an
essential tool to protect our security. For example, Judge Richard Posner argues that “[i]n an era of global terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the government has a
compelling need to gather, pool, sift, and search vast quantities of information, much of it personal.”9 Moreover, proponents of security measures argue that we must provide the executive branch with the discretion it needs to
protect us. We cannot second guess every decision made by government officials, and excessive meddling into issues of national security by judges and oth-ers lacking expertise will prove detrimental. For example, William Stuntz
contends that “effective, active government—government that innovates, that protects people who need protecting, that acts aggressively when action is needed—is dying. Privacy and transparency are the diseases. We need to
find a vaccine, and soon.”10 Stuntz concludes that “[i]n an age of terrorism, privacy rules are not simply unaffordable. They are perverse.”11 We live in an “age of balancing,” and
and civil liberties are not absolute.12 Thus,
how the balancing occurs
the prevailing view is that most rights
liberty must be balanced against security. But there are systematic problems with
that inflate the importance of the security interests and diminish the value of
the liberty interests .
In this essay, I examine some common difficulties in the way that liberty is balanced against security in the context of data mining. Countless discussions about the tradeoffs
liberty interests are cast as individual
rights and balanced against the security interests, which are cast in terms of the safety of society as a whole. Courts and
between security and liberty begin by taking a security proposal and then weighing it against what it would cost our civil liberties. Often, the
commentators defer to the government’s assertions about the effectiveness of the security interest. In the context of data mining, the liberty interest is limited by narrow understandings of privacy that neglect to account for many
privacy problems.
As a result, the balancing concludes with a victory in favor of the security interest. But
as I will argue,
privacy concerns are significantly greater than
acknowledged. These problems undermine the balancing process and skew results toward
the security side of the scale.
important dimensions of data mining’s security benefits require more scrutiny, and the
have
currently
d
ed the
Debates about data mining begin with the assumption that it is an essential tool in protecting our security. Terrorists lurk among us, and ferreting
them out can be quite difficult. Examining data for patterns will greatly assist in this endeavor, the argument goes, because certain identifiable characteristics and behaviors are likely to be associated with terrorist activity. Often,
little more is said, and the debate pro-ceeds to examine whether privacy is important enough to refrain from using such an effective terrorism-fighting tool. Many discussions about security and liberty proceed in this fashion. They
commence by assuming that a particular security measure is effective, and the only remaining question is whether the liberty interest is strong enough to curtail that measure. But given the gravity of the security concerns over
terrorism, the liberty interest has all but lost before it is even placed on the scale. Judge Richard Posner argues that judges should give the executive branch considerable deference when it comes to assessing the security measures
it proposes. In his recent book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency,13 Posner contends that judicial restraint is wise because “when in doubt about the actual or likely consequences of a measure,
the pragmatic, empiricist judge will be inclined to give the other branches of government their head.”14 According to Posner, “[j]udges aren’t supposed to know much about national security.”15 Likewise, Eric Posner and Adrian
Vermeule declare in their new book, Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts,16 that “the executive branch, not Congress or the judicial branch, should make the tradeoff between security and liberty.”17 Moreover,
Posner and Vermeule declare that during emergencies, “[c]onstitutional rights should be relaxed so that the executive can move forcefully against the threat.”18 The problem with such deference is that, historically, the executive
branch has not always made the wisest national security decisions. Nonetheless, Posner and Vermeule contend that notwithstanding its mistakes, the executive branch is better than the judicial and legislative branches on
institutional competence grounds.19 “Judges are generalists,” they observe, “and the political insulation that protects them from current politics also deprives them of information, especially information about novel security
threats and necessary responses to those threats.”20 Posner and Vermeule argue that during emergencies, the “novelty of the threats and of the necessary responses makes judicial routines and evolved legal rules seem
inapposite, even obstructive.”21 “Judicial routines” and “legal rules,” however, are the cornerstone of due process and the rule of law—the central building blocks of a free and democratic society. At many times, Posner,
Vermeule, and other strong proponents of security seem to focus almost exclusively on what would be best for security when the objective should be establishing an optimal balance between security and liberty. Although such a
balance may not promote security with maximum efficiency, it is one of the costs of living in a constitutional democracy as opposed to an authoritarian political regime. The executive branch may be the appropriate branch for
developing security measures, but this does not mean that it is the most adept branch at establishing a balance between security and liberty. In our constitutional democracy, all branches have a role to play in making policy. Courts
protect constitutional rights not as absolute restrictions on executive and legislative policymaking but as important interests to be balanced against government interests. As T. Alexander Aleinikoff notes, “balancing now dominates
major areas of constitutional law.”22 Balancing occurs through various forms of judicial scrutiny, requiring courts to analyze the weight of the government’s interest, a particular measure’s effectiveness in protecting that interest,
and the extent to which the government interest can be achieved without unduly infringing upon constitutional rights.23 For balancing to be meaningful, courts must scrutinize both the security and liberty interests. With
deference, however, courts fail to give adequate scrutiny to security interests. For example, after the subway bombings in London, the New York Police Department began a program of random searches of people’s baggage on the
subway. The searches were conducted without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. In MacWade v Kelly,24 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the program against a Fourth
Amendment challenge. Under the special needs doctrine, when exceptional circumstances make the warrant and probable cause requirements unnecessary, the search is analyzed in terms of whether it is “reasonable.”25
Reasonableness is determined by balancing the government interest in security against the interests in privacy and civil liberties.26 The weight of the security interest should turn on the extent to which the program effectively
improves subway safety. The goals of the program may be quite laudable, but nobody questions the importance of subway safety. The critical issue is whether the search program is a sufficiently effective way of achieving those
goals that it is worth the tradeoff in civil liberties. On this question, unfortunately, the court deferred to the law enforcement officials, stating that the issue “is best left to those with a unique understanding of, and responsibility
for, limited public resources, including a finite number of police officers.” 27 In determining whether the program was “a reasonably effective means of addressing the government interest in deterring and detecting a terrorist
attack on the subway system,”28 the court refused to examine the data to assess the program’s effectiveness.29 The way the court analyzed the government’s side of the balance would justify nearly any search, no matter how
ineffective. Although courts should not take a know-it-all attitude, they should not defer on such a critical question as a security measure’s effectiveness. The problem with many security measures is that they are not wise
expenditures of resources. A small number of random searches in a subway system of over four million riders a day seems more symbolic than effective because the odds of the police finding the terrorist with a bomb are very low.
The government also argued that the program would deter terrorists from bringing bombs on subway trains, but nearly any kind of security measure can arguably produce some degree of deterrence. The key issue, which the court
did not analyze, is whether the program would lead to deterrence significant enough to outweigh the curtailment of civil liberties. If courts fail to question the efficacy of security measures, then the security interest will prevail
nearly all the time. Preventing terrorism has an immensely heavy weight, and any given security measure will provide a marginal advancement toward that goal. In the defer-ence equation, the math then becomes easy. At this
point, it is futile to even bother to look at the civil liberties side of the balance. The government side has already won. Proponents of deference argue that if courts did not defer, then they would be substituting their judgment for
that of executive officials, who have greater expertise in understanding security issues. Special expertise in national security, however, is often not necessary for balancing security and liberty. Judges and legislators should require
the experts to persuasively justify the security measures being developed or used. Of course, in very complex areas of knowledge, such as advanced physics, nonexperts may find it difficult to understand the concepts and
comprehend the terminology. But it is not clear that security expertise involves such sophisticated knowledge that it would be incomprehensible to nonexperts. Moreover, the deference argument conflates evaluating a particular
security measure with creating such a measure. The point of judicial review is to subject the judgment of government officials to critical scrutiny rather than blindly accept their authority. Critical inquiry into factual matters is not
the imposition of the judge’s own judgment for that of the decisionmaker under review.30 Instead, it is forcing government officials to explain and justify their policies. Few will quarrel with the principle that courts should not
“second guess” the decisions of policy experts. But there is a difference between not “second guessing” and failing to critically evaluate the factual and empirical evidence justifying the government programs. Nobody will contest
the fact that security is a compelling interest. The key issue in the balancing is the extent to which the security measure furthers the interest in security. As I have argued elsewhere, whenever courts defer to the government on the
effectiveness of a government security measure, they are actually deferring to the government on the ultimate question as to whether the measure passes constitutional muster.31 Deference by the courts or legislature is an
abdication of their function. Our constitutional system of government was created with three branches, a design structured to establish checks and balances against abuses of power. Institutional competence arguments are often
made as if they are ineluctable truths about the nature of each governmental branch. But the branches have all evolved considerably throughout history. To the extent a branch lacks resources to carry out its function, the answer
should not be to diminish the power of that branch but to provide it with the necessary tools so it can more effectively carry out its function. Far too often, unfortunately, discussions of institutional competence devolve into broad
generalizations about each branch and unsubstantiated assertions about the inherent superiority of certain branches for making particular determinations. It is true, as Posner and Vermeule observe, that historically courts have
been deferential to the executive during emergencies.32 Proponents of security measures often advance what I will refer to as the “pendulum theory”—that in times of crisis, the balance shifts more toward security and in times of
peace, the balance shifts back toward liberty. For example, Chief Justice Rehnquist argues that the “laws will thus not be silent in time of war, but they will speak with a somewhat different voice.”33 Judge Posner contends that the
liberties curtailed during times of crisis are often restored during times of peace.34 Deference is inevitable, and we should accept it without being overly concerned, for the pendulum will surely swing back. As I argue elsewhere,
however, there have been many instances throughout US history of needless curtailments of liberty in the name of security, such as the Palmer Raids, the Japanese Internment, and the McCarthy communist hearings.35 Too often,
such curtailments did not stem from any real security need but because of the “personal agendas and prejudices” of government officials.36 We should not simply accept these mistakes as inevitable; we should seek to prevent
them from occurring. Hoping that the pendulum will swing back offers little consolation to those whose liberties were infringed or chilled. The protection of liberty is most important in times of crisis, when it is under the greatest
threat. During times of peace, when our judgment is not clouded by fear, we are less likely to make unnecessary sacrifices of liberty. The threat to liberty is lower in peacetime, and the need to protect it is not as dire. The greatest
need for safeguarding liberty is during times when we least want to protect it. In order to balance security and liberty, we must assess the security interest. This involves evaluating two components—the gravity of the security
It is often merely assumed without question that the secu-rity threat from terrorism is one
of the gravest dangers we face in the modern world. But this assumption might be wrong. Assessing the risk of harm from terrorism is very difficult
threat and the effectiveness of the security measures to address it.
because terrorism is such an irregular occurrence and is constantly evolving. If we examine the data from previous terrorist attacks, however,
severely overstated.
the threat of terrorism has been
For example, many people fear being killed in a terrorist attack, but based on statistics from terrorism in the United States,
the risk of dying from
terrorism is miniscule. According to political scientist John Mueller, [e]ven with the September 11 attacks included in the count . . . the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late
1960s (which is when the State Department began its accounting) is about the same as the number killed over the same period by lightning, or by accident-causing deer, or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts.37 Add up
the eight deadliest terrorist attacks in US history, and they amount to fewer than four thousand fatalities.38
In contrast, flu and pneumonia deaths are estimated to be around sixty thousand per year.39 Another forty thousand die in auto accidents each year.40 Based on our experience with terrorism thus far, the risk of
dying from terrorism is very low on the relative scale of fatal risks. Dramatic events and media attention can cloud
a rational assessment of risk.
The year 2001 was not just notable for the September 11 attacks. It was also the summer of the shark bite, when extensive media coverage about shark
bites led to the perception that such attacks were on the rise. But there were fewer shark attacks in 2001 than in 2000 and fewer deaths as well, with only four in 2001 as compared to thirteen in 2000.41 And regardless of which
year had more deaths, the number is so low that an attack is a freak occurrence. It is certainly true that our past experience with terrorism might not be a good indicator of the future. More treacherous terrorism is possible, such
as the use of nuclear or biological weapons. This complicates our ability to assess the risk of harm from terrorism. Moreover, the intentional human conduct involved in terrorism creates a sense of outrage and fear that ordinary
deaths do not engender. Alleviating fear must be taken into account, even if such fear is irrationally high in relation to other riskier events such as dying in a car crash. But enlightened policy must not completely give in to the panic
most policymakers find it quite difficult to
assess the threat of terrorism modestly. In the face of widespread public panic, it is hard for government officials to make only moderate changes. Something dramatic must be done,
or political heads will roll. Given the difficulty in assessing the security threat in a more rational manner, it is imperative that the courts meaningfully analyze the effectiveness of security measures. Even if panic and fear
might lead to the gravity of the threat being overstated, we should at least ensure that the measures taken to
promote security are sufficiently effective to justify the cost. Unfortunately, as I will discuss in the next section, rarely do discussions about the sacrifice of civil liberties explain the corresponding
security benefit, why such a benefit cannot be achieved in other ways, and why such a security measure is the best and most rational one to take. Little scrutiny is given to security
measures. They are often just accepted as a given, no matter how ill-conceived or ineffective they might be. Some ineffective security measures are largely symbolic,
and irrational fear of the moment. It should certainly attempt to quell the fear, but it must do so thoughtfully. Nevertheless,
such as the New York City subway search program. The searches are unlikely to catch or deter terrorists because they involve only a miniscule fraction of the millions of daily passengers. Terrorists can just turn to other targets or
simply attempt the bombing on another day or at another train station where searches are not taking place. The vice of symbolic security programs is that they result in needless sacrifices of liberty and drain resources from other,
more effective security measures. Nevertheless, these programs have a virtue—they can ameliorate fear because they are highly visible. Ironically, the subway search program’s primary benefit was alleviating people’s fear (which
was probably too high), albeit in a deceptive manner (as the program did not add much in the way of security).
Data mining represents another kind of security measure, one that currently has little
proven effectiveness and little symbolic value. Data mining programs are often not visible enough to the public to quell much fear. Instead, their benefits come primarily from their actual effectiveness in
reducing terrorist threats, which remains highly speculative. Thus far,
data mining is not very accurate
in the behavioral predictions it makes. For example, there are
approximately 1.8 million airline passengers each day.42 A data mining program to identify terrorists with a false positive rate of 1 percent (which would be exceedingly low for such a program) would flag eighteen thousand people
as false positives. This is quite a large number of innocent people. Why is the government so interested in data mining if it remains unclear whether it will ever be very accurate or workable? Part of the government’s interest in
data mining stems from the aggressive marketing efforts of database companies. After September 11, database companies met with government officials and made a persuasive pitch about the virtues of data mining.43 The
just because data mining might
be effective for businesses trying to predict customer behavior does not make it effective for the
government trying to predict who will engage in terrorism. A high level of accuracy is not necessary when data mining is used by businesses to target
technology sounds quite dazzling when presented by skillful marketers, and it can work quite well in the commercial setting. The problem, however, is that
marketing to consumers, because the cost of error to individuals is minimal. Amazon.com, for example, engages in data mining to determine which books its customers are likely to find of interest by comparing bookbuying
patterns among its customers. Although it is far from precise, it need not be because there are few bad consequences if it makes a wrong book recommendation. Conversely, the consequences are vastly greater for government
I do not believe that the case has been made that data mining is a wise expenditure of
security resources. Those who advocate for security should be just as outraged as those on the liberty side of the debate. Although courts should not micromanage which security measures the government
data mining. Ultimately,
chooses, they should examine the effectiveness of any given security measure to weigh it against the liberty costs. Courts should not tell the executive branch to modify a security measure just because they are not convinced it is
The very point of protecting liberty is to
demand that sacrifices to liberty are not in vain and that security interests, which compromise civil
liberties, are sufficiently effective to warrant the cost.
the best one, but they should tell the executive that a particular security measure is not effective enough to outweigh the liberty costs.
Second - Relative certainty. The disad only may cause violence - surveillance definitely
does. Privacy is paramount for dignity and protecting our unique individuality.
Schneier ‘6
Bruce Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New
America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and the CTO of Resilient Systems. He is the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking
Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. Commentary, “The Eternal Value of Privacy”, WIRED, May 18, 2006,
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70886-0.html
The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and
other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to
hide?" Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me."
"Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong
with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise
that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for
maintaining
the human condition with
dignity and respect. Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches
the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six
lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to
arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy
is important because without it, surveillance information will be
abused : to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time. Privacy protects us from
abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. We do nothing wrong
when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private
journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them.
Privacy is a basic human need.
A
future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit
right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act
so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the
concept of liberty. For
if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment,
criticism, even plagiarism
of our own uniqueness . We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful
that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate
us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose
our individuality , because everything we do is observable and recordable. How many of us have paused
during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it
was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe
the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be
taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our
words are subtly altered. This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives. Too many wrongly characterize the
debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises
under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still
tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very
definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
The 4th Amendment outweighs. An ethical ballot can’t even consider their security
impact. That would treat privacy as mere inconvenience – obliterating liberty.
Smith ‘14
Peter J. Smith IV – attorney for the law firm LUKINS & ANNIS and Lead Council for This brief was was signed by the entire legal
team, which includes four attorneys from the ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION and three additional attorneys from the
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION FOUNDATION - APPELLANT’S REPLY BRIEF in the matter of Smith v. Obama – before the
United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. October 16th – available at: https://www.eff.org/document/smiths-reply-brief
The government argues that it would be more convenient for law enforcement if the courts established
a bright-line rule that extinguished all privacy in information shared with others. See Gov’t Br. 40. The government is
surely right about this. The Bill of Rights exists, however, not to serve governmental efficiency but to safeguard
individual liberty. Cf. Bailey v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1031, 1041 (2013) (“ ‘[T]he mere fact that law enforcement
may be made more efficient can never by itself justify disregard of the Fourth
Amendment .’” (quoting Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U.S. 385, 393 (1978))); Riley, 134 S. Ct. at 2493 (“Our cases have historically recognized that the
warrant requirement is ‘an important working part of our machinery of government,’ not merely
‘an inconvenience to be somehow “weighed” against the claims of police efficiency. ’”
(quoting Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 481 (1971))). Notably, the government made the same appeal for a bright-line rule in Jones and Maynard, see,
e.g., Brief for the United States at 13, Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945, but the Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit rejected it.
Reject those privacy violations as an a priori imperative. Also proves that the disad’s
all hype.
Wyden ‘14
(et al; This amicus brief issued by three US Senators - Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich. Wyden and Udall sat on the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had access to the meta-data program. “BRIEF FOR AMICI CURIAE SENATOR RON
WYDEN, SENATOR MARK UDALL, AND SENATOR MARTIN HEINRICH IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF-APPELLANT, URGING REVERSAL
OF THE DISTRICT COURT” – Amicus Brief for Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - Appeal
from the United States District Court District of Idaho The Honorable B. Lynn Winmill, Chief District Judge, Presiding Case No.
2:13-cv-00257-BLW – Sept 9th, 2014 – This Amicus Brief was prepared by CHARLES S. SIMS from the law firm PROSKAUER ROSE
LLP. This pdf can be obtained at: https://www.eff.org/document/wyden-udall-heinrich-smith-amicus)
Respect for Americans’ privacy is not a matter of convenience, but a Constitutional imperative .
Despite years of receiving classified briefings and asking repeated questions of intelligence officials in both
have seen no evidence that bulk collection accomplishes anything
that other less intrusive surveillance authorities could not. Bulk collection is not only a significant threat
to the constitutional liberties of Americans, but a needless one.9
private and public settings, amici
Reject utilitarianism. It shatters all ethics and justifies the worst atrocities.
Holt ‘95
(Jim Holt is an American philosopher, author and essayist. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times
Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Slate. He hosted a weekly radio spot on
BBC for ten years and he writes frequently about politics and philosophy. New York Times, “Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic,”
August 5, p. Lexis)
Can the deliberate massacre of innocent people ever be condoned? The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 to 250,000
Japanese by incineration and radiation poisoning. Although a small fraction of the victims were soldiers, the great majority were noncombatants -- women, children, the aged. Among the
justifications that have been put forward for President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb, only one is worth taking seriously -- that it saved lives. The alternative, the reasoning goes,
was to launch an invasion. Truman claimed in his memoirs that this would have cost another half a million American lives. Winston Churchill put the figure at a million. Revisionist historians
have cast doubt on such numbers. Wartime documents suggest that military planners expected around 50,000 American combat deaths in an invasion. Still, when Japanese casualties, military
and civilian, are taken into account, the overall invasion death toll on both sides would surely have ended up surpassing that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars will continue to argue over
whether there were other, less catastrophic ways to force Tokyo to surrender. But given the fierce obstinacy of the Japanese militarists, Truman and his advisers had some grounds for
believing that nothing short of a full-scale invasion or the annihilation of a big city with an apocalyptic new weapon would have succeeded. Suppose they were right. Would this prospect have
In the debate over the question, participants on both sides have been playing the
numbers game. Estimate the hypothetical number of lives saved by the bombings, then add up the actual lives
lost. If the first number exceeds the second, then Truman did the right thing; if the reverse, it was wrong to have dropped the bombs. That is one approach to the matter -- the utilitarian
approach. According to utilitarianism, a form of moral reasoning that arose in the 19th century, the goodness or evil of an action is determined
justified the intentional mass killing of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
solely by its consequences. If somehow you can save 10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead and boil that
baby . There is, however, an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes a quite different view. The gist of it is
Some actions, this tradition holds, can never be justified by
their consequences; they are absolutely forbidden. It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are
saved thereby. Applying this absolutist morality to war can be tricky. When enemy soldiers are trying to enslave or kill us, the principle of self-defense permits us to kill them
expressed by St. Paul’s condemnation of those who say, “Let us do evil, that good may come.”
(though not to slaughter them once they are taken prisoner). But what of those who back them? During World War II, propagandists made much of the “indivisibility” of modern warfare: the
idea was that since the enemy nation’s entire economic and social strength was deployed behind its military forces, the whole population was a legitimate target for obliteration. “There are no
civilians in Japan,” declared an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force shortly before the Hiroshima bombing, a time when the Japanese were popularly depicted as vermin worthy of
extermination. The boundary between combatant and noncombatant can be fuzzy, but the distinction is not meaningless, as the case of small children makes clear. Yet is wartime killing of
those who are not trying to harm us always tantamount to murder? When naval dockyards, munitions factories and supply lines are bombed, civilian carnage is inevitable. The absolutist moral
tradition acknowledges this by a principle known as double effect: although it is always wrong to kill innocents deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some
noncombatants will die as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is lying ill. It does not, however, apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Transformed into hostages by the technology of aerial bombardment, the people of those cities were intentionally executed en masse to send a message of terror to the rulers of Japan. The
practice of ordering the massacre of civilians to bring the enemy to heel scarcely began with Truman. Nor did the bomb result in casualties of a new order of magnitude. The earlier bombing of
Tokyo by incendiary weapons killed some 100,000 people. What Hiroshima and Nagasaki did mark, by the unprecedented need for rationalization they presented, was the triumph of
utilitarian thinking in the conduct of war. The conventional code of noncombatant immunity -- a product of several centuries of ethical progress among nations, which had
been formalized by an international commission in the 1920’s in the Hague -- was swept away. A simpler axiom took its place: since war is hell, any means necessary may be used to end, in
Churchill’s words, “the vast indefinite butchery.” It
is a moral calculus that, for all its logical consistency, offends
our deep-seated intuitions about
the
sanctity of life -- our conviction that a person is always to be treated as an end, never as a means. Left up to
the warmakers, moreover, utilitarian calculations are susceptible to bad-faith reasoning: tinker with the
numbers enough and virtually any atrocity can be excused in the national interest. In January, the
world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where mass slaughter was committed as an end in itself -- the ultimate evil. The moral nature of Hiroshima is
the bomb’s sinister legacy is
plain: it has inured us to the idea of reducing innocents to instruments and morality to arithmetic.
ambiguous by contrast. Yet in the postwar era, when governments do not hesitate to treat the massacre of civilians as just another strategic option,
Privacy Advantage 1AC – shorter version
Privacy Advantage – shorter version
Contention # ____ is Privacy
Privacy outweighs.
- Utilitarian impact calc is biased. It inflates the disad’s risk; and
- Reject Surveillance as a structural matter of power – even when “reformed”,
innocents experience powerless unless neutral oversight’s in place.
Solove ‘7
Daniel Solove is an Associate Professor at George Washington University Law School and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He
is one of the world’s leading expert in information privacy law and is well known for his academic work on privacy and for
popular books on how privacy relates with information technology. He has written 9 books and more than 50 law review
articles – From the Article ““I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy” - San Diego Law Review, Vol.
44, p. 745 - GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289 – available from download at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
It is time to return to the
nothing to hide argument . The reasoning of this argument is that when it comes to
government surveillance or use of personal data, there is no privacy violation if a person has nothing sensitive,
embarrassing, or illegal to conceal. Criminals involved in illicit activities have something to fear, but for the vast majority of
people, their activities are not illegal or embarrassing. Understanding privacy as I have set forth reveals the flaw of the nothing to hide argument at its roots. Many
commentators who respond to the argument attempt a direct refutation by trying to point to things that people would want to hide. But the problem with the
nothing to hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. Agreeing
with this assumption concedes far
too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide. As Bruce
Schneier aptly notes, the nothing to hide argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a
wrong.”75 The deeper problem with the nothing to hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy. But understanding
privacy as a plurality of related problems demonstrates that concealment of bad things is just one among many problems caused by government programs such as
the NSA surveillance and data mining. In the categories in my taxonomy, several problems are implicated. The
NSA programs involve problems of
information collection, specifically the category of surveillance in the taxonomy. Wiretapping involves audio surveillance of people’s conversations.
Data mining often begins with the collection of personal information, usually from various third parties that possess people’s data. Under current Supreme Court
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, when the government gathers data from third parties, there is no Fourth Amendment protection because people lack a
“reasonable expectation of privacy” in information exposed to others.76 In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court concluded that there is no reasonable
expectation of privacy in bank records because “[a]ll of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information
voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.”77 In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that people
lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they “know that they must convey numerical information to the phone company,”
and therefore they cannot “harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret.”78 As I have argued extensively elsewhere, the lack of
Fourth Amendment protection of third party records results in the government’s ability to access an extensive amount of personal information with minimal
limitation or oversight.79 Many scholars have referred to information collection as a form of surveillance. Dataveillance, a term coined by Roger Clarke, refers to the
“systemic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons.”80 Christopher Slobogin has
referred to the gathering of personal information in business records as “transaction surveillance.”81 Surveillance
can create chilling effects
on free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.82 Even
surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them. The value of protecting against
chilling effects is not measured simply by focusing on the particular individuals who are deterred from
exercising their rights. Chilling effects harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of
viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity. The nothing to hide
argument focuses primarily on the information collection problems associated with the NSA programs. It contends that limited surveillance of lawful activity will not
chill behavior sufficiently to outweigh the security benefits. One can certainly quarrel with this argument, but one of the difficulties with chilling effects is that it is
often very hard to demonstrate concrete evidence of deterred behavior.83 Whether the NSA’s surveillance and collection of telephone records has deterred people
from communicating particular ideas would be a difficult question to answer. Far too often, discussions of the NSA surveillance and data mining define the problem
solely in terms of surveillance. To return to my discussion of metaphor, the problems are not just Orwellian, but Kafkaesque. The
NSA programs are
problematic even if no information people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited
behavior, but rather
a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of
personal data and its exclusion of the protagonist from having any knowledge or participation in the process. The harms consist of those created by
bureaucracies—indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability. One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges
from the combination of small bits of seemingly innocuous data.84 When combined, the information becomes much more telling about a person. For the person
who truly has nothing to hide, aggregation is not much of a problem. But in the stronger, less absolutist form of the nothing to hide argument, people argue that
certain pieces of information are not something they would hide. Aggregation, however, means that by combining pieces of information we might not care to
conceal, the government can glean information about us that we might really want to conceal. Part of the
allure of data mining for the
government is its ability to reveal a lot about our personalities and activities by sophisticated means of analyzing data. Therefore,
without greater transparency in data mining, it is hard to claim that programs like the NSA data mining program will not
reveal information people might want to hide, as we do not know precisely what is revealed. Moreover, data mining aims to be predictive
of behavior, striving to prognosticate about our future actions. People who match certain profiles are deemed likely to engage in a similar pattern of behavior. It is
quite difficult to refute actions that one has not yet done. Having nothing to hide will not always dispel predictions of future activity. Another
problem in
the taxonomy, which is implicated by the NSA program, is the problem I refer to as exclusion.85 Exclusion is the problem caused when people are
prevented from having knowledge about how their information is being used, as well as barred from being able to access and correct errors in that data. The NSA
program involves a massive database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, the very existence of the program was kept secret for years.86 This kind
of information processing, which forbids people’s knowledge or involvement, resembles in some ways a kind of due process problem. It is a structural problem
involving the way people are treated by government institutions. Moreover, it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent
should the Executive Branch and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant
power over citizens? This
issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to
hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government. A related problem involves “secondary use.” Secondary
use is the use of data obtained for one purpose for a different unrelated purpose without the person’s consent. The Administration has said little about how long
the data will be stored, how it will be used, and what it could be used for in the future. The potential future uses of any piece of personal information are vast, and
without limits or accountability on how that information is used, it is hard for people to assess the dangers of the data being in the government’s control. Therefore,
the problem with the nothing to hide argument is that it focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems—the disclosure of personal information or
surveillance—and not others. It assumes a particular view about what privacy entails, and it sets
important to distinguish here between two ways of
the terms for debate in a manner that is often unproductive. It is
justifying a program such as the NSA surveillance
and data mining program. The first
way is to not recognize a problem. This is how the nothing to hide argument works—it denies even the existence of a problem. The second manner of justifying such
a program is
to acknowledge the problems but contend that the benefits of the NSA program outweigh
the privacy harms . The first justification influences the second, because the low value given to privacy is based upon a narrow view of the problem.
The key misunderstanding is that the nothing to hide argument views privacy in a particular way—as a form of secrecy, as
the right to hide things. But there are many other types of harm involved beyond exposing one’s
secrets to the government. Privacy problems are often difficult to recognize and redress because they create a panoply of types of harm. Courts,
legislators, and others look for particular types of harm to the exclusion of others, and their narrow focus blinds them to seeing other kinds of harms. One of the
difficulties with the nothing to hide argument
is that it looks for a visceral kind of injury as opposed to a
structural one . Ironically, this underlying conception of injury is shared by both those advocating for greater privacy protections and those arguing
in favor of the conflicting interests to privacy. For example, law professor Ann Bartow argues that I have failed to describe
privacy harms in a compelling manner in my article, A Taxonomy of Privacy, where I provide a framework for understanding the manifold different privacy
problems.87 Bartow’s primary complaint is that my taxonomy “frames privacy harms in dry, analytical terms that fail to sufficiently identify and animate the
compelling ways that privacy violations can negatively impact the lives of living, breathing human beings beyond simply provoking feelings of unease.”88 Bartow
claims that the taxonomy
does not have “enough dead bodies” and that privacy’s “lack of blood and death,
or at least of broken bones and buckets of money, distances privacy harms from other categories of tort law. Most
privacy problems lack dead bodies. Of course, there are exceptional cases such as the murders of Rebecca Shaeffer and Amy Boyer. Rebecca
Shaeffer was an actress killed when a stalker obtained her address from a Department of Motor Vehicles record.90 This incident prompted Congress to pass the
Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994.91 Amy Boyer was murdered by a stalker who obtained her personal information, including her work address and Social
Security number, from a database company.92 These examples aside, there is not a lot of death and gore in privacy law. If this is the standard to recognize a
problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized. Horrific cases are not typical, and the purpose of my taxonomy is to explain why most privacy problems are
still harmful despite this fact. Bartow’s objection is actually very similar to the nothing to hide argument. Those
advancing the nothing to hide
argument have in mind a particular kind of visceral privacy harm, one where privacy is violated only when something deeply embarrassing or
discrediting is revealed. Bartow’s
quest for horror stories represents a similar desire to find visceral privacy harms. The problem is that not all
privacy harms are like this. At the end of the day, privacy
is not a horror movie, and demanding more palpable harms will be difficult in many cases.
Yet there is still a harm worth addressing, even if it is not sensationalistic.
In many instances, privacy is
threatened not by singular egregious acts, but by a slow series of relatively minor acts which gradually begin to add up. In this way, privacy problems resemble
certain environmental harms which occur over time through a series of small acts by different actors. Bartow wants to point to a major spill, but gradual pollution by
a multitude of different actors often creates worse problems. The law frequently struggles with recognizing harms that do not result in embarrassment, humiliation,
or physical or psychological injury.93 For example, after the September 11 attacks, several airlines gave their passenger records to federal agencies in direct
violation of their privacy policies. The federal agencies used the data to study airline security.94 A group of passengers sued Northwest Airlines for disclosing their
personal information. One of their claims was that Northwest Airlines breached its contract with the passengers. In Dyer v. Northwest Airlines Corp., the court
rejected the contract claim because “broad statements of company policy do not generally give rise to contract claims,” the passengers never claimed they relied
upon the policy or even read it, and they “failed to allege any contractual damages arising out of the alleged breach.”95 Another court reached a similar
conclusion.96 Regardless of the merits of the decisions on contract law, the cases represent a difficulty with the legal system in addressing privacy problems. The
disclosure of the passenger records represented a “breach of confidentiality.”97 The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of
individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is
maintained in relationships between businesses and their customers. The problem of secondary use is also implicated in this case.98 Secondary use involves data
collected for one purpose being used for an unrelated purpose without people’s consent. The airlines gave passenger information to the government for an entirely
different purpose beyond that for which it was originally gathered. Secondary use problems often do not cause financial, or even psychological, injuries. Instead, the
harm is one of power imbalance. In Dyer, data was disseminated in a way that ignored airline passengers’ interests in the data despite promises made in the privacy
policy. Even if the passengers were unaware of the policy, there is a social value in ensuring that companies adhere to established limits on the way they use
personal information. Otherwise, any stated limits become meaningless, and companies have discretion to boundlessly use data. Such a state of affairs can leave
nearly all consumers in a powerless position. The harm, then, is less one to particular individuals than it is a structural harm. A similar problem surfaces in another
case, Smith v. Chase Manhattan Bank.99 A group of plaintiffs sued Chase Manhattan Bank for selling customer information to third parties in violation of its privacy
policy, which stated that the information would remain confidential. The court held that even presuming these allegations were true, the plaintiffs could not prove
any actual injury: [T]he “harm” at the heart of this purported class action, is that class members were merely offered products and services which they were free to
decline. This does not qualify as actual harm. The complaint does not allege any single instance where a named plaintiff or any class member suffered any actual
harm due to the receipt of an unwanted telephone solicitation or a piece of junk mail.100 The court’s view of harm, however, did not account for the breach of
confidentiality. When
balancing privacy against security, the privacy harms are often characterized in terms of
injuries to the individual, and the interest in security is often characterized in a more broad societal way. The
security interest in the NSA programs has often been defined improperly. In a Congressional hearing, Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales stated: Our enemy is listening, and I cannot help but wonder if they are not shaking their heads in amazement at the thought that anyone would
imperil such a sensitive program by leaking its existence in the first place, and smiling at the prospect that we might now disclose even more or perhaps even
unilaterally disarm ourselves of a key tool in the war on terror.101 The balance between privacy and security is often cast in terms of whether a particular
government information collection activity should or should not be barred. The
issue, however, often is not whether the NSA or other government
agencies should be allowed to engage in particular forms of information gathering; rather, it is what kinds of
oversight and accountability we want in place when the government engages in searches and seizures. The government can
employ nearly any kind of investigatory activity with a warrant supported by probable cause. This is a mechanism of oversight—it
forces government officials to justify their suspicions to a neutral judge or magistrate before engaging in the tactic. For
example, electronic surveillance law allows for wiretapping, but limits the practice with judicial supervision, procedures to minimize the breadth of the wiretapping,
and requirements that the law enforcement officials report back to the court to prevent abuses.102 It is these procedures that the Bush Administration has ignored
by engaging in the warrantless NSA surveillance. The question is not whether we want the government to monitor such conversations, but whether the Executive
Branch should adhere to the appropriate oversight procedures that Congress has enacted into law, or should covertly ignore any oversight. Therefore, the security
interest should not get weighed in its totality against the privacy interest. Rather, what should get weighed is the extent of marginal limitation on the effectiveness
of a government information gathering or data mining program by imposing judicial oversight and minimization procedures. Only in cases where such procedures
will completely impair the government program should the security interest be weighed in total, rather than in the marginal difference between an unencumbered
program versus a limited one. Far too
often, the balancing of privacy interests against security interests takes place in a
manner that severely shortchanges the privacy interest while inflating the security interests . Such is the
logic of the nothing to hide argument. When
examined
the argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions
can see how it shifts the debate to its terms , in which it draws power from its
unfair advantage. It is time to pull the curtain on the nothing to hide argument. Whether explicit or not, conceptions of privacy underpin
and challenged, we
nearly every argument made about privacy, even the common quip “I’ve got nothing to hide.” As I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, understanding privacy
as a pluralistic conception reveals that we are often talking past each other when discussing privacy issues. By focusing more specifically on the related problems
under the rubric of “privacy,” we can better address each problem rather than ignore or conflate them. The nothing to hide argument speaks to some
problems, but not to others. It represents
a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding
consideration of the other problems often raised in government surveillance and data mining
programs. When engaged with directly, the nothing to hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But
when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond
surveillance and disclosure, the nothing to hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say.
Reject utilitarianism and put privacy before security. The ballot should create a side
constraint where ends don’t justify the means. This is especially applies to data
collection in the absence of probable cause.
Albright ‘14
Logan Albright is the Research Analyst at FreedomWorks, and is responsible for producing a wide variety of written content for
print and the web, as well as conducting research for staff media appearances and special projects. He received his Master’s
degree in economics from Georgia State University. “The NSA's Collateral Spying” – Freedom Works - 07/08/2014 http://www.freedomworks.org/content/nsas-collateral-spying
In short, the report, based on information obtained by Edward Snowden, reveals that during the course of its ordinary, otherwise legal surveillance operations,
the NSA also collected data on large numbers of people who were not specifically targeted. The agency
calls this practice “incidental surveillance.” I call it “collateral spying.” The report found that, on average, 9 out of every 10 people
spied on were not the intended target. The NSA has the legal authority to obtain a warrant based on
probable cause in order to surveil an individual. No one is disputing that. But when this targeting results
in collateral spying on vast numbers of innocents, in the absence of probable cause and the corresponding warrants, that is a
major problem. The NSA has asserted that such incidental data collection is inevitable, and to a certain extent that’s likely true. It is
should obviously be
minimized as far as possible , and at the very least the information should be immediately
purged from government databases , not stored for years on end. In any case, the whole situation is indicative of
understandable that in some situations the NSA may learn information about people other than the direct target, but this
the agency’s cavalier attitude towards individual rights. While
national security is a concern we all share, the ends do not justify
the means when those means involve violate the constitutional protections afforded to citizens by our nation’s founders. It is
not okay to violate the rights of an innocent in the process of achieving a broader goal, even
if that goal is noble. The way the NSA has been behaving is Machiavellian in the most literal sense. In his 16th century
political treatise, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli recognized a harsh reality of politics that still plagues us half a millennium later, writing, “A prince wishing to keep
his state is very often forced to do evil.” Taking Machiavelli’s advice as a
green light for immoral behavior has been the problem with
governments throughout history, a problem the founding fathers sought to avoid by setting down precise guidelines for what the government could and could not
do in the form of a Constitution. The disregard of these rules, and the
argument that there should be a national security
exception to the Fourth Amendment, undermines the entire purpose of the American experiment, and restores the European-style
tyrannies the revolutionaries fought against.
Even in a utilitarian framework, privacy outweighs due to relative certainty. The disad
only may cause violence - surveillance definitely does. Privacy is paramount for dignity
and protecting our unique individuality.
Schneier ‘6
Bruce Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New
America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and the CTO of Resilient Systems. He is the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking
Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. Commentary, “The Eternal Value of Privacy”, WIRED, May 18, 2006,
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70886-0.html
The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and
other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to
hide?" Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me."
"Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong
with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise
that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for
maintaining
the human condition with
dignity and respect. Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches
the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six
lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to
arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy
is important because without it, surveillance information will be
abused : to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time. Privacy protects us from
abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. We do nothing wrong
when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private
journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them.
Privacy is a basic human need.
A
future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit
right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act
so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the
concept of liberty. For
if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment,
criticism, even plagiarism
of our own uniqueness . We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful
that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate
us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose
our individuality , because everything we do is observable and recordable. How many of us have paused
during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it
was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe
the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be
taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our
words are subtly altered. This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives. Too many wrongly characterize the
debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises
under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still
tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very
definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
1AC – Bigotry Advantage
Bigotry Advantage 1AC – Longer version
Bigotry Advantage – long version
Contention # ____ is Bigotry
Warrantless surveillance boosts a distinct form of racial, religious, and ethnic
discrimination. The Neg’s security interests only drive this racialized violence.
Unegbu ‘13
Cindy C. Unegbu - J.D. Candidate, Howard University School of Law - NOTE AND COMMENT: National Security Surveillance on
the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion: A Constitutional Misstep - Howard Law Journal - 57 How. L.J. 433 - Fall, 2013 – lexis;
lawrev
Picture this: you live in a society in which the government is allowed to partake in intrusive surveillance
measures without the institutionalized checks and balances upon which the government was founded. In this society, the
government pursues citizens who belong to a particular race or ethnicity, practice a certain religion, or have affiliations with
specific interest groups. Individuals who have these characteristics are subject to surreptitious monitoring, which
includes undercover government officials disguising themselves as community members in order to attend various community events and programs. The government may
also place these individuals on watch lists, even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. These watch lists classify
domestic individuals as potential or suspected terrorists and facilitate the monitoring of their personal activity through various law enforcement agencies for an extended period of time.
This "hypothetical" society is not hypothetical at all; in fact, it is the current state of American
surveillance. The government's domestic spying activities have progressed to intrusive levels,
primarily due to an increased fear of terrorism . n1 This fear has resulted in governmental intelligence
efforts that are focused on political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants. n2 [*435] The
government's domestic surveillance efforts are not only geared toward suspected terrorists and those partaking in criminal activity, but reach any
innocent, non-criminal, non-terrorist national, all in the name of national security. The government's power
to engage in suspicionless surveillance and track innocent citizens' sensitive information has been granted through the creation and revision of the National
Counterterrorism Center n3 and the FBI's (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. n4 The grant of surveillance power has resulted in many opponents,
including those within the current presidential administration, who challenge the order for numerous reasons. n5 These reasons include the inefficiency of storing citizens' random personal
information for extended periods of time, n6 the broad unprecedented authority granted to this body of government without proper approval from Congress, n7 and the constitutional
violations due to the deprivation of citizens' rights. n8 [*436] This Comment argues that the wide-sweeping surveillance authority granted to the government
results in a violation of
the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause due to far-reaching domestic monitoring practices. Surveillance practices, such as posing as members of the community and placing
individuals on watch lists without suspicion of terrorist activity, result in the
impermissible monitoring of individuals on the basis of their
race or ethnicity . These practices, although done in the name of national security, an established compelling government interest, violate the Equal Protection Clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment because they are not narrowly tailored to the stated interest.
The procedures are not narrowly tailored to the
interest of national security because of the over-inclusiveness of the measures .
Warrantless mass surveillance is racist. Vote Aff to prioritize these under-represented
impacts in public debates.
Kumar & Kundnani ‘15
Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012). Arun Kundnani is research fellow at the International Centre
for Counter-Terrorism. He is a writer and activist, and a professor at NYU. “Race, surveillance, and empire” – International
Socialist Review - Issue #96 – Spring - http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire
Beginning in June 2013, a series of news articles
based on whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s collection of documents from the
National Security Agency (NSA) took the world by storm. Over the course of a year, the Snowden material provided a
detailed account of the massive extent of NSA’s warrantless data collection . What became clear was
that the NSA was involved in the mass collection of online material. Less apparent was how this data was actually used by the
NSA and other national security agencies. Part of the answer came in July 2014 when Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain
published an article that identified specific targets of NSA surveillance and showed how individuals were being
placed under surveillance despite there being no reasonable suspicion of their involvement in criminal
activity.1 All of those named as targets were prominent Muslim Americans. The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan
Devereaux published another story for The Intercept, which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people
on the National Counterterrorism Center’s no-fly list had increased tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified documents showed that the NCC
maintains a database of terrorism suspects worldwide—the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment—which contained a million names by 2013, double the
number four years earlier, and increasingly includes biometric data. This
database includes 20,800 persons within the United
States who are disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, with its significant Arab
American population.2 By any objective standard, these were major news stories that ought to have attracted as much attention as the earlier
revelations. Yet the stories barely registered in the corporate media landscape. The “tech community,” which had earlier expressed outrage at the NSA’s mass
digital surveillance, seemed to be indifferent when details emerged of the targeted surveillance of Muslims. The explanation for this reaction is not hard to find.
While many object to the US government collecting private data on “ordinary” people, Muslims tend to be
seen as reasonable targets of suspicion. A July 2014 poll for the Arab American Institute found that 42 percent of Americans think it is
justifiable for law enforcement agencies to profile Arab Americans or American Muslims.3 In what follows, we argue that the
debate on national
security surveillance that has emerged in the United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due
to its failure to place questions of race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the
basis for the ways national security surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to
legitimize this surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective in making
sense of it and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history of US capitalism.
Likewise, we argue that the history of national security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire.
Most everyone violates some law from time-to-time. Mass surveillance results in
selective enforcement that disproportionately impacts those lacking privilege.
Stanfill ‘13
Mel - The author now holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Communications and Media. The
Author was working on that PhD at this time of this writing. When this piece was written, the author held an M.A. from
California State University, East Bay in Media and Cultural Studies and had Graduate minors in Gender and Women’s Studies
and Queer Studies. The author also held a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley - English with Distinction in General
Scholarship. At the time of this writing, the author had published several Peer-Reviewed Publications. The author is internally
quoting Daniel J. Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law
School. “NSA Prism Part III: Due Process and Presumed Guilty” - July 1, 2013 – http://www.melstanfill.com/nsa-prism-part-iiidue-process-and-presumed-guilty/
Posing this as a due process question could be the way to get some traction in light of the nonchalance about privacy discussed last week: The problem with NSA
PRISM is that we are all being treated as guilty until proven innocent. This has been going on since 9/11, of course, with airport security being one highly visible
iteration, but there’s a chance that this new level of awareness of just how much everyone is being treated as criminal without due process of law could be the
straw. Solove describes the stakes well: “Even
if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have
to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom
is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.” Crossing this line into blanket assumption of guilt is what
animates the Stop Watching US petition, which says “the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion
of crime or association with a terrorist organization,” though they tie their concern to the 1st and 4th amendment and “citizens’ right to speak and associate
anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy” without mentioning due process. (That people feel due process
has gone out the window is clear from the fact that RootsAction sent me a petition to President Obama “not to engage in any abduction or other foul play against
Snowden,” ironic when the administration’s line on why they’re disappointed that Hong Kong let him leave is that they want there to be rule of law.) Wired perhaps
elaborates the worst-case-scenario best: “Police
already abuse the immense power they have, but if everyone’s every
action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then
punishment becomes purely selective . Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish
anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all.” Of course, black and Latino citizens have
been living under presumed-guilty, surveilled-within-an inch-of-their-lives, selectively-punished conditions for decades:
they’re more likely to get caught at things white folks also do and be punished more
harshly for them, even as early as middle school (see Ann Ferguson’s Bad Boys). Muslim and Arab citizens have been living
under it since 9/11.
Reject this discrimination as an unacceptable wrong that must be rejected as an end
onto itself.
Shamsi ‘14
(et al; Hina Shamsi is a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches a course in international human rights. She is
also the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, which is dedicated to ensuring that U.S. national security policies and
practices are consistent with the Constitution, civil liberties, and human rights. She has litigated cases upholding the freedoms
of speech and association, and challenging targeted killing, torture, unlawful detention, and post-9/11 discrimination against
racial and religious minorities. Her work includes a focus on the intersection of national security and counterterrorism policies
with international human rights and humanitarian law. She also served as Senior Advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial Executions. Hina is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Northwestern University School of Law. “The
Perversity of Profiling” – April 14th – available at the ACLU website - https://www.aclu.org/blog/perversity-profiling)
Using expanded authorities that permit investigations without
actual
evidence of wrongdoing , the FBI
has also targeted minority communities for interviews based on race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion. It
has used informants to conduct surveillance in community centers, mosques, and other public gathering places and against people exercising their First Amendment
right to worship or to engage in political advocacy. And among
America’s minority communities, “flying while brown” soon
joined “driving while black” as a truism of government-sanctioned discrimination and stigma. It’s hard to
overstate the damage done to the FBI’s relationship with minorities, particularly American Muslims. The damage,
spread further. When federal law enforcement leads in discriminatory profiling, state and local
law enforcement will follow. Nowhere is that clearer than in New York City, where the NYPD – which is twice the size of the
however, has
FBI – launched
a massive program of discriminatory surveillance and investigation of American Muslims,
mapping the places where they carry out daily activities and sending informants to spy on mosques and Muslim community organizations, student groups, and
businesses. After the Associated Press broke a series of stories describing this program in stark and shocking detail, the
NYPD defended itself,
arguing that it was only doing what the FBI was permitted to do. Again, it’s hard to overstate the harm.
From the ACLU’s work with New York’s Muslim communities, we know that a generation of youth is
growing up fearful of its local police force, scared to exercise the rights to freedom of worship, speech, and
association. Fortunately, the issuance of the revised Guidance on Race has been delayed and both the Justice Department and the civil rights community
have a crucial opportunity to put a spotlight on the FBI, which vigorously opposes those fighting for equality. According to the New York Times, the FBI’s
argument seems to be that it needs to identify where Somalis live to investigate potential Somali terrorism suspects.
But that argument must be rejected for the same reason that we reject it in other contexts .
Many mass shooters are young white males, yet we rightly don’t map where whites live or send informants to
majority white communities to ferret out potential mass shooters. Put another way, the FBI’s argument presumes what the Ashcroft
Guidance “emphatically rejects”: that
crime can be prevented by the mass stereotyping of entire communities. Not only is
that wrong , it is a ham-handed approach that squanders resources that should properly be devoted to
investigating actual wrongdoing.
We reject the racialized notions of Surveillance and Security. These practices falsely
construct threats and shut-down dissent in many forms.
Kumar & Kundnani ‘15
Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012). Arun Kundnani is research fellow at the International Centre
for Counter-Terrorism. He is a writer and activist, and a professor at NYU. “Race, surveillance, and empire” – International
Socialist Review - Issue #96 – Spring - http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire
In the second part, we
turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape
national security surveillance practices . The intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has been
carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements such as
Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order.
This is not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s were
passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied for
surveillance regimes have always sought to monitor and penalize a wide range
of dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no means all of these cases. Our focus here is on the production of
racialized “others” as security threats and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations. Further, the current system of mass
surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of racialized security surveillance that
feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the Obama administration and that disproportionately target African
Americans, contributing to their mass incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as the New Jim Crow.4 We argue that
racialized groupings are produced in the very act of collecting information about certain groups deemed
Washington’s army in the American Revolution. State
as “threats” by the national security state— the Brown terrorist , the Black and Brown drug
dealer and user, and the immigrant who threatens to steal jobs. We conclude that “ security” has become one of
the primary means through which racism is ideologically reproduced in the “post-racial,” neoliberal
era. Drawing on W. E. B. Dubois’s notion of the “psychological wage,” we argue that neoliberalism has been legitimized in part through racialized notions of security
that offer a new “psychological wage” as compensation for the decline of the social wage and its reallocation to “homeland security.”
Surveillance is racist – it’s the modern COINTELPRO. Reject the security justifications
that prop-up these forms of violence.
Kumar & Kundnani ‘15
Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012). Arun Kundnani is research fellow at the International Centre
for Counter-Terrorism. He is a writer and activist, and a professor at NYU. “Race, surveillance, and empire” – International
Socialist Review - Issue #96 – Spring - http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire
As of 2008, the
FBI had a roster of 15,000 paid informants and, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the bureau had 10,000 counterterrorism intelligence analysts in 2013.63 The proportion of these informants and analysts who are
assigned to Muslim populations in the United States is unknown but is likely to be substantial. The kinds of infiltration and provocation tactics that
had been practiced against Black radicals in the 1960s are being repeated today. What has changed are the
rationales used to justify them: it is no longer the threat of Black nationalist subversion, but the threat of
Muslim radicalization that is invoked. With new provisions in the Clinton administration’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,
the FBI can launch investigations of a suspected individual or organization simply for providing “material support” to terrorism—a vague term that could include
ideological activity unrelated to any actual plot to carry out violence. While
COINTELPRO violated federal laws, today similar kinds
of investigation and criminalization of political dissent can be carried out legitimately in the name of
countering terrorism.
Bigotry Advantage 1AC – Shorter version
Bigotry Advantage – shorter version
Contention # ____ is Bigotry
Warrantless surveillance boosts a distinct form of racial, religious, and ethnic
discrimination. The Neg’s security interests only drive this racialized violence.
Unegbu ‘13
Cindy C. Unegbu - J.D. Candidate, Howard University School of Law - NOTE AND COMMENT: National Security Surveillance on
the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion: A Constitutional Misstep - Howard Law Journal - 57 How. L.J. 433 - Fall, 2013 – lexis;
lawrev
Picture this: you live in a society in which the government is allowed to partake in intrusive surveillance
measures without the institutionalized checks and balances upon which the government was founded. In this society, the
government pursues citizens who belong to a particular race or ethnicity, practice a certain religion, or have affiliations with
specific interest groups. Individuals who have these characteristics are subject to surreptitious monitoring, which
includes undercover government officials disguising themselves as community members in order to attend various community events and programs. The government may
also place these individuals on watch lists, even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. These watch lists classify
domestic individuals as potential or suspected terrorists and facilitate the monitoring of their personal activity through various law enforcement agencies for an extended period of time.
This "hypothetical" society is not hypothetical at all; in fact, it is the current state of American
surveillance. The government's domestic spying activities have progressed to intrusive levels,
primarily due to an increased fear of terrorism . n1 This fear has resulted in governmental intelligence
efforts that are focused on political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants. n2 [*435] The
government's domestic surveillance efforts are not only geared toward suspected terrorists and those partaking in criminal activity, but reach any
innocent, non-criminal, non-terrorist national, all in the name of national security. The government's power
to engage in suspicionless surveillance and track innocent citizens' sensitive information has been granted through the creation and revision of the National
Counterterrorism Center n3 and the FBI's (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. n4 The grant of surveillance power has resulted in many opponents,
including those within the current presidential administration, who challenge the order for numerous reasons. n5 These reasons include the inefficiency of storing citizens' random personal
information for extended periods of time, n6 the broad unprecedented authority granted to this body of government without proper approval from Congress, n7 and the constitutional
violations due to the deprivation of citizens' rights. n8 [*436] This Comment argues that the wide-sweeping surveillance authority granted to the government
results in a violation of
the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause due to far-reaching domestic monitoring practices. Surveillance practices, such as posing as members of the community and placing
individuals on watch lists without suspicion of terrorist activity, result in the
impermissible monitoring of individuals on the basis of their
race or ethnicity . These practices, although done in the name of national security, an established compelling government interest, violate the Equal Protection Clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment because they are not narrowly tailored to the stated interest.
The procedures are not narrowly tailored to the
interest of national security because of the over-inclusiveness of the measures .
Most everyone violates some law from time-to-time. Mass surveillance results in
selective enforcement that disproportionately impacts those lacking privilege.
Stanfill ‘13
Mel - The author now holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Communications and Media. The
Author was working on that PhD at this time of this writing. When this piece was written, the author held an M.A. from
California State University, East Bay in Media and Cultural Studies and had Graduate minors in Gender and Women’s Studies
and Queer Studies. The author also held a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley - English with Distinction in General
Scholarship. At the time of this writing, the author had published several Peer-Reviewed Publications. The author is internally
quoting Daniel J. Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law
School. “NSA Prism Part III: Due Process and Presumed Guilty” - July 1, 2013 – http://www.melstanfill.com/nsa-prism-part-iiidue-process-and-presumed-guilty/
Posing this as a due process question could be the way to get some traction in light of the nonchalance about privacy discussed last week: The problem with NSA
PRISM is that we are all being treated as guilty until proven innocent. This has been going on since 9/11, of course, with airport security being one highly visible
iteration, but there’s a chance that this new level of awareness of just how much everyone is being treated as criminal without due process of law could be the
straw. Solove describes the stakes well: “Even
if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have
to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom
is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.” Crossing this line into blanket assumption of guilt is what
animates the Stop Watching US petition, which says “the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion
of crime or association with a terrorist organization,” though they tie their concern to the 1st and 4th amendment and “citizens’ right to speak and associate
anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy” without mentioning due process. (That people feel due process
has gone out the window is clear from the fact that RootsAction sent me a petition to President Obama “not to engage in any abduction or other foul play against
Snowden,” ironic when the administration’s line on why they’re disappointed that Hong Kong let him leave is that they want there to be rule of law.) Wired perhaps
elaborates the worst-case-scenario best: “Police
already abuse the immense power they have, but if everyone’s every
action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then
punishment becomes purely selective . Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish
anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all.” Of course, black and Latino citizens have
been living under presumed-guilty, surveilled-within-an inch-of-their-lives, selectively-punished conditions for decades:
they’re more likely to get caught at things white folks also do and be punished more
harshly for them, even as early as middle school (see Ann Ferguson’s Bad Boys). Muslim and Arab citizens have been living
under it since 9/11.
Reject this discrimination as an unacceptable wrong that must be rejected as an end
onto itself.
Shamsi ‘14
(et al; Hina Shamsi is a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches a course in international human rights. She is
also the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, which is dedicated to ensuring that U.S. national security policies and
practices are consistent with the Constitution, civil liberties, and human rights. She has litigated cases upholding the freedoms
of speech and association, and challenging targeted killing, torture, unlawful detention, and post-9/11 discrimination against
racial and religious minorities. Her work includes a focus on the intersection of national security and counterterrorism policies
with international human rights and humanitarian law. She also served as Senior Advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial Executions. Hina is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Northwestern University School of Law. “The
Perversity of Profiling” – April 14th – available at the ACLU website - https://www.aclu.org/blog/perversity-profiling)
Using expanded authorities that permit investigations without
actual
evidence of wrongdoing , the FBI
has also targeted minority communities for interviews based on race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion. It
has used informants to conduct surveillance in community centers, mosques, and other public gathering places and against people exercising their First Amendment
right to worship or to engage in political advocacy. And among
America’s minority communities, “flying while brown” soon
joined “driving while black” as a truism of government-sanctioned discrimination and stigma. It’s hard to
overstate the damage done to the FBI’s relationship with minorities, particularly American Muslims. The damage,
spread further. When federal law enforcement leads in discriminatory profiling, state and local
law enforcement will follow. Nowhere is that clearer than in New York City, where the NYPD – which is twice the size of the
however, has
FBI – launched
a massive program of discriminatory surveillance and investigation of American Muslims,
mapping the places where they carry out daily activities and sending informants to spy on mosques and Muslim community organizations, student groups, and
businesses. After the Associated Press broke a series of stories describing this program in stark and shocking detail, the
NYPD defended itself,
arguing that it was only doing what the FBI was permitted to do. Again, it’s hard to overstate the harm.
From the ACLU’s work with New York’s Muslim communities, we know that a generation of youth is
growing up fearful of its local police force, scared to exercise the rights to freedom of worship, speech, and
association. Fortunately, the issuance of the revised Guidance on Race has been delayed and both the Justice Department and the civil rights community
have a crucial opportunity to put a spotlight on the FBI, which vigorously opposes those fighting for equality. According to the New York Times, the FBI’s
argument seems to be that it needs to identify where Somalis live to investigate potential Somali terrorism suspects.
But that argument must be rejected for the same reason that we reject it in other contexts .
Many mass shooters are young white males, yet we rightly don’t map where whites live or send informants to
majority white communities to ferret out potential mass shooters. Put another way, the FBI’s argument presumes what the Ashcroft
Guidance “emphatically rejects”: that
crime can be prevented by the mass stereotyping of entire communities. Not only is
that wrong , it is a ham-handed approach that squanders resources that should properly be devoted to
investigating actual wrongdoing.
1AC – Journalism Advantage
Journalism Advantage - 1AC
Journalism Advantage
Contention # ____ is Journalism
Status quo mass surveillance chills journalism and crushes government accountability.
Wong ‘15
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law – From the essay: “Internet at a
Crossroads: How Government Surveillance Threatens How We Communicate” - http://www.hrw.org/worldreport/2015/essays/internet-crossroads
A joint report published by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union in July 2014 documented the insidious effects of
large-scale surveillance on the practice of journalism and law in the US. Interviews with dozens of journalists
showed that increased surveillance, combined with tightened measures to prevent leaks and government contact with media, are
intimidating sources, keeping them from talking to journalists (even about unclassified topics of public concern) out of fear that they could face
retaliation, lose their security clearances or jobs, or even face prosecution. Ultimately,
this is having a detrimental impact on the
coverage, particularly on matters related to national security, intelligence, and law
enforcement. This effect undermines the role of the fourth estate in holding government to account.
amount and quality of news
Steve
Coll, staff writer for the New Yorker and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, explained: “ Every
national security
reporter I know would say that the atmosphere in which professional reporters seek insight into policy
failures [and] bad military decisions is just much tougher and much chillier.” Public understanding of
national security policies that are carried out in our name is essential to the functioning of healthy democracies and open
societies.
Indiscriminate collection is the vital internal link. It hampers aggressive journalism on
bad national security decisions.
Sinha ‘14
(et al; Authors Include: G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights
Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Sinha holds a J.D. from New York University’s School of Law. This includes a
specialization as a Scholar from NYU’s Institute for International Law & Justice. The author also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
University of Toronto. Additional authors include - Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, US Program deputy director at Human
Rights Watch, who participated in some of the research interviews; and Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington Director at Human
Rights Watch, who also participated in one of the research interviews and provided key contacts. Human Rights Watch is an
independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the
cause of human rights for all. This card also internally quotes Steve Coll, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia
University. From the Report: WITH LIBERTY TO MONITOR ALL How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law and
American Democracy – This report is based on extensive interviews with some 50 journalists covering intelligence, national
security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and NPR. JULY 2014 –
available at: http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
Every national security reporter I know would say that the atmosphere in which professional reporters seek
insight into policy failures [and] bad military decisions is just much tougher and much chillier. — Steve Coll, staff
writer for The New Yorker and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, February 14, 2014
Numerous US-based journalists covering intelligence, national security, and law enforcement describe the current reporting landscape
as, in some respects, the most difficult they have ever faced. “This is the worst I’ve seen in terms of the government’s efforts to control
information,” acknowledged Jonathan Landay, a veteran national security and intelligence correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.68 “It’s a terrible time to be
covering government,” agreed Tom Gjelten, who has worked with National Public Radio for over 30 years.69 According to Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and
executive editor of The Associated Press, “We say this every time there’s a new occupant in the White House, and it’s true every time: each is more secretive than
the last.”70 Journalists are struggling harder than ever before to protect their sources, and sources are more reluctant to speak. This environment makes reporting
both slower and less fruitful. Journalists interviewed for this report described
the difficulty of obtaining sources and covering
sensitive topics in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the range and effect of the government’s power over them. Both surveillance and leak
investigations loomed large in this context—especially to the extent that there may be a relationship
between the two. More specifically, many journalists see the government’s power as menacing because they know little about when various government
agencies share among themselves information collected through surveillance, and when they deploy that information in leak [what they] will do with it,” observed
James Asher, Washington Bureau Chief for McClatchy Co., the third largest newspaper group in the country.72 One Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for a newspaper
noted that even a decrease in leak prosecutions is unlikely to help, “unless we [also] get clear lines about what is collectable and usable.”73 Others agreed. “I’m
pretty worried that NSA information will make its way into leak investigations,” said one investigative journalist for a major outlet.74 A reporter who covers national
defense expressed concern about the possibility of a “porous wall” between the NSA and the Department of Justice, the latter of which receives referrals connected
to leak investigations.75 Jonathan Landay wondered whether the government might analyze metadata records to identify his contacts.76 A national security
reporter summarized the situation as follows: “Do we trust [the intelligence] portion of the government’s knowledge to be walled off from leak investigations?
That’s not a good place to be.”77 While most journalists
said that their difficulties began a few years ago, particularly with the increase in
leak prosecutions, our interviews confirmed that for many journalists largescale surveillance by the US government
contributes substantially to the new challenges they encounter. The government’s largescale collection of metadata and communications makes it significantly more difficult for them to
protect themselves and their sources, to confirm details for their stories, and ultimately to inform the public.
This erodes meaningful checks on inappropriate government officials. It spills beyond
national security into many policy issues.
Brown ‘14
Bruce Brown - Counsel of Record. BRIEF OF THE REPORTERS COMMITTEE FOR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND 17 MEDIA
ORGANIZATIONS AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF-APPELLANT - The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
is an unincorporated association of reporters. The Reporters Committee has provided representation, guidance and research in
First Amendment and Freedom of Information Act litigation since 1970.Amicus Brief for Smith v. Obama – before the United
States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Amici” means “friend of the court” and – in this context - is legal reference to the
Reporters Committee – Sept 9th - https://www.eff.org/document/rcfp-smith-amicus-brief
In a report that former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. wrote for the Committee to Protect Journalists, numerous
journalists
said surveillance programs and leak prosecutions deter sources from speaking to them. Comm. To Protect Journalists, The
Obama Administration and the Press: Leak Investigations and Surveillance in Post-9/11 America 3 (Oct. 10, 2013), http://bit.ly/1c3Cnfg. In the report, Associated
Press senior managing editor Michael Oreskes commented: “There’s
Sources are more jittery and more standoffish, not
no question that sources are looking over their shoulders.
just in national security reporting. A lot of skittishness is at the more routine level.” Id.
One of the most pernicious effects is the chilling
effect created across government on matters that are less sensitive but certainly in
the public interest as a check on government and elected officials. ” Id. Discussing the NSA
Washington Post national security reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran said: “
surveillance programs, New York Times investigative reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Barstow stated, “I have
absolutely
no doubt whatsoever that stories have not gotten done because of this. ” Jamie Schuman, The Shadows
of the Spooks, The News Media and the Law, Fall 2013, at 9.
Aggressive press is vital to check corrupt governance practices. It builds more
accountable governance.
Sinha ‘14
(et al; Authors Include: G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights
Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Sinha holds a J.D. from New York University’s School of Law. This includes a
specialization as a Scholar from NYU’s Institute for International Law & Justice. The author also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
University of Toronto. Additional authors include - Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, US Program deputy director at Human
Rights Watch, who participated in some of the research interviews; and Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington Director at Human
Rights Watch, who also participated in one of the research interviews and provided key contacts. Human Rights Watch is an
independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the
cause of human rights for all. From the Report: WITH LIBERTY TO MONITOR ALL How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming
Journalism, Law and American Democracy – This card also internally quotes Steve Coll, Dean of the Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University. This report is based on extensive interviews with some 50 journalists covering intelligence,
national security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and NPR. JULY
2014 – available at: http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
In recent decades,
the press has played an important role in checking government , and in particular,
the intelligence community .
225 That has not always been the case. Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post reporter whose series of stories in 1971 first revealed the FBI’s targeting
of dissenters, recalled that there was “very little investigative work” before her articles appeared.226 Even her FBI stories derived from documents stolen by activists, rather than through Medsger’s cultivation of sources inside the
intelligence community. “I was given these files. I didn’t have clever techniques. Nobody was trying to develop inside sources until then.”227 Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, who also won a
National Book Award for his history of the CIA, offered an earlier timeline for the development of investigative journalism on the intelligence community, observing that “serious investigative reporting into the CIA started in the
mid-1960’s, and then seriously expanded a decade later.”228 Phil Bennett elaborated:
The growth of the intelligence community and of a more critical, more
adversarial press occurred in tandem, on overlapping timelines. Although there have been state secrets since the founding of the Republic, the current institutional structure that
manufactures and protects those secrets emerged near the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. For the most part, at first journalists did little to contest the government's monopoly on secrets. But the
Vietnam War led some journalists to see secrecy as a tool for the government to deceive the public. The
Pentagon Papers case ratified this view. Disclosing government secrets then became a central part of the birth of modern
investigative reporting. This has carried over to the digital era.229 Ultimately, the government’s own
investigations into the intelligence community in the mid-1970s—most famously among them, the Church
Committee in the Senate—provided a sound basis for ongoing and active investigative work by journalists on the
intelligence community ever since.230 Those inquiries revealed significant and widespread misconduct by the
intelligence community
dating back decades. By offering the public significant and early insight into objectionable practices by the FBI, Medsger’s stories formed a major part of the
environment that gave rise to those investigations,231 complementing pressure resulting from the Vietnam War and Seymour Hersh’s 1974 reporting on the CIA.232
intelligence community has recently
(once again)
But coverage of the
become more challenging to undertake. “It seems to me that at some point it became very difficult
again to cover these institutions and get inside sources,” Medsger observed.233 Many journalists who spoke to us expressed a strong commitment to their work, and were unwilling to be dissuaded from continued efforts to cover
increasingly difficult beats. “I’m not in any way going to stop reporting,” remarked Adam Goldman. “In most cases, I am not the vulnerable one,” added Steve Aftergood.234 Peter Maass also identified a silver lining: “Even though
it’s harder, it’s also very exciting. We’re being given an amazing opportunity to do exciting work that could help shape society for years to come.”235 Nevertheless,
surveillance
and leak investigations
the effects that
have had on coverage are working to undermine effective
democratic
participation
and governance. “ What makes government better is our work exposing information ,” argued Dana
It makes the country less
safe. Institutions work less well, and it increases the risk of corruption. Secrecy works
against all of us.”
National security journalism is especially important for a
functioning,
accountable system
There’s a real loss to the public
Priest, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter at the Washington Post.236 “It’s not just that it’s harder for me to do my job, though it is.
also
237 Charlie Savage added, “
democratically
.”238 Steve Coll agreed as well, noting, “
,
It is thus inherently important for journalists to seek out certain
information that the government treats as sensitive and, when appropriate, share it with the public. Kathleen Carroll also emphasized the responsibility typically
demonstrated by journalists who work on national security topics. “This is not a bunch of bratty journalists trying to undermine legitimate
government operations,” she argued. Moreover, though she believes “that a government’s actions on behalf of the people it serves should be public, [m]ost news organizations [including her outlet, the
Associated Press] will recognize that certain things the government is doing need to remain secret, at least for now. The disputes take place because the government
the voters. For James Asher, “The role of the press is to be challenging and critical.”240
idea of what should remain secret is much more sweeping.” 241
Building more accountable government – not sweeping rejecting it – is vital to check a
laundry list of existential risks.
Eckersley ‘4
Robyn, Reader/Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, “The Green State:
Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty”, MIT Press, 2004, Google Books, pp. 3-8
While acknowledging the basis for this antipathy toward the nation- state, and the limitations of state-centric analyses of global ecological
degradation, I
seek to draw attention to the positive role that states have played, and might increasingly play, in
global and domestic politics. Writing more than twenty years ago, Hedley Bull (a proto-constructivist and leading writer in the English school)
outlined the state's positive role in world affairs, and his arguments continue to provide a powerful challenge to those who
somehow seek to "get beyond the state," as if such a move would provide a more lasting solution to the
threat of armed conflict or nuclear war , social and economic in justice, or environmental
degradation. 10 As Bull argued, given that the state is here to stay whether we like it or not, then the call
to get "beyond the state is a counsel of despair, at all events if it means that we have to begin by abolishing or
subverting the state, rather than that there is a need to build upon it.""¶ In any event, rejecting the "statist frame" of
world politics ought not prohibit an inquiry into the emancipatory potential of the state as a crucial "node"
in any future network of global ecological governance. This is especially so, given that one can expect states to persist as major
sites of social and political power for at least the foreseeable future and that any green transformations of the present political
order will, short of revolution, necessarily be state-dependent. Thus, like it or not, those concerned about ecological destruction must contend
with existing institutions and, where possible, seek to "rebuild the ship while still at sea." And if states are so implicated in ecological
destruction, then an inquiry into the potential for their transformation even their modest reform into something that is at least more conducive
to ecological sustainability would seem to be compelling.¶ Of
course, it would be unhelpful to become singularly fixated
on the redesign of the state at the expense of other institutions of governance. States are not the only institutions that
limit, condition, shape, and direct political power, and it is necessary to keep in view the broader spectrum of formal and informal institutions
of governance (e.g., local, national, regional, and international) that are implicated in global environmental change. Nonetheless,
while
the state constitutes only one modality of political power, it is an especially significant one because of its
historical claims to exclusive rule over territory and peoples—as expressed in the principle of state sovereignty. As Gianfranco Poggi explains,
the political power concentrated in the state "is a momentous, pervasive, critical phenomenon. Together with other forms of social power, it
constitutes an indispensable medium for constructing and shaping larger social realities, for establishing, shaping and maintaining all broader
and more durable collectivities."12 States play, in varying degrees, significant roles in structuring life chances, in distributing wealth, privilege,
information, and risks, in upholding civil and political rights, and in securing private property rights and providing the legal/regulatory
framework for capitalism. Every one of these dimensions of state activity has, for good or ill, a significant bearing on the global environmental
crisis. Given that the
green political project is one that demands far-reaching changes to both economies and societies,
it is difficult to imagine how such changes might occur on the kind of scale that is needed without the
active support of states. While it is often observed that states are too big to deal with local ecological problems and too small to deal with
global ones, the state nonetheless holds, as Lennart Lundqvist puts it, "a unique position in the constitutive hierarchy from individuals through
villages, regions and nations all the way to global organizations. The state is inclusive of lower political and administrative levels, and
exclusive in speaking for its whole territory and population in relation to the outside world."13 In short, it seems to me inconceivable to
advance ecological emancipation without also engaging with and seeking to transform state power.¶ Of course, not all states are democratic
states, and the green movement has long been wary of the coercive powers that all states reputedly enjoy. Coercion (and not democracy) is
also central to Max Weber's classic sociological understanding of the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of
the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."14 Weber believed that the state could not be defined sociologically in terms of its
ends* only formally as an organization in terms of the particular means that are peculiar to it.15 Moreover his concept of legitimacy was merely
concerned with whether rules were accepted by subjects as valid (for whatever reason); he did not offer a normative theory as to the
circumstances when particular rules ought to be accepted or whether beliefs about the validity of rules were justified. Legitimacy was a
contingent fact, and in view of his understanding of politics as a struggle for power in the context of an increasingly disenchanted world,
likely to become an increasingly unstable achievement.16 In contrast to Weber, my approach to the state is explicitly normative and explicitly
concerned with the purpose of states, and the democratic basis of their legitimacy. It focuses on the limitations of liberal normative theories of
the state (and associated ideals of a just constitutional arrangement), and it proposes instead an alternative green theory that seeks to redress
the deficiencies in liberal theory. Nor is my account as bleak as Weber's. The fact that states possess a monopoly of control over the means of
coercion is a most serious matter, but it does not necessarily imply that they must have frequent recourse to that power. In any event,
whether the use of the state's coercive powers is to be deplored or welcomed turns on the purposes for which
the manner in which it is exercised , and whether it is managed in
public , transparent, and accountable ways —a judgment that must be made against a background of changing problems,
practices, and under- standings. The coercive arm of the state can be used to "bust" political
demonstrations and invade privacy. It can also be used to prevent human rights abuses, curb the
that power is exercised,
excesses of corporate power, and
protect the environment. In short, although the political autonomy of states is widely believed to
are still few social institution that can match the same degree of capacity and potential legitimacy that
states have to redirect societies and economies along more ecologically sustainable lines to address ecological problems
be in decline, there
such as global warming and pollution, the buildup of toxic and nuclear wastes and the rapid erosion of the earth's biodiversity. States—
particularly when they act collectively—have the capacity to curb the socially and ecologically harmful consequences of capitalism. They are
also more amenable to democratization than cor- porations, notwithstanding the ascendancy of the neoliberal state in the increasingly
competitive global economy. There are therefore many good reasons why green political theorists need to think not only critically but also
constructively about the state and the state system. While the state is certainly not "healthy" at the present historical juncture, in this book I
nonetheless join Poggi by offering "a timid two cheers for the old beast," at least as a potentially more significant ally in the green cause.17
Unlike the current Freedom Act, the original Act is perceived by sources as sufficient
to restore trust.
HRW ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. “US Senate: Salvage Surveillance Reform House Bill Flawed” - Human Rights Watch May 22, 2014 – http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvage-surveillance-reform)
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said today. The version of the USA
Freedom Act that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data
collection. The version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was
designed to end bulk collection of business records and phone metadata. The practice has been almost
universally condemned by all but the US security establishment. “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of
Internet users in the US and around the world,” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at
Human Rights Watch. “ Until Congress passes real reform, US credibility and leadership on
Internet freedom will continue to fade .” The initial version of the bill aimed to prohibit bulk
collection by the government of business records, including phone metadata. The bill only addressed one component
of the surveillance programs revealed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, that of US record
collections. However, it
had broad support as a first step, including from Human Rights Watch. On
May 7, a diluted version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence Committee approval on
May 8. While better than alternative bills offered, the
version the House passed could leave the door wide open to
continued indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions of people without
justification, Human Rights Watch said.
1AC - Global Internet Freedom Advantage
Global Internet Advantage - 1AC Econ module
Global Internet Advantage – Econ module
Contention # ____ is Global internet freedom
New Freedom Act fails to restore US’s global credibility on Internet freedom. The
original version solves by closing SST loopholes.
Brinkerhoff ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. Noel Brinkerhoff is a Political reporter and writer covering state and national politics
for 15 years. “With Support of Obama Administration, House NSA Surveillance Reform Bill Includes Gaping Loopholes” – AllGov
– May 26th - http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/with-support-of-obama-administration-house-nsa-surveillance-reformbill-includes-gaping-loopholes-140526?news=853242)
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives claim they have addressed the problems of the National Security Agency’s (NSA)
notorious bulk collection of data, made so famous last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the
legislation adopted to end this controversial practice contains huge loopholes that could allow the
NSA to keep vacuuming up large amounts of Americans’ communications records, all with the blessing of the Obama
administration. Dubbed the
USA Freedom Act, the bill overwhelmingly approved by the House (303 to 121) was criticized
for not going far enough to keep data out of the hands of government. “This so-called
reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the U.S. and around the world,” Cynthia Wong,
senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said. “Until Congress passes real
reform , U.S. credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.” Julian Sanchez, a
researcher at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, warned that the changes could mean the continuation of bulk collection of phone records by another name.
“The
core problem is that this only ends ‘bulk’ collection in the sense the intelligence community uses
that term,” Sanchez told Wired. “As long as there’s some kind of target , they don’t call that bulk collection,
even if you’re still collecting millions of records…If they say ‘give us the record of everyone who visited
these thousand websites,’ that’s not bulk collection, because they have a list of targets.” HRW says the bill,
which now goes to the Senate for consideration, contains ambiguous definitions about what can and cannot be collected by the agency. For
an earlier version more clearly defined the scope of what the NSA could grab under Section 215 of the
Patriot Act, which has formed the legal basis for gathering the metadata of phone calls. “ Under an earlier version of the USA
instance,
Freedom Act, the government would have been required to base any demand for phone metadata or
other records on a “ specific selection term” that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or account.” Under
the House version, this definition was broadened to mean “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a
person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the government to limit the scope” of information sought,” according to Human Rights Watch. “ This
definition is too open-ended and ambiguous to prevent the sort of creative interpretation by intelligence agencies that has been used to
justify overbroad collection practices in the past,” the group claims. The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute is similarly
disappointed in the final House bill. “Taken together,” the Institute wrote, “ the changes to this definition may still allow for massive
collection of millions of Americans’ private information based on very broad selection terms such as a
zip code, an area code , the physical address of a particular email provider or financial institution , or
the IP address of a web hosting service that hosts thousands of web sites.”
The US can alter global practices that threaten internet freedom – but only when US
image is seen as less hypocritical.
Wong ‘13
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law – “ Surveillance and the Corrosion of
Internet Freedom” - July 30, 2013 - Published in: The Huffington Post and also available at the HRW website at this address:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/30/surveillance-and-corrosion-internet-freedom
Defenders of US and UK surveillance programs argue that collecting metadata is not as problematic as “listening to the content
of people’s phone calls” or reading emails. This is misleading. Technologists have long recognized that metadata can reveal incredibly sensitive information, especially if it is
collected at large scale over long periods of time, since digitized data can be easily combined and analyzed. The revelations have also exposed glaring
contradictions about the US Internet freedom agenda. This has emboldened the Chinese state media, for example, to cynically
denounce US hypocrisy, even as the Chinese government continues to censor the Internet, infringe on privacy rights, and curb anonymity online. Though there is hypocrisy on both sides,
the widening rift between US values and actions has real, unintended human rights consequences. For the human
rights movement, the Internet’s impact on rights crystalized in 2005 after we learned that Yahoo! uncritically turned user account
information over to the Chinese government, leading to a 10-year prison sentence for the journalist Shi Tao. The US government
forcefully objected to the Chinese government’s actions and urged the tech industry to act responsibly. In the end, that incident
catalyzed a set of new human rights standards that pushed some companies to improve safeguards for
user privacy in the face of government demands for data. US support was critical back then , but it
is hard to imagine the government having the same influence or credibility now. The mass surveillance scandal has damaged
the US government’s ability to press for better corporate practices as technology companies expand globally. It
will also be more difficult for companies to resist overbroad surveillance mandates if they are seen as
complicit in mass US infringements on privacy. Other governments will feel more entitled to ask for the
same cooperation that the US receives. We can also expect governments around the world to pressure companies to store user data locally or maintain a local
presence so that governments can more easily access it, as Brazil and Russia are now debating. While comparisons to the Chinese government are overstated, there is reason to
worry about the broader precedent the US has set. Just months before the NSA scandal broke, India began rolling out a centralized
system to monitor all phone and Internet communications in the country, without much clarity on
safeguards to protect rights. This development is chilling, considering the government’s problematic use of sedition and Internet laws in recent arrests. Over the last
few weeks, Turkish officials have condemned social media as a key tool for Gezi Park protesters. Twitter has drawn particular ire. Now the
government is preparing new regulations that would make it easier to get data from Internet companies and identify
individual users online. The Obama administration and US companies could have been in a strong position to push back in
India and Turkey. Instead, the US has provided these governments with a roadmap for conducting secret, mass
surveillance and conscripting the help of the private sector.
(Note to students: “conscripting” means compulsory enlistment of companies for state service.)
Washington will inevitably push for global Internet freedom – but US image is vital.
The Internet freedom agenda’s key to the Global Economy.
Kalathil ‘10
Shanthi Kalathil - Adjunct Faculty and Adjunct Lecturer in the Communication, Culture, and Technology (CCT) Master of Arts
Program at Georgetown University. Kalathil has extensive experience advising the U.S. government, international organizations
and nonprofits on supporting civil society, independent media, technology, transparency and accountability. Previously a senior
Democracy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development and she has authored or edited numerous policy and
scholarly publications, including the edited volume Diplomacy, Development and Security in the Information Age. She has
taught courses on international relations in the information age at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and
Georgetown University. Kalathil holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley and the London School of Economics and Political Science –
“Internet Freedom: A Background Paper” – October 2010 - Available via:
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/images/Internet_Freedom_A_Background_Paper_0.pdf
As use of the Internet has grown exponentially around the world, so too have concerns about its defining
attribute as a free and open means of communication. Around the world, countries, companies and citizens are
grappling with thorny issues of free expression, censorship and trust. With starkly different visions for the Internet
developing, this era presents challenges—and also opportunities—for those who wish to ensure the Internet
remains a backbone of liberty and economic growth. U.S. officials have made clear their
vision for the Internet ’s future. President Obama, in a speech before the UN General Assembly, said that the U.S. is
committed to promoting new communication tools, “so that people are empowered to connect with one
another and, in
repressive societies, to do so with security. We will support a free and open Internet, so individuals have the information to make up
their own minds.” His words were reinforced by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski: “ It is essential that we preserve the open Internet and
stand firmly behind the right of all people to connect with one another and to exchange ideas freely and without fear.”1 Indeed, a free, widely accessible
Internet stands at the heart of both global communication and global commerce. Internet freedom enables
dialogue and direct diplomacy between people and civilizations, facilitating the exchange of ideas and culture while bolstering trade and economic
growth. Conversely, censorship and other blockages stifle both expression and innovation. When arbitrary rules
privilege some and not others, the investment climate suffers. Nor can access be expanded if end users have no trust in the network. However, making reality live
up to aspirations for Internet freedom can prove difficult. Numerous global
initiatives—spearheaded by governments, private sector and civil society—are
attempting to enshrine the norms, principles and standards that will ensure the Internet remains a public space for free
expression. At the same time, other norms are fast arising—particularly those defined by authoritarian
countries that wish to splinter the Internet into independently controlled fiefdoms. Even as Internet access has expanded around
the world, many governments are attempting to control, regulate and censor the Internet in all its forms: blogs, mobile
communication, social media, etc. Such governments have devoted vast resources to shaping the Internet’s
development within their own borders, and they are now seeking to shape the Internet outside their
borders as well. Indeed, Internet experts are worried that national governments of all stripes will increasingly seek to extend their regulatory authority over the
global Internet, culminating in a balkanized Internet with limited interoperability. Hence, the next few years
present a distinct window of opportunity to elevate the principles of the free exchange of ideas, knowledge and commerce on
the Internet. While U.S. leadership within this window is vital, a global effort is necessary to ensure that these norms
become a standard part of the Internet’s supporting architecture.
Global economic decline risks nuclear war.
Merlini ‘11
[Cesare Merlini, nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Italian
Institute for International Affairs (IAI) in Rome. He served as IAI president from 1979 to 2001. Until 2009, he also occupied the position of
executive vice chairman of the Council for the United States and Italy, which he co-founded in 1983. His areas of expertise include transatlantic
relations, European integration and nuclear non-proliferation, with particular focus on nuclear science and technology. A Post-Secular World?
DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2011.571015 Article Requests: Order Reprints : Request Permissions Published in: journal Survival, Volume 53, Issue 2
April 2011 , pages 117 - 130 Publication Frequency: 6 issues per year Download PDF Download PDF (~357 KB) View Related Articles To cite
this Article: Merlini, Cesare 'A Post-Secular World?', Survival, 53:2, 117 – 130]
Two neatly opposed scenarios
for the future of the world order illustrate the range of possibilities, albeit at the risk of
oversimplification. The first scenario entails the premature crumbling of the post-Westphalian system. One or more of the acute tensions
apparent today evolves into an open and traditional conflict between states, perhaps even involving the use
of nuclear weapons. The crisis might be triggered by a collapse of the global economic and financial
system, the vulnerability of which we have just experienced, and the prospect of a second Great Depression, with
consequences for peace and democracy similar to those of the first. Whatever the trigger, the unlimited exercise of
national sovereignty, exclusive self-interest and rejection of outside interference would likely be amplified, emptying,
perhaps entirely, the half-full glass of multilateralism, including the UN and the European Union. Many of the more likely conflicts, such as between Israel and Iran
or India and Pakistan, have potential religious dimensions. Short of war, tensions such as those related to immigration might become unbearable. Familiar issues of
creed and identity could be exacerbated. One way or another, the secular rational approach would be sidestepped by a return to theocratic absolutes, competing or
converging with secular absolutes such as unbridled nationalism.
The new Freedom Act won’t solve US image. Protections from the original version do
solve, even without protections for persons outside the US.
Ries ‘14
(Internally quoting Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program. Also internally quoting
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Also internally quoting Center for
Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger – Brian Ries is Mashable’s Real-Time News Editor. Prior to working at
Mashable, Brian was Social Media Editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, responsible for using Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
to cover revolutions, disasters, and presidential elections. During his time at The Daily Beast, he contributed to a team that won
two Webby Awards for “Best News Site”. “Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress Just Passed” - Mashable May 22, 2014 – http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)
As a result, many
of its initial supporters pulled their support. “We supported the original USA Freedom
act, even though it didn’t do much for non-US persons,” Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty
International's Security & Human Rights Program told Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the
original version as “a good step to end bulk collection. ” However, in its current version, it's
not even clear that this bill does that at all, Johnson said. He added that Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in the
bill — something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a law, you can count on the
administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more
positive view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a
statement. "While we share the concerns of many — including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough — without it we would
be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of Americans’ communications into law." The
Electronic Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." “ The
ban on bulk collection was deliberately
watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,” said Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. “We
withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of large-scale,
untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism.” And
Cynthia Wong , senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “This so-called reform bill won’t restore
the trust of Internet users in the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S.
credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.”
Unlike the current Act, the original bill does solve US image. This holds even if plan’s
about bulk collection – instead of every surveillance practices.
HRW ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. “US Senate: Salvage Surveillance Reform House Bill Flawed” - Human Rights Watch May 22, 2014 – http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvage-surveillance-reform)
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said today. The version of the USA Freedom
Act that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data collection. The
version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was designed to end bulk
collection of business records and phone metadata. The practice has been almost universally condemned by all but the US security
establishment. “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the US and around the
world, ” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch . “Until Congress
passes real reform , US credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade .”
The initial version of the bill aimed to prohibit bulk collection by the government of business records, including phone
metadata.
The bill only addressed one component of the surveillance programs revealed by the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden, that of US record collections.
Human Rights Watch.
However, it had broad support as a first step, including from
On May 7, a diluted version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence Committee
the version the House passed could leave the door wide open to
continued indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions of people without
approval on May 8. While better than alternative bills offered,
justification, Human Rights Watch said.
Global Internet Adv - 1AC Democracy version
Global Internet Advantage – Democracy module
New Freedom Act fails to restore US’s global credibility on Internet freedom. The
original version solves by closing SST loopholes.
Brinkerhoff ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. Noel Brinkerhoff is a Political reporter and writer covering state and national politics
for 15 years. “With Support of Obama Administration, House NSA Surveillance Reform Bill Includes Gaping Loopholes” – AllGov
– May 26th - http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/with-support-of-obama-administration-house-nsa-surveillance-reformbill-includes-gaping-loopholes-140526?news=853242)
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives claim they have addressed the problems of the National Security Agency’s (NSA)
notorious bulk collection of data, made so famous last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the
legislation adopted to end this controversial practice contains huge loopholes that could allow the
NSA to keep vacuuming up large amounts of Americans’ communications records, all with the blessing of the Obama
administration. Dubbed the
USA Freedom Act, the bill overwhelmingly approved by the House (303 to 121) was criticized
for not going far enough to keep data out of the hands of government. “This so-called
reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the U.S. and around the world,” Cynthia Wong,
senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said. “Until Congress passes real
reform , U.S. credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.” Julian Sanchez, a
researcher at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, warned that the changes could mean the continuation of bulk collection of phone records by another name.
“The
core problem is that this only ends ‘bulk’ collection in the sense the intelligence community uses
that term,” Sanchez told Wired. “As long as there’s some kind of target , they don’t call that bulk collection,
even if you’re still collecting millions of records…If they say ‘give us the record of everyone who visited
these thousand websites,’ that’s not bulk collection, because they have a list of targets.” HRW says the bill,
which now goes to the Senate for consideration, contains ambiguous definitions about what can and cannot be collected by the agency. For
an earlier version more clearly defined the scope of what the NSA could grab under Section 215 of the
Patriot Act, which has formed the legal basis for gathering the metadata of phone calls. “ Under an earlier version of the USA
instance,
Freedom Act, the government would have been required to base any demand for phone metadata or
other records on a “ specific selection term” that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or account.” Under
the House version, this definition was broadened to mean “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a
person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the government to limit the scope” of information sought,” according to Human Rights Watch. “This
definition is too open-ended and ambiguous to prevent the sort of creative interpretation by intelligence agencies that has been used to
justify overbroad collection practices in the past,” the group claims. The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute is similarly
disappointed in the final House bill. “Taken together,” the Institute wrote, “the changes to this definition may still allow for massive
collection of millions of Americans’ private information based on very broad selection terms such as a
zip code, an area code , the physical address of a particular email provider or financial institution , or
the IP address of a web hosting service that hosts thousands of web sites.”
The US can alter global practices that threaten internet freedom – but only when US
image is seen as less hypocritical.
Wong ‘13
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law – “ Surveillance and the Corrosion of
Internet Freedom” - July 30, 2013 - Published in: The Huffington Post and also available at the HRW website at this address:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/30/surveillance-and-corrosion-internet-freedom
Defenders of US and UK surveillance programs argue that collecting metadata is not as problematic as “listening to the content
of people’s phone calls” or reading emails. This is misleading. Technologists have long recognized that metadata can reveal incredibly sensitive information, especially if it is
collected at large scale over long periods of time, since digitized data can be easily combined and analyzed. The revelations have also exposed glaring
contradictions about the US Internet freedom agenda. This has emboldened the Chinese state media, for example, to cynically
denounce US hypocrisy, even as the Chinese government continues to censor the Internet, infringe on privacy rights, and curb anonymity online. Though there is hypocrisy on both sides,
the widening rift between US values and actions has real, unintended human rights consequences. For the human
rights movement, the Internet’s impact on rights crystalized in 2005 after we learned that Yahoo! uncritically turned user account
information over to the Chinese government, leading to a 10-year prison sentence for the journalist Shi Tao. The US government
forcefully objected to the Chinese government’s actions and urged the tech industry to act responsibly. In the end, that incident
catalyzed a set of new human rights standards that pushed some companies to improve safeguards for
user privacy in the face of government demands for data. US support was critical back then , but it
is hard to imagine the government having the same influence or credibility now. The mass surveillance scandal has damaged
the US government’s ability to press for better corporate practices as technology companies expand globally. It
will also be more difficult for companies to resist overbroad surveillance mandates if they are seen as
complicit in mass US infringements on privacy. Other governments will feel more entitled to ask for the
same cooperation that the US receives. We can also expect governments around the world to pressure companies to store user data locally or maintain a local
presence so that governments can more easily access it, as Brazil and Russia are now debating. While comparisons to the Chinese government are overstated, there is reason to
worry about the broader precedent the US has set. Just months before the NSA scandal broke, India began rolling out a centralized
system to monitor all phone and Internet communications in the country, without much clarity on
safeguards to protect rights. This development is chilling, considering the government’s problematic use of sedition and Internet laws in recent arrests. Over the last
few weeks, Turkish officials have condemned social media as a key tool for Gezi Park protesters. Twitter has drawn particular ire. Now the
government is preparing new regulations that would make it easier to get data from Internet companies and identify
individual users online. The Obama administration and US companies could have been in a strong position to push back in
India and Turkey. Instead, the US has provided these governments with a roadmap for conducting secret, mass
surveillance and conscripting the help of the private sector.
(Note to students: “conscripting” means compulsory enlistment of companies for state service.)
US global democracy promotion is inevitable. Success in the internet freedom agenda
is key to a successful push.
Fontaine ‘11
(et al; Richard Fontaine graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in International Relations from Tulane University. He also holds
a M.A. in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, and he
attended Oxford University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has been an adjunct professor in the
Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is currently the President of President of the
Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “Internet Freedom A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age” – June, 2011 http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_InternetFreedom_FontaineRogers_0.pdf)
The United States has a long history of providing diplomatic and financial support for the promotion of human
rights abroad, including the right to free expression. While each presidential administration emphasizes human rights to differing
degrees, during recent decades they have all consistently held that human rights are a key U.S. interest. Promoting
freedom of the Internet expands human rights support into cyberspace, an environment in which an
ever-greater proportion of human activity takes place. The United States advocates for freedom of the Internet because it accords not
only with American values, but also with rights America believes are intrinsic to all humanity. For years, the U.S. government has
programmatically and rhetorically supported democracy promotion abroad. The State Department
routinely disburses millions of dollars in funding for democracy-building programs around the world, many
of which are aimed explicitly at expanding free expression. Presidential and other speeches regularly refer to the American belief
in the universality of this right; to cite but one example, a March 2011 White House statement on Syria noted that, “The United States stands for a
set of universal rights, including the freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”8 The Obama administration’s 2010 National Security Strategy specifically called
for marshaling the Internet and other information technologies to support freedom of expression abroad,9 and the Bush administration adopted a policy of
maximizing access to information and ideas over the Internet.10 America’s interest in promoting freedom via the Internet comes from the same fundamental belief
in democratic values and human rights. Despite inevitable inconsistencies and difficult
tradeoffs, the United States continues to
support democracy. The Bush administration’s 2006 National Security Strategy committed to support democratic institutions abroad through
transformational diplomacy.11 President Obama, after entering office with an evident desire to move away from the
sweeping tone of his predecessor’s “freedom agenda,” nevertheless told the U.N. General Assembly in 2009 that “there are basic
principles that are universal; there are certain truths which are self-evident – and the United States of America will never waver in our efforts
to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny.”12 To the extent that
supporting Internet freedom advances America’s democracy-promotion agenda, the rationale for promoting
online freedom is clear. However, cause and effect are not perfectly clear and the United States must choose its policies under conditions of
uncertainty. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have wagered that by promoting global Internet freedom the
United States will not only operate according to universal values but will
promote tools that
may, on balance,
benefit societies
over the autocrats that oppress them . Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged countries to “join us in the bet we have
made, a bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries.”13 Given the evidence we discuss
throughout this report, this bet is one worth making.
Global democracy consolidation checks inevitable extinction.
Diamond ‘95
(Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, December,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the
stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common
Nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears
increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by
the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion
do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify
their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much
less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They
do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable,
open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally
responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets
cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones.
to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely
and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable
foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights,
The new Freedom Act won’t solve US image. Protections from the original version do
solve, even without protections for persons outside the US.
Ries ‘14
(Internally quoting Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program. Also internally quoting
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Also internally quoting Center for
Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger – Brian Ries is Mashable’s Real-Time News Editor. Prior to working at
Mashable, Brian was Social Media Editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, responsible for using Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
to cover revolutions, disasters, and presidential elections. During his time at The Daily Beast, he contributed to a team that won
two Webby Awards for “Best News Site”. “Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress Just Passed” - Mashable May 22, 2014 – http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)
As a result, many
of its initial supporters pulled their support. “We supported the original USA Freedom
act, even though it didn’t do much for non-US persons,” Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty
International's Security & Human Rights Program told Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the
original version as “a good step to end bulk collection. ” However, in its current version, it's
not even clear that this bill does that at all, Johnson said. He added that Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in the
bill — something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a law, you can count on the
administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more
positive view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a
statement. "While we share the concerns of many — including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough — without it we would
be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of Americans’ communications into law." The
Electronic Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." “ The
ban on bulk collection was deliberately
watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,” said Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. “We
withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of large-scale,
untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism.” And
Cynthia Wong , senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “This so-called reform bill won’t restore
the trust of Internet users in the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S.
credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.”
Unlike the current Act, the original bill does solve US image. This holds even if plan’s
about bulk collection – instead of every surveillance practices.
HRW ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. “US Senate: Salvage Surveillance Reform House Bill Flawed” - Human Rights Watch May 22, 2014 – http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvage-surveillance-reform)
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said today. The version of the USA Freedom
Act that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data collection. The
version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was designed to end bulk
collection of business records and phone metadata. The practice has been almost universally condemned by all but the US security
establishment. “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the US and around the
world, ” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch . “Until Congress
passes real reform , US credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade .”
The initial version of the bill aimed to prohibit bulk collection by the government of business records, including phone
metadata.
The bill only addressed one component of the surveillance programs revealed by the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden, that of US record collections.
Human Rights Watch.
However, it had broad support as a first step, including from
On May 7, a diluted version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence Committee
the version the House passed could leave the door wide open to
continued indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions of people without
approval on May 8. While better than alternative bills offered,
justification, Human Rights Watch said.
1AC - India advantages
India Adv - 1AC - financial markets scenario
India Advantage - financial markets scenario
Contention # ____ is India
The US can alter India’s surveillance practices by pressuring global internet companies
to demand privacy. But, this only works when US is less hypocritical.
Wong ‘13
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law – “ Surveillance and the Corrosion of
Internet Freedom” - July 30, 2013 - Published in: The Huffington Post and also available at the HRW website at this address:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/30/surveillance-and-corrosion-internet-freedom
Defenders of US and UK surveillance programs argue that collecting metadata is not as problematic as “listening to the content
of people’s phone calls” or reading emails. This is misleading. Technologists have long recognized that metadata can reveal incredibly sensitive information, especially if it is
collected at large scale over long periods of time, since digitized data can be easily combined and analyzed. The revelations have also exposed glaring
contradictions about the US Internet freedom agenda. This has emboldened the Chinese state media, for example, to cynically
denounce US hypocrisy, even as the Chinese government continues to censor the Internet, infringe on privacy rights, and curb anonymity online. Though there is hypocrisy on both sides,
the widening rift between US values and actions has real, unintended human rights consequences. For the human
rights movement, the Internet’s impact on rights crystalized in 2005 after we learned that Yahoo! uncritically turned user account
information over to the Chinese government, leading to a 10-year prison sentence for the journalist Shi Tao. The US government
forcefully objected to the Chinese government’s actions and urged the tech industry to act responsibly. In the end, that incident
catalyzed a set of new human rights standards that pushed some companies to improve safeguards for
user privacy in the face of government demands for data. US support was critical back then , but it
is hard to imagine the government having the same influence or credibility now. The mass surveillance scandal has damaged
the US government’s ability to press for better corporate practices as technology companies expand globally. It
will also be more difficult for companies to resist overbroad surveillance mandates if they are seen as
complicit in mass US infringements on privacy. Other governments will feel more entitled to ask for the
same cooperation that the US receives. We can also expect governments around the world to pressure companies to store user data locally or maintain a local
presence so that governments can more easily access it, as Brazil and Russia are now debating. While comparisons to the Chinese government are overstated, there is reason to
worry about the broader precedent the US has set. Just months before the NSA scandal broke, India began rolling out a centralized
system to monitor all phone and Internet communications in the country, without much clarity on
safeguards to protect rights. This development is chilling, considering the government’s problematic use of sedition and Internet laws in recent arrests. Over the last
few weeks, Turkish officials have condemned social media as a key tool for Gezi Park protesters. Twitter has drawn particular ire. Now the
government is preparing new regulations that would make it easier to get data from Internet companies and identify
individual users online. The Obama administration and US companies could have been in a strong position to push back
in India and Turkey. Instead, the US has provided these governments with a roadmap for conducting secret,
mass surveillance and conscripting the help of the private sector.
(Note to students: “conscripting” means compulsory enlistment of companies for state service.)
Independently, US bulk surveillance sets precedent that causes indiscriminate
surveillance in India.
Sinha ‘14
(et al; Authors Include: G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights
Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Sinha holds a J.D. from New York University’s School of Law. This includes a
specialization as a Scholar from NYU’s Institute for International Law & Justice. The author also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
University of Toronto. Additional authors include - Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, US Program deputy director at Human
Rights Watch, who participated in some of the research interviews; and Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington Director at Human
Rights Watch, who also participated in one of the research interviews and provided key contacts. Human Rights Watch is an
independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the
cause of human rights for all. From the Report: WITH LIBERTY TO MONITOR ALL How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming
Journalism, Law and American Democracy – This report is based on extensive interviews with some 50 journalists covering
intelligence, national security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and
NPR. JULY 2014 – available at: http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
The questions raised
by surveillance are complex. The government has an obligation to protect national security, and in some
cases, it is legitimate for government to restrict certain rights to that end. At the same time, international human rights and
constitutional law
set limits on the state’s authority to engage in activities like surveillance, which have the potential to
large-scale , often indiscriminate US approach to surveillance
carries enormous costs. It erodes global digital privacy and sets a terrible example for other countries
like India , Pakistan, Ethiopia, and others that are in the process of expanding their surveillance capabilities. It
also damages US credibility in advocating internationally for internet freedom, which the US has
undermine so many other rights. The current,
listed as an important foreign policy objective since at least 2010. As this report documents, US surveillance programs
are also doing damage to some of the values the United States claims to hold most dear. These include freedoms of
expression and association, press freedom, and the right to counsel, which are all protected by both international human rights law and the US
Constitution.
India’s surveillance is not narrowly-targeted. This indiscriminate, bulk collection hurts
India’s financial markets.
Trivedi ‘13
Anjani Trivedi. The author holds a Master Degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong and a Bachelor’s Degree in
Mathematics from MIT. The author has previously held internships at the New York Times and CNN International. This piece
internally quotes Meenakshi Ganguly, The South Asia director for Human Rights Watch; Anja Kovacs of the Internet Democracy
Project; and Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s Centre for Internet and Society. “In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips
Under the Radar” – Time Magazine – 6-30-13 - http://world.time.com/2013/06/30/in-india-prism-like-surveillance-slips-underthe-radar/#ixzz2YpWhRsrB
CMS is an ambitious surveillance system that monitors text messages, social-media engagement and phone calls on landlines and
cell phones, among other communications. That means 900 million landline and cell-phone users and 125 million Internet users. The project, which is being implemented by
the government’s Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), is meant to help national law-enforcement agencies save time and avoid manual intervention, according to the Department of Telecommunications’ annual report.
This has been in the works since 2008, when C-DOT started working on a proof-of-concept, according to an older report. The government set aside approximately $150 million for the system as part of its 12th five-year plan,
although the Cabinet ultimately approved a higher amount. Within the internal-security ministry though, the surveillance system remains a relatively “hush-hush” topic, a project official unauthorized to speak to the press tells
TIME. In April 2011, the Police Modernisation Division of the Home Affairs Ministry put out a 90-page tender to solicit bidders for communication-interception systems in every state and union territory of India. The system
requirements included “live listening, recording, storage, playback, analysis, postprocessing” and voice recognition.
Civil-liberties groups concede that states often need
to undertake targeted- monitoring operations. However, the move toward extensive “surveillance capabilities enabled by digital communications,”
suggests that governments are now “casting the net wide, enabling intrusions into private lives,” according to Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. This extensive communications surveillance through
the likes of Prism and CMS are “out of the realm of judicial authorization and allow unregulated, secret surveillance, eliminating any transparency or accountability on the part of the state,” a recent U.N. report stated. India is no
stranger to censorship and monitoring — tweets, blogs, books or songs are frequently blocked and banned. India ranked second only to the U.S. on Google’s list of user-data requests with 4,750 queries, up 52% from two years
back, and removal requests from the government increased by 90% over the previous reporting period. While these were largely made through police or court orders, the new system will not require such a legal process. In recent
times, India’s democratically elected government has barred access to certain websites and Twitter handles, restricted the number of outgoing text messages to five per person per day and arrested citizens for liking Facebook
posts and tweeting. Historically too, censorship has been India’s preferred means of policing social unrest. “Freedom of expression, while broadly available in theory,” Ganguly tells TIME, “is endangered by abuse of various India
laws.” There is a growing discrepancy and power imbalance between citizens and the state, says Anja Kovacs of the Internet Democracy Project. And, in an environment like India where “no checks and balances [are] in place,” that
is troubling. The potential for misuse and misunderstanding, Kovacs believes, is increasing enormously. Currently, India’s laws relevant to interception “disempower citizens by relying heavily on the executive to safeguard
individuals’ constitutional rights,” a recent editorial noted. The power imbalance is often noticeable at public protests, as in the case of the New Delhi gang-rape incident in December, when the government shut down public
transport near protest grounds and unlawfully detained demonstrators. With an already sizeable and growing population of Internet users, the government’s worries too are on the rise. Netizens in India are set to triple to 330
million by 2016, according to a recent report. “As [governments] around the world grapple with the power of social media that can enable spontaneous street protests, there appears to be increasing surveillance,” Ganguly
explains. India’s junior minister for telecommunications attempted to explain the benefits of this system during a recent Google+ Hangout session. He acknowledged that CMS is something that “most people may not be aware of”
because it’s “slightly technical.” A participant noted that the idea of such an intrusive system was worrying and he did not feel safe. The minister, though, insisted that it would “safeguard your privacy” and national security. Given
the high-tech nature of CMS, he noted that telecom companies would no longer be part of the government’s surveillance process. India currently does not have formal privacy legislation to prohibit arbitrary monitoring. The
new system comes under the jurisdiction of the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, which allows for monitoring communication in the “interest of public safety. The surveillance system is not
only an “abuse of privacy rights and security-agency overreach,” critics say, but also counterproductive in terms of
security. In the process of collecting data to monitor criminal activity, the data itself may become a
target for
criminals a “honeypot,” according to Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s
Centre for Internet and Society. Additionally, the wide-ranging tapping undermines financial
markets , Abraham says by compromising confidentiality, trade secrets and intellectual property
terrorists and
—
,
. What’s more,
Whether the nation’s patchy infrastructure will be able to
handle a complex web of surveillance and networks, no one can say. That, Abraham contends, is what attackers will target.
vulnerabilities will have to be built into the existing cyberinfrastructure to make way for such a system.
Financial markets key to India’s Economy.
Goyal ‘14
Dr. Sakshi Goyal, former Faculty member at the Kaling Institute of Management Studies, Faridabad, Haryana (India). “Indian
Financial Markets: A Global Perspective” - Journal of Business Management & Social Sciences Research (JBM&SSR) - Volume 3,
No.6, June 2014 - ISSN No: 2319-5614. Available at:
http://www.borjournals.com/a/index.php/jbmssr/article/viewFile/1729/1078
Financial markets are a vital part of an economy making it possible for industry, trade and commerce to
flourish without any obstacle in terms of resources. Today most economies around the world are judged by the performance of
their financial markets. The financial markets have indicators in place that reflect the performance of companies whose securities are traded in those markets. The financial markets also serve a vital
purpose in the growth and development of a company, which wants to expand. Such companies with expansion plans and new projects are in need of funding and the financial market serves as the best platform from which a
company can determine the feasibility of such possibilities
Krishnan (2011) mentioned that, the economic literature acknowledged that efficient and developed financial markets could lead to
increased economic growth by improving the efficiency of allocation and utilization of savings in the economy. Better functioning financial systems ease the external financing constraints that impede firm and industrial expansion.
“
There is a growing body of empirical analyses, including firm-level studies, industry-level studies, individual country
studies, and cross-country comparisons, which prove this strong, positive link between the functioning of the
financial system and long-run economic growth.
they better allocate resources, monitor managers and
exert corporate control, mobilize savings, and facilitate the exchange of goods and services”. A capital market is a market for securities (debt or equity), where business
In addition,
enterprises (companies) and governments can raise long-term funds. It is defined as a market in which money is provided for periods longer than a year as the raising of short-term funds takes place on other markets (e.g., the
money market). The capital market includes the stock market (equity securities) and the bond market (debt) The capital market of a country can be considered as one of the leading indicators in determining the growth of its
economy. As mentioned by C.Rangarajan, Ex Governor, RBI (1998), “The growth process of any economy depends on the functioning of financial markets which also helps to augment its Capital formation. According to Professor
Hicks, the industrial Revolution in England was ignited more by the presence of liquid financial market than the technological investment”. He writes interestingly- “What happened in the Industrial Revolution is that the Range of
fixed capital goods that were used in production Began noticeably to increase. But fixed capital is sunk; it is embodied in a particular form, from which it can only gradually be released. In order that people should be willing to sink
large amounts of capital it is the availability of liquid funds which is crucial. This condition was satisfied in England ...by the first half of the eighteenth century The liquid asset was there, as it would not have been even a few years
earlier “ Thus, liquidity is a very important component of Financial Market and plays a very vital role in the long run economic development of any country as it helps not only in promoting the savings of the economy but also to
adopt an effective channel to transmit various financial policies by creating liquidity in the market. Therefore Financial System of any country should be well developed, competitive, efficient and integrated to face all shocks. The
financial system and infrastructure of any country at any time can be considered as the result of its own peculiar historical evolution. This evolution is resulted by continuous interaction between all the participants existing in the
system and public policy interventions. The evolution of Indian financial markets and the regulatory system has also followed a similar path. India began with the central bank, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), as the banking sector
regulator, and the Ministry of Finance as the regulator for all other financial sectors. Today, most financial service providers and their regulatory agencies exist. The role of regulators has evolved over time from that of an
instrument for planned development in the initial stage to that of a referee of a relatively more modern and complex financial sector at present. Over this period, a variety of financial sector reform measures have been undertaken
in India, with many important successes. An important feature of these reforms has been the attempt of the authorities to align the regulatory view the needs of the country and domestic factors. These reforms can be broadly
classified as steps taken towards: a) Liberalizing the overall macroeconomic and regulatory environment within which financial sector institutions function. b) Strengthening the institutions and improving their efficiency and
competitiveness. c) Establishing and strengthening the regulatory framework and institutions for overseeing the financial system.The history of Indian capital markets spans back 200 years, around the end of the 18th century. It
was at this time that India was under the rule of the East India Company. The capital market of India initially developed around Mumbai; with around 200 to 250 securities brokers participating in active trade during the second half
of the 19th century. There are a number of factors that have paved path for India market growth. After the economic liberalization, policies were undertaken in the 1990s, the economy of the country has been steadily rising which
has led to more demands and supply circles. This has introduced diverse market sectors and industries in the country, which has led to a competitive consumer market. Through this research paper, an attempt is made to
understand the evolution of Global financial system with more emphasis on Indian markets. It also aims to study the global perspective of financial markets of any country and to understand that how a country’s financial markets is
integrated with the other world markets. Also the concept of efficiency is highlighted which says that a country whose financial markets are well integrated with the world markets are more efficient as compared to one whose
financial markets are not very well integrated. Lastly the paper concludes by leaving scope and opportunities to understand these global concepts in an easier way to the reader and further can be used for extensive research. A
the areas of surplus to the areas of deficit. A Financial System is a composition of various institutions, markets, regulations
and laws, practices, money manager, analysts, transactions and claims and liabilities. Indian Financial market can be considered as one of the oldest across the globe and is experiencing
financial system or financial sector functions as an intermediary and facilitates the flow of funds from
favorable time during the recent years, which have prospered the economy of the country to a
great extent.
Presently, India is rated by six international credit rating agencies, namely Standard and Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s Investor Services, FITCH, Dominion Bond Rating Service (DBRS), the Japanese
Credit Rating agency (JCRA), and the Rating and Investment Information Inc., Tokyo( R&I).
Indian economic upheaval sparks nuclear war with Pakistan – risks of accident,
miscalc, and unauthorized theft all increase.
Busch ‘4
Please note that an updated edition of this book was re-released in Feb of 2015, but the original date was placed in the citation.
Dr. Nathan Busch, Professor of Government and co-director of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport
University. The author holds a Ph.D. in International relations from the University of Toronto and an MA in Political Science
from Michigan State University. The author previously held the position of Research Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and also held the position of Visiting Faculty, National
Security Office, Los Alamos National Laboratory. This piece of evidence internally quotes George Perkovich, a South Asia expert
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It also internally quotes François Heisbourg. He chairs the Geneva Centre
for Security Policy and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. His career has included positions in
government (member of the French mission to the UN, international security adviser to the Minister of Defence), in the defense
industry (vice-president of Thomson-CSF; senior vice president for strategy at Matra Défense Espace) and in academia
(professor of world politics at Sciences-Po Paris, director of the IISS). He is also a member of the International Commission on
nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, and has sat on a number of national and international blue-ribbon bodies. From
the book: No End in Sight: The Continuing Menace of Nuclear Proliferation - p. 202-209
In addition, because
the Indian military currently has little experience handling nuclear weapons, the risks of
accidental use could be very high during a crisis situation, at least for some time to come. If the order were given to prepare India's
nuclear weapons for possible use, the military (perhaps in conjunction with India's nuclear scientists) would need to assemble the warheads rapidly; mate them to
the deliver)' vehicles (gravity bombs or missiles); and prepare them for use, either by loading them into bombers or by aiming the missiles and preparing them for
launch. All these procedures require training and precision, and, given the early stages of India's new command-and-control arrangements, it is not at all clear that
the Indian military would be able to carry them out safely under extreme time constraints.194 If India decided to develop a rapid-response capability, some of these
dangers would be lessened, but more serious dangers would be introduced. In particular, there would be a significantly increased risk of an accidental launch of
nuclear-armed missiles. India
would need to engage in a great deal of additional research into safety mechanisms
to prevent such an accidental launch, and it is simply not known how much effort India is devoting, or
will devote, to this area.195 Because the Prithvi and the two-stage Agni-I missiles contain a nonstorable liquid fuel, it would be impossible to deploy
the current configuration of either missile to allow for a rapid response. This significantly reduces the likelihood of these missiles being launched accidentally during
normal circumstances, though the
risks of accidental launches would probably increase significantly if they were fueled during a
crisis situation. As noted, however, India has conducted several successful flight tests of the Agni and Agni-II missiles. Because these missiles use a solid fuel, they
could be deployed in a rapid-response state. If India were to choose such a deployment option, the risks of an accidental launch could increase significantly. These
risks would depend on the extent to which India integrates use-control devices into its weapons to prevent accidental launches, but there is little evidence that India
is currently devoting significant efforts to develop such use-control devices.196 Furthermore, even if India intends to develop such use-control devices, if a nuclear
crisis were to arise before India had developed them, it still might be tempted to mate warheads on its missiles. If India does decide to weaponize its arsenal, it still
remains to be seen what type of deployment option it would choose. According to a statement in November 1999 by India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, India
would not keep its weapons on a "hair-trigger alert," though he did suggest that these weapons would be dispersed and made mobile to improve their chances of
surviving a first strike.197 If this statement is true, then the risks of accidental launch would be relatively small during normal circumstances.198 But these risks
would increase significantly during crisis situations, when India would presumably mate the warheads to the missiles.199 If the military still has not been given
physical control over the warheads, this would further reduce risks of accidental use during peacetime, though the transfer of nuclear weapons to the military
during a crisis could significantly increase the risks of an accident due to the military's inexperience in handling the nuclear weapons.200 What deployment option
Pakistan might adopt depends in part on India's weapon deployment. It appears that if India were to adopt a rapid-response option, Pakistan would probably adopt
a similar missile deployment, thereby increasing the risks of an accidental launch of its nuclear weapons as well. But even if India were to deploy its weapons (in
field positions) withour the warheads mated, concerns about survivability might nevertheless cause Pakistan to adopt a rapid-response capability. If such an event
were to occur, the risks of Pakistani accidental missile launches could be quite high, especially because it is unlikely that Pakistan currently has the technical capacity
to integrate sophisticated launch controls into its missile designs. Just
as in India, it is also unlikely that Pakistan's nuclear
devices are designed to minimize risks of accidents.201 Because Pakistan's warheads are based on an
early Chinese warhead design, they probably do not contain one-point safety designs, IHE, or fire-resistant
pits. If Pakistan were to assemble its nuclear warheads, there could be an unacceptable risk of an
accidental detonation of its nuclear weapons. Moreover; if Pakistan were to mate nuclear warheads to its missiles, either because it chose
to establish a rapid-response capability or because of an ongoing nuclear crisis, then similar concerns would exist about accidental launches of Pakistani nuclear
risks of unauthorized use of nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan are probably relatively
small because they have a very small number of nuclear weapons and those weapons are tightly controlled by their nuclear establishments. But there are a
number of factors that could increase risks of unauthorized use in the future. Although both India and Pakistan currently
weapons. The current
possess nuclear weapons that could be delivered by aircraft, and are both actively developing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, none of their weapons appear to
contain sophisticated use-control devices to prevent unauthorized use. Instead, the nuclear
controls in both countries appear to be based on
guards, gates, and guns . As we have seen in the Russian and Chinese cases, while the "3 G's" might be sufficient
during normal circumstances, they are particularly vulnerable during political, economic , and social
upheaval s. The Russian case has demonstrated that severe domestic upheavals can undermine central controls and weaken the
infrastructures that previously maintained the security
for nuclear weapons. In particular, such upheavals can undermine the
loyalty of guards and workers at nuclear facilities, especially if the state collapses economically and can no longer
afford to pay those employees. Neither India nor Pakistan appears to have taken the necessary steps to
prevent such weaknesses from arising in their nuclear controls. Because Indian and Pakistani nuclear controls
rely on the "3 G's" while reportedly lacking personnel reliability programs, there could be a significant risk of thefts
of nuclear weapons during severe upheavals.
The Russian analogy is particularly relevant in the Pakistani case. The
Pakistani state is far from stable. After the nuclear tests in 1998 and the military coup in 1999, the Pakistani economy came close to collapsing and remained quite
unstable for the next several years.202 In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States removed economic sanctions and approved
nearly $1 billion in international foreign aid to Pakistan. But with a debt burden of nearly $39 billion, massive economic disparities, and continuing low levels of
foreign investment, there still is significant cause for concern about the prospects for Pakistan's long-term political and economic stability.203 If the Pakistani state
were to fail, there could be significant risks of a collapse in its nuclear controls. Were such an event to occur, there could be an extreme risk of thefts of nuclear
weapons or of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamic militants.204 In the events following the September 11 attacks and President Musharraf's decision
to support U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan, there were serious concerns about a potential collapse of Pakistani nuclear controls. These concerns were spurred by
reports of public riots, a close affiliation among some elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence community with the Taliban regime and al Qaeda, and the
tenuous hold that Pakistani president Musharraf appears to have in Pakistan.205 In October 2001, President Musharraf took significant steps to centralize his
control by removing high-level military and intelligence officers with ties to the Taliban, but analysts have nevertheless continued to raise concerns about
Musharraf's ability to maintain control.206 Due to the seriousness of these risks, President Musharraf ordered an emergency redeployment of Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal, and the United States has offered to advise Pakistan on methods for securing its nuclear stockpile. ' If the U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan had extended
for a longer period, Musharraf might have found it increasingly difficult to remain in power and reign in the more extreme elements in his country. One also
cannot rule out the possibility that terrorists might choose to target nuclear facilities in India and Pakistan,
especially if domestic instability were to increase.
Both India and Pakistan have serious problems with domestic
terrorism.208 These terrorists are increasingly well-armed and have targeted critical infrastructures and military bases in the past.209 Although current defenses at
both Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons storage facilities are probably sufficient to defend against most terrorist attacks,210 the physical protection systems at
other nuclear facilities might be less effective.211 Moreover, if the defenses
at the most sensitive facilities were weakened by
domestic upheavals, then the risks of successful terrorist attacks—either for purposes of theft or sabotage—could
increase significantly. But even if such extreme events did not occur, the tightly controlled decision-making and underdeveloped command-and-control
structures in both India and Pakistan could potentially allow unauthorized use, particularly during crises. In India, some of these risks have been minimized by the
because India
probably still lacks clearly defined, detailed operational procedures and established, resilient communication channels, there would
formalization of its command structure, though the military units are still fairly inexperienced with handling these weapons.212 Moreover,
still be a fairly high risk of unauthorized use arising from confusion or miscommunication during a
crisis. These concerns will probably remain for some time to come, though the specific risks could eventually be improved, depending on the training the military
receives and the degree of professionalism among the troops. Because Pakistan is currently under military rule, and its nuclear weapons are controlled by the
military, one would expect a better coordination of nuclear decision-making and command-and-control systems. Nevertheless, there are potential problems with
Pakistani command and control as well. The lack of a clear operational use doctrine, combined with inadequate C3I could increase the risks of unauthorized use
during crises: "there is no enunciated nuclear doctrine, nor are there decision-making and communications systems adequate for either strategic or tactical
command and control in the nuclear environment. Nuclear targeting information could not be passed in time to be of use in a rapidly changing situation, which
would increase the probability of own-troop strikes by tactical [nuclear] missiles."213 The risks or unauthorized use would increase if India and Pakistan were to
deploy their weapons on ballistic missiles. Risks of decapitation and questions about the survivability of the nuclear forces would probably cause both India and
Pakistan to deploy mobile systems if they were to operationalize their nuclear forces. These systems would significantly increase difficulties in command and
control, especially because their weapons lack use-control devices.214 In addition, because of the risks of decapitation, Pakistan is likely to adopt a "delegative"
system, where the authority to launch nuclear weapons is given to a number of military officials.215 As the number of people authorized to launch nuclear weapons
increases, so does the risk of a use of nuclear weapons that has not been commanded by the central authorities.216 The
greatest concerns have
been raised about a possible inadvertent use of nuclear weapons in South Asia. The combined effects of mutual
mistrust, very short flight times for missiles, continual armed conflicts along their borders, and few reliable CBMs make the risks of inadvertent use quite severe,
especially during crisis situations. According
to George Perkovich, a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, "Kargil proved that having nuclear weapons would not deter new
conflicts. It also showed that unless such conflicts themselves were prevented, the possibility of an accidental or deliberate nuclear exchange would also
increase given both states' relatively poor systems of intelligence surveillance and nuclear command and control."217 Due
to continual mistrust
between the two countries, each would be likely to misinterpret military movements, missile tests, or accidental
detonations as an impending attack by the other side. The risks of misinterpreting each other's motives are compounded by the
vulnerability of their nuclear forces and the short flight times of the forces to key targets. For example, because the runways at Pakistani Air Force bases could be
destroyed by a conventional air strike or nuclear attack,218 India could effectively eliminate Pakistan's nuclear bomber capability. During
an acute crisis,
Pakistan might be faced with a "use them or lose them" dilemma, in that it would need to attack rapidly
or lose its ability to retaliate altogether. For this reason, Pakistani officials would be extremely
suspicious of any Indian actions that could be interpreted as preparations for an
attack. Because the flight time of Indian bombers is approximately ten minutes, Pakistani leaders would have a very limited amount of time to decide
whether to launch their own attack.219 These conditions thus create an ongoing environment in which inadvertent use is quite possible. In addition, both countries
have unreliable intelligence systems, which have repeatedly misinterpreted the other's intentions. For example, during the Brasstacks incident, Pakistani
intelligence reported that India's exercise was merely a cover for an attack. Meanwhile, Indian intelligence overlooked the defensive nature of the Pakistani troops'
position. These intelligence failures caused each side to escalate the tensions unnecessarily. In addition, their intelligence systems have sometimes failed to detect
major troop movements altogether. As we have seen, during the Brasstacks crisis, Indian surveillance planes did not detect Pakistani troops positioned at their
border for two weeks. And in the 1999 Kargil war, Indian intelligence failed to detect the Pakistani invasion until several months after they had positioned
themselves at strategic locations in the Kargil heights. These intelligence failures could have two consequences. First, if either side were surprised by comparatively
benign actions (such as Pakistan's defensive positioning during the Brasstacks crisis), it would be more likely to overreact and mistakenly conclude that an attack is
imminent. And second, if one side (especially Pakistan) is confident that an invasion would not be detected at first, it might be more likely to launch attacks across
the border: Each of these scenarios would greatly increase the risks of nuclear escalation.220 Presumably owing to the massive intelligence failure prior to the 1999
Kargil war, however, India has recently made significant investments in its intelligence-gathering capabilities, which could reduce risks of such failures by India in the
future.221 The
dangers of miscalculations and intelligence failures are increased by the crude early-warning
systems employed by both countries, particularly Pakistan. Several incidents serve to illustrate this point. First, prior to Pakistan's
nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistan reported that it had detected an air force attack on its radars and warned that it had mated a number of warheads to its Ghauri
missiles.222 While this report might have been circulated in order to justify their nuclear tests, circulating such a report could have caused India to mate weapons to
its missiles, greatly increasing the risks of inadvertent use (as well as accidental and unauthorized use). Another, perhaps more troubling, incident occurred prior to
the U.S. missile strike on Afghanistan in August 1998. The United States sent a high-level U.S. official to Pakistan because it feared Pakistan would detect the missile
and interpret it as an Indian strike. Pakistan never even detected the missile, however. Scholars have pointed out that this incident emphasizes not only the U.S.
concern about inadvertent nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but also that Pakistan's early-warning system "has serious flaws, and such shortcomings are
more likely to foster nervousness than calm. To the extent that they lack reliable early-warning systems, India or Pakistan could base launch decisions on unreliable
sources, increasing the chance of mistakes."223 But even if India and Pakistan had reliable early-warning systems, the risks of inadvertent war would still be
extremely high. If Indian or Pakistani radars detected aircraft headed toward them, they would have very little time to decide what to do before the aircraft reached
their targets. In addition, because there would be a great deal of uncertainty about whether attacking bombers carried conventional or nuclear weapons, the
attacked side (especially Pakistan) could
face a "use them or lose them" scenario and be tempted to launch a
nuclear attack to ensure that its nuclear capability was not destroyed.224 Thus, even if India and Pakistan do not deploy
nuclear weapons on missiles, the risks of an inadvertent use in these circumstances could be extremely high. If India and Pakistan were to deploy their nuclear
weapons on missiles (a scenario that is quite likely, given the vulnerability of Pakistani airfields and India's stated need for deterrence against the People's Republic
of China), the risks of inadvertent use would become even worse. Because the flight time for ballistic missiles between the two countries is less than five
minutes,225 Indian and Pakistani leaders would have virtually no time to decide what action to take (or perhaps even to launch a retaliatory strike) before the
missiles hit their targets.226 The psychological effect on the two countries would be tremendous. According
to Francois Heisbourg, once theater
missiles are deployed in South Asia, the strategic
situation will resemble the Cuban missile crisis, except that it "would be
permanent rather than tempo-rary, would occur without adequate C3I in place, and with political leadership located less than
five minutes from mutual Armageddon." 227
(Note to students: “3 G’s” – internally referenced – stands for “guards, gates, and guns” as a security
measure to protect an installation. “C3I” – also internally referenced – stands for “Command, Control,
Communications and Intelligence”).
Even a limited nuclear war between India & Pakistan causes extinction – smoke and
yields prove
Toon ’07
(et al, O. B. Toon -- Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University
of Colorado, Boulder, CO, -- “Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of
individual nuclear terrorism” – Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics – April 19th -- http://www.atmos-chemphys.net/7/1973/2007/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf)
We assess the potential damage and smoke production associated with the detonation of small nuclear
weapons in modern megacities. While the number of nuclear warheads in the world has fallen by about a factor of three since its peak in 1986, the number of
nuclear weapons states is increasing and the potential exists for numerous regional nuclear arms races. Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons, 2 are
constructing them, and an additional 32 nations already have the fissile material needed to build substantial arsenals of low-yield (Hiroshima-sized) explosives.
Population and economic activity worldwide are congregated to an increasing extent in megacities, which might be targeted in a nuclear conflict. We
find
that low yield weapons, which new nuclear powers are likely to construct, can produce 100 times as
many fatalities and 100 times as much smoke from fires per kt yield as previously estimated in analyses
for full scale nuclear wars using high-yield weapons , if the small weapons are targeted at city centers. A single
“small” nuclear detonation in an urban center could lead to more fatalities, in some cases by orders of magnitude, than have occurred in the major historical
a regional nuclear exchange involving 100 15-kt explosions (less than 0.1% of the
explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal). We find that such an exchange could produce direct fatalities comparable to all of
those worldwide in World War II, or to those once estimated for a “counterforce” nuclear war between the
superpowers. Megacities exposed to atmospheric fallout of long-lived radionuclides would likely be abandoned indefinitely, with severe national and
international implications. Our analysis shows that smoke from urban firestorms in a regional war would rise into the
upper troposphere due to pyro-convection. Robock et al. (2007) show that the smoke would subsequently rise deep into the stratosphere due to
atmospheric heating, and then might induce significant climatic anomalies on global scales. We also anticipate
substantial perturbations of global ozone. While there are many uncertainties in the predictions we make here, the principal unknowns are
conflicts of many countries. We analyze the likely outcome of
the type and scale of conflict that might occur. The
scope and severity of the hazards identified pose a significant
threat to the global community. They deserve careful analysis by governments worldwide advised by a broad section of the world scientific community,
as well as widespread public debate. In the 1980s, quantitative studies of the consequences of a nuclear conflict between the superpowers provoked international scientific and political
debate, and deep public concern (Crutzen and Birks, 1982; Turco et al., 1983; Pittock et al., 1985). The resulting recognition that such conflicts could produce global scale damage at
unacceptable levels contributed to an ongoing reduction of nuclear arsenals and improvements in relationships between the major nuclear powers. Here we discuss the effects of the use of a
single nuclear weapon by a state or terrorist. We then provide the first comprehensive quantitative study of the consequences of a nuclear conflict involving multiple weapons between the
emerging smaller nuclear states. Robock et al. (2007) explore the climate changes that might occur due to the smoke emissions from such a conflict. The results of this study show that the
potential effects of nuclear explosions having yields similar to those of the weapons used over Japan during the Second World War (WW-II) are, in relation to yield, unexpectedly large. At least
eight countries are capable of transport and detonation of such nuclear devices. Moreover, North Korea appears to have a growing stockpile of warheads, and Iran is suspiciously pursuing
uranium enrichment – a necessary precursor to weapons construction. Thirty-two other countries that do not now have nuclear weapons possess sufficient fissionable nuclear materials to
construct weapons, some in a relatively short period of time. For these nations, a regional conflict involving modest numbers of 15-kiloton (kt, the TNT explosive yield equivalent) weapons to
attack cities could cause casualties that exceed, in some cases by orders of magnitude, their losses in previous conflicts. Indeed, in some case, the casualties can rival previous estimates for a
limited strategic war between the superpowers involving thousands of weapons carrying several thousand megatons (Mt) of yield. Early radioactive fallout from small nuclear ground bursts
would leave large sections of target areas contaminated and effectively uninhabitable. (Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked by airbursts, which will not deposit large amounts of local
radiation unless it is raining. They were continuously inhabited.) Because of the smoke released in fires ignited by detonations, there is a possibility that 100 15-kt weapons used against city
centers would produce global climate disturbances unprecedented in recorded human history (Robock et al., 2007). An individual in possession of one of the thousands of existing lightweight
nuclear weapons could kill or injure a million people in a terrorist attack. Below we first discuss the arsenals of the existing, and potential, nuclear powers. We then describe the casualties due
to blast and to fires set by thermal radiation from an attack on a single megacity with one low yield nuclear weapon. Next we discuss the casualties if current and projected arsenals of such
weapons were ever used in a regional conflict. We then discuss the impact of radioactive contamination. Finally, we describe the amounts of smoke that may be generated in a regional scale
conflict. At the end of each of these sections we outline the associated uncertainties.
We have attempted to employ realistic scenarios in
this analysis. However, we do not have access to the war plans of any countries, nor to verifiable data on existing nuclear arsenals, delivery systems, or plans
to develop, build or deploy nuclear weapons. There are obviously many possible pathways for regional conflicts to develop. Opinions concerning the likelihood of a
regional nuclear war range from highly improbable to apocalyptic. Conservatism in such matters requires that a range of plausible scenarios be considered, given
the availability of weapons hardware and the history of regional conflict.
In the present analysis, we adopt two potential scenarios: i) a single small
nuclear device detonated in a city center by terrorists; and ii) a regional nuclear exchange between two newly minted nuclear weapons states involving a total of
most citizens and politicians today are aware of the
potential disaster of an Israeli-Iranian-Syrian nuclear confrontation, or a Indian-Pakistani territorial confrontation. Moreover,
100 low yield (15-kt) detonations. We do not justify these scenarios any further except to note that
as nuclear weapons knowledge and implementation proliferates, the possible number and combinations of flash points multiplies. The fact that nuclear weapons of
the type assumed here have been used in past hostilities substantiates the idea that such scenarios as we propose are executable.
The new Freedom Act won’t solve US image. Protections from the original version do
solve, even without protections for persons outside the US.
Ries ‘14
(Internally quoting Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program. Also internally quoting
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Also internally quoting Center for
Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger – Brian Ries is Mashable’s Real-Time News Editor. Prior to working at
Mashable, Brian was Social Media Editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, responsible for using Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
to cover revolutions, disasters, and presidential elections. During his time at The Daily Beast, he contributed to a team that won
two Webby Awards for “Best News Site”. “Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress Just Passed” - Mashable May 22, 2014 – http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)
As a result, many
of its initial supporters pulled their support. “We supported the original USA Freedom
act, even though it didn’t do much for non-US persons,” Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty
International's Security & Human Rights Program told Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the
original version as “a good step to end bulk collection. ” However, in its current version, it's
not even clear that this bill does that at all, Johnson said. He added that Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in the
bill — something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a law, you can count on the
administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more
positive view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a
statement. "While we share the concerns of many — including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough — without it we would
be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of Americans’ communications into law." The
Electronic Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." “ The
ban on bulk collection was deliberately
watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,” said Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. “We
withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of large-scale,
untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism.” And
Cynthia Wong , senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “This so-called reform bill won’t restore
the trust of Internet users in the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S.
credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.”
Unlike the current Act, the original bill does solve US image. This holds even if plan’s
about bulk collection – instead of every surveillance practices.
HRW ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. “US Senate: Salvage Surveillance Reform House Bill Flawed” - Human Rights Watch May 22, 2014 – http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvage-surveillance-reform)
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said today. The version of the USA Freedom
Act that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data collection. The
version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was designed to end bulk
collection of business records and phone metadata. The practice has been almost universally condemned by all but the US security
establishment. “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the US and around the
world, ” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch . “Until Congress
passes real reform , US credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade .”
The initial version of the bill aimed to prohibit bulk collection by the government of business records, including phone
metadata.
The bill only addressed one component of the surveillance programs revealed by the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden, that of US record collections.
Human Rights Watch.
However, it had broad support as a first step, including from
On May 7, a diluted version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence Committee
the version the House passed could leave the door wide open to
continued indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions of people without
approval on May 8. While better than alternative bills offered,
justification, Human Rights Watch said.
India Advantage – 1AC, Cyber-Scenario
India Advantage - Cyber-Scenario
Contention # ____ is India
The US can alter India’s surveillance practices by pressuring global internet companies
to demand privacy. But, this only works when US is less hypocritical.
Wong ‘13
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law – “ Surveillance and the Corrosion of
Internet Freedom” - July 30, 2013 - Published in: The Huffington Post and also available at the HRW website at this address:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/30/surveillance-and-corrosion-internet-freedom
Defenders of US and UK surveillance programs argue that collecting metadata is not as problematic as “listening to the content
of people’s phone calls” or reading emails. This is misleading. Technologists have long recognized that metadata can reveal incredibly sensitive information, especially if it is
collected at large scale over long periods of time, since digitized data can be easily combined and analyzed. The revelations have also exposed glaring
contradictions about the US Internet freedom agenda. This has emboldened the Chinese state media, for example, to cynically
denounce US hypocrisy, even as the Chinese government continues to censor the Internet, infringe on privacy rights, and curb anonymity online. Though there is hypocrisy on both sides,
the widening rift between US values and actions has real, unintended human rights consequences. For the human
rights movement, the Internet’s impact on rights crystalized in 2005 after we learned that Yahoo! uncritically turned user account
information over to the Chinese government, leading to a 10-year prison sentence for the journalist Shi Tao. The US government
forcefully objected to the Chinese government’s actions and urged the tech industry to act responsibly. In the end, that incident
catalyzed a set of new human rights standards that pushed some companies to improve safeguards for
user privacy in the face of government demands for data. US support was critical back then , but it
is hard to imagine the government having the same influence or credibility now. The mass surveillance scandal has damaged
the US government’s ability to press for better corporate practices as technology companies expand globally. It
will also be more difficult for companies to resist overbroad surveillance mandates if they are seen as
complicit in mass US infringements on privacy. Other governments will feel more entitled to ask for the
same cooperation that the US receives. We can also expect governments around the world to pressure companies to store user data locally or maintain a local
presence so that governments can more easily access it, as Brazil and Russia are now debating. While comparisons to the Chinese government are overstated, there is reason to
worry about the broader precedent the US has set. Just months before the NSA scandal broke, India began rolling out a centralized
system to monitor all phone and Internet communications in the country, without much clarity on
safeguards to protect rights. This development is chilling, considering the government’s problematic use of sedition and Internet laws in recent arrests. Over the last
few weeks, Turkish officials have condemned social media as a key tool for Gezi Park protesters. Twitter has drawn particular ire. Now the
government is preparing new regulations that would make it easier to get data from Internet companies and identify
individual users online. The Obama administration and US companies could have been in a strong position to push back
in India and Turkey. Instead, the US has provided these governments with a roadmap for conducting secret,
mass surveillance and conscripting the help of the private sector.
(Note to students: “conscripting” means compulsory enlistment of companies for state service.)
Independently, US bulk surveillance sets precedent that causes indiscriminate
surveillance in India.
Sinha ‘14
(et al; Authors Include: G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights
Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Sinha holds a J.D. from New York University’s School of Law. This includes a
specialization as a Scholar from NYU’s Institute for International Law & Justice. The author also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
University of Toronto. Additional authors include - Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, US Program deputy director at Human
Rights Watch, who participated in some of the research interviews; and Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington Director at Human
Rights Watch, who also participated in one of the research interviews and provided key contacts. Human Rights Watch is an
independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the
cause of human rights for all. From the Report: WITH LIBERTY TO MONITOR ALL How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming
Journalism, Law and American Democracy – This report is based on extensive interviews with some 50 journalists covering
intelligence, national security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and
NPR. JULY 2014 – available at: http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
The questions raised
by surveillance are complex. The government has an obligation to protect national security, and in some
cases, it is legitimate for government to restrict certain rights to that end. At the same time, international human rights and
constitutional law
set limits on the state’s authority to engage in activities like surveillance, which have the potential to
large-scale , often indiscriminate US approach to surveillance
carries enormous costs. It erodes global digital privacy and sets a terrible example for other countries
like India , Pakistan, Ethiopia, and others that are in the process of expanding their surveillance capabilities. It
also damages US credibility in advocating internationally for internet freedom, which the US has
undermine so many other rights. The current,
listed as an important foreign policy objective since at least 2010. As this report documents, US surveillance programs
are also doing damage to some of the values the United States claims to hold most dear. These include freedoms of
expression and association, press freedom, and the right to counsel, which are all protected by both international human rights law and the US
Constitution.
India’s surveillance is not narrowly-targeted. This indiscriminate, bulk collection
becomes a “honeypot” for cyber-targeting.
Trivedi ‘13
Anjani Trivedi. The author holds a Master Degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong and a Bachelor’s Degree in
Mathematics from MIT. The author has previously held internships at the New York Times and CNN International. This piece
internally quotes Meenakshi Ganguly, The South Asia director for Human Rights Watch; Anja Kovacs of the Internet Democracy
Project; and Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s Centre for Internet and Society. “In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips
Under the Radar” – Time Magazine – 6-30-13 - http://world.time.com/2013/06/30/in-india-prism-like-surveillance-slips-underthe-radar/#ixzz2YpWhRsrB
CMS is an ambitious surveillance system that monitors text messages, social-media engagement and phone calls on
landlines and cell phones, among other communications. That means 900 million landline and cell-phone users and 125 million Internet
users. The project, which is being implemented by the government’s Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), is meant to help national law-enforcement
agencies save time and avoid manual intervention, according to the Department of Telecommunications’ annual report. This has been in the works since 2008,
when C-DOT started working on a proof-of-concept, according to an older report. The government set aside approximately $150 million for the system as part of its
12th five-year plan, although the Cabinet ultimately approved a higher amount. Within the internal-security ministry though, the surveillance system remains a
relatively “hush-hush” topic, a project official unauthorized to speak to the press tells TIME. In April 2011, the Police Modernisation Division of the Home Affairs
Ministry put out a 90-page tender to solicit bidders for communication-interception systems in every state and union territory of India. The system requirements
included “live listening, recording, storage, playback, analysis, postprocessing” and voice recognition. Civil-liberties
groups concede that
states often need to undertake targeted- monitoring operations. However, the move toward extensive “surveillance
capabilities enabled by digital communications,” suggests that governments are now “casting the net wide, enabling intrusions into private lives,” according to
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. This extensive communications surveillance through the likes of Prism and CMS are “out of the
realm of judicial authorization and allow unregulated, secret surveillance, eliminating any transparency or accountability on the part of the state,” a recent U.N.
report stated. India is no stranger to censorship and monitoring — tweets, blogs, books or songs are frequently blocked and banned. India ranked second only to
the U.S. on Google’s list of user-data requests with 4,750 queries, up 52% from two years back, and removal requests from the government increased by 90% over
the previous reporting period. While these were largely made through police or court orders, the new system will not require such a legal process. In recent times,
India’s democratically elected government has barred access to certain websites and Twitter handles, restricted the number of outgoing text messages to five per
person per day and arrested citizens for liking Facebook posts and tweeting. Historically too, censorship has been India’s preferred means of policing social unrest.
“Freedom of expression, while broadly available in theory,” Ganguly tells TIME, “is endangered by abuse of various India laws.” There is a growing discrepancy and
power imbalance between citizens and the state, says Anja Kovacs of the Internet Democracy Project. And, in an environment like India where “no checks and
balances [are] in place,” that is troubling. The potential for misuse and misunderstanding, Kovacs believes, is increasing enormously. Currently, India’s laws relevant
to interception “disempower citizens by relying heavily on the executive to safeguard individuals’ constitutional rights,” a recent editorial noted. The power
imbalance is often noticeable at public protests, as in the case of the New Delhi gang-rape incident in December, when the government shut down public transport
near protest grounds and unlawfully detained demonstrators. With an already sizeable and growing population of Internet users, the government’s worries too are
on the rise. Netizens in India are set to triple to 330 million by 2016, according to a recent report. “As [governments] around the world grapple with the power of
social media that can enable spontaneous street protests, there appears to be increasing surveillance,” Ganguly explains. India’s junior minister for
telecommunications attempted to explain the benefits of this system during a recent Google+ Hangout session. He acknowledged that CMS is something that “most
people may not be aware of” because it’s “slightly technical.” A participant noted that the idea of such an intrusive system was worrying and he did not feel safe.
The minister, though, insisted that it would “safeguard your privacy” and national security. Given the high-tech nature of CMS, he noted that telecom companies
would no longer be part of the government’s surveillance process. India currently does not have formal privacy legislation to prohibit arbitrary monitoring. The
new system comes under the jurisdiction of the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, which allows for monitoring communication in the “interest of public safety.” The
surveillance system is not only an “abuse of privacy rights and security-agency overreach ,” critics say, but
also counterproductive in terms of security. In the process of collecting data to monitor
criminal activity, the data itself may become a target for terrorists and criminals — a “honeypot,” according
to Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s Centre for Internet and Society. Additionally, the wideranging tapping undermines financial markets , Abraham says, by compromising confidentiality, trade
secrets and
intellectual property. What’s more, vulnerabilities will have to be built into the existing cyberinfrastructure to make way for such a
system. Whether the nation’s patchy infrastructure will be able to handle a complex web of surveillance and
networks, no one can say. That, Abraham contends,
is what attackers will target.
(Note to students: “CMS” – internally referenced – is India’s new surveillance system. “CMS” stands for
“Central Monitoring System”.)
A hack on the CMS will eventually succeed. That escalates to mass de-stabilization of
India.
Dilipraj ‘13
Mr E. Dilipraj is a Research Associate at Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi. He is also pursuing his PhD at the Centre for
Latin American Studies from JNU, New Delhi. This evidence is internally quoting Sunil Abraham, who is the Executive Director of
the Bangalore based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society. The Centre for Internet and Society is a nonprofit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with
disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness. Sunil Abraham also founded Mahiti in 1998, a company
committed to creating high impact technology and communications solutions. Sunil was elected an Ashoka fellow in 1999 to
'explore the democratic potential of the Internet' and was also granted a Sarai FLOSS fellowship in 2003. Between June 2004
and June 2007, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network, a project of United Nations Development
Programme's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Between
September 2007 and June 2008, he managed ENRAP an electronic network of International Fund for Agricultural Development
projects in the Asia-Pacific facilitated and co-funded by International Development Research Centre, Canada. Also internally
quoting Mr. Sachin Pilot, India’s Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology. Modified for potentially
objectionable language. “CYBER WARFARE AND NATIONAL SECURITY” - AIR POWER Journal Vol. 8 No. 3, MONSOON 2013 (JulySeptember) – available at: http://www.academia.edu/7534559/CYBER_WARFARE_AND_NATIONAL_SECURITY__AN_ANALYSIS_OF_INCIDENTS_BETWEEN_INDIA_AND_PAKISTAN
security providers for the cyber space have
always been lacking in vigilance to provide security to their country’s cyber networks and infrastructures. Sunil
Abraham, Executive Director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, said during an interview to ‘Al Jazeera,’ “The Indian
government has a very low level of cyber awareness and cyber security. We don’t take cyber security as
seriously as the rest of the world”. The problem of cyber attacks by the hacking groups would not be a big problem if it
stopped with the hacking and defacing of websites. But, in reality, it moves on to the next stages. The same
people who carry out hacking and website defacing jobs may get involved in cyber espionage and data
mining against their enemies. These people may also volunteer their expert services to the terrorist organisations in return for
While aggression is the only tactic followed by the hacker groups in both countries, on the contrary, the
money and other forms of remuneration.
According to a cyber security professional working with one of India’s
intelligence agencies , We once sat down to check the Delhi [internet] Backbone. We found thousands of systems
compromised. All were government systems, Research and Analysis Wing, Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence... we don’t realise how
much damage has already happened. The lack of awareness and the lethargic approach in monitoring and providing security to the cyber networks by India led to thousands of compromised
The infection ranges from small Viruses, Botnets to that of Stuxnet level malwares which can
hamper the total operations of the network connected to the compromised computer. It has been observed that out of
computers across the country.
the 10,000 Stuxnet infected Indian computers, 15 were located at critical infrastructure facilities. These included the Gujarat and Haryana Electricity Boards and an ONGC offshore oil rig.
Though Stuxnet reached the networks of these infrastructures, thankfully, it did not activate itself on
them. In other words, India was only a few flawed lines of code away from having its power and oil
sectors crippled (destroyed). The list of new malwares goes on – Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu, etc – and many more are in the process of coding; their abilities to
operate as cyber weapons are incredible and, at the same time, unbearable, if not protected against properly. Assuming that the hacker
groups get access such malwares, then the situation would become extremely dangerous for the national security as it is equivalent
to terrorists getting access to nuclear weapons. While talking about the same, Mr. Sachin Pilot , Minister
of State for Communications and Information Technology said: The entire economies of some countries
have been (destroyed) paralysed by viruses from across the border. We have to make ourselves more
resilient. Power, telecom, defence, these areas are on top of our agenda. A careful study of the series of hacking on one another’s websites
and networks by the private hacking groups of India and Pakistan would reveal a basic fact that something which started as a
small act of hate has now taken on a much different shape in the form of personal revenge, economic profits, a race to show off
technical supremacy, and anti-national propaganda. This was very much evident from one unwanted event that disturbed the internal security of India in August 2012. The Indian
government was alerted by the exodus after thousands of people from the northeast gathered at railway stations in various cities all over the country after being threatened by the rounds of
SMS and violent morphed pictures that were being circulated on more than 100 websites. The SMS threatened the northeastern people living in various cities in India of a targeted attack on
them, asking them to go back to their homeland, whereas the pictures circulated on the internet were images of some violent bloodshed. Out of the various SMS that were in circulation, one
said: It is a request to everyone to call back their relatives, sons and daughters in Bangalore as soon as possible. Last night, four northeastern guys were killed by Muslims in Bangalore (two
Manipuri, two Nepali). Two Nepali girls were kidnapped from Brigade Road. The reports say that from August 20, marking Ramzan, after 2 pm, they are going to attack every northeastern
person. The riot started because of the situation in Assam.32 Another SMS said: Many northeast students staying in Pune were beaten up by miscreants believed to be Muslims following the
Assam riots. Heard that it is happening in Muslim areas like Mumbai, Andhra Pradesh, Bangalore. At Neelasandra, two boys were killed and one near passport office.33 The Government of
India reacted soon on this matter and a 43-page report was prepared by intelligence agencies along with the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) and India Computer Emergency
Response Team (CERT-IN) which traced several doctored images to Pakistan. The origins of these morphed images were later traced back in specific to Lahore, Rawalpindi and other Pakistani
cities by the Indian intelligence agencies. "From all available forensic evidence, we are fairly convinced that all those postings came from Pakistan," said an official of NTRO.
Another
senior official who has been involved in India's Pakistan watch for several years said, It has been happening for several
months now.
This is a low cost, very effective way of destabilising us. They don't need to send terrorists and
explosives to create mayhem. Internet has been a very effective platform for instigating communal
divisions in India. They also have a multiplier effect , first resulting in anger and hatred, then riots and, finally, many taking
to terrorism. This act of unnecessary involvement by Pakistan-based elements is seen as cyber terrorism and cyber psychological warfare against India to cause internal security disturbance
and
eventually to create a huge crisis in the country. This incident which created major turmoil in the internal security of the country is the
biggest example of the adverse effects of wrong use of cyber technology.
(Note to students: “CMS” – internally referenced – is India’s new surveillance system. “CMS” stands for
“Central Monitoring System”.)
Mass instability in India sparks nuclear war with Pakistan – risks of miscalc, accidents,
and unauthorized theft all increase.
Busch ‘4
Please note that an updated edition of this book was re-released in Feb of 2015, but the original date was placed in the citation.
Dr. Nathan Busch, Professor of Government and co-director of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport
University. The author holds a Ph.D. in International relations from the University of Toronto and an MA in Political Science
from Michigan State University. The author previously held the position of Research Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and also held the position of Visiting Faculty, National
Security Office, Los Alamos National Laboratory. This piece of evidence internally quotes George Perkovich, a South Asia expert
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It also internally quotes François Heisbourg. He chairs the Geneva Centre
for Security Policy and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. His career has included positions in
government (member of the French mission to the UN, international security adviser to the Minister of Defence), in the defense
industry (vice-president of Thomson-CSF; senior vice president for strategy at Matra Défense Espace) and in academia
(professor of world politics at Sciences-Po Paris, director of the IISS). He is also a member of the International Commission on
nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, and has sat on a number of national and international blue-ribbon bodies. From
the book: No End in Sight: The Continuing Menace of Nuclear Proliferation - p. 202-209
In addition, because
the Indian military currently has little experience handling nuclear weapons, the risks of
accidental use could be very high during a crisis situation, at least for some time to come. If the order were given to prepare India's
nuclear weapons for possible use, the military (perhaps in conjunction with India's nuclear scientists) would need to assemble the warheads rapidly; mate them to
the deliver)' vehicles (gravity bombs or missiles); and prepare them for use, either by loading them into bombers or by aiming the missiles and preparing them for
launch. All these procedures require training and precision, and, given the early stages of India's new command-and-control arrangements, it is not at all clear that
the Indian military would be able to carry them out safely under extreme time constraints.194 If India decided to develop a rapid-response capability, some of these
dangers would be lessened, but more serious dangers would be introduced. In particular, there would be a significantly increased risk of an accidental launch of
nuclear-armed missiles. India
would need to engage in a great deal of additional research into safety mechanisms
to prevent such an accidental launch, and it is simply not known how much effort India is devoting, or
will devote, to this area.195 Because the Prithvi and the two-stage Agni-I missiles contain a nonstorable liquid fuel, it would be impossible to deploy
the current configuration of either missile to allow for a rapid response. This significantly reduces the likelihood of these missiles being launched accidentally during
normal circumstances, though the
risks of accidental launches would probably increase significantly if they were fueled during a
crisis situation. As noted, however, India has conducted several successful flight tests of the Agni and Agni-II missiles. Because these missiles use a solid fuel, they
could be deployed in a rapid-response state. If India were to choose such a deployment option, the risks of an accidental launch could increase significantly. These
risks would depend on the extent to which India integrates use-control devices into its weapons to prevent accidental launches, but there is little evidence that India
is currently devoting significant efforts to develop such use-control devices.196 Furthermore, even if India intends to develop such use-control devices, if a nuclear
crisis were to arise before India had developed them, it still might be tempted to mate warheads on its missiles. If India does decide to weaponize its arsenal, it still
remains to be seen what type of deployment option it would choose. According to a statement in November 1999 by India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, India
would not keep its weapons on a "hair-trigger alert," though he did suggest that these weapons would be dispersed and made mobile to improve their chances of
surviving a first strike.197 If this statement is true, then the risks of accidental launch would be relatively small during normal circumstances.198 But these risks
would increase significantly during crisis situations, when India would presumably mate the warheads to the missiles.199 If the military still has not been given
physical control over the warheads, this would further reduce risks of accidental use during peacetime, though the transfer of nuclear weapons to the military
during a crisis could significantly increase the risks of an accident due to the military's inexperience in handling the nuclear weapons.200 What deployment option
Pakistan might adopt depends in part on India's weapon deployment. It appears that if India were to adopt a rapid-response option, Pakistan would probably adopt
a similar missile deployment, thereby increasing the risks of an accidental launch of its nuclear weapons as well. But even if India were to deploy its weapons (in
field positions) withour the warheads mated, concerns about survivability might nevertheless cause Pakistan to adopt a rapid-response capability. If such an event
were to occur, the risks of Pakistani accidental missile launches could be quite high, especially because it is unlikely that Pakistan currently has the technical capacity
to integrate sophisticated launch controls into its missile designs. Just
as in India, it is also unlikely that Pakistan's nuclear
devices are designed to minimize risks of accidents.201 Because Pakistan's warheads are based on an
early Chinese warhead design, they probably do not contain one-point safety designs, IHE, or fire-resistant
pits. If Pakistan were to assemble its nuclear warheads, there could be an unacceptable risk of an
accidental detonation of its nuclear weapons. Moreover; if Pakistan were to mate nuclear warheads to its missiles, either because it chose
to establish a rapid-response capability or because of an ongoing nuclear crisis, then similar concerns would exist about accidental launches of Pakistani nuclear
risks of unauthorized use of nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan are probably relatively
small because they have a very small number of nuclear weapons and those weapons are tightly controlled by their nuclear establishments. But there are a
number of factors that could increase risks of unauthorized use in the future. Although both India and Pakistan currently
weapons. The current
possess nuclear weapons that could be delivered by aircraft, and are both actively developing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, none of their weapons appear to
contain sophisticated use-control devices to prevent unauthorized use. Instead, the nuclear
controls in both countries appear to be based on
guards, gates, and guns . As we have seen in the Russian and Chinese cases, while the "3 G's" might be sufficient
during normal circumstances, they are particularly vulnerable during political, economic, and social
upheaval s. The Russian case has demonstrated that severe domestic upheavals can undermine central controls and weaken the
infrastructures that previously maintained the security
for nuclear weapons. In particular, such upheavals can undermine the
loyalty of guards and workers at nuclear facilities, especially if the state collapses economically and can no longer
afford to pay those employees. Neither India nor Pakistan appears to have taken the necessary steps to prevent such weaknesses from arising in
their nuclear controls. Because Indian and Pakistani nuclear controls rely on the "3 G's" while reportedly lacking personnel reliability
there could be a significant risk of thefts of nuclear weapons during severe
upheavals. The Russian analogy is particularly relevant in the Pakistani case. The Pakistani state is far from stable. After the nuclear tests in 1998 and the
programs,
military coup in 1999, the Pakistani economy came close to collapsing and remained quite unstable for the next several years.202 In the aftermath of the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States removed economic sanctions and approved nearly $1 billion in international foreign aid to Pakistan. But with a debt
burden of nearly $39 billion, massive economic disparities, and continuing low levels of foreign investment, there still is significant cause for concern about the
prospects for Pakistan's long-term political and economic stability.203 If the Pakistani state were to fail, there could be significant risks of a collapse in its nuclear
controls. Were such an event to occur, there could be an extreme risk of thefts of nuclear weapons or of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamic
militants.204 In the events following the September 11 attacks and President Musharraf's decision to support U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan, there were serious
concerns about a potential collapse of Pakistani nuclear controls. These concerns were spurred by reports of public riots, a close affiliation among some elements of
the Pakistani military and intelligence community with the Taliban regime and al Qaeda, and the tenuous hold that Pakistani president Musharraf appears to have in
Pakistan.205 In October 2001, President Musharraf took significant steps to centralize his control by removing high-level military and intelligence officers with ties
to the Taliban, but analysts have nevertheless continued to raise concerns about Musharraf's ability to maintain control.206 Due to the seriousness of these risks,
President Musharraf ordered an emergency redeployment of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, and the United States has offered to advise Pakistan on methods for
securing its nuclear stockpile. ' If the U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan had extended for a longer period, Musharraf might have found it increasingly difficult to
remain in power and reign in the more extreme elements in his country. One also cannot
rule out the possibility that terrorists might
choose to target nuclear facilities in India and Pakistan, especially if domestic instability were to
increase.
Both India and Pakistan have serious problems with domestic terrorism.208 These terrorists are increasingly well-armed and have targeted
critical infrastructures and military bases in the past.209 Although current defenses at both Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons storage facilities are probably
sufficient to defend against most terrorist attacks,210 the physical protection systems at other nuclear facilities might be less effective.211 Moreover, if the
defenses at the most sensitive facilities were weakened by domestic upheavals, then the risks of successful
terrorist attacks—either for purposes of theft or sabotage—could increase significantly. But even if such extreme events did not
occur, the tightly controlled decision-making and underdeveloped command-and-control structures in both India and Pakistan could potentially allow unauthorized
use, particularly during crises. In India, some of these risks have been minimized by the formalization of its command structure, though the military units are still
fairly inexperienced with handling these weapons.212 Moreover, because
established, resilient
India probably still lacks clearly defined, detailed operational procedures and
communication channels, there would still be a fairly high risk of unauthorized use
arising from confusion or miscommunication during a crisis. These concerns will probably remain for some time to
come, though the specific risks could eventually be improved, depending on the training the military receives and the degree of professionalism among the troops.
Because Pakistan is currently under military rule, and its nuclear weapons are controlled by the military, one would expect a better coordination of nuclear decisionmaking and command-and-control systems. Nevertheless, there are potential problems with Pakistani command and control as well. The lack of a clear operational
use doctrine, combined with inadequate C3I could increase the risks of unauthorized use during crises: "there is no enunciated nuclear doctrine, nor are there
decision-making and communications systems adequate for either strategic or tactical command and control in the nuclear environment. Nuclear targeting
information could not be passed in time to be of use in a rapidly changing situation, which would increase the probability of own-troop strikes by tactical [nuclear]
missiles."213 The risks or unauthorized use would increase if India and Pakistan were to deploy their weapons on ballistic missiles. Risks of decapitation and
questions about the survivability of the nuclear forces would probably cause both India and Pakistan to deploy mobile systems if they were to operationalize their
nuclear forces. These systems would significantly increase difficulties in command and control, especially because their weapons lack use-control devices.214 In
addition, because of the risks of decapitation, Pakistan is likely to adopt a "delegative" system, where the authority to launch nuclear weapons is given to a number
of military officials.215 As the number of people authorized to launch nuclear weapons increases, so does the risk of a use of nuclear weapons that has not been
commanded by the central authorities.216 The
greatest concerns have been raised about a possible inadvertent use of
nuclear weapons in South Asia. The combined effects of mutual mistrust, very short flight times for missiles, continual armed conflicts along their
borders, and few reliable CBMs make the risks of inadvertent use quite severe, especially during crisis situations. According to George Perkovich,
a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "Kargil proved that having
nuclear weapons would not deter new conflicts. It also showed that unless such conflicts themselves were prevented, the
possibility of an accidental or deliberate nuclear exchange would also increase given both states' relatively poor systems of intelligence surveillance and nuclear
command and control."217 Due
to continual mistrust between the two countries, each would be likely to
misinterpret military movements, missile tests, or accidental detonations as an impending attack by the other side. The
risks of misinterpreting each other's motives are compounded by the vulnerability of their nuclear forces and the short flight times of the forces to key targets. For
example, because the runways at Pakistani Air Force bases could be destroyed by a conventional air strike or nuclear attack,218 India could effectively eliminate
Pakistan's nuclear bomber capability. During
an acute crisis, Pakistan might be faced with a "use them or lose them"
dilemma, in that it would need to attack rapidly or lose its ability to retaliate altogether. For this reason,
Pakistani officials would be extremely suspicious of any Indian actions that could be
interpreted as preparations for an attack. Because the flight time of Indian bombers is approximately ten minutes, Pakistani
leaders would have a very limited amount of time to decide whether to launch their own attack.219 These conditions thus create an ongoing environment in which
inadvertent use is quite possible. In addition, both countries have unreliable intelligence systems, which have repeatedly misinterpreted the other's intentions. For
example, during the Brasstacks incident, Pakistani intelligence reported that India's exercise was merely a cover for an attack. Meanwhile, Indian intelligence
overlooked the defensive nature of the Pakistani troops' position. These intelligence failures caused each side to escalate the tensions unnecessarily. In addition,
their intelligence systems have sometimes failed to detect major troop movements altogether. As we have seen, during the Brasstacks crisis, Indian surveillance
planes did not detect Pakistani troops positioned at their border for two weeks. And in the 1999 Kargil war, Indian intelligence failed to detect the Pakistani invasion
until several months after they had positioned themselves at strategic locations in the Kargil heights. These intelligence failures could have two consequences. First,
if either side were surprised by comparatively benign actions (such as Pakistan's defensive positioning during the Brasstacks crisis), it would be more likely to
overreact and mistakenly conclude that an attack is imminent. And second, if one side (especially Pakistan) is confident that an invasion would not be detected at
first, it might be more likely to launch attacks across the border: Each of these scenarios would greatly increase the risks of nuclear escalation.220 Presumably owing
to the massive intelligence failure prior to the 1999 Kargil war, however, India has recently made significant investments in its intelligence-gathering capabilities,
which could reduce risks of such failures by India in the future.221 The
dangers of miscalculations and intelligence failures are
increased by the crude early-warning systems employed by both countries, particularly Pakistan. Several
incidents serve to illustrate this point. First, prior to Pakistan's nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistan reported that it had detected an air force attack on its radars and
warned that it had mated a number of warheads to its Ghauri missiles.222 While this report might have been circulated in order to justify their nuclear tests,
circulating such a report could have caused India to mate weapons to its missiles, greatly increasing the risks of inadvertent use (as well as accidental and
unauthorized use). Another, perhaps more troubling, incident occurred prior to the U.S. missile strike on Afghanistan in August 1998. The United States sent a highlevel U.S. official to Pakistan because it feared Pakistan would detect the missile and interpret it as an Indian strike. Pakistan never even detected the missile,
however. Scholars have pointed out that this incident emphasizes not only the U.S. concern about inadvertent nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but also
that Pakistan's early-warning system "has serious flaws, and such shortcomings are more likely to foster nervousness than calm. To the extent that they lack reliable
early-warning systems, India or Pakistan could base launch decisions on unreliable sources, increasing the chance of mistakes."223 But even if India and Pakistan
had reliable early-warning systems, the risks of inadvertent war would still be extremely high. If Indian or Pakistani radars detected aircraft headed toward them,
they would have very little time to decide what to do before the aircraft reached their targets. In addition, because there would be a great deal of uncertainty about
whether attacking bombers carried conventional or nuclear weapons, the attacked side (especially Pakistan) could
face a "use them or lose
them" scenario and be tempted to launch a nuclear attack to ensure that its nuclear capability was not
destroyed.224 Thus, even if India and Pakistan do not deploy nuclear weapons on missiles, the risks of an inadvertent use in these circumstances could be
extremely high. If India and Pakistan were to deploy their nuclear weapons on missiles (a scenario that is quite likely, given the vulnerability of Pakistani airfields and
India's stated need for deterrence against the People's Republic of China), the risks of inadvertent use would become even worse. Because the flight time for
ballistic missiles between the two countries is less than five minutes,225 Indian and Pakistani leaders would have virtually no time to decide what action to take (or
perhaps even to launch a retaliatory strike) before the missiles hit their targets.226 The psychological effect on the two countries would be tremendous.
According to Francois Heisbourg, once theater missiles are deployed in South Asia, the strategic situation will resemble the
Cuban missile crisis, except that it "would be permanent rather than tempo-rary, would occur without adequate C3I in place, and
with political leadership located less than five minutes from mutual Armageddon." 227
(Note to students: “3 G’s” – internally referenced – stands for “guards, gates, and guns” as a security
measure to protect an installation. “C3I” – also internally referenced – stands for “Command, Control,
Communications and Intelligence”).
Even a limited nuclear war between India & Pakistan causes extinction – smoke and
yields prove
Toon ’07
(et al, O. B. Toon -- Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University
of Colorado, Boulder, CO, -- “Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of
individual nuclear terrorism” – Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics – April 19th -- http://www.atmos-chemphys.net/7/1973/2007/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf)
We assess the potential damage and smoke production associated with the detonation of small nuclear
weapons in modern megacities. While the number of nuclear warheads in the world has fallen by about a factor of three since its peak in 1986, the number of
nuclear weapons states is increasing and the potential exists for numerous regional nuclear arms races. Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons, 2 are
constructing them, and an additional 32 nations already have the fissile material needed to build substantial arsenals of low-yield (Hiroshima-sized) explosives.
Population and economic activity worldwide are congregated to an increasing extent in megacities, which might be targeted in a nuclear conflict. We
find
that low yield weapons, which new nuclear powers are likely to construct, can produce 100 times as
many fatalities and 100 times as much smoke from fires per kt yield as previously estimated in analyses
for full scale nuclear wars using high-yield weapons , if the small weapons are targeted at city centers. A single
“small” nuclear detonation in an urban center could lead to more fatalities, in some cases by orders of magnitude, than have occurred in the major historical
a regional nuclear exchange involving 100 15-kt explosions (less than 0.1% of the
could produce direct fatalities comparable to all of
those worldwide in World War II, or to those once estimated for a “counterforce” nuclear war between the
superpowers. Megacities exposed to atmospheric fallout of long-lived radionuclides would likely be abandoned indefinitely, with severe national and
international implications. Our analysis shows that smoke from urban firestorms in a regional war would rise into the
upper troposphere due to pyro-convection. Robock et al. (2007) show that the smoke would subsequently rise deep into the stratosphere due to
atmospheric heating, and then might induce significant climatic anomalies on global scales. We also anticipate
substantial perturbations of global ozone. While there are many uncertainties in the predictions we make here, the principal unknowns are
conflicts of many countries. We analyze the likely outcome of
explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal). We find that such an exchange
the type and scale of conflict that might occur. The
scope and severity of the hazards identified pose a significant
threat to the global community. They deserve careful analysis by governments worldwide advised by a broad section of the world scientific community,
as well as widespread public debate. In the 1980s, quantitative studies of the consequences of a nuclear conflict between the superpowers provoked international scientific and political
debate, and deep public concern (Crutzen and Birks, 1982; Turco et al., 1983; Pittock et al., 1985). The resulting recognition that such conflicts could produce global scale damage at
unacceptable levels contributed to an ongoing reduction of nuclear arsenals and improvements in relationships between the major nuclear powers. Here we discuss the effects of the use of a
single nuclear weapon by a state or terrorist. We then provide the first comprehensive quantitative study of the consequences of a nuclear conflict involving multiple weapons between the
emerging smaller nuclear states. Robock et al. (2007) explore the climate changes that might occur due to the smoke emissions from such a conflict. The results of this study show that the
potential effects of nuclear explosions having yields similar to those of the weapons used over Japan during the Second World War (WW-II) are, in relation to yield, unexpectedly large. At least
eight countries are capable of transport and detonation of such nuclear devices. Moreover, North Korea appears to have a growing stockpile of warheads, and Iran is suspiciously pursuing
uranium enrichment – a necessary precursor to weapons construction. Thirty-two other countries that do not now have nuclear weapons possess sufficient fissionable nuclear materials to
construct weapons, some in a relatively short period of time. For these nations, a regional conflict involving modest numbers of 15-kiloton (kt, the TNT explosive yield equivalent) weapons to
attack cities could cause casualties that exceed, in some cases by orders of magnitude, their losses in previous conflicts. Indeed, in some case, the casualties can rival previous estimates for a
limited strategic war between the superpowers involving thousands of weapons carrying several thousand megatons (Mt) of yield. Early radioactive fallout from small nuclear ground bursts
would leave large sections of target areas contaminated and effectively uninhabitable. (Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked by airbursts, which will not deposit large amounts of local
radiation unless it is raining. They were continuously inhabited.) Because of the smoke released in fires ignited by detonations, there is a possibility that 100 15-kt weapons used against city
centers would produce global climate disturbances unprecedented in recorded human history (Robock et al., 2007). An individual in possession of one of the thousands of existing lightweight
nuclear weapons could kill or injure a million people in a terrorist attack. Below we first discuss the arsenals of the existing, and potential, nuclear powers. We then describe the casualties due
to blast and to fires set by thermal radiation from an attack on a single megacity with one low yield nuclear weapon. Next we discuss the casualties if current and projected arsenals of such
weapons were ever used in a regional conflict. We then discuss the impact of radioactive contamination. Finally, we describe the amounts of smoke that may be generated in a regional scale
conflict. At the end of each of these sections we outline the associated uncertainties.
We have attempted to employ realistic scenarios in
this analysis. However, we do not have access to the war plans of any countries, nor to verifiable data on existing nuclear arsenals, delivery systems, or plans
to develop, build or deploy nuclear weapons. There are obviously many possible pathways for regional conflicts to develop. Opinions concerning the likelihood of a
regional nuclear war range from highly improbable to apocalyptic. Conservatism in such matters requires that a range of plausible scenarios be considered, given
the availability of weapons hardware and the history of regional conflict.
In the present analysis, we adopt two potential scenarios: i) a single small
nuclear device detonated in a city center by terrorists; and ii) a regional nuclear exchange between two newly minted nuclear weapons states involving a total of
most citizens and politicians today are aware of the
potential disaster of an Israeli-Iranian-Syrian nuclear confrontation, or a Indian-Pakistani territorial confrontation. Moreover,
100 low yield (15-kt) detonations. We do not justify these scenarios any further except to note that
as nuclear weapons knowledge and implementation proliferates, the possible number and combinations of flash points multiplies. The fact that nuclear weapons of
the type assumed here have been used in past hostilities substantiates the idea that such scenarios as we propose are executable.
The new Freedom Act won’t solve US image. Protections from the original version do
solve, even without protections for persons outside the US.
Ries ‘14
(Internally quoting Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program. Also internally quoting
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Also internally quoting Center for
Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger – Brian Ries is Mashable’s Real-Time News Editor. Prior to working at
Mashable, Brian was Social Media Editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, responsible for using Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
to cover revolutions, disasters, and presidential elections. During his time at The Daily Beast, he contributed to a team that won
two Webby Awards for “Best News Site”. “Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress Just Passed” - Mashable May 22, 2014 – http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)
As a result, many
of its initial supporters pulled their support. “We supported the original USA Freedom
act, even though it didn’t do much for non-US persons,” Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty
International's Security & Human Rights Program told Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the
original version as “a good step to end bulk collection. ” However, in its current version, it's
not even clear that this bill does that at all, Johnson said. He added that Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in the
bill — something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a law, you can count on the
administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more
positive view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a
statement. "While we share the concerns of many — including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough — without it we would
be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of Americans’ communications into law." The
Electronic Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." “ The
ban on bulk collection was deliberately
watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,” said Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. “We
withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of large-scale,
untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism.” And
Cynthia Wong , senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “This so-called reform bill won’t restore
the trust of Internet users in the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S.
credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.”
Unlike the current Act, the original bill does solve US image. This holds even if plan’s
about bulk collection – instead of every surveillance practices.
HRW ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. “US Senate: Salvage Surveillance Reform House Bill Flawed” - Human Rights Watch May 22, 2014 – http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvage-surveillance-reform)
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said today. The version of the USA Freedom
Act that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data collection. The
version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was designed to end bulk
collection of business records and phone metadata. The practice has been almost universally condemned by all but the US security
establishment. “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the US and around the
world, ” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch . “Until Congress
passes real reform , US credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade .”
The initial version of the bill aimed to prohibit bulk collection by the government of business records, including phone
metadata.
The bill only addressed one component of the surveillance programs revealed by the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden, that of US record collections.
Human Rights Watch.
However, it had broad support as a first step, including from
On May 7, a diluted version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence Committee
the version the House passed could leave the door wide open to
continued indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions of people without
approval on May 8. While better than alternative bills offered,
justification, Human Rights Watch said.
India Advantage – 1AC, Democracy Scenario
India Advantage - Democracy Scenario
Contention # ____ is India
The US can alter India’s surveillance practices by pressuring global internet companies
to demand privacy. But, this only works when US is less hypocritical.
Wong ‘13
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law – “ Surveillance and the Corrosion of
Internet Freedom” - July 30, 2013 - Published in: The Huffington Post and also available at the HRW website at this address:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/30/surveillance-and-corrosion-internet-freedom
Defenders of US and UK surveillance programs argue that collecting metadata is not as problematic as “listening to the content
of people’s phone calls” or reading emails. This is misleading. Technologists have long recognized that metadata can reveal incredibly sensitive information, especially if it is
collected at large scale over long periods of time, since digitized data can be easily combined and analyzed. The revelations have also exposed glaring
contradictions about the US Internet freedom agenda. This has emboldened the Chinese state media, for example, to cynically
denounce US hypocrisy, even as the Chinese government continues to censor the Internet, infringe on privacy rights, and curb anonymity online. Though there is hypocrisy on both sides,
the widening rift between US values and actions has real, unintended human rights consequences. For the human
rights movement, the Internet’s impact on rights crystalized in 2005 after we learned that Yahoo! uncritically turned user account
information over to the Chinese government, leading to a 10-year prison sentence for the journalist Shi Tao. The US government
forcefully objected to the Chinese government’s actions and urged the tech industry to act responsibly. In the end, that incident
catalyzed a set of new human rights standards that pushed some companies to improve safeguards for
user privacy in the face of government demands for data. US support was critical back then , but it
is hard to imagine the government having the same influence or credibility now. The mass surveillance scandal has damaged
the US government’s ability to press for better corporate practices as technology companies expand globally. It
will also be more difficult for companies to resist overbroad surveillance mandates if they are seen as
complicit in mass US infringements on privacy. Other governments will feel more entitled to ask for the
same cooperation that the US receives. We can also expect governments around the world to pressure companies to store user data locally or maintain a local
presence so that governments can more easily access it, as Brazil and Russia are now debating. While comparisons to the Chinese government are overstated, there is reason to
worry about the broader precedent the US has set. Just months before the NSA scandal broke, India began rolling out a centralized
system to monitor all phone and Internet communications in the country, without much clarity on
safeguards to protect rights. This development is chilling, considering the government’s problematic use of sedition and Internet laws in recent arrests. Over the last
few weeks, Turkish officials have condemned social media as a key tool for Gezi Park protesters. Twitter has drawn particular ire. Now the
government is preparing new regulations that would make it easier to get data from Internet companies and identify
individual users online. The Obama administration and US companies could have been in a strong position to push back
in India and Turkey. Instead, the US has provided these governments with a roadmap for conducting secret,
mass surveillance and conscripting the help of the private sector.
(Note to students: “conscripting” means compulsory enlistment of companies for state service.)
Independently, US bulk surveillance sets precedent that causes indiscriminate
surveillance in India.
Sinha ‘14
(et al; Authors Include: G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights
Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. Sinha holds a J.D. from New York University’s School of Law. This includes a
specialization as a Scholar from NYU’s Institute for International Law & Justice. The author also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
University of Toronto. Additional authors include - Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, US Program deputy director at Human
Rights Watch, who participated in some of the research interviews; and Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington Director at Human
Rights Watch, who also participated in one of the research interviews and provided key contacts. Human Rights Watch is an
independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the
cause of human rights for all. From the Report: WITH LIBERTY TO MONITOR ALL How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming
Journalism, Law and American Democracy – This report is based on extensive interviews with some 50 journalists covering
intelligence, national security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and
NPR. JULY 2014 – available at: http://www.hrw.org/node/127364)
The questions raised
by surveillance are complex. The government has an obligation to protect national security, and in some
cases, it is legitimate for government to restrict certain rights to that end. At the same time, international human rights and
constitutional law
set limits on the state’s authority to engage in activities like surveillance, which have the potential to
large-scale , often indiscriminate US approach to surveillance
carries enormous costs. It erodes global digital privacy and sets a terrible example for other countries
like India , Pakistan, Ethiopia, and others that are in the process of expanding their surveillance capabilities. It
also damages US credibility in advocating internationally for internet freedom, which the US has
undermine so many other rights. The current,
listed as an important foreign policy objective since at least 2010. As this report documents, US surveillance programs
are also doing damage to some of the values the United States claims to hold most dear. These include freedoms of
expression and association, press freedom, and the right to counsel, which are all protected by both international human rights law and the US
Constitution.
Absent surveillance reform that boosts privacy, India’s standing as a leader in
democracy will fall
Kaul ‘14
Mahima Kaul, heads the Cyber and Media Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi and is also the editor of its
monthly Cyber Monitor. The Initiative provides a vibrant platform for all stakeholders to discuss internet-related issues in India.
It also runs India's biggest internet policy platform: Cyfy: The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance, which
brings governments, business, academia and civil society participation from over 12 countries to New Delhi, every October. She
is Member, India Project Advisory Committee Member for Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and the European
Union's project "Advancing Internet Freedoms" which looks at internet freedom in India, Pakistan and Malaysia. The author
holds an M.A. Communication Policy, University of Westminster, and a B. A. Political Science & History, McGill University.
“Ensuring Privacy in a Regime of Surveillance” - From the publication: Cyfy - March 30, 2014 http://cyfy.org/ensuring-privacy-ina-regime-of-surveillance/
This paper examines the legality of surveillance structures in India today (including mass surveillance
programmes), and an expanding e-government project, and juxtaposes them against the missing privacy legal framework
that is needed in a liberal democracy such as India. It concludes that accountability mechanisms and laws
are needed to safeguard a society that is increasingly adapting to mass surveillance and the lack of privacy. In India, as is the case globally, there is
no doubt that a necessary argument must and will be made for being able to use the same technologies for policing and security as are used to perpetrate crimes
and acts of terror. With increasing Internet penetration in the country, India released its first Cyber Security Policy in 2013, flagging the biggest areas of concerns for
the country, including protecting critical information infrastructure and training more cyber security personnel. There is also growing concern in the country about
the security of mobile networks given the increasing number of cheap and unverified products entering the market. With the increasing frequency of terror attacks
on Indian soil there is a necessity for law enforcement officials to be able to investigate suspects with speed. At the same time, there is also a need and desire to use
digital technologies to make governance more effective and efficient for the citizenry. Therefore, there are two broad aspects that need to be examined. The first
relates to the surveillance mechanisms that exist via previous legislation, and new mass surveillance schemes that are being built by leveraging current technology.
The second concerns the mass (and secure) collection of citizen data to build governance tools for smoother delivery of public services. A recent NATO publication
flagged the problems with the first issue well: ‘State-sponsored
surveillance tends to be discounted as a “passive” or invisible
intrusion, but when conducted on a pervasive scale, it is an activity that can severely harm rights in several dimensions. First, the invasion
of privacy occurs at the point of intrusion and capture of material, not only at the point of access or use of information. The inability to direct one’s communications
to only those who are intended recipients is a serious loss of control over one’s identity and autonomy; everyone has experienced the sensation of literally “being a
different person” when in public, as opposed to among intimates. The uncertainty over which communications will be accessed when, and by whom, can also chill
the exercise of many rights: freedom of expression, access to information, association with others, religious belief and practice, and assembly, for example.’1 India
has a number of laws that offer a basis for the kinds of surveillance that exists in the country. Some of these are listed below: The Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 was
drafted to cover the use of telegraphy, phones, communication, radio, telex and fax in India. Section 5 of the act allows for legal wiretapping, and the guidelines
state that only the home secretary, either of the Government of India or of a state government, can give an order for lawful interception. The order for the
wiretapping is valid for a period of two months and should not exceed six. The Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1993 does not permit anyone to own wireless
transmission apparatus without a license, and in Section 7 gives power to any officer specially empowered by the central government to search any building, vessel
or place if there is reason to believe that there is any wireless telegraphy apparatus which has been used to commit an offence. The Indian Post Office Act of 1898,
Section 26, confers powers of interception of postal articles for the ‘public good’. Section 91 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, grants other powers to the
police; it states that: ‘Whenever any court or any officer in charge of a police station considers that the production of any document or other thing is necessary or
desirable for the purposes of any investigation, inquiry, trial or other proceeding under this code by or before such court or officer, such court may issue a
summons, or such officer a written order, to the person in whose possession or power such document or thing is believed to be, requiring him to attend and
produce it, or to produce it, at the time and place stated in the summons or order.’ The most recent and currently controversial legislation is the Information
Technology Act of 2000, amended in 2008 after the horrific Mumbai terror attack. Currently, the act contains some sections that require persons to reveal personal
information without much room for recourse. Section 44 lays out punishment and fines in case of failure to furnish any document, return or report to the controller
or the certifying authority. Section 66a lists out punishment upto three years with a fine for sending any communication through electronic means which could be
considered grossly offensive, menacing, false information for annoyance, inconvenience, hatred, ill-will and so on. Section 80 gives police and senior government
officials the power to enter any public place and search and arrest without warrant any person found therein who is reasonably suspected or having committed or
of committing or about to commit an offence under this act. However, in
2013, information about a mass surveillance scheme
being rolled out by the Government of India came to light. The Central Monitoring System ( CMS ) was launched in 2009, but
became public knowledge four years later. According to reports and interviews, the CMS will automate already existing data from other
interception and monitoring programmes, and will have a non-erasable command log of all provisioning activities. Simply put, ‘CMS
targets private information of individuals since it will enable real-time tracking of online activities, phone
calls, text messages and even social media conversations.’2 Further, CMS will not need permission from nodal officers of the Telecommunication
Service Providers (TSPs), and will provision requests from all law and enforcement agencies. It isn’t quite clear what the legal basis of CMS is, but it has been
suggested that it will operate under Section 52 (2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, which as we know allows for interception of (telegraphic) messages for various
reasons including ‘public emergency’ and ‘public safety’. It has not been created by, or answers to, Parliament. According to available information, the CMS can tap
information from various other monitoring and interception schemes across India. These include the Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems (CCTNS),
Lawful Intercept and Monitoring Program (LIM), Telephone Call Interception System (TCIS) and the Internet Monitoring System (IMS). The various
department/agencies that will have access to all this gathered data, through CMS, include the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Defence Intelligence Agency
(DIA), Department of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), Enforcement Directorate, Intelligence Bureau, Narcotics Control Bureau, National Intelligence Agency, Central
Board of Direct Taxes, Ministry of Home Affairs, the Military Agencies of Assam and Jammu & Kashmir, and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). As reported in
The Hindu, ‘The CMS will have unfettered access to the existing Lawful Interception Systems (LIS) currently installed in the network of every fixed and mobile
operator, ISP, and International Long Distance service provider. Mobile and long distance operators, who were required to ensure interception only after they were
in receipt of the “authorization”, will no longer be in the picture. With CMS, all authorizations remain secret within government departments. This means that
government agencies can access in real time any mobile and fixed line phone conversation, SMS, fax, website visit, social media usage, Internet search and email,
including partially written emails in draft folders, of “targeted numbers”. This is because, contrary to the impression that the CMS was replacing the existing
surveillance equipment deployed by mobile operators and ISPs, it would actually combine the strength of two, expanding the CMS’s forensic capabilities multiple
times.’3 At the same time, limited resources to store citizen data are becoming a thing of the past. New technologies like cloud computing have allowed space for
storage to increase exponentially. Therefore, as the capacity of the state to accumulate data increases, for example with MeghRaj, a National Cloud launched by the
Government of India in February 2014, it will be able to expand its e-government services. Therefore, the common refrain among privacy experts and other
stakeholders is that the crux of the matter lies in India passing an all-inclusive privacy law. This, they believe, would take into account not just protection for the
individual viz-a-viz civil and criminal laws in India, but ensure there are privacy safeguards in the ambitious projects that the government of India is undertaking with
regards to citizens private data. These would include the massive rollout of e-governance projects under the National e-Government Programme, which includes 31
mission mode projects that seek to, in the first phase, digitize all available citizen data (such as land records and health records) for respective ministries, and then,
in the second phase, build responsive and efficient government service delivery platforms. In some states this means accessing healthcare through smartcards,
while in others citizens can access and pay their electricity bills online. For example, Bhoomi, an e-government project in Karnataka under the revenue department
has already computerized over 20 million land records of over 6.7 million farmers. These digitized ministries will soon not function as islands. The NATGRID – the
National Intelligence Grid – is a system that will connect several government departments and data-bases to collect ‘comprehensive patterns of intelligence that can
be readily accessed by intelligence agencies.’ While this means a single point to access citizen data from a variety of sources, it also allows a single window to steal
this personal information. Then there is the controversial UID – Universal ID card – that the Government of India plans on issuing to every resident of India, after
collecting his or her biometric data. Simply put, the UID will become a citizen identifier. This means that the government will now be able to confirm that it is indeed
citizen ‘x’ who is making phone calls or sending emails of some interest to the authorities, by immediately identifying the person through biometric data available
with the state. Conversely, this also means that the state now has not just biometric data on its people, but it will be linked to all their communication data in an
easy-to-find manner. All this is happening without a comprehensive privacy law passed by the Indian Parliament. Article 21 of the Indian Constitution declares that
no citizen can be denied his life and liberty except by law, and the right to privacy has been interpreted to be part of that. Further, Article 43A of the IT Act directs
corporate bodies who ‘possess, deal or handle’ any ‘sensitive personal data’ to implement and maintain ‘reasonable’ security practices, failing which they would be
liable to compensate those affected by any negligence attributable to this failure. This must necessarily extend to the government as well. It is instructive to refer to
the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy, chaired by Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court.4 The report suggested a conceptual
framework for privacy regulation in India, touching upon five salient points. Technological neutrality and interoperability with international standards: the privacy
act should not refer to any specific technologies and should be generic enough to adapt to changes in society, helping build trust of global clients and users. Multidimensional privacy: the privacy act must include concerns related to a number of platforms including audio, video, personal identifiers, DNA, physical privacy and
so on. Horizontal applicability: any legislation must extend to the government and private sector. Conformity with privacy principles: this means that the data
controller should be accountable for the collection, processing and use of the data, therefore, guaranteeing privacy. Co-regulatory enforcement regime: establishing
the office of a privacy officer is also recommended as the primary authority for the enforcement of provisions in the act. However, it is also suggested that industry
specific self-regulation organizations also be established. The document also refers to court judgments from Indian courts that have helped shape some form of
privacy safeguards into the system. For example, in the 1997 case, PUCL vs Union of India, the court observed: ‘Telephone-tapping is a serious invasion of an
individual’s privacy. It is no doubt correct that every government, howsoever democratic, exercises some degree of sub rosaoperation as a part of its intelligence
outfit, but at the same time citizen’s right to privacy has to be protected from being abused by the authorities of the day.’ The court then placed restrictions on the
class of bureaucrats who could authorize such surveillance and also ordered the creation of a review committee, which would look at all surveillance measures
authorized under the act. The Shah Report lays out a road map of acts passed by the Indian Parliament that would need to be reviewed for balance between
individual privacy and national security. For example, when reviewing the UID scheme, the report points out that citizens should be informed if their data is
breached. They should also be informed about where and how their data will be used, and notified of any changes in UID’s privacy policy. These and other
suggestions are then placed in a broader regulatory framework that imagines a privacy commissioner for India. At the same time it is pertinent to remember that
there is no privacy law to safeguard citizens, the government itself does not have a legal framework for the kind of mass
surveillance India is moving towards. As pointed out by privacy experts: ‘The two laws covering interception are the Indian Telegraph Act of
while
1885 and the Information Technology Act of 2000, as amended in 2008, and they restrict lawful interception to time-limited and targeted interception. The targeted
interception both these laws allow ordinarily requires case-by-case authorization by either the home secretary or the secretary of the department of information
technology.’5 Where do these competing interests end up? There is no privacy law to shield citizens from upgraded mass surveillance technology and systems,
which themselves constantly need updated legal grounding. Ironically, just before the Snowden revelations, in his April 2013 report to the Human Rights Council of
the United Nations, Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue noted that he was ‘deeply concerned by actions taken by states against individuals communicating via the
Internet, frequently justified broadly as being necessary to protect national security or to combat terrorism. While such ends can be legitimate under international
human rights law, surveillance often takes place for political, rather than security reasons in an arbitrary and covert manner.’6 The report also highlights the fact
that national legal standards that impose little or no judicial oversight, or allow warrantless surveillance powers in the name of national security without any
particular demonstration of a genuine need or threat and that ‘every individual should also be able to ascertain which public authorities or private individuals or
bodies control or may control their files.’ Today, the concept of privacy is also undergoing a sea change due to the increasing ease with which citizens and customers
are handing over data to governments and businesses. This has been seen with information shared on social media – 93 million Indians are on Facebook – and was
seen in the almost unquestioned way in which e-governance projects were welcomed in the early days without any flags being raised about any data security or
privacy safeguards in the design. In his essay, ‘The Real Privacy Problem’,7 writer Evgeny Morozov wrestles with the evolving concept of ‘privacy’. He writes of a
privacy scholar named Spiros Simitis who grappled with data protection in the 1980s, and the three ideas he grappled with. The first was that with virtually every
employee, taxpayer, patient, bank customer, welfare recipient, or car driver handing over their personal data to private companies (and of course, government)
privacy was now everyone’s problem. The second was that CCTV and other recording technologies like smart cards were normalizing surveillance, weaving it into
our everyday life. The third was that by allowing everyday activities to be recorded, citizens were actually allowing ‘long-term strategies of manipulation intended to
mould and adjust individual conduct.’ Ultimately, while technology itself is always faulted for being the cause of privacy failures, the truth is that these gaps enter
the system through poor legislation. As discussed, when projects
are created without thinking of who could have unwarranted access to
the information could be used and abused outside the scope of what it is collected for, is when the problems truly begin.
Privacy safeguards, transparency about the intent and extent of a project (even when it was intended for surveillance) injects accountability
information, or how
into a system that remains static, despite the dynamic leaps in technology. This
is the best way forward should India want to
retain its spirit and label of being a liberal democracy.
If Indian democracy faltered, it would ruin the global democratic model
Gupta ‘13
Deepankar Gupta is an Indian sociologist. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Shiv Nadar University and director, Centre
for Public Affairs and Critical Theory. He was formerly Professor in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. For a brief period from 1993–1994, he was also associated with the Delhi School of Economics as
Professor in the Department of Sociology. “The importance of being Indian: Despite its warts, India’s democracy has fired global
imagination for over six decades” – The Times of India - Mar 30, 2013 - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/edit-page/Theimportance-of-being-Indian-Despite-its-warts-Indias-democracy-has-fired-global-imagination-for-over-sixdecades/articleshow/19281689.cms?
When India dared to birth democracy, many thought it was premature and that it would soon be history. Sixty-six
action-filled years
later, India's democracy is now a little too old to die young. What is more, the world
watches every move we make ; in fact, cannot have enough of us. This is not because India is efficient and
affluent - far from it. Rather, it is the way India goes wrong that fires global imagination. In any other country
of comparative vintage and want, ethnicity, once introduced, would have run wild. Indian politici-ans too have repeatedly played this dirty
trick, but our democracy has limited its appeal. The ultra corrupt may be ultra rich but because of
India's judiciary and the press they often wake up in jail to swill bad tea. Even army officers might face court martial if they mess with the
rules. Political bosses, and their cronies, are forever bending and twisting the law, but for all their power and pelf, they can never quite ignore it. Indian
politicians err time and again, but their overbites serve as object lessons because procedures hold. This not
only pulls us out of periodic crises with a just-back-from-the-dentist feel, but also tells the world, the advanced West included, how
easily democracy can be lost. If India had been another underperforming tin-pot dictatorship, it would
not have been the thought experiment it is today.
Take a look at the following: Corruption, assaults and poli-tical
conspiracies happen worldwide, but when they strike India they excite the mind like nothing else. For example, South Africa is a serious centre of gang rapes, or
"jack rolling" in the local lingo, but that does not cause an international stir. Yet the news of the December rape and murder in Delhi ricocheted within minutes
across the world. This was not because the protests were passionate, or because the police should have gone to a finishing school. What was being observed was
whether our Cons-titution would hold. Eventually it did; false cases were withdrawn and, boorish cops notwithstanding, no bullets were fired. Ethnic intolerance
again is an international affliction. When Putin tells Russian minorities to put up or shut up he gets a standing ovation at home and hardly any press abroad. In
Burma, Rohingya Muslims foxhole themselves in fear, but that does not make big news. With India it is different. If the western world was horrified with the 2002
Gujarat killings, it was because our free press and civil society, also gifts of democracy, brought things out in the open. Corruption in China is monumental. It
periodically fells bridges and schools, killing hundreds. Brazil has a homicide rate three times higher than India's and political violence in Russia is just too bad to be
true. The world may condemn all of this, and it does. However, it
is only when India goes wrong that tongues wag the mind just about
everywhere. That India can make this happen again and again is what makes us special. Had we been too
perfect, we would be Scandinavia, and nothing unique. On the other hand, had we been too violent, we would
have been just another Honduras, or maybe Zimbabwe. But because our stubborn demo-cracy has held to its frame, our leadership blunders light
up the sky. This is our real USP! India's imperfections make for its significance. In terms of economic underdevelopment and dodgy politicians, we have a fair
amount in common with many troubled nations, some of whom are our neighbours. But even in the darkest of times, we hardly expect military coups and mass
arrests, as they do. To their credit, millions of Chinese bloggers also noticed that Delhi's anti-rape agitations did not turn Vijay Chowk into a Tiananmen Square.
Advanced democracies too owe us a debt of gratitude. For years India has acted as a not-for-profit
laboratory so that they might remember the fundamentals of citizenship that made them rich and kept them that way. It is now
payback time and they should tell us how exactly they set up universal health and education that served their citizens so well. When democracies
reach out to each other this way, the world becomes a better place and friendships stay secure. This is
something that neither G-20 nor Brics meets can do as it is in the nature of the economic beast to cross wires and compete. For starters, South Africa is as unhappy
with Brazilian chickens flying in as it is with China's promiscuity with other African countries. The distant hope of a Brics Development Bank or of currency swaps will
not blow these fears out of the water.
Democracy checks inevitable extinction.
Diamond ‘95
(Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Coeditor of The Journal of Democracy , “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s”,
December, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the
stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common
Nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears
increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by
the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion
do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify
their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much
less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They
do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable,
open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally
responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets
cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones.
to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely
and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable
foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights,
The new Freedom Act won’t solve US image. Protections from the original version do
solve, even without protections for persons outside the US.
Ries ‘14
(Internally quoting Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program. Also internally quoting
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human
Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular
focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global
Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the
technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights
in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of
expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Also internally quoting Center for
Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger – Brian Ries is Mashable’s Real-Time News Editor. Prior to working at
Mashable, Brian was Social Media Editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, responsible for using Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
to cover revolutions, disasters, and presidential elections. During his time at The Daily Beast, he contributed to a team that won
two Webby Awards for “Best News Site”. “Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress Just Passed” - Mashable May 22, 2014 – http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)
As a result, many
of its initial supporters pulled their support. “We supported the original USA Freedom
act, even though it didn’t do much for non-US persons,” Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty
International's Security & Human Rights Program told Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the
original version as “a good step to end bulk collection. ” However, in its current version, it's
not even clear that this bill does that at all, Johnson said. He added that Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in the
bill — something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a law, you can count on the
administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more
positive view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a
statement. "While we share the concerns of many — including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough — without it we would
be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of Americans’ communications into law." The
Electronic Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." “ The
ban on bulk collection was deliberately
watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,” said Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. “We
withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of large-scale,
untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism.” And
Cynthia Wong , senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “This so-called reform bill won’t restore
the trust of Internet users in the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S.
credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.”
Unlike the current Act, the original bill does solve US image. This holds even if plan’s
about bulk collection – instead of every surveillance practices.
HRW ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before
joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of
their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom,
with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning
Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and
human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights
Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human
rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Human Rights
Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and
advance the cause of human rights for all. “US Senate: Salvage Surveillance Reform House Bill Flawed” - Human Rights Watch May 22, 2014 – http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvage-surveillance-reform)
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said today. The version of the USA Freedom
Act that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data collection. The
version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was designed to end bulk
collection of business records and phone metadata. The practice has been almost universally condemned by all but the US security
establishment. “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the US and around the
world, ” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch . “Until Congress
passes real reform , US credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade .”
The initial version of the bill aimed to prohibit bulk collection by the government of business records, including phone
metadata.
The bill only addressed one component of the surveillance programs revealed by the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden, that of US record collections.
Human Rights Watch.
However, it had broad support as a first step, including from
On May 7, a diluted version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence Committee
the version the House passed could leave the door wide open to
continued indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions of people without
approval on May 8. While better than alternative bills offered,
justification, Human Rights Watch said.