Sunday Night Speech - Kick a disad, Extend
a Disad. Extend Case Args
Background information
For tonight’s speech, you will be giving a Negative Block speech (2NC-1NR). It will be up to six minutes
long.
It will be similar to what Harris did during the in-lab debate yesterday.
Guidelines:
 You will extend ONE of the two disads
 You will kick the other disad
 You will extend some arguments against your opponent’s privacy advantage. You can chose
how many arguments to extend and how long you would like to spend on the case. We
would like to see you practice reading some extension ev in the 2NC-1NR when answering
the privacy advantage.
 Prior to the speech, YOU WILL BE ASKED TO TELL YOUR JUDGE HOW LONG YOU INTEND TO
SPEND ON EACH PAGE – example:
o “I plan to kick the politics disad in 15 seconds”
o “I plan to extend the terror disad for 3 mins”
o “I plan to extend answers to the privacy advantage for 2:45”
Blueprint for Flowing
Get one page for the Politics Disad – pre-flow the 1NC shell and 2AC answers (both below).
Get another page for the Terror Disad – pre-flow the 1NC shell and 2AC answers (both below).
Get a final page for the Privacy Advantage – pre-flow the 1AC version, the 1NC frontline (both below)…
We will verbally read the 2AC answers to the 1NC privacy frontline in-front of the lab. We will do this in
order to help you practice flowing. So, you will not be able to fully prep the speech until you hear the
2AC vs. the case.
Background info on the 1AC
Aff Plan
In this hypothetical, the Affirmative plan was from the packet materials. The plan text reads:
Bulk collection of domestic metadata by United States federal intelligence agencies – including
internet, email, and Skype data - should cease.
1AC - 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
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.
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,
1NC Section
1NC – Terror Disad
Uniqueness – Domestic surveillance successfully checks terror incidents now. Prefer
longitudinal studies.
Boot ‘13
Max Boot is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2004, he was named by the
World Affairs Councils of America as one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy."
In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at
the Christian Science Monitor. Boot holds a bachelor's degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California,
Berkeley and a master's degree in history from Yale University. Boot has served as an adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq and
Afghanistan. He is the published author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the
Present. From the article: “Stay calm and let the NSA carry on” - LA Times – June 9th http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/09/opinion/la-oe-boot-nsa-surveillance-20130609
After 9/11, there was a widespread expectation of many more terrorist attacks on the United States. So far that hasn't
happened. We haven't escaped entirely unscathed (see Boston Marathon, bombing of), but on the whole we have been a lot safer than most
security experts, including me, expected. In light of the current controversy over the National Security Agency's monitoring of telephone calls and
emails, it is worthwhile to ask: Why is that? It is certainly not due to any change of heart among our enemies.
Radical Islamists still want to kill American infidels. But the vast majority of the time, they fail. The Heritage Foundation estimated last year that
50 terror attacks on the American
ist
homeland had been foiled since 2001. Some, admittedly, failed through sheer incompetence on the part of the would-be terrorists. For instance, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American
jihadist, planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010 that started smoking before exploding, thereby alerting two New Yorkers who in turn called police, who were able to defuse it. But it would be naive to adduce all of our security
more attacks would have succeeded absent the ramped-up counter-terrorism efforts
undertaken by the U.S. intelligence community, the military and law enforcement. And a large element of the intelligence community's
success lies in its use of special intelligence — that is, communications intercepts. The CIA is notoriously deficient in human intelligence — infiltrating spies into terrorist
success to pure serendipity. Surely
organizations is hard to do, especially when we have so few spooks who speak Urdu, Arabic, Persian and other relevant languages. But the NSA is the best in the world at intercepting communications.
That is the
most important technical advantage we have in the battle against fanatical foes who will not
hesitate to sacrifice their lives to take ours. Which brings us to the current kerfuffle over two NSA monitoring programs that
have been exposed by the Guardian and the Washington Post. One program apparently collects metadata on all telephone calls made in the United States. Another program provides access
to all the emails, videos and other data found on the servers of major Internet firms such as Google, Apple and
Microsoft. At first blush these intelligence-gathering activities raise the specter of Big Brother snooping on ordinary American
citizens who might be cheating on their spouses or bad-mouthing the president. In fact, there are considerable safeguards built into both programs
to ensure that doesn't happen. The phone-monitoring program does not allow the NSA to listen in on
conversations without a court order. All that it can do is to collect information on the time, date and
destination of phone calls. It should go without saying that it would be pretty useful to know if someone in the U.S. is calling a number in Pakistan or Yemen that is used by a terrorist organizer. As for
the Internet-monitoring program, reportedly known as PRISM, it is apparently limited to "non-U.S. persons" who are abroad and thereby enjoy no constitutional protections. These are hardly rogue operations. Both programs were
initiated by President George W. Bush and continued by President Obama with the full knowledge and support of Congress and continuing oversight from the federal judiciary. That's why the leaders of both the House and Senate
intelligence committees, Republicans and Democrats alike, have come to the defense of these activities.
It's possible that, like all government programs, these could be
abused — see, for example, the IRS making life tough on tea partiers. But there is no evidence of abuse so far and plenty of evidence —
in the lack of successful terrorist attacks — that these programs have been effective in disrupting terrorist plots. Granted there is something inherently
creepy about Uncle Sam scooping up so much information about us. But Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Citibank and other companies know at least as much about us, because they use very similar data-mining programs to
track our online movements. They gather that information in order to sell us products, and no one seems to be overly alarmed. The NSA is gathering that information to keep us safe from terrorist attackers. Yet somehow its actions
have become a "scandal," to use a term now loosely being tossed around. The real scandal here is that the Guardian and Washington Post are compromising our national security by telling our enemies about our intelligencegathering capabilities. Their news stories reveal, for example, that only nine Internet companies share information with the NSA. This is a virtual invitation to terrorists to use other Internet outlets for searches, email, apps and all
to stop or scale back the NSA's special intelligence efforts would amount to
unilateral disarmament in a war against terrorism that is far from over.
the rest. No intelligence effort can ever keep us 100% safe, but
(Note to students: a “longitudinal study” is research carried out over an extended period of time. In this
case, several years.)
Link – curtailing surveillance boosts terror risks. That risk’s serious and
underestimated.
Lewis ‘14
James Andrew Lewis is a senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, D.C., where he writes on technology, security, and the international economy. Before
joining CSIS, he worked at the US Departments of State and Commerce as a Foreign Service officer and as a member of the
Senior Executive Service. His diplomatic experience included negotiations on military basing in Asia, the Cambodia peace
process, and the five-power talks on arms transfer restraint. Lewis received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
“Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES - STRATEGIC
TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAM – December - http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate
Americans are reluctant to accept terrorism is part of their daily lives, but attacks have been planned or
attempted against American targets (usually airliners or urban areas) almost every year since 9/11. Europe faces even
greater risk, given the thousands of European Union citizens who will return hardened and radicalized from fighting in Syria and Iraq. The threat of attack
is easy to exaggerate, but that does not mean it is nonexistent. Australia’s then-attorney general said in August 2013 that
communications surveillance had stopped four “mass casualty events” since 2008. The constant planning and preparation for attack by terrorist groups is not
apparent to the public. The
dilemma in assessing risk is that it is discontinuous. There can be long periods with
no noticeable activity, only to have the apparent calm explode. The debate over how to reform
surveillance has discounted this risk. Communications surveillance is an essential law
enforcement and intelligence tool. There is no replacement for it. Some suggestions for alternative
communications
approaches to surveillance, such as the idea that the National Security Agency (NSA) only track known or suspected terrorists,
reflect wishful thinking, as it is the unknown terrorist who will inflict the greatest harm.
Vigilance link - Strong intel gathering’s key to discourages initiation of BW attacks.
Pittenger ‘14
US Rep. Robert Pittenger, chair of Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, “Bipartisan bill on NSA data collection protects both
privacy and national security” - Washington Examiner, 6/9/14, http://washingtonexaminer.com/rep.-robert-pittengerbipartisan-bill-on-nsa-data-collection-protects-both-privacy-and-nationalsecurity/article/2549456?custom_click=rss&utm_campaign=Weekly+Standard+Story+Box&utm_source=weeklystandard.com&
utm_medium=referral
This February, I took
that question to a meeting of European Ambassadors at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe. During the conference, I asked three questions: 1. What is the current worldwide terrorist threat? 2. What is America’s role in addressing and mitigating this
threat? 3. What
role does intelligence data collection play in this process, given the multiple platforms for attack
including physical assets, cyber, chemical, biological , nuclear and the electric grid? Each ambassador
acknowledged the threat was greater today than before 9/11, with al Qaeda and other extreme Islamist terrorists
stronger, more sophisticated, and having a dozen or more training camps throughout the Middle East and
Africa. As to the role of the United States, they felt our efforts were primary and essential for peace and
security around the world. Regarding the intelligence-gathering, their consensus was, “We want privacy,
but we must have your intelligence .” As a European foreign minister stated to me, “Without U.S. intelligence, we are blind.” We
cannot yield to those loud but misguided voices who view the world as void of the deadly and destructive
intentions of unrelenting terrorists. The number of terrorism-related deaths worldwide doubled between 2012 and
2013, jumping from 10,000 to 20,000 in just one year. Now is not the time to stand down. Those who embrace an altruistic
worldview should remember that vigilance and strength have deterred our enemies in the past.
That same commitment is required today to defeat those who seek to destroy us and our way of life. We must
make careful, prudent use of all available technology to counter their sophisticated operations if we are to maintain our
freedom and liberties.
Bioterror attacks cause extinction
Mhyrvold ‘13
Nathan, Began college at age 14, BS and Masters from UCLA, Masters and PhD, Princeton “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to
Action,” Working Draft, The Lawfare Research Paper Series Research paper NO . 2 – 2013
As horrible as this would be, such a pandemic is by no means the worst attack one can imagine, for several reasons. First, most
of the classic
bioweapons are based on 1960s and 1970s technology because the 1972 treaty halted bioweapons
development efforts in the United States and most other Western countries. Second, the Russians, although solidly
committed to biological weapons long after the treaty deadline, were never on the cutting edge of biological research. Third and most important, the
science
and technology of molecular biology have made enormous advances, utterly transforming the field in the last
few decades. High school biology students routinely perform molecular-biology manipulations that would
have been impossible even for the best superpower-funded program back in the heyday of biologicalweapons research. The biowarfare methods of the 1960s and 1970s are now as antiquated as the
lumbering mainframe computers of that era. Tomorrow’s terrorists will have vastly more deadly bugs to
choose from. Consider this sobering development: in 2001, Australian researchers working on mousepox, a nonlethal virus that infects mice (as chickenpox
does in humans), accidentally discovered that a simple genetic modification transformed the virus.10, 11 Instead of producing mild symptoms, the new virus killed
60% of even those mice already immune to the naturally occurring strains of mousepox. The new virus, moreover, was unaffected by any existing vaccine or
antiviral drug. A team of researchers at Saint Louis University led by Mark Buller picked up on that work and, by late 2003, found a way to improve on it: Buller’s
variation on mousepox was 100% lethal, although his team of investigators also devised combination vaccine and antiviral therapies that
were partially effective in protecting animals from the engineered strain.12, 13 Another saving grace is that the genetically altered virus is no
longer contagious. Of course, it is quite possible that future tinkering with the virus will change that
property, too. Strong reasons exist to believe that the genetic modifications Buller made to mousepox would work
for other poxviruses and possibly for other classes of viruses as well. Might the same techniques allow chickenpox or another poxvirus
that infects humans to
be turned into a 100% lethal bioweapon, perhaps one that is resistant to any known antiviral therapy?
I’ve asked this question of experts many times, and no one has yet replied that such a manipulation
couldn’t be done. This case is just one example. Many more are pouring out of scientific journals and conferences every
year. Just last year, the journal Nature published a controversial study done at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in which virologists enumerated the changes
one would need to make to a highly lethal strain of bird flu to make it easily transmitted from one mammal to another.14 Biotechnology
is advancing
so rapidly that it is hard to keep track of all the new potential threats . Nor is it clear that anyone is even trying. In addition to
lethality and drug resistance, many other parameters can be played with, given that the infectious power of an
epidemic depends on many properties, including the length of the latency period during which a person is
contagious but asymptomatic. Delaying the onset of serious symptoms allows each new case to spread to more
people and thus makes the virus harder to stop. This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated by HIV , which is very
difficult to transmit compared with smallpox and many other viruses. Intimate contact is needed, and even then, the infection rate is low. The
balancing
factor is that HIV can take years to progress to AIDS , which can then take many more years to kill the
victim. What makes HIV so dangerous is that infected people have lots of opportunities to infect others. This property has allowed HIV to claim more than 30
million lives so far, and approximately 34 million people are now living with this virus and facing a highly uncertain future.15 A
virus genetically
engineered to infect its host quickly, to generate symptoms slowly —say, only after weeks or months—and to spread easily
vastly more devastating than HIV . It could silently
penetrate the population to unleash its deadly effects suddenly . This type of epidemic would be
through the air or by casual contact would be
almost impossible to combat because most of the infections would occur before the epidemic became obvious.
A technologically sophisticated terrorist group could develop such a virus and kill a large part of humanity with
it. Indeed, terrorists may not have to develop it themselves: some scientist may do so first and publish the details. Given the
rate at which biologists are making discoveries about viruses and the immune system, at some point in the
near future, someone may create
artificial pathogens that could drive the human race to
extinction . Indeed, a detailed species-elimination plan of this nature was openly proposed in a scientific
journal. The ostensible purpose of that particular research was to suggest a way to extirpate the malaria mosquito, but similar
techniques could be directed toward humans.16 When I’ve talked to molecular biologists about this method, they are quick to point out that it
is slow and easily detectable and could be fought with biotech remedies. If you challenge them to come up with improvements to the suggested attack plan,
however, they have plenty of ideas. Modern
biotechnology will soon be capable, if it is not already, of
bringing about
the demise of the human race — or at least of killing a sufficient number of people to end high-tech
civilization and set humanity back 1,000 years or more. That terrorist groups could achieve this level of technological sophistication
may seem far-fetched, but keep in mind that it takes only a handful of individuals to accomplish these tasks. Never has lethal power of this potency been accessible
to so few, so easily. Even more dramatically than nuclear proliferation, modern biological science has frighteningly undermined the correlation between the lethality
of a weapon and its cost, a fundamentally stabilizing mechanism throughout history. Access to extremely lethal agents—lethal enough to exterminate Homo
sapiens—will be available to anybody with a solid background in biology, terrorists included.
The Disad turns the case via rollback and new civil liberty violations. Status Quo
detection is key.
Clarke ‘13
(et al; This is the Final Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications
Technologies. President Obama ordered a blue-ribbon task force to review domestic surveillance. This report releases the
findings of that group. The report was headed by five experts – including Richard Alan Clarke, who is the former National
Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism for the United States. Other expert contributors
include Michael Joseph Morell, who was the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and served as acting director
twice in 2011 and from 2012 to 2013 and Cass Robert Sunstein, who was the Administrator of the White House Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration and is currently a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
“LIBERTY AND SECURITY IN A CHANGING WORLD” – December 12th, 2013 – Easily obtained via a google search.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=https%3A%2F
2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fdocs%2F2013-12
12_rg_final_report.pdf&ei=Db0yVdDjKIKdNtTXgZgE&usg=AFQjCNH0S_Fo9dckL9bRarVpi4M6pq6MQ&bvm=bv.91071109,d.eXY)
The September 11 attacks were a vivid demonstration of the need for detailed information about the
activities of potential terrorists. This was so for several reasons. First, some information, which could have been useful, was
not collected and other information, which could have helped to prevent the attacks, was not shared among departments. Second, the scale of damage that 21st-century terrorists can inflict is far greater than
anything that their predecessors could have imagined. We are no longer dealing with threats from firearms and conventional explosives, but with the
possibility of
w
eapons of
m d
ass
estruction,
including nuclear devices and biological and chemical agents. The damage that such attacks could inflict on the nation,
measured in terms of loss of life, economic and social disruption, and the consequent sacrifice of civil liberties, is extraordinary. The events of September 11 brought this home with crystal clarity. Third, 21st-century terrorists
operate within a global communications network that enables them both to hide their existence from outsiders and to communicate with one another across continents at the speed of light. Effective safeguards against terrorist
attacks require the technological capacity to ferret out such communications in an international communications grid. Fourth, many of the international terrorists that the United States and other nations confront today cannot
realistically be deterred by the fear of punishment. The conventional means of preventing criminal conduct—the fear of capture and subsequent punishment—has relatively little role to play in combating some contemporary
terrorists. Unlike the situation during the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union was deterred from launching a nuclear strike against the United States in part by its fear of a retaliatory counterattack, the terrorist enemy in the 21stcentury is not a nation state against which the United States and its allies can retaliate with the same effectiveness. In such circumstances, detection in advance is essential in any effort to “provide for the common defence.” Fifth,
the threat of massive terrorist attacks involving nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons can generate a chilling and destructive environment of fear and anxiety among our nation’s citizens.
If Americans came
to believe that we are infiltrated by enemies we cannot identify and who have the power to bring death, destruction, and chaos to our lives on a massive scale, and that preventing
such attacks is beyond the capacity of our government , the quality of national life would be
greatly imperiled. Indeed, if a similar or even more devastating attack were to occur in the future, there would almost
surely be an impulse to increase the use of surveillance technology to prevent further strikes, despite the potentially
corrosive effects on individual freedom and self-governance.
1NC –Politics shell
Obama’s all in on TPP, but PC key to bring deal itself across congressional finish line –
it’s the mother of all trade fights because its perceived as setting the new framework
for ALL FUTURE TRADE DEALS
Vinik, 15 -- Danny Vinik is a staff writer at The New Republic, New Republic, 4/8/15,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121476/trans-pacific-partnership-foundation-all-future-tradedeals
A theme runs through these four disagreements: They're overrated. The actual effects of the TPP are exaggerated. Labor
unions warn
about mass job losses and the Obama Administration touts the significant labor provisions in the law, but
the academic evidence largely points to small job losses or gains. The left demands a chapter on currency manipulation
while knowing that the 11 other TPP countries will never accept one without significant restrictions on
the Federal Reserve. Even for Washington, a town where every policy decisions becomes
a massive lobbying free-for-all, the TPP seems overblown. Until, that is, you consider what’s
really at stake with the TPP . "I think its larger importance is trying to establish a new
framework under which global trade deals will be done, ” said Hanson. “Now that the [World
Trade Organization] seems to be pretty much ineffective as a form for negotiating new trade deals, we
need a new rubric." Looked at through that lens, it makes sense why both the unions and the
Obama administration have spent so much political capital on the TPP. If the TPP sets the
framework for future trade deals , it could be a long time before unions have the
leverage again to push for a crackdown on currency manipulation. They understand, as the
Obama Administration and many interest groups do , what much of the media doesn't: The TPP isn't
just a 12-country trade deal. It's much bigger than that. When I shared this theory with Jared Bernstein, he
began to rethink his position. “When you put it that way, I kind of feel myself being pulled back into the initial title of my post,” he said. “In
other words, if this is the last big trade deal , then perhaps the absence of a currency chapter is a
bigger deal than I thought.” If the TPP could determine the course of global trade for decades
to come , then each interest group has a huge incentive to fight for every last policy
concession . It explains why labor and business groups are putting huge amounts of
money into this fight. That money and the accompanying rhetoric has only made it
harder for policy journalists to cut through these complex debates. It may take decades before we really
understand the stakes of the TPP.
Freedom act was delicate balancing act – ANY additional changes drain PC and
guarantee intense opposition – congressional leadership, GOP, law enforcement
Gross, 6/5 – Grant, Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for the IDG News Service, and is based
in Washington, D.C., IDG News Service, PC World, 6/5/15, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2932337/dont-expect-major-changes-to-nsasurveillance-from-congress.html
What’s in the USA Freedom Act? Some critics have blasted the USA Freedom Act as fake reform, while supporters have called it the biggest
overhaul of U.S. surveillance program in decades. Many civil liberties and privacy groups have come down in the middle of those two views,
calling it modest reform of the counterterrorism Patriot Act. The law aims to end the NSA’s decade-plus practice of collecting U.S. telephone
records in bulk, while allowing the agency to search those records in a more targeted manner. The law also moves the phone records database
from the NSA to telecom carriers, and requires the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to consult with tech and privacy experts
when ruling on major new data collection requests from the NSA. It also requires all significant FISC orders from the last 12 years to be released
to the public. The new law limits bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records by requiring the FBI, the agency that applies for data
collection, to use a “specific selection term” when asking the surveillance court to authorize records searches. The law prohibits the FBI and
NSA from using a “broad geographic region,” including a city, county, state or zip code, as a search term, but it doesn’t otherwise define
“specific search term.” That’s a problem, according to critics. The surveillance court could allow, for example, “AT&T” as a specific search term
and give the NSA the authority to collect all of the carrier’s customer records. Such a ruling from FISC would seem to run counter to
congressional intent, but this is the same court that defined all U.S. phone records as “relevant” to a counterterrorism investigation under the
old version of the Patriot Act’s Section 215. The USA Freedom
Act also does nothing to limit the NSA’s surveillance of overseas
limiting that NSA program, called Prism in 2013
Internet traffic, including the content of emails and IP voice calls. Significantly
Snowden leaks, will
be a difficult task in Congress , with many lawmakers unconcerned
about the
privacy rights of people who don’t vote in U.S. elections. Still, the section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes those NSA
foreign surveillance programs sunsets in 2017, and that deadline will force Congress to look at FISA, although lawmakers may wait until the last
minute, as they did with the expiring sections of the Patriot Act covered in the USA Freedom Act. The House Judiciary Committee will continue
its oversight of U.S. surveillance programs, and the committee will address FISA before its provisions expire, an aide to the committee said.
Republican leaders opposed to more changes Supporters of new reforms will have to bypass
congressional leadership , however. Senate Republican leaders attempted to derail even the USA
Freedom Act and refused to allow amendments that would require further changes at the
NSA. In the House, Republican leaders threatened to kill the USA Freedom Act if the Judiciary
Committee amended the bill to address other surveillance programs. Still, many House members, both Republicans
and Democrats, have pushed for new surveillance limits, with lawmakers adding an amendment to end so-called backdoor government
searches of domestic communications to a large appropriations bill this week. Obama’s administration has threatened to veto the
appropriations bill for several unrelated reasons, but several House members have pledged to push hard to prohibit the FBI and CIA from
searching the content of reportedly tens of thousands of U.S. communications swept up in an NSA surveillance program targeting overseas
terrorism suspects. Closing that surveillance backdoor is a top priority for civil liberties groups, said Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel
with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington, D.C., legislative office. “We’ve had this statute that masquerades as affecting only people
abroad, but the reality is that it sweeps up large numbers of U.S. persons,” she said. Other changes possible Advocates and lawmakers will also
push for a handful of other surveillance reforms in the coming months. The
changes most likely to pass make limited
changes to surveillance programs, however. While not tied to NSA surveillance, lawmakers will press for changes to the 29-year-old
Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a wiretap law that gives law enforcement agencies warrantless access to emails and other
communications stored in the cloud for more than six months. A House version of ECPA reform counts more than half the body as co-sponsors.
Still, tech companies and civil liberties groups have been pushing since 2010 to have those communications protected by warrants, but
law
enforcement agencies and some Republican lawmakers have successfully opposed the changes .
Another bill that may gain traction in coming months is the Judicial Redress Act, a bill that would allow citizens of some countries to file lawsuits
under the U.S. Privacy Act if government agencies misuse their records. “The Privacy Act offers limited protections, even to Americans, but
passage of this bill would be an important first step to addressing especially European concerns that US privacy reforms won’t help them,” said
Berin Szoka, president of free market think tank TechFreedom. Public pressure, along with potentially new leaks, will be the key to driving any
more surveillance changes, advocates said. “The public will for mass surveillance laws was made very clear recently, and that’s partly why we
saw much of Congress flock to whatever could be called surveillance reform,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, a founder of digital rights group Fight for the
Future. “No one is fooled by USA
Freedom—it’s a weak piece of legislation that uses exceptions in legislative
language to codify the NSA’s practice of surveilling most people.” Congress has much work left to do, Cheng said by
email. “After the recent showdown and public outcry, USA Freedom is at best, seen as a beginning of surveillance reform, not the end,” she
said.
Impact is multiple scenarios for conflict throughout asia and east asia – impact D and
thumpers don’t apply – TPP is necessary AND sufficient condition, accesses every
structural check – 11 reasons
-
Pivot
Institutions and Rules that moderate and constrain Territorial disputes and escalation
US regional leadership
Perception and credibility of US regional commitment
Perception and Regional credibility of US-Japan alliance effectiveness
Economy
Trade
Economic interdependence
Peaceful china rise and transition
Rule of law
Outweighs US military shift
Economist 14. [11-15-14 --- http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21631797-americaneeds-push-free-trade-pact-pacific-more-vigorously-americas-big-bet]
Mr Froman, the trade tsar, puts
TPP into a dauntingly ambitious context. He calls it central to America’s pivot
to Asia , a chance to show the country’s commitment to creating institutions that
moderate territorial disputes , and an opportunity to show emerging economies (meaning China)
what economic rules the global economy should follow . “At a time when there is uncertainty
about the direction of the global trading system , TPP can play a central role in setting
rules of the road for a critical region in flux,” he says. The flipside of this is that failure becomes
an even bigger risk , which Mr Froman acknowledges. Perhaps in an effort to prod a somnolent, introspective Congress into action,
he makes the dramatic claim that failure could mean America “would forfeit its seat at the centre of the
global economy”. Many pundits in Washington agree that American leadership in Asia is on the
table . Michael Green of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies says TPP failure would “ undermine the
impression of the United States as a Pacific power and look like an abdication of
leadership ”. It would also take pressure off Japan and China to reform their economies. Mireya Solís, a
Japan expert at the Brookings Institution, says it would be a “ devastating blow to the United States’
credibility ”. Those views are echoed in East Asia. Mr Tay in Singapore says TPP failure would be a
disaster: “If the domestic issues of these two countries cannot be resolved, there is no sense that
the US-Japan alliance can provide any kind of steerage for the region.” Deborah Elms, head of
the Singapore-based Asian Trade Centre, suggests that so far the American pivot has manifested itself mainly as an extra 1,000 marines
Without TPP, all the pivot amounts to is a few extra boots on the
ground in Darwin,” she says. Even members of America’s armed forces are worried . As one senior serving
officer in the Pacific puts it, “the TPP unites countries that are committed to a trade-based
future, transparency and the rule of law. It is the model that the United States and Europe
have advanced versus that advanced by China. It is an opportunity to move the arc of Chinese
development, or identify it as a non-participant.”
stationed in Australia. “
Nuclear war
Landay 00 (Jonathan S., National Security and Intelligence Correspondent, Knight Ridder/Tribune
News Service, 3-10, Lexis)
Few if any experts think China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea, or India and Pakistan are spoiling to fight. But
even a minor miscalculation by any of them could destabilize Asia, jolt the global economy and even start
a nuclear war . India, Pakistan and China all have nuclear weapons, and North Korea may have a few, too. Asia
lacks the kinds of organizations, negotiations and diplomatic relationships that helped keep an uneasy peace for five
decades in Cold War Europe. “Nowhere else on Earth are the stakes as high and relationships so
fragile ,” said Bates
Gill, director of northeast Asian policy studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “We see the
great power interest overlaid with lingering confrontations with no institutionalized
security mechanism in place. There are elements for potential disaster.” In an effort to cool the region’s tempers, President
convergence of
Clinton, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger all will hopscotch Asia’s capitals this month. For
America, the stakes could hardly be higher. There are 100,000 U.S. troops in Asia committed to defending Taiwan, Japan
and South Korea, and the
U nited S tates would instantly become embroiled if Beijing moved against Taiwan or
North Korea attacked South Korea. While Washington has no defense commitments to either India or Pakistan, a conflict between the
two could end the global taboo against using nuclear weapons and demolish the already shaky international
nonproliferation regime. In addition, globalization has made a stable Asia, with its massive markets, cheap labor,
exports and resources, indispensable to the U.S. economy. Numerous U.S. firms and millions of American jobs
depend on trade with Asia that totaled $600 billion last year, according to the Commerce Department.
1NC Case Frontline vs. the Privacy advantage
1. Counter-bias – their epistemology’s more flawed. Excess fear of surveillance
means Aff scholarship’s MORE of an exaggeration than ours.
McDonough ‘15
(Shannon McDonough – Instructor in Social Sciences at Allen University. The author holds a B.A. in Sociology from Miami
University, Ohio and an M.A. Sociology from The University of South Carolina. This article is co-authored by Mathieu Deflem – a
Professor at the University of South Carolina in the Department of Sociology. His research areas include law, policing, terrorism,
popular culture, and sociological theory. “The Fear of Counterterrorism: Surveillance and Civil Liberties Since 9/11” – From the
Journal: Society - February 2015, Volume 52, Issue 1, pp 70-79 – obtained via the Springer database collection).
Civil liberties organizations as well as a number of academic scholars have routinely criticized post-9/11
counterterrorism initiatives as unconstitutional and major threats to civil liberties and privacy. Harmonizing with the claims from civil
liberties groups are contributions in the popular and scholarly discourse on surveillance and counterterrorism that lament the
purported negative impact of government al policies and related surveillance and intelligence activities on personal rights
and liberties. The revelations by former security contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013 concerning alleged spying practices by
the National Security Agency (NSA) greatly reinvigorated these debates. We investigate here if there is any counterevidence to the alarmist statements that are often made in the popular and scholarly discourse on civil
liberties and surveillance. Against the background of academic scholarship on surveillance and criticisms from civil liberty and privacy groups,
we rely on archival sources, government documents, and media reports to examine a variety of claims made
concerning civil liberties violations by security agencies. Our analysis reveals that at least a sizeable number of
claims raised against counterterrorism practices are without objective foundation in terms of
any actual violations. As an explanation for this marked discrepancy, we suggest that, as various survey data show, there is a
relatively distinct , albeit it uneven and not entirely stable, culture of privacy and civil liberties in contemporary
American society which independently contributes to a fear of counterterror ism, rather than of
terrorism . These specific cultural sensitivities bring about an increase in the amount of civil rights allegations
independent of actual violations thereof.
2. Rights can’t be absolute – as they sometimes conflict with other “rights”. If
some rights were absolute, privacy wouldn’t be one of them.
Himma ‘7
Kenneth - Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. The author holds JD and PhD and was formerly a
Lecturer at the University of Washington in Department of Philosophy, the Information School, and the Law School. “Privacy vs.
Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right”. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 859, 2007. Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=994458
It is perhaps worth noting that absolutist
conceptions are not limited to privacy rights. Some people take the position that the moral
right to life is absolute; on an absolutist conception of the right to life, it is never justified to take the life of a person—and this rules out not only the death penalty,
but the use of deadly force in defense of the lives of innocent others from a culpable attack. Many people take an absolutist view with respect to something they
call a “right to information,” holding that there should be no restrictions of any kind, including legal protection of intellectual property rights, on the free flow of
information. As this view has most famously, and idiosyncratically, been put by John Perry Barlow, “information wants to be free.”5 When it comes to rights,
absolutist talk among theorists, lawyers, and ordinary folk is not at all uncommon these days. Indeed,
nature, absolute and hence that it is a conceptual truth that
some people seem to think that rights are, by
all rights are absolute. Consider the following quote from Patrick Murphy, a Democrat
who ran for Congress in 2006: I am also very concerned about the erosion of constitutional rights and civil liberties over the past few years. I taught Constitutional
Law at West Point, and it makes me so angry to see our elected leaders in Washington—specifically the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress—
pushing policies that erode the foundation of this country. The equal protection clause of the constitution is absolute. The right to privacy is absolute. The right to
assemble is absolute. Yet time and time again, the administration has supported, and the Congressional leadership has supported nominees and policies that do not
follow the constitution. With my background, I can add to this debate. And I’m not afraid to take a stand for what’s right.6 As Murphy explains it, every right in the
Constitution is absolute and hence utterly without exception. As there is nothing in the Constitution or any legal instrument or norm that suggests or entails that
constitutional rights are absolute, it is reasonable to think that Murphy believes, as many people do, that it is part of the very meaning of having a right that it can
never justifiably be infringed. This is why debates about political issues are frequently framed in terms of whether there is some right that protects the relevant
interests; rights provide the strongest level of moral or legal protection of the relevant interests. It is certainly true that rights provide a higher level of protection
than any other considerations that are morally relevant, but it is not because rights are, by nature, absolute. Rights provide robust protection of the relevant
interests because it is a conceptual truth that the infringement of any right cannot be justified by an appeal of the desirable consequences of doing so. No matter
how many people it might make happy, it would be wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person because her right to life takes precedence over the interests of
other people in their own happiness. As Ronald Dworkin famously puts this conceptual point, rights trump consequences.7 But this conceptual truth about rights
does not imply rights are, by nature, absolute. The claim that rights trump consequences implies only that some stronger consideration than the desirable
there is some such consideration that
would justify infringing some rights. One such candidate, of course, is the existence of other more important
rights. It is commonly thought that at least some rights are commensurable and can be ranked in a hierarchy that expresses the relative weight each right in the
hierarchy has with respect to other rights. For example, one might think that the right to life is at the top of the hierarchy of
commensurable rights, and that property rights are in this hierarchy also. This would explain the common intuition that one may
use deadly force when necessary to defend innocent lives from culpable attack, but not when necessary only to defend
consequences of infringing a right can justify doing so. This latter claim leaves open the possibility that
property rights from violation. If, as seems clear from this example, it is possible for two rights to conflict and for one to outweigh the other, it follows that rights are
not, by nature, absolute. What may explain the mistaken view that rights are necessarily absolute is confusion about the relationship of various terms that flesh out
the status, origin, and contours of moral rights and obligations. For example, rights
are frequently described as “inviolable,” meaning that
a right can never be justifiably violated. This, of course, is a conceptual truth; to say that a right is violated is to say that its infringement is without justification.
But this does not imply that rights can never be justifiably infringed; a person’s right to life can be
justifiably infringed if he (they) culpably shoots at an innocent person and there is no other way to save that
person’s life except through use of lethal force in defense of his life. Rights are also thought, by nature, to be supreme, relative to some
system of norms—moral, social, or legal—in the sense that they cannot be defeated by other kinds of protections; moral rights are thought to be supreme over all
other kinds of considerations, including social and legal rights. But
this does not imply that rights are absolute because it says
nothing about the relative importance of one right to another; it simply asserts that, by nature, rights
outweigh all other relevant considerations. Supremacy and inviolability are part of the very nature of a right, but these properties do not entail
that rights are, by nature, absolute. Of course, the negation of the claim that all rights are absolute does not imply that no rights are absolute. The possibility of
conflicts between any two rights does not preclude there being one right that wins every conflict because it is absolute, and hence, without exception. A moral
pacifist, for example, takes this view of the moral right to life and holds that intentional killing of a human being is always wrong. Moreover, if there are two rights
that do not come into conflict with each other and win in conflicts with all other rights, those two rights might be absolute. One might think, for example, that the
rights to privacy and life can never conflict and that both are absolute. I
am somewhat skeptical that any right is absolute in this strong sense,
but if there are any, it will not be privacy.
As we will see in more detail, privacy is commensurable with other rights, like the right to
life, which figures into the right to security. It seems clear that privacy rights and the right to life can come into conflict. For
example, a psychologist
might be justified in protecting a patient’s privacy interests even though doing so includes information
that might prevent that person from committing a minor property crime of some kind, but she would not be
justified in protecting that information if the psychologist knows its disclosure is necessary to prevent a
murder. In any event, I will discuss these kinds of examples in more detail below.
3. (analytic) - The Aff uses people as a means to an end, too. They just flip the
script. Victims from the disad shouldn’t be a “means” to the Aff’s pro-privacy
“end”.
4. Security interests are competing rights claims that impact serous moral
questions.
Himma ‘7
Kenneth - Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. The author holds JD and PhD and was formerly a
Lecturer at the University of Washington in Department of Philosophy, the Information School, and the Law School. “Privacy vs.
Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right”. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 859, 2007. Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=994458
At the outset, it is important to stress that security interests do not embrace interests not immediately
related to the survival and minimal physiological well-being of the individual. My interest in security encompasses my
interest in continuing life, my interest in being free from the kind of physical injury that threatens my ability to provide for myself,
my interest in being free from the kind of financial injury that puts me in conditions of health- or life-threatening poverty, and my interest in being
free from psychological trauma inflicted by others that renders me unable to care for myself. My interest in security is a
negative one in the sense that it is protected by a moral right constituted, in part, by moral obligations owed to me by other people to
refrain from committing acts of violence or theft capable of causing serious threats to my health, well-being, and
life. While it is difficult to draw the line between a serious harm and a nonserious harm, it will have to suffice for my purposes to say that a serious harm is one
that interferes significantly with the daily activities that not only give my life meaning, but make it possible for me to continue to survive. Significant
trauma to the brain not only interferes with many activities that constitute what Don Marquis calls the “goodness of life,”19 but also interferes with my
ability to make a living teaching and writing philosophy—while a mildly bruised arm does not. Where exactly to draw the line is not
entirely clear, but for my purposes I do not think much turns on it as long as it is understood that security interests do not include minor injuries of any kind. I
imagine the boundaries of the relevant notion of seriousness are likely to be contested in any event, but all would agree that the interest in security, by nature,
It should be abundantly clear that morality protects these
interests in the strongest terms available to it. Unless one is a complete skeptic about morality and moral objectivity,
protects only against threats of serious injuries.
little argument is needed to show that we have a moral right to be free from acts that pose a high risk of
causing either our death or grievous injuries to our bodies. Moreover, I would hazard that non-skeptics about morality would also accept that the
moral right to physical security is sufficiently important that a state is, as a matter of political morality, obligated to protect it, by criminalizing attacks on it, as a
condition of its legitimacy. No state authority
that failed to protect this right could be morally legitimate; at the very least
interests are not, however,
no state authority that failed to do so could be justified in claiming a legitimate monopoly over the use of force. Security
just about our own well-being; they encompass the well-being of other persons whose activities conduce to our
own physical security. We are social beings who live in societies in which there is a pronounced division of labor that makes the security of one person dependent
upon the security of other persons in a variety of ways—some more abstract, some less abstract.
5. Assessing Utilitarian consequences are good. Putting ethics in a vacuum is
morally irresponsible.
Issac, ‘2
(Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Vol. 49 No. 2, Spring)
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world one must attend to
the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that
power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding
concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility.
The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that
the purity of one’s intentions does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or
refusing to make common cause with morally comprised parties may seem like the right thing, but if such tactics entail impotence,
then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters;
(2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness, it
is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics-as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a
potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and
(3)
it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the
effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may
engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in
the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important,
always , to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and
historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism
inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It
promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
6. Alt cause – corporate privacy infringements are far worse and the public readily
accepts it.
Lewis ‘14
James Andrew Lewis is a senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, D.C., where he writes on technology, security, and the international economy. Before
joining CSIS, he worked at the US Departments of State and Commerce as a Foreign Service officer and as a member of the
Senior Executive Service. His diplomatic experience included negotiations on military basing in Asia, the Cambodia peace
process, and the five-power talks on arms transfer restraint. Lewis received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
“Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES - STRATEGIC
TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAM – December - http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate
Some of the unhappiness created by the Edward Snowden leaks reflects the unspoken recognition that online
privacy has changed
irrevocably. The precipitous decline in privacy since the Internet was commercialized is the elephant in
the room we ignore in the surveillance debate. America’s privacy laws are both limited in scope and out of date. Although a majority
of Americans believe privacy laws are inadequate, the
surveillance debate has not led to a useful discussion of privacy in
the context of changed technologies and consumer preferences. Technology is more intrusive as companies pursue
revenue growth by harvesting user data. Tracking online behavior is a preferred business model. On average, there are 16 hidden
tracking programs on every website. The growing market for “big data” to predict consumer behavior and
target advertising will further change privacy. Judging by their behavior, Internet users are willing to
exchange private data for online services. A survey in a major European country found a majority of Internet users
disapproved of Google out of privacy concerns, but more than 80 percent used Google as their search engine. The
disconnect between
consumer statements and behavior reduces the chances of legislating better protections.
7. No impact to a 4th Amendment violation – the Special Needs Doctrine justifies
minor privacy intrusions
Branda ‘14
(et al; JOYCE R. BRANDA, Acting Assistant Attorney General, BRIEF FOR THE APPELLEES - Amicus Brief for Smith v. Obama –
before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Amici” means “friend of the court” and – in this context - is legal
reference to the Reporters Committee – October 2nd - https://www.eff.org/document/governments-smith-answering-brief)
Even if plaintiff had a cognizable privacy interest in Verizon Wireless’s business records—and she does not—the Fourth
Amendment would permit the government to acquire those records under the special needs doctrine.
The Section 215 telephony-metadata program serves the paramount government interest in preventing and
disrupting terrorist attacks on the United States, a compelling special governmental need. And because of the
significant safeguards in the program—including a requirement of court authorization based on reasonable suspicion before a human analyst
accesses the data—the impact on cognizable privacy interests is at most minimal.
8. Plan will get circumvented
Granick ‘14
Jennifer Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer was the Civil Liberties
Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jennifer practices, speaks and writes about computer crime and security,
electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, data protection, copyright, trademark and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. From
2001 to 2007, Jennifer was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability,
and Internet law and policy. Before teaching at Stanford, Jennifer earned her law degree from University of California, Hastings
College of the Law and her undergraduate degree from the New College of the University of South Florida. “USA Freedom Act:
Oh, Well. Whatever. Nevermind.” – Just Security - May 21, 2014 http://justsecurity.org/10675/usa-freedom-act-oh-wellwhatever-nevermind/
Additionally, in December of 2013, Deputy
Attorney General James Cole testified before the Senate Judiciary
Committee that the NSA might continue its bulk collection of nearly all domestic phone call records, even if
the original USA FREEDOM ACT passed into law. As I wrote at the time, this testimony shows that the
Administration and the intelligence community believe they can do whatever they want, regardless of
the law s Congress passes, so long they can convince one of the judges appointed to the secretive Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC) to agree. All they need is some legal hook they can present with a
straight face.
2AC Section
2AC vs. TPP
1. Zero chance congress rejects TPP post fast track approval – structural factors
Stoltzfoos, 6/23 -- Rachel, Reporter @ Daily Caller, Daily Caller, 6/23/15,
http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/23/congress-secures-trade-promotion-authority-forobama/
TPA would give Congress more power to shape the trade agreement by defining specific objectives the president must work toward in a deal,
and by setting new transparency rules. But once
the president submits a deal to Congress, TPA greatly restricts the
Senate’s ability to block or complicate the deal. Any deal the president submits to Congress in
the next six years is almost guaranteed to pass , because the Senate must promptly approve or
reject the deal with no chance to amend it and little time for debate. And just 51 votes would be
required for passage — a far cry from the 61 votes required for major legislation. (RELATED: Why Are Senate
Republicans So Eager To Cede Their Trade Authority To Obama?)What do you think? Obama says he needs TPA to conclude a massive
trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he is currently negotiating with 11 other countries. And the Republicans who fought
for the deal say TPA is key to future free trade agreements that will benefit the U.S. economy.What do you think? Critics contend its a
dangerous concession of Senate power to a president that can’t be trusted.
2. There’s bipartisan momentum for curtailing surveillance
Weisman, 13 (Jonathan Weisman, political writer for NYT, 7-28-2013, "Momentum Builds against
N.S.A. Surveillance", New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/momentumbuilds-against-nsa-surveillance.html, DA: 5-30-2015)
WASHINGTON — The movement to crack down on government surveillance started with an odd couple from Michigan,
Representatives Justin Amash, a young libertarian Republican known even to his friends as “chief wing nut,” and John Conyers Jr., an elder of
the liberal left in his 25th House term. But what began on the political fringes only a week ago has
built a momentum that
even critics say may be unstoppable , drawing support from Republican and Democratic leaders,
attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national
security in the House. The rapidly shifting politics were reflected clearly in the House on Wednesday, when a plan to defund the
National Security Agency’s telephone data collection program fell just seven votes short of passage. Now, after initially signaling that they were
comfortable with the scope of the N.S.A.’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet activities, but not their content, revealed last month by
Edward J. Snowden, lawmakers are
showing an increasing willingness to use legislation to curb those actions.
work on
legislation in the House Judiciary Committee to significantly rein in N.S.A. telephone surveillance. Mr. Sensenbrenner
Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, have begun
said on Friday that he would have a bill ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict phone surveillance to only
those named as targets of a federal terrorism investigation, make significant changes to the secret court that oversees such programs and give
businesses like Microsoft and Google permission to reveal their dealings before that court. “There
is a growing sense that things
have really gone a-kilter here,” Ms. Lofgren said. The sudden reconsideration of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policy has taken much
of Washington by surprise. As the revelations by Mr. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, were gaining attention in the news media, the White
House and leaders in both parties stood united behind the programs he had unmasked. They were focused mostly on bringing the leaker to
justice. Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they
maintain control over the extent of any revisions. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee met on Wednesday as the House deliberated to
try to find accommodations to growing public misgivings about the programs, said the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein,
Democrat of California. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat and longtime critic of the N.S.A. surveillance programs, said he had taken part
in serious meetings to discuss changes. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the panel, said, “We’re talking through it
right now.” He added, “There are a lot of ideas on the table, and it’s pretty obvious that we’ve got some uneasy folks.” Representative Mike
Rogers, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has assured House colleagues that an intelligence policy
bill he plans to draft in mid-September will include new privacy safeguards. Aides familiar with his efforts said the House Intelligence
Committee was focusing on more transparency for the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees data gathering, including
possibly declassifying that court’s orders, and changes to the way the surveillance data is stored. The legislation may order such data to be held
by the telecommunications companies that produce them or by an independent entity, not the government. Lawmakers say their votes
to
restrain the N.S.A. reflect a gut-level concern among voters about personal privacy. “I represent a very
reasonable district in suburban Philadelphia, and my constituents are expressing a growing concern on the sweeping
amounts of data that the government is compiling,” said Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican
who represents one of the few true swing districts left in the House and who voted on Wednesday to limit N.S.A. surveillance. Votes from the
likes of Mr. Fitzpatrick were not initially anticipated when Republican leaders chided reporters for their interest in legislation that they said
would go nowhere. As the House slowly worked its way on Wednesday toward an evening vote to curb government surveillance, even
proponents of the legislation jokingly predicted that only the “wing nuts” — the libertarians of the right, the most ardent liberals on the left —
would support the measure. Then Mr. Sensenbrenner, a Republican veteran and one of the primary authors of the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act,
stepped to a microphone on the House floor. Never, he said, did he intend to allow the wholesale vacuuming up of domestic phone records,
nor did his legislation envision that data dragnets would go beyond specific targets of terrorism investigations. “The time has come to stop it,
and the way we stop it is to approve this amendment,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said. He had not intended to speak, and when he did, he did not say
much, just seven brief sentences. “I was able to say what needed to be said in a minute,” he said Friday. Lawmakers from both parties said the
brief speech was a pivotal moment. When the tally was final, the effort to end the N.S.A.’s programs had fallen short, 205 to 217. Supporters
included Republican leaders like Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Democratic leaders like Representative James E.
Clyburn of South Carolina. Republican moderates like Mr. Fitzpatrick and Blue Dog Democrats like Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon
joined with respected voices on national security matters like Mr. Sensenbrenner and Ms. Lofgren. Besides Ms. McMorris Rodgers,
Representative Lynn Jenkins of Kansas, another member of the Republican leadership, voted yes. On the Democratic side, the chairman of the
House Democratic Caucus, Representative Xavier Becerra of California, and his vice chairman, Representative Joseph Crowley of New York,
broke with the top two Democrats, Representatives Nancy Pelosi of California and Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who pressed hard for no votes.
On Friday, Ms. Pelosi, the House minority leader and a veteran of the Intelligence Committee, and Mr. Hoyer
dashed off a letter
to the president warning that even those Democrats who had stayed with him on the issue on Wednesday would
be seeking changes. That letter included the signature of Mr. Conyers, who is rallying an increasingly unified
Democratic caucus to his side, as well as 61 House Democrats who voted no on Wednesday but are now publicly signaling their
discontent. “Although some of us voted for and others against the amendment, we all agree that there are lingering questions and concerns
about the current” data collection program, the letter stated. Representative Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, a Republican who voted for the curbs
and predicted that changes to the N.S.A. surveillance programs were now unstoppable, said: “This was in many respects a vote intended to
send a message. The vote was just too strong.” Ms. Lofgren said the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders had not come to grips
with what she called “a grave sense of betrayal” that greeted Mr. Snowden’s revelations. Since the Bush administration, lawmakers had been
repeatedly assured that such indiscriminate collection of data did not exist, and that when targeting was unspecific, it was aimed at people
abroad. The movement against the N.S.A. began with the fringes of each party. Mr. Amash of Michigan began pressing for an amendment on
the annual military spending bill aimed at the N.S.A. Leaders of the Intelligence Committee argued strenuously that such an amendment was
not relevant to military spending and should be ruled out of order. But Mr. Amash, an acolyte of Ron Paul, a libertarian former congressman,
persisted and rallied support. Mr. Sensenbrenner and Ms. Lofgren said they were willing to work with the House and Senate intelligence panels
to overhaul the surveillance programs, but indicated that they did not believe those panels were ready to go far enough. “I would just hope the
Intelligence Committees will not stick their heads in the sand on this,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.
3. No link - Fiat means the plan passes immediately and without any
disagreements.
4. Political capital doesn’t exist and isn’t key to their DA- more likely winners win
Michael Hirsch ‘13, chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously
served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He was also
Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier
on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror.
He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based
Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-suchthing-as-political-capital-20130207
On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt reduction. In
response, the
pundits will do what they always do
this time of year: They will
talk about
how unrealistic most of the proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of
much political capital Obama possesses to push his program through
“
”
bearing on what actually happens
talked
seriously
about
Obama having enough political
. Most of
how
this talk will have no
Three months ago
if someone had
capital to oversee
both immigration and gun-control
this person would have been called crazy
In
over the next four years. Consider this:
, just before the November election,
passage of
reform
legislation at the beginning of his second term—
even after winning the election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)—
and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.)
his first term
Obama didn’t dare to even bring up gun control
And yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s
political capital chances are fair that both will now happen What changed In the case of gun control
Newtown
, in a starkly polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for
at least two years.
, a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the
president’s health care law.
“
personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or
”—
.
it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the 20 first-graders who were slaughtered in
?
, of course,
, Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point
in the national conscience. One thing changed after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies.
Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers:
“Be bold.” As a result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weap ons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make
anything more than cosmetic changes to gun laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile
, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called
immigration
turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence
It has almost
entirely to do with
the
Hispanic vote
movement on immigration has come out
of the Republican Party’s introspection
Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit of compromise on
reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would
“self-deport.” But this
—his political mandate, as it were.
just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney,
breakdown of the
in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a
speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the
recent
mainly
, and the realization by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing
demographic death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meani ngless term. Often it is a
synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elec ted and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on
the country’s mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of
the idea of political capita
is so poorly
defined that presidents and pundits often get it wrong.
capital
conveys that we know more than we really do about ever-elusive
political power
political capital. But the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side.” The real problem is that
l—or mandates, or momentum—
“Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political
capital—some sense of an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It almost never happens. In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political
the idea
the
unforeseen events can suddenly change everything
is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It
concept of
, and it discounts the way
. Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to invest, just as
someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history. Naturally, any president has practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of
Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at present. And unless a surge in the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able
to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any concessions that make him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can
align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just don’t know what you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “Winning wins.” In theory, and in
depending on Obama’s handling of any
issue, even in a polarized time he could still deliver on
his second-term goals depending on
the breaks
political capital is, at best, an empty concept
that almost nothing in the academic literature successfully quantifies or even defines it.
practice,
particular
,
his skill and
,
a lot of
. Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to
the huge disparity in the Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass legislation and run successful presidencies say that
and
,
“It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a
president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far more complex than the term suggests.
Winning on
one issue often changes the calculation for the next issue; there is never any known amount
of capital
Ornstein says. “If
they think he’s going to win, they may change positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon
effect.Ӧ
¶
. “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he wants, and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors”
ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ
Sometimes, a clever practitioner of power can get more done just because he’s aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress w ell. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide
victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main reasons for that mandate (in addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to that election, and his ability to get far more
done than anyone thought possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his exhaustive study of LBJ, The Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late
1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize Southern lawmakers’ support for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table [said that] the presidency has only a certain
amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of course, was what political capital was called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson didn’t worry about coinage, and he got the Civil Rights Act
enacted, along with much else: Medicare, a tax cut, antipoverty programs. He appeared to understand not just the ways of Congress but also the way to maximize the momentum he possessed in the lingering mood of national grief and determination by picking the right issues, as Caro
records. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” LBJ said. “It is a controllable fact of political life.” Johnson had the skill and wherewithal to realize that, at that moment of history, he could have unlimited coinage if he handled the politics right. He did. (At least until Vietnam, that is.)
And then there are the presidents who get the politics, and the issues, wrong. It was the last president before Obama who was just starting a second term, George W. Bush, who really revived the claim of political capital, which he was very fond of wielding. Then Bush promptly
demonstrated that he didn’t fully understand the concept either. At his first news conference after his 2004 victory, a confident-sounding Bush declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. That’s my style.” The 43rd president threw all of his
political capital at an overriding passion: the partial privatization of Social Security. He mounted a full-bore public-relations campaign that included town-hall meetings across the country. Bush failed utterly, of course. But the problem was not that he didn’t have enough political capital.
Yes, he may have overestimated his standing. Bush’s margin over John Kerry was thin—helped along by a bumbling Kerry campaign that was almost the mirror image of Romney’s gaffe-filled failure this time—but that was not the real mistake. The problem was that whatever credibility or
stature Bush thought he had earned as a newly reelected president did nothing to make Social Security privatization a better idea in most people’s eyes. Voters didn’t trust the plan, and four years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the stock-market collapse bore out the public’s skepticism.
Privatization just didn’t have any momentum behind it, no matter who was pushing it or how much capital Bush spent to sell it. The mistake that Bush made with Social Security, says John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and a wellfollowed political blogger, “was that just because he won an election, he thought he had a green light. But there was no sense of any kind of public urgency on Social Security reform. It’s like he went into the garage where various Republican policy ideas were hanging up and picked one. I
don’t think Obama’s going to make that mistake.… Bush decided he wanted to push a rock up a hill. He didn’t understand how steep the hill was. I think Obama has more momentum on his side because of the Republican Party’s concerns about the Latino vote and the shooting at
Obama may get his way
not because of his reelection,
but because Republicans are
beginning to doubt whether taking a hard line on fiscal policy is a good idea
¶
¶
Newtown.”
also
on the debt ceiling,
Sides says, “
,” as the party suffers in the polls.
THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER
Presidents
are limited in what they can do by time and attention span, of course, just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate. But this, too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital
passing the health care law in his first term. But the real problem was that the plan was unpopular, the economy was bad, and the president didn’t realize that the national mood (yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party
revolt about to burst on the scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout, aghast at the amount of federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage
was simply an intervention too far. So was the idea of another economic stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic fights over the debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with the country’s mood. Unlike Bush, Obama did
ultimately get his idea passed. But the bigger political problem with health care reform was that it distracted the government’s attention from other issues that people cared about more urgently, such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional
staffers told me at the time that their bosses didn’t really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation with loopholes. Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the aides said. Weighing the imponderables
of momentum, the often-mystical calculations about when the historic moment is ripe for an issue, will never be a science. It is mainly intuition, and its best practitioners have a long history in American politics. This is a tale told well in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Lincoln. Daniel DayLewis’s Abraham Lincoln attempts a lot of behind-the-scenes vote-buying to win passage of the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, along with eloquent attempts to move people’s hearts and minds. He appears to be using the political capital of his reelection and the turning of the tide in
the Civil War. But it’s clear that a surge of conscience, a sense of the changing times, has as much to do with the final vote as all the backroom horse-trading. “The reason I think the idea of political capital is kind of distorting is that it implies you have chits you can give out to people. It
really oversimplifies why you elect politicians, or why they can do what Lincoln did,” says Tommy Bruce, a former political consultant in Washington. Consider, as another example, the storied political career of President Franklin Roosevelt. Because the mood was ripe for dramatic change
in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was able to push an astonishing array of New Deal programs through a largely compliant Congress, assuming what some described as near-dictatorial powers. But in his second term, full of confidence because of a landslide victory in 1936 that
brought in unprecedented Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt overreached with his infamous Court-packing proposal. All of a sudden, the political capital that experts thought was limitless disappeared. FDR’s plan to expand the Supreme Court by putting in his
judicial allies abruptly created an unanticipated wall of opposition from newly reunited Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. FDR thus inadvertently handed back to Congress, especially to the Senate, the power and influence he had seized in his first term. Sure, Roosevelt
had loads of popularity and momentum in 1937. He seemed to have a bank vault full of political capital. But, once again, a president simply chose to take on the wrong issue at the wrong time; this time, instead of most of the political interests in the country aligning his way, they opposed
him. Roosevelt didn’t fully recover until World War II, despite two more election victories. In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to
if he picks issues
there is no reason to
think he can’t win far more victories than
careful calculators of political capital believe is possible
If he can get
some early wins
that will create momentum, and one win may well lead
to others. “Winning wins
worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But
that the country’s mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control—
any of the
now
,
including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction. Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new, more mature Obama seems to be emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly.
—as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-income tax increase—
.” Obama himself learned some hard lessons over the past four years about the falsity of the political-capital concept. Despite his decisive victory over John McCain in 2008, he fumbled the selling of his $787 billion
stimulus plan by portraying himself naively as a “post-partisan” president who somehow had been given the electoral mandate to be all things to all people. So Obama tried to sell his stimulus as a long-term restructuring plan that would “lay the groundwork for long-term economic
growth.” The president thus fed GOP suspicions that he was just another big-government liberal. Had he understood better that the country was digging in against yet more government intervention and had sold the stimulus as what it mainly was—a giant shot of adrenalin to an
economy with a stopped heart, a pure emergency measure—he might well have escaped the worst of the backlash. But by laying on ambitious programs, and following up quickly with his health care plan, he only sealed his reputation on the right as a closet socialist. After that, Obama’s
public posturing provoked automatic opposition from the GOP, no matter what he said. If the president put his personal imprimatur on any plan—from deficit reduction, to health care, to immigration reform—Republicans were virtually guaranteed to come out against it. But this year,
when he sought to exploit the chastened GOP’s newfound willingness to compromise on immigration, his approach was different. He seemed to understand that the Republicans needed to reclaim immigration reform as their own issue, and he was willing to let them have some credit.
When he mounted his bully pulpit in Nevada, he delivered another new message as well: You Republicans don’t have to listen to what I say anymore. And don’t worry about who’s got the political capital. Just take a hard look at where I’m saying this: in a state you were supposed to have
won but lost because of the rising Hispanic vote. Obama was cleverly pointing the GOP toward conclusions that he knows it is already reaching on its own: If you, the Republicans, want to have any kind of a future in a vastly changed electoral map, you have no choice but to move. It’s
your choice.
5. The Recent Freedom Act and the TPA prove “winner’s win”. Obama wanted
both laws – and got them both. Those successes made him look strong – and
now it’s hard to disagree with him. The Aff plan is just another victory.
6. Political Capital is not real. It’s a myth- Congress votes based on ideology
Frank Moraes is a freelance writer with broad interests. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in
Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, and throughout the computer
industry. And he has taught physics. 1-8-2013 http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2013/01/politicalcapital-is-myth.html
Yesterday, Jonathan Chait metaphorically scratched his head: "Nominating Hagel Most Un-Obama Thing Ever." He can't understand this nomination given that (1)
Hagel will be a hard sell and (2) Obama doesn't much listen to his advisers anyway. It is interesting speculation, but I wouldn't have even thought about it had he not
written, "Why
waste political capital picking a fight that isn't essential to any policy goals?"¶ This brought to mind something that
has been on my mind for a while, as in posts like "Bipartisan Consensus Can Bite Me." I'm afraid that just like Santa Claus and most conceptions of
God, " Political Capital" is a myth. I think it is just an idea that Villagers find comforting. It is a neat
narrative in which one can straightjacket a political fight. Otherwise, it is just bullshit .¶ Let's go back to late 2004, after Bush Jr was reelected. He said, "I earned capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it." What was this thing that Bush intended to
spend? It is usually said that political capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor
and kill the gays. But he used his political capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this proves the point, but does anyone really think if Bush had
decided to use his political capital destroying food stamps and Medicaid that he would have succeeded any better? The truth was that Bush's political capital didn't
exist.¶ Let's
look at more recent events: the Fiscal Cliff. Obama didn't win that fight because the people who voted for him
demanded it. He won it because everyone knew that in the new year he would still be president. Tax rates were going up.
Boehner took the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was the best deal that he felt he could get. He didn't fold
because of some magic p olitical c apital that Obama could wave over him.¶ There is no doubt that public opinion does affect how politicians
act. Even politicians in small safe districts have to worry that larger political trends may end up making them look stupid, out of touch, or just cruel. But beyond that,
they really don't care. If they did, then everyone in the House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate and the associated
p olitical c apital. But they don't, because presidential elections have consequences -- for who's in the White House. They don't have much
consequence for the representative from the Third District of California.
2AC vs. the Terror Disad
1. US losing the war on terror
Miller ‘15
Internally quoting Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. - Greg Miller - Intelligence reporter for the Washington
Post; former national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and co-author of The Interrogators: Inside the Secret
War against al Qaeda - “In campaign against terrorism, U.S. enters period of pessimism and gloom” – Washington Post - March
7 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-campaign-against-terrorism-us-enters-period-of-pessimismand-gloom/2015/03/07/ca980380-c1bc-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html
In congressional testimony recently, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. went beyond the usual litany of threats to say that terrorism
trend lines were worse “than at any other point in history.” Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata, commander of U.S.
Special Operations forces in the Middle East, told participants on a counter-terrorism strategy call that he regarded the Islamic State as a greater menace than alQaeda ever was. Speaking at a New York police terrorism conference, Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, said he had come to doubt that he would
live to see the end of al-Qaeda and its spawn. “This is long term,” he said. “My children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation will still be fighting this
fight.” The
assessments reflect a pessimism that has descended on the U.S. counterterrorism community
over the past year amid a series of discouraging developments. Among them are the growth of the Islamic
State, the ongoing influx of foreign fighters into Syria, the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Yemen and the downward
spiral of Libya’s security situation. The latest complication came Saturday, when the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria carried out a series of suicide
bombings and reportedly declared its allegiance to the Islamic State. Unlike the waves of anxiety that accompanied the emergence of new terrorist plots over the
past decade, the latest shift in mood seems more deep-seated. U.S. officials depict a bewildering landscape in which al-Qaeda and the brand of Islamist militancy it
inspired have not only survived 14 years of intense counterterrorism operations but have also spread. Officials emphasize that their campaign has accomplished
critical goals. In particular, most officials and experts now see the risk of a Sept. 11-scale attack as infinitesimal, beyond the reach of al-Qaeda and its scattered
affiliates. Still, the
adjusted outlook contrasts sharply with the surge of optimism that followed the killing of Osama
bin Laden in 2011 and the dawn of the Arab Spring, which was initially seen as a political awakening across the Middle East that might render al-Qaeda and its
archaic ideology irrelevant. Within months of bin Laden’s death, then-Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was convinced “that we’re within reach of
strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” President Obama echoed that view in subsequent years by saying that al-Qaeda was on “a path to defeat” and, more recently,
that the then-nascent Islamic State was analogous to a junior varsity sports team. Such
upbeat characterizations have all but
evaporated.
2. Turn – Arab-American coop:
o mass surveillance kills law enforcement coop with US-Arab Americans –
that’s key to check terror.
Risen ‘14
(Internally quoting Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Tom Risen is a reporter
for U.S. News & World Report. “Racial Profiling Reported in NSA, FBI Surveillance” - U.S. News & World Report - July 9, 2014 http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/07/09/racial-profiling-reported-in-nsa-fbi-surveillance)
The National Security Agency and the FBI have reportedly been overzealous trying to prevent terrorist attacks to the point
that anti-Islamic racism in those agencies led to the surveillance of prominent Muslim-Americans,
revealing a culture of racial profiling and broad latitude for spying on U.S. citizens. An NSA document leaked by
former agency contractor Edward Snowden to reporter Glenn Greenwald shows 202 Americans targeted among the approximately 7,485 email addresses
monitored between 2002 and 2008, Greenwald’s news service The Intercept reports. To monitor Americans, government agencies must first make the case to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause that the targets are terrorist agents, foreign spies or “are or may be” abetting sabotage,
espionage or terrorism. Despite this filter The Intercept identified five Muslim-Americans with high public profile including civil rights leaders, academics, lawyers
and a political candidate. Racial profiling of Muslims by security officers has been a controversy since the terrorist attacks of 2001 spiked fears about al-Qaida
trainees preparing more attacks. The New York Police Department has disbanded its unit that mapped New York’s Muslim communities that designated surveillance
of mosques as “terrorism enterprise investigations” after pressure from the Justice Department about aggressive monitoring by police. A 2005 FBI memo about
surveillance procedures featured in The Intercept story uses a fake name “Mohammed Raghead” for the agency staff exercise. This latest report about email
surveillance of successful Muslim-Americans is akin to “McCarthyism” that fed paranoia about communist spies during the Cold War, says Reza Aslan, a professor at
the University of California, Riverside. “The
notion that these five upstanding American citizens, all of them prominent public individuals,
represent a threat to the U.S. for no other reason than their religion is an embarrassment to the FBI and an
affront to the constitution,” Aslan says. There is a risk of radicalization among citizens Americans, evidenced by some who have gone to
fight jihads in Syria and Somalia, but mass shootings carried out by U.S. citizens of various racial backgrounds occurs much more often, says Vanda
Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Since 1982, there have been at least 70 mass
shootings across the U.S. “We
have seen very little domestic terrorism in the U.S.,” Felbab-Brown says. This lack of
terrorism is due in part to the willingness of the Islamic community to cooperate with
law enforcement to identify possible radical threats , out of gratitude that the U.S. is a stable, secure country
compared with the Middle East, she says. “ That could go sour if law enforcement becomes too aggressive, too
extreme ,” she says.
o The turn’s unique – relations are low now. We also control the vital internal
link:
Ramirez ‘4
(et al; Deborah A. Ramirez, Professor of Law at Northeastern University. She holds a JD from Harvard University, "Developing
partnerships between law enforcement and American Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities: a promising practices guide"
(2004). Partnering for Prevention & Community Safety Initiative Publications. Paper 4. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20004127)
For all these reasons, in a post-September 11th world, it
is critical for law enforcement and the Muslim, Arab, and Sikh
communities in this country to strengthen their relationships. Historically, these relationships have not
existed in any significant way. Prior to September 11th, law enforcement primarily focused their community policing efforts on
other communities of color – Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, etc. Similarly, hate crime enforcement efforts mostly focused on crimes
against the gay community, Jews, Latinos, Asians and African-Americans. Consequently few state, local or federal law enforcement agencies
had any significant contact with the Arab, Muslim, or Sikh communities prior to September of 2001. It is the premise of the Partnering for
Prevention and Community Safety Initiative that Americans
will only truly be safe from terrorist attacks when law
enforcement agencies adopts a strategy focused on building trust and strengthening relationships with
the Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities. This paradigm is not only more consistent with our
constitutional ideals, it also represents our best hope for securing our homeland.
3. No link – targeted warrants, which plan allows, solve the terror disad just as
well.
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. Amici” means “friend of the court” and – in this context - is legal reference to Wyden, Udall, etc. This pdf can be obtained
at: https://www.eff.org/document/wyden-udall-heinrich-smith-amicus)
As members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, amici Senators Wyden and Udall have for years
participated in the oversight of government surveillance conducted under the Patriot Act that they knew would astonish
most Americans. They sought to warn the public about those activities as best they could without disclosing classified information. They also co-sponsored an
amendment to the Patriot Act’s reauthorization that sought to address the problem of government officials “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes” and
“describ[ing] the execution of these laws in a way that misinforms or misleads the public.” See 157 Cong. Rec. S3360 (daily ed. May 25, 2011) (introducing SA 384 to
S. 990, 112th Cong. § 3 (2011)); see also 157 Cong. Rec. S3386 (daily ed. May 26, 2011) (statement of Sen. Wyden) (“The fact is anyone can read the plain text of the
PATRIOT Act. Yet many Members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch.”); 157 Cong. Rec. S3258 (daily ed. May
24, 2011) (statement of Sen. Udall) (“Congress is granting powers to the executive branch that lead to abuse, and, frankly, shield the executive branch from
accountability”). Now that the government’s bulk call-records program has been documented and exposed, the
executive branch has retreated
from frequently repeated claims about its necessity and expressed an intent to end government bulk collection under section 215. Press Release,
FACT SHEET: The Administration’s Proposal for Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program (Mar. 27, 2014), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2014/03/27/fact-sheet-administration-s-proposal-ending-section-215-bulk-telephony-m (“White House Press Release”). While Senators Udall, Heinrich and
Wyden broadly support a policy aimed at ending the government’s indiscriminate collection of telephony metadata, they share a concern that there is no plan to
suspend the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records in the absence of new legislation, which is not necessarily imminent. Meanwhile, the government
continues to defend its bulk call-record collection program vigorously against statutory and constitutional challenges in the courts. Amici
submit this
brief to respond to the government’s argument that its collection of bulk call records is necessary to defend the nation
against terrorist attacks. Amici make one central point: as members of the committee charged with overseeing the
National Security Agency’s surveillance, amici have reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk
collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered
through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans. The government has at its disposal a
number of authorities that allow it to obtain the call records of suspected terrorists and those in contact with suspected terrorists. It appears to amici that these
more targeted authorities could have been used to obtain the information that the government has
publicly claimed was crucial in a few important counterterrorism cases.
4. Terrorist can’t obtain and correctly deploy bioweapons
Ouagrham-Gormley 14
Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley is Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University. She worked
for a decade at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. She was for two years research director of the James Martin
Center for Nonproliferation Studies office in Kazakhstan and was founding editor of the International Export Control Observer,
Cornell University Press, November 2014, “Barriers to Bioweapons”,
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100857780
In both the popular imagination and among lawmakers and national security experts, there exists the belief that with sufficient
motivation and material resources, states or terrorist groups can produce bioweapons easily, cheaply,
and successfully. In Barriers to Bioweapons, Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley challenges this perception by showing that bioweapons
development is a difficult, protracted, and expensive endeavor, rarely achieving the
expected results whatever the magnitude of investment. Her findings are based on extensive
interviews she conducted with former U.S. and Soviet-era bioweapons scientists and on careful analysis of archival data
and other historical documents related to various state and terrorist bioweapons programs. Bioweapons development relies on living
organisms that are
sensitive to their environment and handling conditions, and therefore behave unpredictably . These
features place a greater premium on specialized knowledge. Ben Ouagrham-Gormley posits that lack of access to
such
intellectual capital constitutes the greatest barrier to the making of bioweapons. She
integrates theories drawn from economics, the sociology of science, organization, and management with her empirical research. The resulting theoretical
framework rests on the idea that the pace and success of a bioweapons development program can be measured by its ability to ensure the creation and transfer of
scientific and technical knowledge. The
specific organizational, managerial, social, political, and economic conditions
necessary for success are difficult to achieve, particularly in covert programs where the
need to prevent detection imposes managerial and organizational conditions that conflict with
knowledge production.
5. Bioterror risk is low and wouldn’t kill many people anyway.
Keller 13
(Rebecca, 7 March 2013, Analyst at Stratfor, “Bioterrorism and the Pandemic Potential,” Stratfor,
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/bioterrorism-and-pandemic-potential)
The risk of
an accidental release of H5N1 is similar to that of other infectious pathogens currently being
studied. Proper safety standards are key, of course, and experts in the field have had a year to determine
the best way to proceed, balancing safety and research benefits. Previous work with the virus was conducted at
biosafety level three out of four, which requires researchers wearing respirators and disposable gowns to work in pairs in a negative pressure
environment. While many of these labs are part of universities, access is controlled either through keyed entry or even palm scanners. There
are roughly 40 labs that submitted to the voluntary ban. Those wishing to resume work after the ban was lifted must comply with guidelines
requiring strict national oversight and close communication and collaboration with national authorities. The
risk of release either
through accident or theft cannot be completely eliminated, but given the established parameters the
risk is minimal . The use of the pathogen as a biological weapon requires an assessment of whether a
non-state actor would have the capabilities to isolate the virulent strain, then weaponize and distribute
it. Stratfor has long held the position that while terrorist organizations may have rudimentary capabilities regarding
biological weapons, the likelihood of a successful attack is very low . Given that the laboratory
version of H5N1 -- or any influenza virus, for that matter -- is a contagious pathogen, there would be two
possible modes that a non-state actor would have to instigate an attack. The virus could be refined and
then aerosolized and released into a populated area, or an individual could be infected with the virus
and sent to freely circulate within a population. There are severe constraints that make success using
either of these methods unlikely. The technology needed to refine and aerosolize a pathogen for a
biological attack is beyond the capability of most non-state actors. Even if they were able to develop a
weapon, other factors such as wind patterns and humidity can render an attack ineffective. Using a
human carrier is a less expensive method, but it requires that the biological agent be a contagion. Additionally,
in order to infect the large number of people necessary to start an outbreak, the infected carrier must
be mobile while contagious, something that is doubtful with a serious disease like small pox. The
carrier also cannot be visibly ill because that would limit the necessary human contact.
6. No rollback — Boston bombing proves fear won’t spike out of control.
Hayes 13
Danny Hayes, associate professor of political science at George Washington University, focusing on political communication and
political behavior; co-author of Influence from Abroad, a book about Americans' views toward U.S. foreign policy, 2013 (“Why
the Boston Marathon bombing won’t erode civil liberties,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, April 28 th, Available Online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/why-the-boston-maraton-bombing-wont-erode-civilliberties/, Accessed 06-21-2013)
From the moment that Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was pulled out of a boat in Watertown, Mass., the
debate over civil liberties and domestic anti-terrorism policies, largely dormant in recent years, was reignited. Noting that “the
homeland is the battlefield,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) urged the Obama administration to designate Tsarnaev, an American citizen, as an enemy combatant.
Civil liberties groups then objected when authorities decided not to read Miranda rights to the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, invoking a public safety
exception. Speculation also arose
that police might now find it easier to persuade the public to support the use of
surveillance technology and domestic drones. “After Boston,” Ryan Gallagher wrote this week in Slate, “the balance in the struggle between privacy
and security may swing back in their favor.” But research conducted shortly after 9/11, combined with some recent polling
data, suggests that Americans may be unlikely to trade civil liberties for a greater sense of security as a
result of the bombing. That’s because the attack hasn’t made the public significantly more fearful of
future domestic terrorism, and because trust in government is low . After 9/11, concern over terrorism
skyrocketed. In a Gallup survey fielded in the days before the attack, less than one-half of one percent of Americans said terrorism was the country’s most
important problem. But in October 2001, 46 percent did. These worries boosted support for legislation, such as the USA PATRIOT Act,
that expanded law enforcement’s power to investigate suspected terrorism, even as those measures were criticized for eroding civil liberties protections. In a survey
conducted between November 2001 and January 2002, political scientists Darren Davis and Brian Silver designed a series of questions to explore the tradeoffs
between security and civil liberties. They began by asking people whether they agreed more with the statement that “in order to curb terrorism in this country, it
will be necessary to give up some civil liberties” or that “we should preserve our freedoms above all, even if there remains some risk of terrorism.” Forty-five
percent of Americans chose the first option, indicating a willingness to give up some freedoms in exchange for greater security. When respondents were asked
about the tradeoffs involving specific measures, there was wide variation. Davis and Silver found that very few Americans – eight percent – believed that the
government should have the power to investigate people who participate in nonviolent protests. And just 18 percent said they supported racial profiling. But when
asked, for instance, whether they agreed that “high school teachers have the right to criticize America’s policies toward terrorism” or that “high school teachers
should defend America’s policies in order to promote loyalty to our country,” 60 percent said teachers should back the government. Perhaps not surprisingly, the
biggest influence on whether people were willing to offer pro-security over pro-civil liberties responses was their fear of a second attack. Respondents who believed
another terrorist act was imminent were more likely to support tradeoffs in favor of security. Importantly, Davis and Silver found that the relationship was strongest
among people who expressed high levels of political trust: People who believe the government typically does the right thing and who were fearful of another
terrorist attack were the most willing to relinquish civil liberties protections. Those findings are consistent with a series of studies by Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy
and their colleagues at Stony Brook University. In one survey conducted between October 2001 and March 2002, the researchers found that 86 percent of
Americans said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about another domestic terrorist act. The greater the concern, the more likely respondents were to
support the use of government-issued ID cards and allowing authorities to monitor phone calls and e-mail. But in
contrast to 9/11, polling since
the Boston Marathon suggests that the bombing has made Americans only slightly more fearful of future
terrorist attacks than they were beforehand. Fifty-eight percent of respondents in a Pew poll conducted April 18-21 said they were “very” or
“somewhat” worried about another attack on the United States. That was no higher, however, than when the same question was asked in November 2010. And it
was significantly lower than the 71 percent who said they were worried in October 2001. A slightly different question in a Washington Post poll taken April 17-18
found that 69 percent of Americans said that the possibility of a major terrorist attack worried them either “a great deal” or “somewhat.” That figure was only a few
percentage points higher than when the same question was asked in 2007 and 2008. In
addition, political trust is lower today than it
was in 2001, when public confidence in government rose sharply after the terrorist attacks. If Davis and Silver’s findings are
correct, then greater
skepticism of government – produced in part by the struggling economy – should limit the public’s
willingness to give law enforcement more latitude . Ultimately, the scope of the Boston tragedy was smaller than 9/11,
which could help explain its limited effect on the public. It may also be that because
Americans believe terrorist attacks are now a
fundamental part of life in the United States , any single event will have a more muted effect
on public opinion . And because the Tsarnaev brothers have not been connected to any known terrorist organizations, Americans may feel less
under siege than they did when al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were identified as the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks. Regardless of the reason, all
of this
suggests that policymakers are likely to face a more difficult task than they did after 9/11 in persuading the public
to support additional security measures that infringe on Americans’ freedoms.