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2015 Atlanta Urban Debate League
Middle School Varsity Supplement Packet (Aff and Neg)
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................................... 2
Explanation Of Each Card ......................................................................................................................... 3
Additional Affirmative Cards for Right to Privacy Advantage ................................................................... 4
Additional Affirmative Cards for Solvency ................................................................................................ 6
Additional Negative Card for Right to Privacy Advantage ........................................................................ 7
Additional Negative Card for Solvency ..................................................................................................... 8
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2015 Atlanta Urban Debate League
Middle School Varsity Supplement Packet (Aff and Neg)
Explanation Of Each Card
The additional affirmative right to privacy card is from Jack Donnelly, who is making the argument
utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number of people) is a bad decision making calculus and
instead we should protect the overall concept of rights. This is an extension card to the 1AC in the starter
packet.
The additional affirmative solvency card is from Matt Kibhe. Explains what the SSRA does and also says that
it leaves in place key law enforcement tools need to fight terrorism. This card can be used as a answer to the
terrorism DA.
The additional negative card against the right to privacy advantage is from Eric Posner a key figure in the
negative terrorism DA and case arguments. Posner is making the argument that we have in fact have given up
our rights before during the creation of the constitution and that during moments where the U.S is at risk of
a terrorist attack that rights should be curtailed for the benefit of everyone. This is an answer to protect
rights outweighs all.
The additional negative solvency card Julian Assnage is making the argument that surveillance is inevitable.
Companies do it all the time such as Facebook and Google. He says we have a misunderstand of how the
Internet and phones work and that this isn’t a issue that can be resolved by passing a law.
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2015 Atlanta Urban Debate League
Middle School Varsity Supplement Packet (Aff and Neg)
Additional Affirmative Cards for Right to Privacy Advantage
Human rights must come before anything. They guarantee the baseline conditions for living a
decent human life.You should be highly skeptical of any attempts to discard them in favor of
utilitarian calculation.
Donnelly, 85 (Jack, College of the Holy Cross, The Concept of Human Rights, 1985, p. 55-58)
Basic moral and political rights are not just weighting factors in utilitarian calculations that
deal with an undifferentiated 'happiness'. Rather, they are demands and constraints of a different order,
grounded in an essentially substantive judgement of the conditions necessary for human
development and flourishing.They also provide means - rights - for realising human potentials. The
neutrality of utilitarianism, its efforts to assure that everyone counts 'equally,' results in no-one
counting as a person; as Robert E. Goodin puts it, people drop out of utilitarian calculations,
which are instead about disembodied preferences (1981:95; compare Dworkin 1977:94-100,232-8, 274 ff.). In
Aristotelian terms, utilitarianism errs in basing its judgements on 'numerical' rather than 'proportional' equality. For our purposes,
such differences should be highlighted. Therefore, let us consider utilitarianism, whether act or rule, as an alternative to rights in
general, and thus human rights as well. In particular, we can consider utility and human rights as competing strategies for limiting the
range of legitimate state action. Once again, Bentham provides a useful focus for our discussion. While Bentham insists on the
importance of limiting the range of legitimate state action (1838:11, 495,VIII, .557 ff.), he also insists that (natural) rights do not set
those limits. In fact, he argues that construed as limits on the state, natural rights 'must ever be, - the rights of anarchy', justifying
insurrection whenever a single right is violated (1838:11, 522, 496, 501, 506). For Bentham, natural rights are
absolute rights, and thus inappropriate to the real world of political action. In fact, though, no
major human rights theorist argues that they are absolute. For example, Locke holds that the right to
revolution is reserved by society, not the individual (1967: para. 243). Therefore, individual violations of human rights per se do not
justify revolution. Furthermore, Locke supports revolution only in cases of gross, persistent and systematic violations of natural
rights (1967:paras 204, 207, 225), as does Paine. The very idea of absolute rights is absurd from a human rights perspective, since
logically there can be at most one absolute right, unless we (unreasonably) assume that rights never come into conflict. A more
modest claim would be that human rights are 'absolute' in the sense that they override all principles and practices except other
human rights. Even this doctrine, however, is rejected by most if not all major human rights theorists and documents. For example,
Article I of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, after declaring that 'men are born, and always continue, free and equal in
respect of their rights', adds that 'civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility', thus recognising restrictions on
the continued complete equality of rights. Similarly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 29) permits such limitations
as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and
of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. The International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes a similar general limiting proviso (Article 4) as well as particular limitations on most
of the enumerated rights. Rights ordinarily 'trump' other considerations, but the mere presence of a
right - even a basic human right - does not absolutely and automatically determine the proper
course of action, all things considered. In certain exceptional circumstances, needs, utility,
interests or righteousness may override rights. The duties correlative to rights, and even the trumping force of
rights, are prima facie only. But other principles also have prima facie moral force. Sometimes this will be sufficient to overcome
even the special entrenched priority of rights. The obligations arising from such rights therefore ought not to be discharged, all
things considered. In such cases, we can speak of the right being 'infringed', since the (prima facie) obligation correlative to the
righties not discharged, but it would be seriously misleading to say that it had been 'violated' (Thomson 1976, 1977). But if even
basic human rights can be justifiably infringed, aren't rights ultimately subservient to utility? If
recalcitrant political realities sometimes require subordinating natural rights, aren't we simply suggesting that human rights are
merely utopian aspirations inappropriate to a world in which dirty hands are often a requirement of political action - and thus
where utility is the only reasonable guide? Such a response misconstrues the relationship between rights and utility and the ways in
which rights are overridden. Consider a very simple case, involving minor rights that on their face would seem to be easily
overridden. If A promises to drive B and C to the movies but later changes his mind, in deciding whether to keep his promise and
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Middle School Varsity Supplement Packet (Aff and Neg)
discharge his rights-based obligations). A must consider more than the relative utilities of both courses of action for all the parties
affected; in most cases, he ought to drive them to the movies even if that would reduce overall utility. At the very least he must ask
them to excuse him from his obligation, this requirement (as well as the power to excuse) being a reflection of the right-holder's
control over the rights relationship. Utility alone usually will not override even minor rights; we require more than a simple
calculation of utility to justify infringing rights. The special priority of rights/titles, as we have seen, implies that the quality, not just
the quantity, of the countervailing forces (utilities) must be taken into consideration. For example, if, when the promised time
comes, A wants instead to go get drunk with some other friends, simply not showing up to drive B and C to the movies will not be
justifiable even if that would maximize utility; the desire for a drunken binge is not a consideration that ordinarily will justifiably
override rights. But if A accompanies an accident victim to the hospital, even if A is only one of several passers-by who stopped to
offer help, and his action proves to be of no real benefit to the victim, usually this will be a sufficient excuse, even if utility would be
maximized by A going to the movies. Therefore, even recasting rights as weighted interests (which would seem to be the obvious
utilitarian 'fix' to capture the special priority of rights) still misses the point, because it remains essentially quantitative. Rights even
tend to override an accumulation of comparable or parallel interests. Suppose that sacrificing a single innocent person with a rare
blood factor could completely and permanently cure ten equally innocent victims of a disease that produces a sure, slow and
agonizing death. Each of the eleven has the 'same' right to life. Circumstances require, however, that a decision be made as to who
will live and who will die. The natural rights theorist would almost certainly choose to protect the rights of the one individual - and
such a conclusion, when faced with the scapegoat problem, is one of the greatest virtues of a natural rights doctrine to its
advocates. This conclusion rests on a qualitative judgement that establishes the right, combined with the further judgement that it is
not society’s role to infringe such rights simply to foster utility, a judgment arising from the special moral priority of rights.
Politically, such considerations are clearest in the case of extremely unpopular minorities. For example, plausible arguments can be
made that considerations of utility would justify persecution of selected religious minorities (e.g. Jews for centuries in the West,
Mormons in nineteenth-century America, Jehovah's Witnesses in contemporary Malawi), even giving special weight to the interests
of members of these minorities and considering the precedents set by such persecutions. Nonetheless, human rights demand that
an essentially qualitative judgement be made that such persecutions are incompatible with a truly human life and cannot be allowed
- and such judgements go a long way to explaining the relative appeal of human rights theories. But suppose that the sacrifice of
one innocent person would save not ten but a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million people. All things considered, trading
one innocent life for a million, even if the victim resists most forcefully, would seem to be not merely justifiable but demanded.
Exactly how do we balance rights (in the sense of 'having a right'), wrongs (in the sense of 'what is right') and interests? Do the
numbers count? If so, why, and in what way? If not, why not? Ultimately the defender of human rights is forced
back to human nature, the source of natural or human rights. For a natural rights theorist
there are certain attributes, potentialities and holdings that are essential to the maintenance of
a life worthy of a human being. These are given the special protection of natural rights; any
'utility' that might be served by their infringement or violation would be indefensible, literally
inhuman - except in genuinely extraordinary circumstances, the possibility of which cannot be
denied, but the probability of which should not be overestimated. Extraordinary circumstances
do force us to admit that, at some point, however rare, the force of utilitarian considerations
builds up until quantity is transformed into quality.The human rights theorist, however, insists
on the extreme rarity of such cases. Furthermore, exotic cases should not be permitted to obscure the fundamental
difference in emphasis (and in the resulting judgements in virtually all cases) between utility and (human) rights. Nor should they be
allowed to obscure the fact that on balance the flaws in rights-based theories and practices seem less severe, and without a doubt
less numerous, than those of utility-based political strategies.
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2015 Atlanta Urban Debate League
Middle School Varsity Supplement Packet (Aff and Neg)
Additional Affirmative Cards for Solvency
SSRA still allows for targeted surveillance – it ends mass surveillance by requiring a warrant
intercept Americans' communications
Kibbe, 15 (Matt, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, previously worked as Chief of Staff to U.S. Representative Dan Miller
(R-FL), Senior Economist at the Republican National Committee, Director of Federal Budget Policy at the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, and Managing Editor of Market Process. 3-24-15. “Letter in Support of the Surveillance State Repeal Act”
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/letter-support-surveillance-state-repeal-act)
The Surveillance State Repeal Act would repeal the misguided USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008.The PATRIOT Act, passed in the panicked aftermath of the tragic September 11th
attacks, gives the federal government an unprecedented amount of power to monitor the private
communications of U.S. citizens without a warrant. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008
expanded the wiretapping program to grant the government more power. Both laws clearly violate our
4th Amendment right against unreasonable searches.
The Surveillance State Repeal Act would prohibit the government from collecting information
on U.S. citizens obtained through private communications without a warrant. It would
mandate that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) regularly monitor domestic
surveillance programs for compliance with the law and issue an annual report. A section of the
bill explicitly forbids the government from mandating that electronic manufacturers install
“back door” spy software into their products. This is a legitimate concern due to a recently
released security report finding government spying software on hard drives in personal
computers in the United States.
It’s important to note that the Surveillance State Repeal Act saves anti-terrorism tools that are useful
to law enforcement. It retains the ability for government surveillance capabilities against
targeted individuals, regardless of the type of communications methods or devices being used. It would also protect
intelligence collection practices involving foreign targets for the purpose of investigating weapons of mass destruction.
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Additional Negative Card for Right to Privacy Advantage
Rights don’t trump lives – the function of the law is to be pragmatic
POSNER 03 Prof of Law at U Chicago [Richard Posner, Security Versus Civil Liberties, from Rights vs
. Public Safety after 9/11, eds Amitai Etzioni and Jason H. Marsh] pages 25-28
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks have come many proposals for tightening security; some measures to that end have already been taken. Civil
libertarians are troubled. They fear that concerns about national security will lead to an erosion of civil liberties. They offer historical examples of
supposed overreactions to threats to national security. They treat our existing civil liberties—freedom of the press, protections of privacy
and of the rights of criminal suspects, and the rest—as sacrosanct, insisting that the battle against international terrorism accommodate itself
to them.
I consider this a profoundly mistaken approach to the question of balancing liberty and security . The basic mistake is the prioritizing
of liberty. It is a mistake about law and a mistake about history. Let me begin with law. What we take to be our civil liberties—for example, immunity
from arrest except upon probable cause to believe we've committed a crime, and from prosecution for violating a criminal statute enacted after we committed the
act that violates it—were made legal rights by the Constitution and other enactments. The other enactments can be changed relatively easily, by
amendatory legislation. Amending the Constitution is much more difficult. In recognition of this the Framers left most of the constitutional provisions that confer
rights pretty vague. The courts have made them definite.
Concretely, the scope of these rights has been determined, through an interaction of constitutional text and subsequent judicial interpretation, by a
weighing of competing interests. I'll call them the public-safety interest and the liberty interest. Neither, in my view, has priority. They are both
important, and their relative importance changes from time to time and from situation to situation. The safer the nation feels, the more weight
judges will be willing to give to the liberty interest. The greater the threat that an activity poses to the nation's safety, the stronger
will the grounds seem for seeking to repress that activity, even at some cost to liberty. This fluid approach is only common sense. Supreme
the Bill
of Rights should not be made into a suicide pact. It was not intended to be such, and the present contours of the rights that it confers,
Court Justice Robert Jackson gave it vivid expression many years ago when he said, in dissenting from a free-speech decision he thought doctrinaire, that
having been shaped far more by judicial interpretation than by the literal text (which doesn't define such critical terms as "due process of law" and "unreasonable"
arrests and searches), are alterable in response to changing threats to national security.
If it is true, therefore, as it appears to be at this writing, that the events of September 11 have revealed the United States to be in much greater jeopardy
from international terrorism than had previously been believed—have revealed it to be threatened by a diffuse, shadowy enemy that must be fought
stands to reason that our civil liberties will be curtailed. They should be curtailed, to the
extent that the benefits in greater security outweigh the costs in reduced liberty. All that can reasonably be asked of the
responsible legislative and judicial officials is that they weigh the costs as carefully as the benefits.
It will be argued that the lesson of history is that officials habitually exaggerate dangers to the nation's security. But the lesson of history
is the opposite. It is because officials have repeatedly and disastrously underestimated these dangers that our history is as violent as
it is. Consider such underestimated dangers as that of secession, which led to the Civil War; of a Japanese attack on the United States,
which led to the disaster at Pearl Harbor; of Soviet espionage in the 1940s, which accelerated the Soviet Union's acquisition of nuclear weapons and
emboldened Stalin to encourage North Korea's invasion of South Korea; of the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba, which precipitated the Cuban
with police measures as well as military force—it
missile crisis; of political assassinations and outbreaks of urban violence in the 1960s; of the Tet Offensive of 1968; of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the
subsequent taking of American diplomats as hostages; and, for that matter, of the events of September 11.
It is true that when we are surprised and hurt, we tend to overreact—but only with the benefit of hindsight can a reaction be
separated into its proper and excess layers. In hindsight we know that interning Japanese-Americans did not shorten World War II. But was this known at
the time? If not, shouldn't the Army have erred on the side of caution, as it did? Even today we cannot say with any assurance that Abraham Lincoln
was wrong to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War, as he did on several occasions, even though the Constitution is clear that only
Congress can suspend this right. (Another of Lincoln's wartime measures, the Emancipation Proclamation, may also have been unconstitutional.) But
Lincoln would have been wrong to cancel the 1864 presidential election, as some urged : by November of 1864 the North was close to victory,
and canceling the election would have created a more dangerous precedent than the wartime suspension of habeas corpus. This last
example shows that civil liberties remain part of the balance even in the most dangerous of times , and even though their relative weight must
then be less.
Lincoln's unconstitutional acts during the Civil War show that even legality must sometimes be sacrificed for other values. We are a nation
under law, but first we are a nation. I want to emphasize something else, however: the malleability of law, its pragmatic rather than dogmatic
character. The law is not absolute, and the slogan "Fiat iustitia ruat caelum" ("Let justice be done though the heavens fall") is dangerous nonsense. The law is a
human creation rather than a divine gift, a tool of government rather than a mandarin mystery. It is an instrument for promoting social welfare, and as
the conditions essential to that welfare change, so must it change.
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Additional Negative Card for Solvency
Facebook and Google engage in mass surveillance – plan doesn't effect that
Assange 12 (Julian, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. Andy Muller-Maguhn, specialist on computers, telecommunications, and
surveillance. Jacob Appelbaum, computer security researcher. Jeremie Zimmerman, co-founder and spokesperson for the citizen
advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. Conversation in the book “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet,” chapter
titled “Private Sector Spying”)
JÉRÉMIE: State-sponsored surveillance is indeed a major issue which challenges the very structure of all
democracies and the way they function, but there is also private surveillance and potentially private mass
collection of data. Just look at Google. If you’re a standard Google user Google knows who
you’re communicating with, who you know, what you’re researching, potentially your sexual
orientation, and your religious and philosophical beliefs. ANDY: It knows more about you than
you know yourself. JÉRÉMIE: More than your mother and maybe more than yourself. Google knows when you’re online and
when you’re not. ANDY: Do you know what you looked for two years, three days and four hours ago?
You don’t know; Google knows. JÉRÉMIE: Actually, I try not to use Google anymore for these very reasons. JACOB: It’s
like the Kill Your Television of the 21st century. 55 Effective protest except the network effect prevents your protest from working.
56 Kill your television, man. JÉRÉMIE: Well it’s not a protest, it is more my personal way of seeing things. ANDY: I watched these
beautiful movies of people throwing their televisions out of three-story houses. JÉRÉMIE: It’s not only the state-sponsored
surveillance, it’s the question of privacy, the way data is being handled by third parties and the knowledge that people have of what
is being done with the data. I don’t use Facebook so I don’t know much about it. But now with Facebook you see the
behavior of users who are very happy to hand out any kind of personal data, and can you blame
people for not knowing where the limit is between privacy and publicity? A few years ago, before digital
technologies, people who had a public life were either in show-business, politics or journalism, and now everybody has the potential
for public life by clicking a publish button. “Publish” means make something public, it means handing out access to this data to the
rest of the world— and, of course, when you see teenagers sending pictures of themselves drunk or
whatever, they may not have this vision that it means the whole of the rest of the world,
potentially for a very, very long period of time. Facebook makes its business by blurring this line
between privacy, friends, and publicity. And it is even storing the data when you think that it is
only meant for your friends and the people you love. So whatever the degree of publicity that
you intend your data to be under, when you click publish on Facebook you give it to Facebook
first, and then they give access to some other Facebook users after. JULIAN: Even this line between government and corporation
is blurred. If you look at the expansion in the military contractor sector in the West over the past ten years, the NSA, which was
the biggest spy agency in the world, had ten primary contractors on its books that it worked with. Two years ago it had over 1,000.
So there is a smearing out of the border between what is government and what is the private sector. JÉRÉMIE: And it can be argued
that the US spying agencies have access to all of Google’s stored data. JULIAN: But they do. JÉRÉMIE: And all of Facebook’s data, so
in a way Facebook and Google may be extensions of these agencies. JULIAN: Do you have a Google subpoena Jake? Was a
subpoena sent to Google to hand over information related to your Google account? WikiLeaks got subpoenas to our California
domain name registrar dynadot, which is where the wikileaks.org registration is made. They were subpoenas from the secret
ongoing Grand Jury investigation into WikiLeaks, asking for financial records, login records, et cetera, which it gave them. 57 JACOB:
The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter and Google and Sonic.net, three services that I use or have used in the past, each
received a 2703( d) notice, which is this unusual form of secret subpoena. 58 JULIAN: Under the PATRIOT Act? JACOB: No. This is
the Stored Communications Act, essentially. The Wall Street Journal is saying that each of these services claims that the government
wanted the metadata, and the government asserted it has the right to do this without a warrant. There’s an ongoing legal case about
the government’s right to keep its tactics secret, not only from the public, but from court records. I read the Wall Street Journal and
found out like everyone else. JULIAN: So Google sucked up to the US government in its Grand Jury investigation into WikiLeaks
when the government subpoenaed your records— not a conventional subpoena, but this special sort of intelligence subpoena. But
the news came out earlier in 2011 that Twitter had been served a number of subpoenas, from the same Grand Jury, but Twitter
fought to be able to notify the people whose accounts were subpoenaed— for the gag order to be lifted. I don’t have a Twitter
account, so I didn’t get one, but my name and Bradley Manning’s name were on all the subpoenas as the information that was being
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2015 Atlanta Urban Debate League
Middle School Varsity Supplement Packet (Aff and Neg)
searched for. Jake, you had a Twitter account so Twitter received a subpoena in relation to you. Google also received a subpoena,
but didn’t fight to make it public. 59 JACOB: Allegedly. That’s what I read in the Wall Street Journal. I might not be even allowed to
reference it except for in connection to the Wall Street Journal. JULIAN: Is it because these orders also have a gag component?
That has been found to be unconstitutional, hasn’t it? JACOB: Maybe not. For the Twitter case it is public that we lost the motion
for a stay where we said that disclosing this data to the government would do irreparable harm as they can never forget this data
once they receive it. They said, “Yeah well, your stay is denied, Twitter must disclose this data.” We’re in the process of appeal,
specifically about the secrecy of docketing— and I can’t talk about that— but as it stands right now, the court said that on
the internet you have no expectation of privacy when you willingly reveal information to a third
party, and, by the way, everyone on the internet is a third party. JULIAN: Even if the organization
like Facebook or Twitter says that it will keep the information private. JACOB: For sure. And this is the
blurring of the state and corporation. This is actually probably the most important thing to consider here, that the NSA and
Google have a partnership in cyber-security for US national defense reasons. ANDY: Whatever
cyber-security means in this context. That’s a wide term. JACOB: They are trying to exempt everything from
the Freedom of Information Act and to keep it secret. Then the US government also asserts it has the right to
send an administrative subpoena, which has a lower bar than a search warrant, where the third
party is gagged from telling you about it, and you have no right to fight because it is the third
party that is directly involved, and the third party has no constitutional grounds to protect your
data either. JULIAN: The third party being Twitter or Facebook or your ISP. JACOB: Or anyone. They said it was a oneto-one one-to-one map with banking privacy and with dialing a telephone.You willingly disclose
the number to the phone company by using it.You knew that, right? By using the telephone you
obviously are saying, “I have no expectation of privacy,” when typing those numbers.There is
even less explicit connection to the machine. People don’t understand how the internet
works— they don’t understand telephone networks either— but courts have consistently ruled
that this is the case, and in our Twitter case so far, which unfortunately I can’t really talk about because I don’t actually live in
a free country, they assert essentially the same thing. 60 It’s absolute madness to imagine that we give up all of
our personal data to these companies, and then the companies have essentially become
privatized secret police. And— in the case of Facebook— we even have democratized
surveillance. Instead of paying people off the way the Stasi did in East Germany, we reward
them as a culture— they get laid now.They report on their friends and then, “Hey, so and so got
engaged;” “Oh, so and so broke up;” “Oh, I know who to call now.”
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