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NSA Negative NAUDL 2015-16

NSA NegativeNSA Negative.........................................................................................................................................................................1

Privacy Advantage Answers

1NC – Frontline Privacy [1/6]........................................................................................................................................3

#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions......................................................................................................................9

#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions....................................................................................................................10

#2 Privacy Losses are Inevitable extensions...............................................................................................................11

#3 Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions.............................................................................................................12

#4 Security Consequences come before Privacy- extensions....................................................................................14

#5 Posner – Balancing Good—Extensions...................................................................................................................16

#6 Mass Surveillance Decreases Discrimination- extension.......................................................................................18

Answers to: Privacy is a Right.....................................................................................................................................20

Answers to: Surveillance Violates 4th Amendment.....................................................................................................22

Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom [1/2]............................................................................................................23

Answer to Surveillance has chilling effect...................................................................................................................25

Answers to Surveillance is Tyranny.............................................................................................................................26

Surveillance Protects Rights........................................................................................................................................27

Solvency Answers

1NC Frontline – Solvency [1/5]...................................................................................................................................28

USA Freedom Act Solves Violations............................................................................................................................33

Oversight works now..................................................................................................................................................35

Amount of Surveillance is Limited..............................................................................................................................37

NSA will Circumvent Restrictions [1/2].......................................................................................................................38

OFF CASE ARGUMENTS

Topicality

1NC – Topicality Domestic Surveillance......................................................................................................................40

2NC Topicality – Domestic Interpretation...................................................................................................................42

2NC Topicality – Clear Definition Good.......................................................................................................................45

2NC Topicality – NSA is Foreign Surveillance..............................................................................................................46

Terrorism Disadvantage

NSA Negative NAUDL 2015-16

1NC Terrorism DA Link................................................................................................................................................47

Link Terrorism- 702 and Prism....................................................................................................................................48

Link Terrorism – Online Surveillance..........................................................................................................................49

Link Terrorism – Delay................................................................................................................................................51

Terrorism – Answers to “Too much Data” [1/2].........................................................................................................52

Other Arguments

Politics Disad Link.......................................................................................................................................................54

Executive Counterplan Solvency.................................................................................................................................55

NSA Negative Privacy RightsNAUDL 2015-16

1NC – Frontline Privacy [1/6]

1. The NSA is not a rogue agency, there has been no abuse of surveillance.Lowry, Editor, the National Review, 2015 (Rich, , 5-27-2015, "Lowry: NSA data program faces death by bumper sticker," Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com/csp/mediapool/sites/sltrib/pages/printfriendly.csp?id=2557534)

You can listen to orations on the NSA program for hours and be outraged by its violation of our liberties, inspired by the glories of the Fourth Amendment and prepared to mount the barricades to stop the NSA in its tracks — and still have no idea what the program actually does. That’s what the opponents leave out or distort, since their case against the program becomes so much less compelling upon fleeting contact with reality. The program involves so-called metadata, information about phone calls, but not the content of the calls — things like the numbers called, the time of the call, the duration of the call. The phone companies have all this information, which the NSA acquires from them. What happens next probably won’t shock you, and it shouldn’t. As Rachel Brand of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board writes, “It is stored in a database that may be searched only by a handful of trained employees, and even they may search it only after a judge has determined that there is evidence connecting a specific phone number to terrorism.” The charge of domestic spying is redolent of the days when J. Edgar Hoover targeted and harassed Martin Luther King Jr. Not only is there zero evidence of any such abuse, it isn’t even possible based on the NSA database alone. There are no names with the numbers. As former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy points out, whitepages.com has more personal identifying information. The NSA is hardly a rogue agency. Its program is overseen by a special panel of judges, and it has briefed Congress about its program for years.



2. Privacy invasions are inevitable. They will continue to grow, Moore’s law proves.Seemann, freelance writer focusing on technology, 2015, (Michael, “ Digital Tailspin Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden” The Network Notebooks series March 2015 http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NN09_Digital_Tailspin_SP.pdf)

That the NSA was eavesdropping on satellite phone connections worldwide was known as early as 2000. Its global network of radio stations and radar domes was called ‘Echelon’. The European Parliament called for an investigation, but when the enquiry commission submitted its report on September 5, 2001, it was overshadowed by the events of 9/11 a few days later. Apart from Echelon leaving deep traces in the collective memory of nerd culture, virtually nothing happened – this was a scandal that was to remain without political consequence. Even ‘post-Snowden’, no political, technical, or legal solutions to surveillance are forthcoming. On the contrary, surveillance will likely keep on spreading, parallel to the datafication of the world. What was monitored at the time of Echelon was the same as it is today: everything. Only before, ‘everything’ was less extensive by several orders of magnitude. What can be put under surveillance will be put under surveillance, i.e. the digitized areas of life. These areas are subject to Moore’s Law, meaning that their capacities will double every 18 to 24 months. The digital tailspin has only just begun. And it will continue to sink into every nook and cranny of daily life, leaving no corner undigitized. So when in ten years’ time the latest eavesdropping operations of intelligence are revealed, we might hear of brain scanners, or of sensors tapping into our bloodstreams. Either way, people will shrug it off, or maybe not even that, as their thoughts on the issue will be publicly available anyway.

http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NN09_Digital_Tailspin_SP.pdf



3. Privacy is not absolute, corporations and big data make violations of privary inevitable. Goldsmith, Professor at Harvard Law 2015Jack, School, The Ends of Privacy, The New Rambler, Apr. 06, 2015 (reviewing Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)). Published Version http://newramblerreview.com/images/files/Jack- Goldsmith_Review-of-Bruce-Schneier.pdf

The truth is that consumers love the benefits of digital goods and are willing to give up traditionally private information in exchange for the manifold miracles that the Internet and big data bring. Apple and Android each offer more than a million apps, most of which are built upon this model, as are countless other Internet services. More generally, big data promises huge improvements in economic efficiency and productivity, and in health care and safety. Absent abuses on a scale we have not yet seen, the public’s attitude toward giving away personal information in exchange for these benefits will likely persist, even if the government requires firms to make more transparent how they collect and use our data. One piece of evidence for this is that privacy-respecting search engines and email services do not capture large market shares. In general these services are not as easy to use, not as robust, and not as efficacious as their personal-data-heavy competitors.

Schneier understands and discusses all this. In the end his position seems to be that we should deny ourselves some (and perhaps a lot) of the benefits big data because the costs to privacy and related values are just too high. We “have to stop the slide” away from privacy, he says, not because privacy is “profitable or efficient, but because it is moral.” But as Schneier also recognizes, privacy is not a static moral concept. “Our personal definitions of privacy are both cultural and situational,” he acknowledges. Consumers are voting with their computer mice and smartphones for more digital goods in exchange for more personal data. The culture increasingly accepts the giveaway of personal information for the benefits of modern computerized life.

This trend is not new. “The idea that privacy can’t be invaded at all is utopian,” says Professor Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. “There are amounts and kinds of information which previously were not given out and suddenly they have to be given out. People adjust their behavior and conceptions accordingly.” That is Fried in the 1970 Newsweek story, responding to an earlier generation’s panic about big data and data mining. The same point applies today, and will apply as well when the Internet of things makes today’s data mining seem as quaint as 1970s-era computation.



4. Must weigh the consequences of policy decisions — especially when responding to terrorism. Isaac , Professor of political science at Indiana, 2002 Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University-Bloomington, 2002 (“Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent, Volume 49, Issue 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via EBSCOhost, p. 35-37)

As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility . The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends . Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice , moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice . [end page 35] This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant . Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important , always , to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment . It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance . And it undermines political effectiveness.



5. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If mass surveillance is good policy, it is justified. Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on the United States Court of Appeals, 2006 (Richard A, was named the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century by The Journal of Legal Studies, 2006 “Wire Trap,” New Republic, February 6th, Available Online at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/104859/wire-trap)

The revelation by The New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) is conducting a secret program of electronic surveillance outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has sparked a hot debate in the press and in the blogosphere. But there is something odd about the debate: It is aridly legal. Civil libertarians contend that the program is illegal, even unconstitutional; some want President Bush impeached for breaking the law. The administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does violate FISA (the administration denies that it does), then, to that extent, the law is unconstitutional. This legal debate is complex, even esoteric. But, apart from a handful of not very impressive anecdotes (did the NSA program really prevent the Brooklyn Bridge from being destroyed by blowtorches?), there has been little discussion of the program’s concrete value as a counter-terrorism measure or of the inroads it has or has not made on liberty or privacy.

Not only are these questions more important to most people than the legal questions; they are fundamental to those questions. Lawyers who are busily debating legality without first trying to assess the consequences of the program have put the cart before the horse. Law in the United States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy. In analyzing all but the simplest legal questions, one is well advised to begin by asking what social policies are at stake. Suppose the NSA program is vital to the nation’s defense, and its impingements on civil liberties are slight. That would not prove the program’s legality, because not every good thing is legal; law and policy are not perfectly aligned. But a conviction that the program had great merit would shape and hone the legal inquiry. We would search harder for grounds to affirm its legality, and, if our search were to fail, at least we would know how to change the law--or how to change the program to make it comply with the law--without destroying its effectiveness. Similarly, if the program’s contribution to national security were negligible--as we learn, also from the Times, that some FBI personnel are indiscreetly whispering--and it is undermining our civil liberties, this would push the legal analysis in the opposite direction.

Ronald Dworkin, the distinguished legal philosopher and constitutional theorist, wrote in The New York Review of Books in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that “we cannot allow our Constitution and our shared sense of decency to become a suicide pact.” He would doubtless have said the same thing about FISA. If you approach legal issues in that spirit rather than in the spirit of ruat caelum fiat iusticia (let the heavens fall so long as justice is done), you will want to know how close to suicide a particular legal interpretation will bring you before you decide whether to embrace it. The legal critics of the surveillance program have not done this, and the defenders have for the most part been content to play on the critics’ turf.



6. Surveillance increases democratic accountability and makes discriminatory bias impossible.Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,William H., 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance

Broad-based surveillance distributes its burdens widely, which may be fairer.

For democratic accountability, panopticon-style surveillance has an underappreciated advantage. It may more easily accommodate transparency. Electronic surveillance is governed by fully specified algorithms. Thus, disclosure of the algorithms gives a full picture of the practices. By contrast, when government agents are told to scan for suspicious behavior, we know very little about what criteria they are using. Even if we require the agents to articulate their criteria, they may be unable to do so comprehensively. The concern is not just about good faith, but also about unconscious predisposition. Psychologists have provided extensive evidence of pervasive, unconscious bias based on race and other social stereotypes and stigma. Algorithm-governed electronic surveillance has no such bias.


#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions (___)

(__)The NSA is well-regulated and constrained by judicial oversight.Cohen, fellow at The Century Foundation, 2015(Michael A. 6-3-2015, "NSA Surveillance Debate Drowned Out on Both Sides by Fear Tactics," World Politics Review, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15905/nsa-surveillance-debate-drowned-out-on-both-sides-by-fear-tacticsa)

The arguments of NSA opponents have, for two years, relied on hypothetical, trumped-up fears of the government ransacking our private information. These concerns have been raised even though, from all appearances, the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities are reasonably well-regulated and constrained by judicial oversight. NSA opponents like to point out that a recent court decision determined that the bulk records collection program was illegal, which ignores the many other court decisions that accepted its legality. More important, it ignores the decisions of the secret FISA Court, which ordered the NSA not to scrap collection programs that were determined to be operating unconstitutionally, but rather to make changes to them to get them in line with constitutional constraints.


#1 No Abuse of Surveillance extensions (___)

(__) There’s no evidence of abuse of surveillance powers. Simon, fellow at The Century Foundation, 2013, (David, 7/3/13, "We are shocked, shocked...," http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/)

I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone, somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce — witness those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure — and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As happens the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.


#2 Privacy Losses are Inevitable extensions (___)

(__)Privacy is eroding now because of technological innovation.Stalder, Sociology Professor at Queens University, 2009(Felix, "Privacy is not the Antidote to Surveillance." Surveillance & Society 1.1 (2009): 120-124.)

The standard answer to these problems the call for our privacy to be protected. Privacy, though, is a notoriously vague concept. Europeans have developed on of the most stringent approaches where privacy is understood as ‘informational self-determination’. This, basically, means that an individual should be able to determine the extent to which data about her or him is being collected in any given context. Following this definition, privacy is a kind of bubble that surrounds each person, and the dimensions of this bubble are determined by one's ability to control who enters it and who doesn't. Privacy is a personal space; space under the exclusive control of the individual. Privacy, in a way, is the informational equivalent to the (bourgeois, if you will) notion of "my home is my castle." As appealing and seemingly intuitive as this concept is, it plainly doesn't work. Everyone agrees that our privacy has been eroding for a very long time – hence the notion of the "surveillance society" – and there is absolutely no indication that the trend is going to slow down, let alone reverse. Even in the most literal sense, the walls of our castles are being pierced by more and more connections to the outside world. It started with the telephone, the TV and the Internet, but imagine when your fridge begins to communicate with your palm pilot, updating the shopping list as you run out of milk, and perhaps even sending a notice to the grocer for home delivery. Or maybe the stove will alert the fire department because you didn't turn off the hot plate before rushing out one morning.6

A less futuristic example of this connectivity would be smoke detectors that are connected to alarm response systems. Outside the home, it becomes even more difficult to avoid entering into relationships that produce electronic, personal data. Only the most zealous will opt for standing in line to pay cash at the toll both every day, if they can just breeze through an electronic gate instead. This problem is made even more complicated by the fact that there are certain cases in which we want "them" to have our data. Complete absence from databanks is neither practical nor desirable. For example, it can be a matter of life and death to have instant access to comprehensive and up-to-date health-related information about the people who are being brought into the emergency room unconscious. This information needs to be too detailed and needs to be updated too often – for example to include all prescriptiondrugs a person is currently using – to be issued on, say, a smartcard held by the individual, hence giving him or her full control over who accesses it. To make matters worse, with privacy being by definition personal, every single person will have a different notion about what privacy means. Data one person might allow to be collected might be deeply personal for someone else. This makes it very difficult to collectively agree on the legitimate boundaries of the privacy bubble.


#3 Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions (___)

(__)Privacy can’t be restored – technological and corporate invasions happen all the time.Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studeies, 2014

(James Andrew “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - Center For Strategic & International Studies - Strategic Technologies Program – December - http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate)

On average, there are 16 tracking programs on every website.4 This means that when you visit a website, it collects and reports back to 16 companies on what you’ve looked at and what you have done. These programs are invisible to the user. They collect IP address, operating system and browser data, the name of the visiting computer, what you looked at, and how long you stayed. This data can be made even more valuable when it is matched with other data collections. Everything a consumer does online is tracked and collected. There is a thriving and largely invisible market in aggregating data on individuals and then selling it for commercial purposes. Data brokers collect utility bills, addresses, education, arrest records (arrests, not just convictions). All of this data is recorded, stored, and made available for sale. Social networking sites sell user data in some anonymized form so that every tweet or social media entry can be used to calculate market trends and refine advertising strategies. What can be predicted from this social media data is amazing—unemployment trends, disease outbreaks, consumption patterns for different groups, consumer preferences, and political trends. It is often more accurate than polling because it reflects peoples’ actual behavior rather than the answer they think an interviewer wants to hear. Ironically, while the ability of U.S. agencies to use this commercial data is greatly restricted by law and policy, the same restrictions do not apply to foreign governments. The development of the Internet would have been very different and less dynamic if these business models had not been developed. They provide incentives and financial returns to develop or improve Internet services. There is an implicit bargain where you give up privacy in exchange for services, but in bargains between service providers and consumers, one side holds most of the cards and there is little transparency. But the data-driven models of the Internet mean that it is an illusion to think that there is privacy online or that NSA is the only entity harvesting personal data.


#3 Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions (___)

(__)Corporation commit much worse privacy violations.Lowry, Editor, the National Review, 2015, (Rich, , 5-27-2015, "Lowry: NSA data program faces death by bumper sticker," Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com/csp/mediapool/sites/sltrib/pages/printfriendly.csp?id=2557534)

In the context of all that is known about us by private companies, the NSA is a piker. Take the retailer Target, for example. According to The New York Times, it collects your “demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit.” Of course, the Fourth Amendment applies to the government, not private entities like Target. The amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” If the NSA were breaking into homes and seizing metadata that people had carefully hidden away from prying eyes, it would be in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment. But no one is in possession of his or her own metadata. Even if the NSA didn’t exist, metadata would be controlled by someone else, the phone companies. The Supreme Court has held that you don’t have an expectation of privacy for such information in the possession of a third party. One frightening way to look at mail delivery is that agents of the state examine and handle the correspondence of countless of millions of Americans. They aren’t violating anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights, though, because no one expects the outside of their envelopes to be private.


#4 Security Consequences come before Privacy - extensions (___)

(__)Terrorism and fear chill speech and democracy more than surveillance.Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,(William H, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance

With low crime rates and small risks of terrorism in the United States, privacy advocates do not feel compelled to address the potential chilling effect on speech and conduct that arises from fear of private lawlessness, but we do not have to look far to see examples of such an effect abroad and to recognize that its magnitude depends on the effectiveness of public law enforcement. To the extent that law enforcement is enhanced by surveillance, we ought to recognize the possibility of a warming effect that strengthens people’s confidence that they can act and speak without fear of private aggression.

(__) Security is more important than privacy because if people aren’t secure the right to privacy is meaningless.Himma, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University, 2007Kenneth Einar,. "Privacy versus security: Why privacy is not an absolute value or right." San Diego L. Rev. 44 (2007): 857.

The last argument I wish to make in this essay will be brief because it is extremely well known and has been made in a variety of academic and nonacademic contexts. The basic point here is that no right not involving security can be meaningfully exercised in the absence of efficacious protection of security. The right to property means nothing if the law fails to protect against threats to life and bodily security. Likewise, the right to privacy has little value if one feels constrained to remain in one's home because it is so unsafe to venture away that one significantly risks death or grievous bodily injury. This is not merely a matter of describing common subjective preferences; this is rather an objective fact about privacy and security interests. If security interests are not adequately protected, citizens will simply not have much by way of privacy interests to protect. While it is true, of course, that people have privacy interests in what goes on inside the confines of their home, they also have legitimate privacy interests in a variety of public contexts that cannot be meaningfully exercised if one is afraid to venture out into those contexts because of significant threats to individual and collective security-such as would be the case if terrorist attacks became highly probable in those contexts. It is true, of course, that to say that X is a prerequisite for exercising a particular right Y does not obviously entail that X is morally more important than Y, but this is a reasonable conclusion to draw. If it is true that Y is meaningless in the absence of X, then it seems clear that X deserves, as a moral matter, more stringent protection than Y does. Since privacy interests lack significance in the absence of adequate protection of security interests, it seems reasonable to infer that security interests deserve, as a moral matter, more stringent protection than privacy interests.


#4 Security Consequences come before Privacy- extensions (___)

(__)Privacy rights are not absolute, security and preserving life is more important.Himma, 2007Kenneth Einar, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. "Privacy versus security: Why privacy is not an absolute value or right." San Diego L. Rev. 44 (2007): 857.

From an intuitive standpoint, the idea that the right to privacy is an absolute right seems utterly implausible. Intuitively, it seems clear that there are other rights that are so much more important that they easily trump privacy rights in the event of a conflict. For example, if a psychologist knows that a patient is highly likely to commit a murder, then it is, at the very least, morally permissible to disclose that information about the patient in order to prevent the crime-regardless of whether such information would otherwise be protected by privacy rights. Intuitively, it seems clear that life is more important from the standpoint of morality than any of the interests protected by a moral right to privacy. Still one often hears-primarily from academics in information schools and library schools, especially in connection with the controversy regarding the USA PATRIOT Act-the claim that privacy should never be sacrificed for security, implicitly denying what I take to be the underlying rationale for the PATRIOT Act. This also seems counterintuitive because it does not seem unreasonable to believe we have a moral right to security that includes the right to life. Although this right to security is broader than the right to life, the fact that security interests include our interests in our lives implies that the right to privacy trumps even the right to life-something that seems quite implausible from an intuitive point of view. If I have to give up the most private piece of information about myself to save my life or protect myself from either grievous bodily injury or financial ruin, I would gladly do so without hesitation. There are many things I do not want you to know about me, but should you make a credible threat to my life, bodily integrity, financial security, or health, and then hook me up to a lie detector machine, I will truthfully answer any question you ask about me. I value my privacy a lot, but I value my life, bodily integrity, and financial security much more than any of the interests protected by the right to privacy.


#5 Posner – Balancing Good—Extensions (___)

(__)The counter-terror benefits of mass surveillance outweigh privacy and the Constitution.Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on the United States Court of Appeals, 2006 (Richard A. “Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis,” Washington Post, December 21st, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001053.html

The goal of national security intelligence is to prevent a terrorist attack, not just punish the attacker after it occurs, and the information that enables the detection of an impending attack may be scattered around the world in tiny bits. A much wider, finer-meshed net must be cast than when investigating a specific crime. Many of the relevant bits may be in the e-mails, phone conversations or banking records of U.S. citizens, some innocent, some not so innocent. The government is entitled to those data, but just for the limited purpose of protecting national security.The Pentagon's rush to fill gaps in domestic intelligence reflects the disarray in this vital yet neglected area of national security. The principal domestic intelligence agency is the FBI, but it is primarily a criminal investigation agency that has been struggling, so far with limited success, to transform itself. It is having trouble keeping its eye on the ball; an FBI official is quoted as having told the Senate that environmental and animal rights militants pose the biggest terrorist threats in the United States. If only that were so. Most other nations, such as Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Israel, many with longer histories of fighting terrorism than the United States, have a domestic intelligence agency that is separate from its national police force, its counterpart to the FBI. We do not. We also have no official with sole and comprehensive responsibility for domestic intelligence. It is no surprise that gaps in domestic intelligence are being filled by ad hoc initiatives.We must do better. The terrorist menace, far from receding, grows every day. This is not only because al Qaeda likes to space its attacks, often by many years, but also because weapons of mass destruction are becoming ever more accessible to terrorist groups and individuals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001053.html



#5 Posner – Balancing Good—Extensions (___)

(__) NSA data collection does not violate rights since computers filter the massive amount of data for key signals before a human ever sees the data.

Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Judge on the United States Court of Appeals, 2006 (Richard A. “Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis,” Washington Post, December 21st, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001053.html

These programs are criticized as grave threats to civil liberties. They are not. Their significance is in flagging the existence of gaps in our defenses against terrorism. The Defense Department is rushing to fill those gaps, though there may be better ways. The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer. The data that make the cut are those that contain clues to possible threats to national security. The only valid ground for forbidding human inspection of such data is fear that they might be used to blackmail or otherwise intimidate the administration's political enemies. That danger is more remote than at any previous period of U.S. history. Because of increased political partisanship, advances in communications technology and more numerous and competitive media, American government has become a sieve. No secrets concerning matters that would interest the public can be kept for long. And the public would be far more interested to learn that public officials were using private information about American citizens for base political ends than to learn that we have been rough with terrorist suspects – a matter that was quickly exposed despite efforts at concealment. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it difficult to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents unless they are suspected of being involved in terrorist or other hostile activities. That is too restrictive. Innocent people, such as unwitting neighbors of terrorists, may, without knowing it, have valuable counterterrorist information. Collecting such information is of a piece with data-mining projects such as Able Danger.




#6 Mass Surveillance Decreases Discrimination - extension (___)

(__)Mass surveillance is less discriminatory because it targets everyone equally.Hadjimatheou, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, 2014 (Katerina, Security Ethics Group, “The Relative Moral Risks of Untargeted and Targeted Surveillance” Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2014) 17:187–207 DOI 10.1007/s10677-013-9428-1)

There are good reasons to think that both the extent to which surveillance treats people like suspects and the extent to which it stigmatises those it affects increases the more targeted the measure of surveillance. As has already been established, stigmatisation occurs when individuals are marked out as suspicious. Being marked out implies being identified in some way that distinguishes one from other members of the wider community or the relevant group. Being pulled out of line for further search or questioning at an airport; being stopped and searched on a busy train platform while other passengers are left alone; having one’s travel history, credit card, and other records searched before flying because one fits a profile of a potential terrorist-these are all examples of being singled out and thereby marked out for suspicion. They are all stigmatising, because they all imply that there is something suspicious about a person that justifies the intrusion.

In contrast, untargeted surveillance such as blanket screening at airports, spot screening of all school lockers for drugs, and the use of speed cameras neither single people out for scrutiny nor enact or convey a suspicion that those surveilled are more likely than others to be breaking the rules. Rather, everybody engaged in the relevant activity is subject to the same measure of surveillance, indiscriminately and irrespective of any evidence suggesting particular suspiciousness. Such evidence may well emerge from the application of untargeted surveillance, and that evidence may then be used to justify singling people out for further, targeted surveillance. But untargeted surveillance itself affects all people within its range equally and thus stigmatises none in particular.


#6 Mass Surveillance Decreases Discrimination- extension (___)

(__)Mass surveillance solves discrimination.Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,William H. Simon, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance

More generally, broad-reach electronic mechanisms have an advantage in addressing the danger that surveillance will be unfairly concentrated on particular groups; targeting criteria, rather than reflecting rigorous efforts to identify wrongdoers, may reflect cognitive bias or group animus. Moreover, even when the criteria are optimally calculated to identify wrongdoers, they may be unfair to law-abiding people who happen to share some superficial characteristic with wrongdoers. Thus, law-abiding blacks complain that they are unfairly burdened by stop-and-frisk tactics, and law-abiding Muslims make similar complaints about anti-terrorism surveillance.

Such problems are more tractable with broad-based electronic surveillance. Because it is broad-based, it distributes some of its burdens widely. This may be intrinsically fairer, and it operates as a political safeguard, making effective protest more likely in cases of abuse. Because it is electronic, the efficacy of the criteria can be more easily investigated, and their effect on law-abiding people can be more accurately documented. Thus, plaintiffs in challenges to stop-and-frisk practices analyze electronically recorded data on racial incidence and “hit rates” to argue that the criteria are biased and the effects racially skewed. Remedies in such cases typically require more extensive recording.


Answers to: Privacy is a Right (___)

(__)Their understanding of privacy rights as personal will fail because its impossible in modern society.Stalder, 2009,Felix. Department of Sociology, Queens University "Privacy is not the Antidote to Surveillance." Surveillance & Society 1.1 (2009): 120-124.

So rather than fight those connections – some of which are clearly beneficial, some of which are somewhat ambiguous, and some are clearly disconcerting – we have to reconceptualize what these connections do. Rather than seeing them as acts of individual transgression (X has invaded Y’s privacy) we have to see them part of a new landscape of social power. Rather than continuing on the defensive, by trying to maintain an ever-weakening illusion of privacy, we have to shift to the offensive and start demanding accountability of those whose power is enhanced by the new connections. In a democracy, political power is, at least ideally, tamed by making the government accountable to those who are governed, not by carving out areas in which the law doesn't apply. It is, in this perspective, perhaps no co-incidence that many of the strongest privacy advocates (at least in the US) lean politically towards libertarianism, a movement which includes on its fringe white militias which try to set up zones liberated from the US government. In our democracies, extensive institutional mechanisms have been put into to place to create and maintain accountability, and to punish those who abuse their power. We need to develop and instate similar mechanisms for the handling of personal information – a technique as crucial to power as the ability to exercise physical violence – in order to limit the concentration of power inherent in situations that involve unchecked surveillance. The current notion of privacy, which frames the issue as a personal one, won't help us accomplish that.9 However, notions of institutionalized accountability will, because they acknowledge surveillance as a structural problem of political power. It's time to update our strategies for resistance and develop approaches adequate to the actual situation rather than sticking to appealing but inadequate ideas that will keep locking us into unsustainable positions.


Answers to: Privacy is a Right (___)

(__)There should not be a universal ethical rule against surveillance, the context matters.Stoddart, 2014 Eric. School of Divinity, University of St Andrews "Challenging ‘Just Surveillance Theory’: A Response to Kevin Macnish’s ‘Just Surveillance? Towards a Normative Theory of Surveillance’." Surveillance & Society 12.1 (2014): 158-163.

I am sorry to say that I find Macnish's aim of a normative ethics of surveillance to be an unnecessary goal. I could be persuaded that a radically revised model of practical reasoning based on the Just War Tradition might have saliency for investigative strategies involving surveillance technologies. However, 'surveillance' is much too all-encompassing a term to be the subject of its own ethics. There can be no 'ethics of surveillance' but there may be norms appropriate for particular contexts of surveillance. This means examining specific domains in which surveillance is deployed, along with other strategies, to address concerns or challenges. For example, the ethics of surveillance in elderly care or the ethics of surveillance in education are valuable discussions to be had. My point is that it ought to be the ethics of elderly care that is foregrounded within which we would be seek to understand the ethical deployment of surveillance mechanisms.


Answers to: Surveillance Violates 4 th Amendment (___)

(__)NSA programs don’t violate the Fourth Amendment because they information has been given to a third-party.Herman & Yoo, 2014Yoo, John, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Arthur Herman. senior fellow at Hudson Institute. "A Defense of Bulk Surveillance." National Review 65 (2014): 31-33.

Considering the millions of phone numbers making billions of phone calls that year and every year, these levels of surveillance can hardly be considered a major intrusive system. But what about the program’s constitutionality and alleged violation of the Fourth Amendment? The Fourth Amendment does not protect some vague and undefined right to privacy. Instead, it declares: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” The Constitution protects only the privacy of the “person,” the home, and “papers and effects,” which are usually located in the home. It does not reach information or things that we voluntarily give up to the government or to third parties outside of the home or our persons. The Fourth Amendment also does not make such information absolutely immune—it is still subject to search if the government is acting reasonably or has a warrant. These basic principles allow the government to search through massive databases of call and e-mail records when doing so is a reasonable measure to protect the nation’s security, which is its highest duty.


Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom [1/2] (__) Surveillance doesn’t harm freedom or autonomy, because they aren’t reliant on digital communication.Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015 (Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.

The second harm Greenwald sees surveillance posing is personal in nature. Surveillance is said to undermine the very essence of human freedom because the “range of choices people consider when they believe that others are watching is . . . far more limited than what they might do when acting in a private realm.”16 Internet-based surveillance is viewed as especially damaging in this respect because this is “where virtually everything is done” in our day, making it the place “where we develop and express our very personality and sense of self.” Hence, “to permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.”17

This claim too seems overstated in two respects. First, it exaggerates the extent to which our self-development hinges upon electronic communication channels and other related activities that leave electronic traces. The arrival of the Internet certainly opens new vistas, but it does not entirely close earlier ones. A person who fears what her browsing habits might communicate to the authorities can obtain texts offline. Similarly, an individual who fears transmitting materials electronically can do so in person, as Snowden did when communicating with Greenwald. There are costs to communicating in such “old-fashioned” ways, but these costs are neither new nor prohibitive. Second, a substantial part of our self-development takes place in public. We become who we are through personal, social, and intellectual engagements, but these engagements do not always have to be premised on anonymity. Not everyone wants to hide all the time, which is why public engagement—through social media or blogs, for instance—is such a central aspect of the contemporary Internet.

(__) Surveillance doesn’t destroy freedom, we’re doing fine.Seemann, freelance writer focusing on technology, 2015, (Michael, “ Digital Tailspin Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden” The Network Notebooks series March 2015 http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NN09_Digital_Tailspin_SP.pdf)

Our digital lives have been monitored, not just occasionally or recently, but continuously for the past ten years. That means that if total surveillance were as much a risk to personal freedom and individuality as digital rights activists have been suggesting for a long time, no one in the Western hemisphere would be able to feel free or individualistic any more. In other words, the question of whether we can live with total surveillance has already been answered in a way that is by no means hypothetical, but decidedly empirical: yes, we can, and we have been doing so for more than ten years.

http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NN09_Digital_Tailspin_SP.pdf


Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom [2/2] (___)

(__) The claims about authoritarianism are hyperbolic and paranoid. All law enforcement practice might be used improperly, but accountability checks the worst practices.Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,William H. Simon, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance

The third trope of the paranoid style is the slippery slope argument. The idea is that an innocuous step in a feared direction will inexorably lead to further steps that end in catastrophe. As The Music Man (1962) puts it in explaining why a pool table will lead to moral collapse in River City, Iowa, “medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle.” In this spirit, Daniel Solove in Nothing to Hide (2011) explains why broad surveillance is a threat even when limited to detection of unlawful activity. First, surveillance will sometimes lead to mistaken conclusions that will harm innocent people. Second, since “everyone violates the law sometimes” (think of moderate speeding on the highway), surveillance will lead to over-enforcement of low-stakes laws (presumably by lowering the costs of enforcement), or perhaps the use of threats of enforcement of minor misconduct to force people to give up rights (as for example, where police threaten to bring unrelated charges in order to induce a witness or co-conspirator to cooperate in the prosecution of another). And finally, even if we authorize broad surveillance for legitimate purposes, officials will use the authorization as an excuse to extend their activities in illegitimate ways. Yet, slippery slope arguments can be made against virtually any kind of law enforcement. Most law enforcement infringes privacy. (“Murder is the most private act a man can commit,” William Faulkner wrote.) And most law enforcement powers have the potential for abuse. What we can reasonably ask is, first, that the practices are calibrated effectively to identify wrongdoers; second, that the burden they put on law-abiding people is fairly distributed; and third, that officials are accountable for the lawfulness of their conduct both in designing and in implementing the practices.


Answer to Surveillance has chilling effect (__)Surveillance does not eliminate dissent, empirical examples demonstrate the opposite. Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015 (Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.

Greenwald identifies two major harms. The first is political in nature. Mass surveillance is said to stifle dissent because “a citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.” Compliance occurs because, anticipating being shamed or condemned for nonconformist behavior, individuals who know they are being watched “think only in line with what is expected and demanded.”13 Even targeted forms of surveillance are not to be trusted, Greenwald argues, because the “indifference or support of those who think themselves exempt invariably allows for the misuse of power to spread far beyond its original application.”14

These claims strike me as overblown. The more extreme claim, that surveillance furthers thought control, is neither logical nor supported by the facts. It is logically flawed because accusing someone of trying to control your mind proves that they have not succeeded in doing so. On a more practical level, the fate met by states that have tried to perfect mass control—the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, for example—suggests that surveillance cannot eliminate dissent. It is also not clear that surveillance can undermine dissident movements as easily as Greenwald posits. The United States' record, he writes, “is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists.”15 These cases are certainly troubling, but it hardly needs pointing out that surveillance did not prevent the end of segregation, retreat from Vietnam, and the rise of environmental consciousness. This record suggests that dissident movements that have public opinion on their side are not easily intimidated by state surveillance (a point reinforced by the Arab Spring).

Surveillance may make it harder for individuals to associate with movements on the far ends of the political spectrum. But why must a liberal democracy refrain from monitoring extremist groups such as neo-Nazis and anarchists? There is the danger that officials could label as “extreme” legitimate movements seeking to challenge the prevailing order. Yet the possibility that surveillance programs could expand beyond their original ambit does not constitute a good reason to end surveillance altogether. A more proportionate response is to see that surveillance powers are subject to oversight.


Answers to Surveillance is Tyranny (___)

(__)The argument that NSA surveillance enables tyranny is wrong. The data exists inevitably and if you are concerned about the risk of a tyrant taking over, there are much bigger issues than privacy to be concerned about.Etzioni, Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University, 2014 (Amitai, Intelligence and National Security (2014): NSA: National Security vs. Individual Rights, Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2013.867221)

Part VI: The Coming Tyrant?

A common claim among civil libertarians is that, even if little harm is presently being inflicted by government surveillance programs, the infrastructure is in place for a less-benevolent leader to violate the people’s rights and set us on the path to tyranny. For example, it has been argued that PRISM ‘will amount to a “turnkey” system that, in the wrong hands, could transform the country into a totalitarian state virtually overnight. Every person who values personal freedom, human rights and the rule of law must recoil against such a possibility, regardless of their political preference’.177 And Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been ‘careful to point out that he is concerned about the possible abuses of some future, Hitler-like president’.178 A few things might be said in response.

First, all of the data that the government is collecting is already being archived (at least for short periods – as discussed above) by private corporations and other entities. It is not the case that PRISM or other such programs entail the collection of new data that was not previously available.

Second, if one is truly concerned that a tyrant might take over the United States, one obviously faces a much greater and all-encompassing threat than a diminution of privacy. And the response has to be similarly expansive. One can join civic bodies that seek to shore up democracies, or work with various reform movements and public education drives, or ally with groups that prepare to retreat to the mountains, store ammunition and essential foods, and plan to fight the tyrannical forces. But it makes no sense to oppose limited measures to enhance security on these grounds.


Surveillance Protects Rights (___)

(__)Private abuse of digital information is worse and only surveillance can stop that.Simon, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia University, 2014,William H. Simon, 10-20-2014, "Rethinking Privacy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/william-simon-rethinking-privacy-surveillance

The critics’ preoccupation with the dangers of state oppression often leads them to overlook the dangers of private abuse of surveillance. They have a surprisingly difficult time coming up with actual examples of serious harm from government surveillance abuse. Instead, they tend to talk about the “chilling effect” from awareness of surveillance.

By contrast, there have been many examples of serious harm from private abuse of personal information gained from digital sources. At least one person has committed suicide as a consequence of the Internet publication of video showing him engaged in sexual activity. Many people have been humiliated by the public release of a private recording of intimate conduct, and blackmail based on threats of such disclosure has emerged as a common practice. Some of this private abuse is and should be illegal. But the legal prohibitions can only be enforced if the government has some of the surveillance capacities that critics decry. Illicit recording and distribution can only be restrained if the wrongdoers can be identified and their actions effectively restrained. Less compromising critics would deny government these capacities.

NSA Negative SolvencyNAUDL 2015-16

1NC Frontline – Solvency [1/5]

1. The affirmative is unnecessary, the USA freedom act solved the abusive parts of NSA surveillance.

Kaplan, American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner, PhD in Political Science from MIT, 2015,(Fred, 6-1-2015, "The USA Freedom Act Won’t Harm National Security," Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/06/don_t_worry_about_the_patriot_act_expiring_the_usa_freedom_act_won_t_hurt.2.html)

So does the new law have any significance whatever? Can it properly be called a reform law? Yes, for three main reasons. First, it adopts another of the Obama commission’s recommendations: requiring the appointment of a privacy advocate on the FISA Court. This may make the court hearings—which are held in secret—less of a rubber-stamp exercise. Second, it requires periodic declassification review of the court’s rulings (another commission recommendation), which may lead to greater accountability.Third, and most significant, the very removal of metadata from NSA headquarters substantially reduces the potential for abuse. The Obama commission found no evidence that the NSA has used metadata analysis to go after political opponents—or, for that matter, any target other than suspected members or associates of three specific terrorist organizations. It is worth noting that Snowden’s documents have revealed no such evidence, either. However, one can imagine what Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover might have done with the technology that the NSA has at its disposal—and it’s hardly a farfetched notion that the likes of Nixon or Hoover could again ascend to national power. The NSA has set its metadata-search algorithms to trace terrorists, but there’s no physical reason why they couldn’t be set to search for domestic drug traffickers, criminals, political enemies, or troublemakers of whatever category some rogue director might choose. (Currently the NSA is crawling with lawyers, who assiduously follow reporting requirements, but one can imagine a climate in which a director might tear down this whole apparatus.) Removing the metadata from the NSA removes the temptation, or opportunity, for abuse. Given the fears tapped by Snowden’s disclosures, and some harrowing chapters of 20th-century American history, this is a very good thing. And it’s been accomplished with no compromise of national security.



2. The NSA’s actions taken under Section 702 have sufficient oversight in the status quo.Cordero, Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law, 2014,(Carrie, The Brookings Institution A Debate One Year After Snowden: The Future Of U.S. Surveillance Authorities Washington, D.C. Thursday, June 5, 2014 http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/06/05-debate-snowden-future-us-surveillance-nsa#/full-event/)

So, the driving question becomes what problem is it that we’re actually trying to solve because some of the reforms that are currently on the table are wildly out of sync with the actual information that has been revealed. And it’s also worth noting that there have been significant harms from the disclosures, including operational, economic, and political harms.What has not been revealed is that there is any type of systematic, deliberate, strategic-level misuse or abuse of NSA’s authorities, and what we also have learned is that there is actually a significant amount of oversight and accountability that exists over NSA’s activities, and this involves oversight of all three branches of government. It involves federal judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, inspectors general, compliance offices, and so when we want to think about what might be meaningful reform going forward, one area that we can focus on is ensuring that those oversight and accountability mechanisms continue to be well-funded, well-staffed, and are continually evaluated for their effectiveness. We also can focus on making sure that there’s more information made publicly available regarding how those oversight mechanisms monitor what’s going on.



3. Domestic communications are a tiny fraction of data collected by the NSA.Etzioni, Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University, 2014 (Amitai, Intelligence and National Security (2014): NSA: National Security vs. Individual Rights, Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2013.867221)

Critics contend that these standards and procedures are far from rigorous and do not satisfactorily ensure that targeted persons are not American citizens or residents.127 Numbers are difficult to come by, as the intelligence community maintains that it is ‘not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority’ of the FISA Amendments Act that authorizes PRISM.128 John D. Bates, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has noted that, given the scale of the NSA’s data collection, ‘the court cannot know for certain the exact number’ of wholly domestic communications collected under the act.129

Critics cite an NSA internal audit dated May 2012, which found 2776 incidents in the preceding 12months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of protected communications. Most of these incidents were unintended, many involved failures of due diligence or violations of operating procedures. However, ‘the most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3000 Americans and greencard holders.’

Other reports show that (1) these violations make up just a tiny fraction of 250 million communications that are collected by the NSA each year;130 (2) practically all were inadvertent, mostly technical mistakes e.g., syntax errors when making database queries 131 or the programming error that interchanged the Washington DC area code 202 with the international dialing code for Egypt which is 20; 132 (3) measures were taken to reduce error rate; 133 (4) wilful violations of privacy led to termination of the offending employees;134 and (5) the NSA was responsive to internal audits and deferred to court guidance – which shows that oversight works.135



4. Circumvention Turn - NSA Surveillance is much more than a single program, the aff is just playing a game of “Whack-A-Mole.” Surveillance will just pop up with another name.Howell & Zeisberg, Professor of American Politics at the University of Chicago & Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, 2015 (William & Sydney; 7-1-2015, "Executive Secrecy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/howell-zeisberg-executive-secrecy

Consider too the development of new computing systems underwriting the surveillance state. Like most legal scholars, Kitrosser focuses her attention on the kinds of information the federal government can collect and the purposes to which this information can be put. But she does not adequately grapple with the sheer size and breadth of the new capacities that underlie the collection and analysis of information. As Arnold reports, the Department of Defense is working on a “global information grid” with the power to store and process “possibly yottabytes” of data—that is, 1024 bytes, or 100,000 gigabytes, which amounts to 500 quintillion pages of text.

An apparatus of this scale presents a dazzling array of opportunities for mischief. It is as if the government has created an unimaginably large game of Whack-a-Mole: while checking may be an effective way to suppress one troubling program, the existence of this grid will create constant opportunities for new information gathering regimes. For example, although President Barack Obama openly supported the recent restrictions on the NSA implemented by the 2015 Freedom Act, other legislation provides opportunities for him and his successors to continue collecting such data. Through FISA legislation (the legal basis for PRISM and other surveillance and data programs) and Executive Order 12333 (which provides authority for NSA foreign surveillance, and may encompass domestic communications data that travel outside the U.S), presidents will be able to continue programs of mass surveillance despite the Freedom Act—a fact lamented by stalwart critics such as Rand Paul.

Moreover, Kitrosser’s framework may call in vain upon legislators and judges to exert independence and oversight they would just as soon disavow. The FISA Court’s record of granting 99 percent or more of the warrants that the government requests—including, according to a Snowden leak, permitting the NSA to compel a Verizon company to turn over daily information on every phone call made, foreign or domestic—demonstrates that courts may be only too willing to cooperate with the executive.



5. The NSA will simply come up with new legal authorities and technology to continue surveillance.Waldman, contributor Washington Post, 2015, (Paul., 6-3-2015, "A reality check on the future of government spying," Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/06/03/a-reality-check-on-the-future-of-government-spying/

And let’s not forget that the NSA and other government agencies are certain — not possible, not likely, but certain — to come up with new ways to spy on Americans as new technologies become available. Just as the NSA did with the bulk phone data collection, they’ll probably take a look at earlier laws and decide that there’s a legal basis for whatever new kind of surveillance they want to begin — and that it’s best if the public didn’t know about it. Indeed, just this week an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that the FBI is using aircraft with advanced cameras to conduct investigations without warrants. That’s a relatively mundane use of technology, but there will always be new tools and capabilities coming down the pike, and the impulse will always be to put them into operation, then figure out afterward if it’s legally justifiable. The story of the bulk telephone data collection tells us that the only thing likely to restrain the expansion of government surveillance is public exposure. If you’re hoping that politicians who care about privacy will do it on their own, you’re likely to be disappointed.


USA Freedom Act Solves Violations

(__) USA Freedom increases transparency and limits the NSA’s worst programs.

Nakashima, National Security Reporter for the Washington Post, 2015,(Ellen, 6-1-2015, "Congressional action on NSA is a milestone in the post-9/11 world," Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congressional-action-on-nsa-is-a-milestone-in-the-post-911-world/2015/06/02/f46330a2-0944-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html)

The USA Freedom Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday, marks the first piece of legislation to rein in surveillance powers in the wake of disclosures two years ago by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and the national debate he catalyzed. It comes as Obama is winding down the nation’s wars overseas and as fears of another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001, no longer galvanize and unify lawmakers in the same way they once did. Today, Congress and the nation are much more divided about the proper balance between liberty and security. The inability of the Senate for weeks to resolve the issue, forcing the lapse of three surveillance powers at midnight Sunday, reflected the fissures between those who think that the terrorist threat is as potent as ever and those who believe that the government has overreached in its goal to keep Americans safe. With the passage of the USA Freedom Act, though, Congress has answered Obama’s call to end the National Security Agency’s bulk storage of Americans’ phone data while preserving a way for the agency to obtain the records of terrorism suspects. “The Senate’s passage of the USA Freedom Act today is a huge win for national security and the Fourth Amendment,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a lead sponsor of the bill. At the same time, the legislation doesn’t end the surveillance debate or go as far as some members of the president’s liberal base or the libertarian right would like. Some lawmakers have vowed to press for further changes to protect citizens’ privacy and enhance transparency. “The fight to protect Americans’ constitutional rights against government overreach is not over,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has long called for an end to secret surveillance law, said in a statement. He added: “Everybody who has supported our fight for surveillance reform over the last two years is responsible for our victory today and I’m looking forward to working with a bipartisan coalition to push for greater reforms in the future.” The bill’s passage is a milestone in the post-9/11 world. “For the first time since 9/11, Congress has placed significant limits on the government’s ability to spy on Americans,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. But the bill’s significance, some analysts say, will become apparent only with time. “Is it the beginning of a recalibration of intelligence policy, or is it the most that Congress can accomplish and the end of the reform process?” said Steven Aftergood, a national security and transparency expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “We won’t really know that until we get further down the line.” Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel, said the law is a landmark — but not a good one. “It is going to make the National Security Agency risk-averse in ways that the CIA has occasionally been risk-averse,” he said. “They followed the rules. They believed they were following the rules, and they got punished nonetheless.” The USA Freedom Act not only ends NSA bulk collection but also narrows the collection of other types of records under the USA Patriot Act and other intelligence authorities. It increases transparency in surveillance court decisions and provides the opportunity for a public advocate in normally closed court hearings. It also reinstates the three lapsed authorities, while amending one of them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congressional-action-on-nsa-is-a-milestone-in-the-post-911-world/2015/06/02/f46330a2-0944-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congressional-action-on-nsa-is-a-milestone-in-the-post-911-world/2015/06/02/f46330a2-0944-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html


Oversight works now

(__) Oversight of section 702 is working now.Cordero,Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law , 2014Carrie F., 6-13-2014, "Fear vs. Facts: Exploring the Rules the NSA Operates Under," Cato Unbound, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/13/carrie-f-cordero/fear-vs-facts-exploring-rules-nsa-operates-under

It is worth exploring. Here is how oversight of the Section 702 surveillance works, as one example, since it has been the subject of a significant part of the debate of the past year. Section 702 was added to FISA by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It authorizes the NSA to acquire the communications, for foreign intelligence purposes, of non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States. These are persons with no Constitutional protections, and yet, because the acquisition requires the assistance of a U.S. electronic communications provider, there is an extensive approval and oversight process. There is a statutory framework. Specifically, the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence jointly approve certifications. According to declassified documents, the certifications are topical, meaning, the way the statute is being implemented, the certifications are not so specific that they identify individual targets; but they are not so broad that they cover any and everything that might be foreign intelligence information. The certifications are filed with the FISC, along with targeting and minimization procedures. Targeting procedures are the rules by which NSA selects valid foreign intelligence targets for collection. Minimization procedures are rules by which NSA handles information concerning U.S. persons. The FISC has to approve these procedures. If it does not approve them, the government has to fix them. The Court reviews these procedures and processes annually. The Court can request a hearing with government witnesses (like senior intelligence officials, even the NSA Director, if the judge wanted or needed to hear from him personally) or additional information in order to aid in its decisionmaking process. Information about the 702 certifications is reported to the Congressional intelligence committees.

Once the certifications are in effect, attorneys from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Security Division and attorneys and civil liberties officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) review the NSA’s targeting decisions and compliance with the rules. They conduct reviews at least every 90 days. During that 90-day period, oversight personnel are in contact with NSA operational and compliance personnel. Compliance incidents can be discovered in one of at least two ways: the NSA can self-report them, which it does; or the DOJ and ODNI oversight personnel may discover them on their own. Sometimes the NSA does not report a compliance incident in the required timeframe. Then the time lag in reporting may become an additional compliance incident. The DOJ and ODNI compliance teams write up semi-annual reports describing the results of their reviews. The reports are approved by the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence and provided to the FISC and to Congress. According to the one report that has been declassified so far, in August 2013, for a six-month period in 2012, the rate of error for the NSA’s compliance under Section 702 collection was .49% - less than half of one percent. If we subtract the compliance incidents that were actually delays in reporting, then the noncompliance rate falls to between .15-.25% - less than one quarter of one percent. Hardly an agency run amok.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/13/carrie-f-cordero/fear-vs-facts-exploring-rules-nsa-operates-under

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/13/carrie-f-cordero/fear-vs-facts-exploring-rules-nsa-operates-under


Amount of Surveillance is Limited

(__) The program under Section 702 does not collect a large amount of data.Dempsey, Member of the President’s Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 2014(James X, , 7-10-2014, "Take it from a civil liberties watchdog: not everything is bulk surveillance," Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/10/nsa-privacy-civil-liberties-oversight-board)

Our report on the so-called "702 program" provides probably the most complete accounting of any national security surveillance program published by any country in the world. In my personal view, many details about the program could have been made public before Edward Snowden's leaks without hindering the intelligence agencies in doing their job. Indeed, they should have been. There are huge benefits, in terms of democratic legitimacy, to the public knowing what its government is doing. We found that the 702 program does not scan internet communications for keywords. It targets specific individuals using specific identifiers such as email addresses and phone numbers. We saw a demonstration of the government's targeting process. We reviewed sample targeting decisions. We considered how data is filtered before it enters the government's coffers. In sum, what we found is not a bulk collection program.

(__)Collection under Section 702 is miniscule.Dickerson, Harvard Law student and former editor Harvard National Security Journal, 2015(Julie, 2-17-2015, "Harvard National Security Journal – Meaningful Transparency: The Missing Numbers the NSA and FISC Should Reveal," Harvard National Security Journal, http://harvardnsj.org/2015/02/meaningful-transparency-the-missing-numbers-the-nsa-and-fisc-should-reveal/

Under § 702 of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the NSA uses information from U.S. electronic communication service providers to target non-Americans outside the United States for documented foreign intelligence purposes. The NSA collects more than 250 million internet communications under this power each year. While a large absolute number, it is unclear what percent of total internet communications these § 702 communications constitute. The NSA has revealed that the internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day, the NSA touches 1.6% of that data in its foreign intelligence mission, and the NSA only selects 0.025% of that data for review. The net result is that NSA analysts look at a mere 0.00004% of the world’s traffic. These percentages of total data traffic, though indicative that the percent of § 702 communications collected is likely miniscule, do not map perfectly onto percentages of total communications.


NSA will Circumvent Restrictions [1/2]

(__) Limits on NSA surveillance fail, they will simply seek other ways to collect the data, which may be more intrusive.Pozen, Associate Professor, Columbia Law School, 2015

(David,. Privacy-Privacy Tradeoffs (June 28, 2015). University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=

Restated in more general and prescriptive terms, the suggested tradeoff is that tighter limits on what sorts of data the NSA can electronically collect or mine at the front end might lead to looser—and more privacy-invasive—investigatory practices at the back end. Beyond the automated “sifting” function identified by Posner, a variety of mechanisms could conceivably produce such a result. In the absence of bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, for instance, the NSA might seek to identify suspected foreign terrorists’ American associates in a less surgical manner, through ever-widening wiretaps instead of link analysis and contact chaining. 71

Tighter limits on what may be acquired under any particular authority, such as Section 215, could push NSA officers to submit broader warrant applications to the FISC 72 or to make greater use of other legal authorities, as by expanding the targeting of non-U.S. persons under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on the hope or expectation that this would yield more “incidental” collection of U.S. persons’ communications.73 Barriers to domestic acquisition could likewise lead to more aggressive “privacy shopping,” whereby the NSA relies on foreign partners to obtain data it cannot lawfully or efficiently obtain on its own.74

In short, it is not implausible to think that collection limits could backfire; or that the more (meta)data the NSA has at its disposal, the less it will need officers to review intercepted communications. Big Data analytics can take over, to some extent, from old-fashioned listening and reading. And if one deems the latter to be an especially or uniquely significant privacy problem, one can arrive at the unsettling paradox of preferring that the NSA “collect it all”75 on privacy grounds.


NSA will Circumvent Restrictions [2/2]

(__) Empirically, Presidents have done anything to avoid restrictions on their authority.Howell & Zeisberg, Professor of American Politics at the University of Chicago & Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, 2015 (William & Sydney, 7-1-2015, "Executive Secrecy," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/howell-zeisberg-executive-secrecy)

But presidents, Arnold reminds us, had no desire to toil in the light of day for all to see. If Congress longed for an information revolution, presidents responded with policy retrenchment. Rather than bend to Congress’s wishes, subsequent presidents—Democrats and Republicans alike—went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their activities, defy the clear intent of statutory law, suppress scientific information—in short, to circumvent, hedge, and deny at nearly every turn. “A complete history of the era,” Arnold says, “reveals episode after episode of evasive maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and outright defiance.”

In their effort to work around the legal architecture of the sunshine era, presidents have not merely lurked in the shadows. Arnold catalogs a multitude of cases in which presidents, long before September 11, 2001, developed formal procedures with the express intent of evading the watchful eyes of Congress and the courts. Presidents have repeatedly asserted the authority to classify information that, by all rights, ought to be the subject of public deliberation. Through national security directives and Office of Legal Counsel memos, they have propagated secret laws that are not subject to the checks that Madison and his intellectual descendants considered so vital.

(__) Circumvention of laws banning surveillance is empirically proven.Ackerman, national security editor for the Guardian US, 2015, (Spencer,. 6-1-2015, "Fears NSA will seek to undermine surveillance reform," Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-congress-secret-law)

Yet in recent memory, the US government permitted the NSA to circumvent the Fisa court entirely. Not a single Fisa court judge was aware of Stellar Wind, the NSA’s post-9/11 constellation of bulk surveillance programs, from 2001 to 2004. Energetic legal tactics followed to fit the programs under existing legal authorities after internal controversy or outright exposure. When the continuation of a bulk domestic internet metadata collection program risked the mass resignation of Justice Department officials in 2004, an internal NSA draft history records that attorneys found a different legal rationale that “essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk internet metadata that it had”. After a New York Times story in 2005 revealed the existence of the bulk domestic phone records program, attorneys for the US Justice Department and NSA argued, with the blessing of the Fisa court, that Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorized it all along – precisely the contention that the second circuit court of appeals rejected in May.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-congress-secret-law


1NC – Topicality Domestic Surveillance

1. Interpretation - Domestic surveillance is surveillance that physically takes place on the surveilling state’s territory, which is distinct from foreign surveillance which is in surveillance across state borders and surveillance entirely overseas.Deeks,Associate Professor, University of Virginia Law School, 2015Ashley.. "An International Legal Framework for Surveillance." Virginia Journal of International Law 55 (2015): 2014-53.

As a result, this Article is focused on the category of spying that consists of foreign surveillance. “Foreign surveillance” here refers to the clandestine surveillance by one state during peacetime of the communications of another state’s officials or citizens (who are located outside the surveilling state’s territory) using electronic means, including cyber-monitoring, telecommunications monitoring, satellites, or drones. Foreign surveillance is comprised of two types of surveillance: “transnational surveillance” and “extraterritorial surveillance.”13 Transnational surveillance refers to the surveillance of communications that cross state borders, including those that begin and end overseas but incidentally pass through the collecting state. Extraterritorial surveillance refers to the surveillance of communications that take place entirely overseas. For example, if Australia intercepted a phone call between two French nationals that was routed through a German cell tower, this would be extraterritorial surveillance. In contrast, surveillance that takes place on the surveilling state’s territory (“domestic surveillance”) against either that state’s nationals or any other individual physically present in that state generally would be regulated by the ICCPR, as discussed below.14 This Article focuses predominately on transnational and extraterritorial surveillance, arguing that states should close the gap between the ways in which they regulate the two.

2. Violation – The NSA collection of internet traffic under 702 is foreign surveillance the communications of at least one party are outside the US.Simcox 2015Robin Simcox is a Research Fellow at The Henry Jackson Society “Surveillance After Snowden Effective Espionage in an Age of Transparency” 5/26/2015 Henry Jackson Society http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2015/05/26/surveillance-after-snowden-effective-espionage-in-an-age-of-transparency/

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) governs the interception of communications – for the specific purpose of acquiring foreign intelligence information – of those based outside the US. It is widely considered to be more integral to the NSA’s work than that of Section 215.

NSA Negative TopicalityNAUDL 2015-16

1NC – Topicality Domestic Surveillance

3. The Affirmative interpretation is bad for debateLimits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their interpretation makes the topic too big. They make the domestic limit meaningless. All surveillance becomes topical by their standards.

4. Topicality is a Voting Issue because the opportunity to prepare promotes better debating


2NC Topicality – Domestic Interpretation (___)

(__) Domestic Surveillance must be entirely within the territorial boundaries of a state.Forcese, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, 2011(Craig. Canada"Spies Without Borders: International Law and Intelligence Collection." Journal of National Security Law and Policy 5 (2011).)

Likewise, electronic surveillance may have a domestic, foreign, and transnational nexus. As noted, a domestic wiretap may be the source of intelligence. In another scenario, one state may covertly monitor communications arising in another state from a listening facility housed in the first state’s embassy in the second state’s capital. In addition, signals emanating from the territory of one state may be intercepted on the territory of another.

The range of geographic permutations on spying is laid out in table 1. For the purposes of this paper, I shall use the terms “territorial” to describe purely domestic spying, “extraterritorial” to describe purely foreign spying and “transnational” to describe spying that straddles state borders.

Table 1: Geography of Spying

Territorial Extraterritorial TransnationalHuman intelligence Collection of information

by a state agent from people and their associated documents and media sources that takes place within the state.

Collection of information by a state agent from people and their associated documents and media sources that takes place on the territory of another the state.

Collection of information by a state agent from people and their associated documents and media sources in which the source (but not the agent) is located on the territory of another state.

Electronic surveillance Interception of communications or actions passed by radio, wire, or other electromagnetic, photo-electronic and/or photooptical means and of electromagnetic radiations in which both the communication and the interception takes place within the state.


2NC Topicality – Domestic Interpretation Good (___)

(__) The distinction between domestic and foreign is the critical question in determining how to handle surveillance. Their blurring of this distinction means we don’t learn about the law.

Freiwald, Professor, University of San Francisco School of Law., 2008 Susan. "Electronic Surveillance at the Virtual Border." Mississippi Law Journal 78 (2008): 2009-15.

While the FISA scheme is a creature of Congress, it must conform to constitutional constraints.26 As Part II discusses, Fourth Amendment precedents require the judiciary to oversee executive branch surveillance of purely “domestic” surveillance.27 But the Fourth Amendment has much less, if anything, to say about executive branch conduct of purely “foreign” surveillance.28 One could defensibly arrange the scenarios along a spectrum from most “domestic,” and therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment, to most “foreign,” and therefore least protected.

Rather than viewing the Fourth Amendment as providing decreasing judicial oversight as the character of the electronic surveillance becomes increasingly foreign, however, one could instead view Fourth Amendment protection as being all or nothing. In other words, one could view the Fourth Amendment as providing strict regulation for purely domestic investigations and no regulation for purely foreign investigations because the latter are governed by executive branch discretion. Then one would view the rules for cases that fall in the middle as designed to determine whether to treat the investigation as domestic or foreign. Under this view, in cases that are neither clearly domestic nor clearly foreign, the judge’s role would be to review the executive’s decision to deprive the target of judicial oversight of the surveillance that the Fourth Amendment mandates. The executive makes such a determination when a target effectively acts in the interest of a foreign power; in such a case, the executive may be said to “exile” that target if she is a U.S. Person.29

In this analysis, the virtual border plays a key role. On this side of the virtual border, domestic targets enjoy extensive judicial review of executive branch surveillance, pursuant to the dictates of the Fourth Amendment.30 On the other side, foreign targets are subject to whatever electronic surveillance the executive branch chooses to conduct in the exercise of its foreign affair powers.31 Foreign targets have no right to complain about surveillance techniques in our courts, though they may of course raise their complaints in their own courts.32


2NC Topicality – Clear Definition Good (___)

(__) Clear definition of domestic surveillance is critical to good policy making.Yoo and Sulmasy, Associate Professor of Law, United States Coast Guard Academy and Professor of Law, University of California–Berkeley 2007,(John and Glenn, “Counterintuitive: Intelligence Operations and International Law”. Michigan Journal of International Law, Vol. 28, 2007; UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 1030763. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1030763)

Domestically, so many components and issues comprise “intelligence” that it remains difficult to pin down a specific definition.22 Mark Lowenthal, an expert in intelligence gathering, has noted that “[v]irtually every book written on the subject of intelligence begins with a discussion of what the author believes ‘intelligence’ to mean, or at least how the he or she intends to use the term. This editorial fact tells us much about the field of intelligence.”23 Even those who have spent years in the field find the term vague.24 Any international convention on the peacetime conduct of intelligence collection would prove unsuccessful at the very least because of difficulties in defining exactly what it would seek to regulate. Defining intelligence and intelligence gathering often derives from such vague subject terms as counterintelligence, business intelligence, foreign intelligence, espionage, maritime intelligence, space-related intelligence, signals intelligence, and human intelligence. These subject terms themselves then need an established universal definition and further simplification in order to reduce the ambiguity associated with attempts to regulate the practice. Currently, the United States defines intelligence as a body of evidence and the conclusions drawn from it. It is often derived from information that is concealed or not intended to be available for use by the inquirer.”25 This vague and overly broad definitional statement reveals the problems with actually articulating what intelligence is and what it is not. Without a clear definition of the term (from the United States or any other state for that matter), we should not expect regulation of intelligence activities at the international level.


2NC Topicality – NSA is Foreign Surveillance (___)

(__) The NSA is a Foreign Intelligence agency.

De, General Counsel, National Security Agency, 2014,(Rajesh , 10-16-2014, "The NSA and Accountability in an Era of Big Data," Journal Of National Security Law & Policy, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1547942293/D7CD0D4112B54FC9PQ/2?accountid=10422)

As noted earlier, NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. Executive Order 12333 defines foreign intelligence as "information relating to the capabilities, intentions, or activities of foreign governments or elements thereof, foreign organizations, foreign persons, or international terrorists." This language largely mirrors that which Congress adopted in the National Security Act of 1947. FISA contains a more intricate definition of foreign intelligence information for the specific purposes of that statutory scheme, but all support the same overall conclusion - NSA's mission is neither open-ended, nor is it discretionary. NSA may only collect signals intelligence for a foreign purpose.

(__) Section 702 collects communications of non-Americans outside of the US.Dickerson, Harvard Law student and former editor Harvard National Security Journal, 2015(Julie, 2-17-2015, "Harvard National Security Journal – Meaningful Transparency: The Missing Numbers the NSA and FISC Should Reveal," Harvard National Security Journal, http://harvardnsj.org/2015/02/meaningful-transparency-the-missing-numbers-the-nsa-and-fisc-should-reveal/

Under § 702 of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the NSA uses information from U.S. electronic communication service providers to target non-Americans outside the United States for documented foreign intelligence purposes. The NSA collects more than 250 million internet communications under this power each year. While a large absolute number, it is unclear what percent of total internet communications these § 702 communications constitute. The NSA has revealed that the internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day, the NSA touches 1.6% of that data in its foreign intelligence mission, and the NSA only selects 0.025% of that data for review. The net result is that NSA analysts look at a mere 0.00004% of the world’s traffic. These percentages of total data traffic, though indicative that the percent of § 702 communications collected is likely miniscule, do not map perfectly onto percentages of total communications.

NSA Negative Terrorism DisadvantageNAUDL 2015-16

1NC Terrorism DA Link

(__) Link –Section 702 is the most valuable NSA surveillance program, it has prevented multiple terror attacks.Taylor, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, 2014(Stuart, “The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists”, April 28, 2014 http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/big-snoop)

Yet there's no denying that PRISM's mining of emails and other Internet messages has produced a mother lode of useful information. An internal NSA document leaked by Snowden described the program as "the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief" and the NSA's "leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly one in seven [of all the intelligence community's secret] reports."

More to the point, PRISM has often contributed to the collection of actionable intelligence used in the fight against terrorism. Even Wyden, the NSA's strongest congressional critic, acknowledges as much. He and his ally on the surveillance issue, Senator Mark Udall (D-Colo.), said in a joint statement last summer that "multiple terrorist plots have been disrupted at least in part because of information obtained under Section 702."


Link Terrorism- 702 and Prism

(__) Surveillance under section 702 is crucial to detect and act on threats of terrorism.Hines, defense council member of the Truman National Security Project, 2013 (Pierre “Here’s how metadata on billions of phone calls predicts terrorist attacks” http://qz.com/95719/heres-how-metadata-on-billions-of-phone-calls-predicts-terrorist-attacks, June 19th, 2013)

Yesterday, when NSA Director General Keith Alexander testified before the House Committee on Intelligence, he declared that the NSA’s surveillance programs have provided “critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events.” FBI Deputy Director Sean Boyce elaborated by describing four instances when the NSA’s surveillance programs have had an impact: (1) when an intercepted email from a terrorist in Pakistan led to foiling a plan to bomb of the New York subway system; (2) when NSA’s programs helped prevent a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange; (3) when intelligence led to the arrest of a U.S. citizen who planned to bomb the Danish Newspaper office that published cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad; and (4) when the NSA’s programs triggered reopening the 9/11 investigation. So what are the practical applications of internet and phone records gathered from two NSA programs? And how can “metadata” actually prevent terrorist attacks? Metadata does not give the NSA and intelligence community access to the content of internet and phone communications. Instead, metadata is more like the transactional information cell phone customers would normally see on their billing statements—metadata can indicate when a call, email, or online chat began and how long the communication lasted. Section 215 of the Patriot Act provides the legal authority to obtain “business records” from phone companies. Meanwhile, the NSA uses Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize its PRISM program. According the figures provided by Gen. Alexander, intelligence gathered based on Section 702 authority contributed in over 90% of the 50 cases. One of major benefits of metadata is that it provides hindsight—it gives intelligence analysts a retrospective view of a sequence of events. As Deputy Director Boyce discussed, the ability to analyze previous communications allowed the FBI to reopen the 9/11 investigation and determine who was linked to that attack. It is important to recognize that terrorist attacks are not orchestrated overnight; they take months or years to plan. Therefore, if the intelligence community only catches wind of an attack halfway into the terrorists’ planning cycle, or even after a terrorist attack has taken place, metadata might be the only source of information that captures the sequence of events leading up to an attack. Once a terrorist suspect has been identified or once an attack has taken place, intelligence analysts can use powerful software to sift through metadata to determine which numbers, IP addresses, or individuals are associated with the suspect. Moreover, phone numbers and IP addresses sometimes serve as a proxy for the general location of where the planning has taken place. This ability to narrow down the location of terrorists can help determine whether the intelligence community is dealing with a domestic or international threat.

http://qz.com/95719/heres-how-metadata-on-billions-of-phone-calls-predicts-terrorist-attacks

http://qz.com/95719/heres-how-metadata-on-billions-of-phone-calls-predicts-terrorist-attacks


Link Terrorism – Online Surveillance

(__) Surveillance of internet communication is critical to stop terrorism.De, General Counsel, National Security Agency, 2014,(Rajesh , 10-16-2014, "The NSA and Accountability in an Era of Big Data," Journal Of National Security Law & Policy, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1547942293/D7CD0D4112B54FC9PQ/2?accountid=10422)

NSA performs its mission in an ever more rapidly evolving operational environment, one characterized by persistent change in both the nature of our adversaries and their communications. Foreign threats are no longer limited to traditional nation state actors, or even widely-recognized terrorist groups like al Qaeda and its affiliates. Moreover, adversaries today communicate through means more operationally simple yet technically sophisticated than ever before. As you know better than most, these changes are taking place against a backdrop of increasingly complex, dynamic, and voluminous communications data flows around the globe. Industry and academic estimates regularly chart the growth of such trends, often in metrics of such dizzying scale that they can become mind numbing: as of 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day; more data crosses the internet every second today than was stored on the entire internet 20 years ago; global mobile traffic grew 70 percent in 2012, reaching 885 petabytes per month; and it is estimated that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world's population in 2013. Scale, however, is merely one of the challenges for a signals intelligence agency like NSA-trends toward greater mobility and the increasing adoption of internet- based encryption pose additional challenges as well.

Perhaps the most alarming trend is that the digital communications infrastructure is increasingly also becoming the domain for foreign threat activity. In other words, it is no longer just a question of "collecting" or even "connecting" the dots in order to assess foreign threats amidst more and more digital noise, it is also a question of determining which of the so-called "dots" may constitute the threat itself. As President Obama has recognized, "the cyber threat to our nation is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face."


Link Terrorism – Online Surveillance

(__) Blocking intelligence from using the internet is a huge risk- terrorists use the internet.Cordero, Director of National Security Studies Center at Georgetown University Law, 2013(Carrie, "Continued Oversight of US Government Surveillance Authorities: Hearing Before the S. Committee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., December 11, 2013 (Statement by Professor Carrie F. Cordero, Geo. UL Center)." (2013).

Some will argue that Congress should outlaw bulk collection under FISA, based on the “power of metadata” argument as well as arguments about our changing expectation of privacy in light of the methods of modern communications. But everyday Americans, or friends in foreign nations, are not the only people using the Internet to communicate. We all - - regular people, government leaders, as well as those who pose national security threats such as terrorists, terrorist financiers and facilitators, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, spies, sophisticated hackers, and cyber intruders - - use the Internet, computers, and smart phones to communicate. And so just as regular people should not be expected to turn off their modern communications and revert to old fashioned modes of communication, neither should the Intelligence Community or law enforcement resort to pen, paper and index cards to conduct national security collection or investigations. It is just as unrealistic to expect citizens to unplug, as it is to expect or require the NSA or FBI to use 20th century collection, analytic or investigative techniques or methods to protect the nation from 21st century threats.


Link Terrorism – Delay

(__) The plan results in a huge amount of paperwork for the NSA – makes them really slow

Cordero, Director of National Security Studies Center at Georgetown University Law, 2013(Carrie, "Continued Oversight of US Government Surveillance Authorities: Hearing Before the S. Committee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., December 11, 2013 (Statement by Professor Carrie F. Cordero, Geo. UL Center)." (2013).

In light of recent unauthorized disclosures, concerns have also been expressed regarding the NSA’s collection targeting or pertaining to foreign persons located outside the United States. Suggestions have been made that U.S. foreign intelligence collection should recognize some sort of privacy right for non-U.S. persons. In fact, the U.S. Intelligence Community has a recent history of affording Constitutional protections to persons who are not entitled to them. Congress made a deliberate decision with the passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to end that practice. And for good reason: prior to 2007, the U.S. government was, in fact, going through incredible hoops to acquire certain communications of foreign terrorist targets overseas. Two parallel processes caused this to happen. The first was described in a written statement for the record by the Director of National Intelligence before this Committee in September 2007

“…[P]rior to Congress passing the Protect America Act last month, in a significant number of cases, IC agencies were required to make a showing of probable cause in order to target for surveillance the communications of a foreign intelligence target located overseas. Then, they needed to explain that probable cause finding in documentation, and obtain approval of the FISA Court to collect against a foreign terrorist located in a foreign country. Frequently, although not always, that person's communications were with another foreign person located overseas. In such cases, prior to the Protect America Act, FISA’s requirement to obtain a court order, based on a showing of probable cause, slowed, and in some cases prevented altogether, the Government's ability to collect foreign intelligence information, without serving any substantial privacy or civil liberties interests.”

In other words, the Intelligence Community, because of the requirements of the FISA statute prior to 2007, found itself in a position where it was seeking individual probable cause-based orders from the FISC to target terrorists overseas. When the government needed to obtain certain communications of a terrorist target, located in, as examples, Pakistan or Yemen, it was preparing a full application to the FISC, with a detailed factual showing providing probable cause that the target was an agent of a foreign power, and obtaining the signatures of a high ranking national security official and the Attorney General, and then submitting that application to the FISC for approval. This extensive process, in addition to being unnecessary from a Constitutional perspective, was a crushing force on the system.


Terrorism – Answers to “Too much Data” [1/2] (__) The NSA needs all of the data – its like taking out 200 pieces of a 1000 piece puzzle, it becomes a lot harder to understand the picture when you eliminate data.Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studeies, 2014


This effort takes place over months and involves multiple intelligence, law enforcement, and military agencies, with more than a dozen individuals from these agencies collaborating to build up a picture of the bomb-maker and his planned attack. When the bomb-maker leaves the Middle East to carry out his attack, he is prevented from entering the United States. An analogy for how this works would be to take a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, randomly select 200 pieces, and provide them to a team of analysts who, using incomplete data, must guess what the entire picture looks like. The likelihood of their success is determined by how much information they receive, how much time they have, and by experience and luck. Their guess can be tested by using a range of collection programs, including communications surveillance programs like the 215 metadata program.

What is left out of this picture (and from most fictional portrayals of intelligence analysis) is the number of false leads the analysts must pursue, the number of dead ends they must walk down, and the tools they use to decide that something is a false lead or dead end. Police officers are familiar with how many leads in an investigation must be eliminated through legwork and query before an accurate picture emerges. Most leads are wrong, and much of the work is a process of elimination that eventually focuses in on the most probable threat. If real intelligence work were a film, it would be mostly boring. Where the metadata program contributes is in eliminating possible leads and suspects.

(__) There’s not too much data – computer processing power solves the problem.Sagar,, associate professor of political science at Yale, 2015 (Rahul, -"Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden," Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / 2015, pp 145-159.

Greenwald also raises objections from a national security perspective. He warns that mass surveillance undermines national security because “it swamps the intelligence agencies with so much data that they cannot possibly sort through it effectively.”11 He also questions the efficacy of communications surveillance, arguing that it has little to show in terms of success in combating terrorism. But these criticisms are equally unpersuasive. It is certainly possible that a surveillance program could generate so much raw data that an important piece of information is overlooked. But in such a case the appropriate response would not be to shut down the program but rather to bulk up the processing power and manpower devoted to it. Finally, both the President's Review Group and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have examined the efficacy of the NSA's programs. Both report that the NSA's foreign surveillance programs have contributed to more than fifty counterterrorism investigations, leading them to conclude that the NSA “does in fact play an important role in the nation's effort to prevent terrorist attacks across the globe.”12


Terrorism – Answers to “Too much Data” [2/2]

(__) Bulk data is critical to eliminate false positives. Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014


Assertions that a collection program contributes nothing because it has not singlehandedly prevented an attack reflect an ill-informed understanding of how the United States conducts collection and analysis to prevent harmful acts against itself and its allies. Intelligence does not work as it is portrayed in films—solitary agents do not make startling discoveries that lead to dramatic, last-minute success (nor is technology consistently infallible). Intelligence is a team sport. Perfect knowledge does not exist and success is the product of the efforts of teams of dedicated individuals from many agencies, using many tools and techniques, working together to assemble fragments of data from many sources into a coherent picture. Analysts assemble this mosaic from many different sources and based on experience and intuition. Luck is still more important than anyone would like and the alternative to luck is acquiring more information. This ability to blend different sources of intelligence has improved U.S. intelligence capabilities and gives us an advantage over some opponents.

Portrayals of spying in popular culture focus on a central narrative, essential for storytelling but deeply misleading. In practice, there can be many possible narratives that analysts must explore simultaneously. An analyst might decide, for example, to see if there is additional confirming information that points to which explanation deserves further investigation. Often, the contribution from collection programs comes not from what they tell us, but what they let us reject as false. In the case of the 215 program, its utility was in being able to provide information that allowed analysts to rule out some theories and suspects. This allows analysts to focus on other, more likely, scenarios.

NSA Negative Politics DisadvantageNAUDL 2015-16

Politics Disad Link

(__) The plan is unpopular because PRISM works, Congress got rid of metadata in the USA Freedom act because it was ineffecitve.National Journal, 2015, (Dustin Volz is a staff correspondent for National Journal covering tech policy. Dustin is a graduate of Arizona State University. Lauren Fox is a staff correspondent for National Journal. She graduated from the University of Oregon. 6-3-2015, "The War Over NSA Spying Is Just Beginning," nationaljournal, http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/the-war-over-nsa-spying-is-just-beginning-20150603)

The momentum to end the NSA's phone dragnet snowballed over the past year and a half as two review panels deemed it ineffective. President Obama pledged to end it "as it currently exists" and a federal appeals court deemed it illegal. But further reforms—such as to the Internet surveillance program known as PRISM, which Snowden also revealed—are likely to be tougher sells in Congress. For PRISM especially, that's in part because the program is considered more useful and because it deals primarily with surveillance of foreigners. U.S. tech companies that are subject to PRISM, including Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, have called for changes to the program. Yet when asked about whether he would work to take down PRISM, even Wyden bristled at the question. "I am going to keep it to the three that I am going to change," Wyden said. Even reformers outside the confines of the Senate recognize that ending PRISM is a complicated pursuit. "It is not going to be quite as easy to drum up the same support," says Liza Goitein, codirector for the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

NSA Negative Executive Oder CounterplanNAUDL 2015-16

Executive Counterplan Solvency (__) The President should limit NSA programs on their own. Congressional limits are too inflexible and link to the Terrorism disad. Cordero, Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law, 2014,(Carrie, The Brookings Institution A Debate One Year After Snowden: The Future Of U.S. Surveillance Authorities Washington, D.C. Thursday, June 5, 2014 http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/06/05-debate-snowden-future-us-surveillance-nsa#/full-event/)

MS. CORDERO: One additional point on the President’s initiative. So, there have been policy directives. The President issued a new order in January that does place additional limits on the collection. That is completely within the President’s authority and is appropriate and so forth.

Where I think this debate over the last year is now taking a turn is now the President can make those determinations, and if it determines that those policy decisions are having an adverse impact on national security and he needs to adjust them, he currently has the flexibility to do that.

The problem with some of the legislative proposals that are currently on the table is that they will outlaw certain activity, and it will be in law if bulk collection, for example, is outlawed, can’t be conducted under the FISA statute. And that’s where we risk the potential to create an environment that nobody in the legal community or the national security community wants to revisit, which is the environment that we faced in the pre-9/11 days and right after where the law, the statutes, had become so outdated with respect to the way the technology occurred and the threats that we were facing that the Executive needed to act on Executive authority alone. And unfortunately some of the proposals that are currently on the table risk putting us down that path in the years to come.

(__) The President can unilaterally end the programs.Brand, member of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 2015(Rachel L. 5-20-2015, "Opinion: What Congress gets wrong about NSA surveillance practices," Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0520/Opinion-What-Congress-gets-wrong-about-NSA-surveillance-practices

The debate about this program is important, and reasonable people differ on whether its benefits outweigh its privacy impacts. But if the goal is to do away with this program, legislation is unnecessary. The president could unilaterally end the program today without any action by Congress. This would be simpler and have fewer unintended consequences than passing legislation that permanently removes this investigative tool from the toolbox and tinkers with a number of other important counterterrorism tools.

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