1AC NSA 702 Reform

1AC Inherency
The recent USA Freedom Act, did not reform the NSAs the
mass collection of domestic communication under Section 702
of the FISA Amendments Act.

Goitein 15,

Elizabeth, Co-Director of the Brennan Center for Justices Liberty and National
Security Program, 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC,
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform
The USA Freedom Act will end the bulk collection of phone metadata and prohibit similar
programs for any type of business records under foreign intelligence collection
authorities. For phone records, the government may obtain metadata on an ongoing basis only for suspected
terrorists and those in contact with them. For other types of records, the government must tie its request for
records to a specific selection term, such as a person, address, or account. Given the surge in surveillance since
9/11, the USA Freedom Acts imposition of constraints on collection is historic. Indeed, the USA Freedom Act is the
most significant limitation on foreign intelligence surveillance since the 1970s. If faithfully implemented a critical

Even under
USA Freedom, however, the government is still able to pull in a great deal of
information about innocent Americans. Needless to say, not everyone in contact with a suspected
caveat, to be sure the law will meaningfully curtail the overbroad collection of business records.

terrorist is guilty of a crime; even terrorists call for pizza delivery. Intelligence officials also may need to obtain
records like flight manifests that include information about multiple people, most of whom have nothing to do
with terrorism. Some of this overcollection may be inevitable, but its effects could be mitigated. For instance,
agencies could be given a short period of time to identify information relevant to actual suspects, after which they
would have to destroy any remaining information. USA Freedom fails to impose such limits. More fundamentally,
bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that abandoned the individualized

Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within the United
States, wished to obtain communications between Americans and foreigners, it had
to convince the FISA Court that the individual target was a foreign power or its
agent. Today, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA may target
any foreigner overseas and collect his or her communications with Americans
without obtaining any individualized court order. Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the
NSAs activities when it conducts surveillance overseas, the standards are even more lax. The result is mass
surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty in
comparison. Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they
incidentally sweep in massive amounts of Americans data, including the content
of calls, e-mails, text messages, and video chats. Limits on keeping and using such information
are weak and riddled with exceptions. Moreover, foreign targets are not limited to suspected
terrorists or even agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration recently
acknowledged, foreigners have privacy rights too , and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner
suspicion approach after 9/11.

overseas is an indefensible violation of those rights. Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA Freedom
because they hoped it would relieve the post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their likely long-term goal is to avoid
changes to Section 702, Executive Order 12333, and the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection

Privacy advocates who supported USA

Freedom did so because they saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in
surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return to the principle of
individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance. If intelligence officials are correct in their
without any individualized showing of wrongdoing.

calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the law clears the way for further reforms across the

The answer
to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not in the text of the law, but in
the unwritten story of what happens next.
full range of surveillance programs, history will vindicate the privacy advocates who supported it.

And, the NSA has massively expanded its surveillance since

2008, American internet communication have been intercepted
by NSA surveillance operations far more often than the
intended surveillance targets.
Gellman, 2014
Barton Gellman, Washington Post national staff. Contributed to three Pulitzer Prizes
for The Washington Post, 7-5-2014, "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far
outnumber the foreigners who are," Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-datathose-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally
targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security
Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of
10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations , which former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but
were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans.
Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or
residents. NSA analysts masked, or minimized, more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans privacy, but The
Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only
abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the
intercepted messages and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama
administration has not been willing to address. Among the most valuable contents which The Post will
U.S.residents.

not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project,
double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders
into U.S. computer networks. Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to
the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002
terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts

but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality . They tell
said would compromise ongoing operations.

stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and
disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded
nevertheless. In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he

The cache Snowden provided came from

domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008
with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in
obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications.

closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowdens
reach.The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages
long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts. The material spans President Obamas first term, from

the files offer an

unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA
amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30
years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge . One program, codenamed PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and
five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts
data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks .
No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
intelligence committees in Congress or the presidents Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a
comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects not only from its
targets but also from people who may cross a targets path.
2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSAs domestic collection. Taken together,

Privacy

1AC Privacy Rights

Advantage One is Privacy
First, surveillance under Section 702 is a substantial invasive
of privacy because of the broad targetting guidelines in the
FISA Amendments Act.
Laperruque, 2014,

Jake, Center for Democracy and Tehcnology Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and
Security. Previously served as a law clerk for Senator Al Franken on the
Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and as a policy fellow for
Senator Robert Menendez. "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant
Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy & Technology., 7-22-2014,
https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significant-section702-reform/
Section 702 Surveillance Is Fundamentally More Invasive
While incidental collection of the communications of a person who communicates with a target is an inevitable
feature of communications surveillance, it is tolerated when the reason for the surveillance is compelling and

In other instances of communications surveillance

conducted in the US, surveillance requires court approval of a target, and that
target must be a suspected wrongdoer or spy, a terrorist, or another agent of a
foreign power. Section 702 requires neither of these elements.
Under Section 702, targeting can occur for the purpose of collecting foreign
intelligence information even though there is no court review of any particular
target. Instead, the super secret FISA court merely determines whether the guidelines under which the
adequate procedural checks are in place.

surveillance is conducted are reasonably designed to result in the targeting of non-Americans abroad and that

means incidental surveillance may occur purely

because someone communicated with an individual engaged in activities that may
have broadly defined foreign intelligence value . For example, the communications of
someone who communicates with a person abroad whose activities might relate to
the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs can be collected, absent any independent
assessment of necessity or accuracy.
minimization guidelines are reasonable.

This

As another example, under traditional FISA for intelligence surveillance in the U.S. of people in the U.S. your
communications could be incidentally collected only if you were in direct contact with a suspected agent of a
foreign power, and additionally if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had affirmed this suspicion based on

Under Section 702, your personal information could be scooped up by

the NSA simply because your attorney, doctor, lover, or accountant was a person
abroad who engaged in peaceful political activity such as protesting a G8 summit.
probable cause.

And, these invasions are magnified because the data is the full
content of the communication.

Goitein 15,

Elizabeth, Co-Director of the Brennan Center for Justices Liberty and National
Security Program., 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC,
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform
Some of this overcollection may be inevitable, but its effects could be mitigated .
For instance, agencies could be given a short period of time to identify information relevant to actual suspects, after

which they would have to destroy any remaining information. USA Freedom fails to impose such limits. More
fundamentally, bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that abandoned the

Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within the

United States, wished to obtain communications between Americans and foreigners,
it had to convince the FISA Court that the individual target was a foreign power or
its agent. Today, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA may
target any foreigner overseas and collect his or her communications with Americans
without obtaining any individualized court order. Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the
NSAs activities when it conducts surveillance overseas, the standards are even more lax. The result is mass
surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty in
comparison. Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they
incidentally sweep in massive amounts of Americans data, including the content
of calls, e-mails, text messages, and video chats . Limits on keeping and using such
information are weak and riddled with exceptions . Moreover, foreign targets are not limited to
individualized suspicion approach after 9/11.

suspected terrorists or even agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration recently acknowledged,
foreigners have privacy rights too, and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner overseas is an indefensible

Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA Freedom

because they hoped it would relieve the post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their
likely long-term goal is to avoid changes to Section 702, Executive Order 12333, and
the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection without any
individualized showing of wrongdoing . Privacy advocates who supported USA Freedom did so because
violation of those rights.

they saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return
to the principle of individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance. If intelligence officials are correct in their
calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the law clears the way for further reforms across the

The answer
to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not in the text of the law, but in
the unwritten story of what happens next.
full range of surveillance programs, history will vindicate the privacy advocates who supported it.

And, indiscriminate wide-scale NSA Surveillance erodes privacy

rights and violates the constitution

Sinha, 2014
G. Alex Sinha is an Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch
and the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union, July 2014
With Liberty to Monitor All How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism,
Law, and American Democracy Human Rights Watch,
http://www.hrw.org/node/127364
The United States government today is implementing a wide variety of surveillance
programs that, thanks to developments in its technological capacity, allow it to scoop up personal
information and the content of personal communications on an unprecedented
scale. Media reports based on revelations by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor
Edward Snowden have recently shed light on many of these program s. They have

revealed, for example, that the US collects vast quantities of informationknown as metadataabout phone calls
made to, from, and within the US.

It also routinely collects the content of international chats,

emails, and voice calls.

It has engaged in the large-scale collection of massive amounts of cell phone

location data. Reports have also revealed a since-discontinued effort to track internet usage and email patterns in
the US; the comprehensive interception of all of phone calls made within, into, and out of Afghanistan and the
Bahamas; the daily collection of millions of images so the NSA can run facial recognition programs; the acquisition
of hundreds of millions of email and chat contact lists around the world; and the NSAs deliberate weakening of

In response to public concern over the programs intrusion on

the privacy of millions of people in the US and around the world, the US government has at
global encryption standards.

times acknowledged the need for reform. However, it has taken few meaningful
steps in that direction. On the contrary, the USparticularly the intelligence communityhas forcefully
defended the surveillance programs as essential to protecting US national security. In a world of constantly shifting
global threats, officials argue that the US simply cannot know in advance which global communications may be
relevant to its intelligence activities, and that as a result, it needs the authority to collect and monitor a broad
swath of communications. In our interviews with them, US officials argued that the programs are effective, plugging
operational gaps that used to exist, and providing the US with valuable intelligence. They also insisted the programs
are lawful and subject to rigorous and multi-layered oversight, as well as rules about how the information obtained
through them is used. The government has emphasized that it does not use the information gleaned from these

The questions raised by

surveillance are complex. The government has an obligation to protect national
security, and in some cases, it is legitimate for government to restrict certain rights
to that end. At the same time, international human rights and constitutional law set limits on the
states authority to engage in activities like surveillance, which have the potential to
undermine so many other rights. The current, large-scale, often indiscriminate US
approach to surveillance carries enormous costs. It erodes global digital privacy and
sets a terrible example for other countries like India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and others
programs for illegitimate purposes, such as persecuting political opponents.

that are in the process of expanding their surveillance capabilities. It also damages US credibility in advocating
internationally for internet freedom, which the US has listed as an important foreign policy objective since at least

US surveillance programs are also doing damage to some of

the values the United States claims to hold most dear. These include freedoms of
expression and association, press freedom, and the right to counsel, which are all
protected by both international human rights law and the US Constitution.
2010.As this report documents,

And, these privacy violations are more dangerous than any risk
of terrorism, which is magnified by the fact that surveillance
fails to prevent attacks.

Schneier, 2014

Bruce Schneier a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
Law School, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory
Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the CTO at Resilient
Systems, Inc.,1-6-2014, "Essays: How the NSA Threatens National Security,"
Schneier On Security,
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_threaten.html
We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer . NSA Director General
Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he

At this point, the only "plot"

prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant
group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet
the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombingseven though one of the two terrorists was on the
watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an
ineffective counterterrorism tool. Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is
extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic
revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two."

costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the

It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political
systems, as Congress is unable to provide any meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what
government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable
to challenge government actions in court . It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer
cost to our society.

products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the

And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom,

and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random
violence. And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical
Internet become untrusted.

problem. Recent history illustrates many episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover
and his FBI spying, McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and
more recentlythe Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples .

Building
the surveillance state makes it too easy for people and organizations to slip over the
line into abuse.

The First impact is the loss of personal autonomy and agency.

Privacy is a gateway right, it enables all of our other freedoms.

PoKempne 2014,

Dinah, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, The Right Whose Time Has Come
(Again): Privacy in the Age of Surveillance 1/21/14 http://www.hrw.org/worldreport/2014/essays/privacy-in-age-of-surveillance
Technology has invaded the sacred precincts of private life, and unwarranted
exposure has imperiled our security, dignity, and most basic values. The law must
rise to the occasion and protect our rights. Does this sound familiar? So argued Samuel
Warren and Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article announcing
The Right to Privacy. We are again at such a juncture . The technological developments they
saw as menacingphotography and the rise of the mass circulation pressappear rather quaint to us now. But the
harms to emotional, psychological, and even physical security from unwanted exposure seem just as vivid in our
digital age.Our

renewed sense of vulnerability comes as almost all aspects of daily

social life migrate online. At the same time, corporations and governments have acquired frightening
abilities to amass and search these endless digital records, giving them the power to know us in extraordinary
detail.

In a world where we share our lives on social media and trade immense amounts of personal
information for the ease and convenience of online living, some have questioned whether privacy is
a relevant concept. It is not just relevant, but crucial.
Indeed, privacy is a gateway right that affects our ability to exercise almost every
other right, not least our freedom to speak and associate with those we choose,
make political choices, practice our religious beliefs, seek medical help, access
education, figure out whom we love, and create our family life. It is nothing less
than the shelter in which we work out what we think and who we are; a fulcrum of
our autonomy as individuals.
The importance of privacy, a right we often take for granted, was thrown into sharp relief in
2013 by the steady stream of revelations from United States government files released by former National
Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, and published in the Guardian and other major newspapers
around the world. These revelations, supported by highly classified documents, showed the US, the UK,
and other governments engaged in global indiscriminate data interception, largely
unchecked by any meaningful legal constraint or oversight, without regard for the
rights of millions of people who were not suspected of wrongdoing.

The Second impact is Totalitarianism, the loss of autonomy due

to surveillance enables turnkey totalitarianism, destroying
democracy.

Haggerty, 2015
Kevin D. Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Alberta, Whats
Wrong with Privacy Protections? in A World Without Privacy: What Law Can and
Should Do? Edited by Austin Sarat p. 230
emphasis on the threat of authoritarian forms of rule
inherent in populations open to detailed institutional scrutiny will be portrayed as overblown
and over dramatic, suggesting I veer towards the lunatic fringe of unhinged conspiracy theorists.66 But one
does not have to believe secret forces are operating behind the scenes to recognize that
our declining private realm presents alarming dangers . Someone as conservative and deeply
embedded in the security establishment as William Binney a former NSA senior executive
says the security surveillance infrastructure he helped build now puts us on the
verge of turnkey totalitarianism.67 The contemporary expansion of surveillance ,
where monitoring becomes an ever-more routine part of our lives, represents a tremendous shift in
the balance of power between citizens and organizations. Perhaps the greatest danger
of this situation is how our existing surveillance practices can be turned to oppressive uses.
From this point forward our expanding surveillance infrastructure stands as a resource to
be inherited by future generations of politicians, corporate actors, or even messianic leaders.
Given sufficient political will this surveillance infrastructure can be re-purposed to monitor
in unparalleled detail people who some might see as undesirable due to their political opinions,
religion, skin color, gender, birthplace, physical abilities, medical history, or any
number of an almost limitless list of factors used to pit people against one another . The
twentieth century provides notorious examples of such repressive uses of
surveillance. Crucially, those tyrannical states exercised fine-grained political control by
relying on surveillance infrastructures that today seem laughably rudimentary,
comprised as they were of paper files, index cards, and elementary telephone tapping.68 It is no more
alarmist to acknowledge such risks are germane to our own societies than it is to
recognize the future will see wars, terrorist attacks, or environmental disasters
events that could themselves prompt surveillance structures to be re-calibrated towards
more coercive ends. Those who think this massive surveillance infrastructure will
not, in the fullness of time, be turned to repressive purposes are either innocent as to the realities of
power, or whistling past a graveyard. But one does not have to dwell on the most extreme possibilities to
Still others will say I am being alarmist. My

be unnerved by how enhanced surveillance capabilities invest tremendous powers in organizations.

Surveillance capacity gives organizations unprecedented abilities to manipulate

human behaviors, desires, and subjectivities towards organizational ends ends that
are too often focused on profit, personal aggrandizement, and institutional self-interest rather
than human betterment.

Freedom and dignity are ethically prior to security.

Cohen, 2014

Elliot D. Ph.D., ethicist and political analyst. He is the editor in chief of the
International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Technology of Oppression: Preserving
Freedom and Dignity in an Age of Mass, Warrantless Surveillance.. DOI:
10.1057/9781137408211.0011.

The threat posed by mass, warrantless surveillance technologies

Presently, such a threat to human freedom and dignity lies in the technological
erosion of human privacy through the ever-evolving development and deployment
of a global, government system of mass, warrantless surveillance . Taken to its logical
conclusion, this is a systematic means of spying on, and ultimately manipulating and
controlling, virtually every aspect of everybody's private life a thoroughgoing, global
dissolution of personal space, which is supposed to be legally protected. In such a governmental state
of "total (or virtually total) information awareness," the potential for government control and
manipulation of the people's deepest and most personal beliefs, feelings, and values can
transform into an Orwellian realityand nightmare. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, the
technology that has the potential to remove such scenarios from the realm of science fiction to that of true science
is currently being developed. This is not to deny the legitimate government interest in "national security"; however,

the exceptional disruption of privacy for legitimate state reasons cannot and should
not be mistaken for a usual and customary rule of mass invasion of people's private
lives without their informed consent. Benjamin Franklin wisely and succinctly
expressed the point: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor
do they deserve, either one." In relinquishing our privacy to government, we also
lose the freedom to control, and act on, our personal information, which is what
defines us individually, and collectively, as free agents and a free nation. In a world
devoid of freedom to control who we are, proclaiming that we are "secure" is an
empty platitude.

Economy

1AC Economy Advantage

Advantage Two is the Economy.
NSA surveillance has put the US ecomony and competive
advantage at risk because of losses in the technology sector.
The USA freedom act wont solve the problem.
Mindock 2015

Clark Mindock - Reporting Fellow at International Business Times Internally quoting

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. ITIF is a non-partisan
research and educational institute a think tank NSA Surveillance Could Cost
Billions For US Internet Companies After Edward Snowden Revelations International Business Times - June 10 2015 http://www.ibtimes.com/nsasurveillance-could-cost-billions-us-internet-companies-after-edward-snowden1959737
Failure to reform National Security Administration spying programs revealed by Edward
Snowden could be more economically taxing than previously thought , says a new study
published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Tuesday. The study suggests the
programs could be affecting the technology sector as a whole, not just the cloudcomputing sector, and that the costs could soar much higher than previously
expected. Even modest declines in cloud computing revenues from the revealed
surveillance programs, according to a previous report, would cost between $21.5 billion and $35 billion by
2016. New estimates show that the toll will likely far exceed ITIFs initial $35 billion estimate. The U.S.
governments failure to reform many of the NSAs surveillance programs has damaged
the competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector and cost it a portion of the global
market share, a summary of the report said. Revelations by defense contractor Snowden in June 2013
exposed massive U.S. government surveillance capabilities and showed the NSA collected American phone records

bulk phone-record revelations, and many others in the same vein,

Internet companies in providing the data,
raised questions about the transparency of American surveillance programs and
prompted outrage from privacy advocates. The study, published this week, argues that unless the
American government can vigorously reform how NSA surveillance is regulated and
overseen, U.S. companies will lose contracts and, ultimately, their competitive edge in
a global market as consumers around the world choose cloud computing and
technology options that do not have potential ties to American surveillance
programs. The report comes amid a debate in Congress on what to do with the Patriot
Act, the law that provides much of the authority for the surveillance programs. As of June 1, authority
to collect American phone data en masse expired, though questions remain as to whether
letting that authority expire is enough to protect privacy. Supporters of the programs argue that they
provide the country with necessary capabilities to fight terrorism abroad. A further reform made the
phone records collection process illegal for the government, and instead gave that
responsibility to the telecom companies.
in bulk, and without a warrant. The

including the required complacency of American telecom and

Reform is necessary to regain US leadership in the global

marketplace.
Castro and Mcquinn 2015
Daniel Castro is the Vice President of the Information Technology and Innovation
Foundation and Director of the Center for Data Innovation; Alan McQuinn is a
Research Assistant with The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Prior to joining ITIF, he was a telecommunications fellow for Congresswoman Anna
Eshoo, an Honorary Co-Chair of ITIF, 6/9/15, Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How
U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness Information Technology &
Innovation Foundation http://www.itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usafreedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subverts-us-competitiveness
When historians write about this period in U.S. history it could very well be that one of the
themes will be how the United States lost its global technology leadership to other
nations. And clearly one of the factors they would point to is the long-standing
privileging of U.S. national security interests over U.S. industrial and commercial
interests when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. This has occurred over the last few years as the U.S.
government has done relatively little to address the rising commercial challenge to
U.S. technology companies, all the while putting intelligence gathering first and foremost.
Indeed, policy decisions by the U.S. intelligence community have reverberated
throughout the global economy. If the U.S. tech industry is to remain the leader in
the global marketplace, then the U.S. government will need to set a new course that
balances economic interests with national security interests. The cost of inaction is
not only short-term economic losses for U.S. companies, but a wave of protectionist
policies that will systematically weaken U.S. technology competiveness in years to come,
with impacts on economic growth, jobs, trade balance, and national security
through a weakened industrial base. Only by taking decisive steps to reform its
digital surveillance activities will the U.S. government enable its tech industry to
effectively compete in the global market.

The US is the driving force behind global economic recovery

Economist 2015
American shopper, 2-14, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21643188world-once-again-relying-too-much-american-consumers-power-growth-americanshopper
A Global economy running on a single engine is better than one that needs jump
leads. The American economy is motoring again, to the relief of exporters from
Hamburg to Hangzhou. Firms added more than 1m net new jobs in the past three months, the best showing
since 1997 (see article). Buoyed up by cheap petrol, Americans are spending; in January consumer sentiment

The IMF reckons that American growth will hit 3.6%

in 2015, faster than the world economy as a whole . All this is good. But growing dependence on
jumped to its highest in more than a decade.

the American economyand on consumers in particularhas unwelcome echoes. A decade ago American
consumers borrowed heavily and recklessly. They filled their ever-larger houses with goods from China; they fuelled
gas-guzzling cars with imported oil. Big exporters recycled their earnings back to America, pushing down interest
rates which in turn helped to feed further borrowing. Europe was not that different. There, frugal Germans financed
debt binges around the euro areas periphery.After the financial crisis, the hope was of an end to these imbalances.
Debt-addicted Americans and Spaniards would chip away at their obligations; thrifty German and Chinese
consumers would start to enjoy life for once. At first, this seemed to be happening. Americas trade deficit, which
was about 6% of GDP in 2006, had more than halved by 2009.

But now the world is slipping back into

some nasty habits. Hair grows faster than the euro zone, and what growth there is
depends heavily on exports. The countries of the single currency are running a
current-account surplus of about 2.6% of GDP, thanks largely to exports to America.
At 7.4% of GDP, Germanys trade surplus is as large as it has ever been. Chinas
growth, meanwhile, is slowingand once again relying heavily on spending
elsewhere. It notched up its own record trade surplus in January. Chinas exports have actually begun to drop,
but imports are down by more. And over the past year the renminbi, which rose by more than 10% against the
dollar in 2010-13, has begun slipping again, to the annoyance of American politicians. A mericas

economy is
warping as a result. Consumptions contribution to growth in the fourth quarter of
2014 was the largest since 2006. The trade deficit is widening. Strip out oil, and Americas trade deficit
grew to more than 3% of GDP in 2014, and is approaching its pre-recession peak of about 4%. The worlds
reliance on America is likely to deepen. Germans are more interested in shipping savings abroad
than investing at home (see article). Households and firms in Europes periphery are overburdened with debt,
workers wages squeezed and banks in no mood to lend. Like Germany, Europe as a whole is relying on exports.
China is rebalancing, but not fast enough: services have yet to account for more than half of annual Chinese output.

Additionally, NSA surveillance has created a global move

towards data nationalisation which threatens to fragment
the internet.
Omtzigt 15,

Pieter Herman Omtzigt is a Dutch politician. As a member of the Christian

Democratic Appeal he was an MP from June 3, 2003 to June 17, 2010 and is
currently an MP since October 26, 2010. He focuses on matters of taxes, pensions
and additions. Explanatory memorandum by Mr Pieter Omtzigt, rapporteur
Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Mass surveillance Report, 1/26/2015,
http://website-pace.net/documents/19838/1085720/20150126-MassSurveillanceEN.pdf
In response to growing discontent with US surveillance, one political response has been
to push for more technological sovereignty and data nationalisation. The
Snowden disclosures have therefore had serious implications on the development of
the Internet and hastened trends to balkanize the Internet to the detriment of the
development of a wide, vast and easily accessible online network. The Internet as we
knew it, or believed we knew it, is a global platform for exchange of information, open and
free debate, and commerce. But Brazil and the European Union , for example,
announced plans to lay a $185 million undersea fibre-optic cable between them to
thwart US surveillance. German politicians also called for the development of a German internet for
108.

German customers data to circumvent foreign servers and the information to stay on networks that would fully be

Russia passed a law obliging internet companies to store the

data of Russian users on servers in Russia .160 After a six-month inquiry following the Snowden
under Germanys control. 159

disclosures, the European Parliament adopted a report on the NSA surveillance programme in February 2014 161,
which argues that the EU should suspend bank data and Safe Harbour agreements on data privacy (voluntary data
protection standards for non-EU companies transferring EU citizens personal data to the US) with the United States.
MEPs added that the European Parliament should only give its consent to the EU-US free trade deal (TTIP) that is

The European Parliament

seeks tough new data protection rules that would place US companies in the
difficult situation of having to check with EU authorities before complying with
mandatory requests made by US authorities . The European Parliaments LIBE Committee also
being negotiated, if the US fully respects EU citizens fundamental rights.

advocated the creation of a European data cloud that would require all data from European consumers to be
stored or processed within Europe, or even within the individual country of the consumer concerned.

Some

nations, such as Australia, France, South Korea, and India, have already
implemented a patchwork of data-localisation requirements according to two legal
scholars.162

This regional fragmentation of the internet would collapse the

global economy and create the necessary conditions for global
instability.
Jardine, 2014

Eric CIGI Research Fellow, Global Security & Politics, 9-19-2014, "Should the Average
Internet User in a Liberal Democracy Care About Internet Fragmentation? ," Cigi,
https://www.cigionline.org/blogs/reimagining-internet/should-average-internet-userliberal-democracy-care-about-internet-fragme
Even though your average liberal democratic Internet user wouldnt see it, at least
at the content level, the fragmentation of the Internet would matter a great deal. If
the Internet was to break apart into regional or even national blocks, there would be
large economic costs in terms of lost future potential for global GDP growth. As a
recent McKinsey & Company report illustrates, upwards of 15 to 25 percent of
Global GDP is currently determined by the movement of goods, money, people and
data. These global flows (which admittedly include more than just data flows)
contribute yearly between 250 to 400 billion dollars to global GDP growth. The
contribution of global flows to global GDP growth is only likely to grow in the future,
provided that the Internet remains a functionally universal system that works
extraordinarily well as a platform for e-commerce. Missing out on lost GDP growth
harms people economically in liberal democratic countries and elsewhere. Average
users in the liberal democracies should care, therefore, about the fragmentation of
the broader Internet because it will cost them dollars and cents, even if the
fragmentation of the Internet would not really affect the content that they
themselves access.Additionally, the same Mckinsey & Company report notes that
countries that are well connected to the global system have GDP growth that is up
to 40 percent higher than those countries that have fewer connections to the wider
world. Like interest rates, annual GDP growth compounds itself, meaning that early
gains grow exponentially. If the non-Western portions of the Internet wall
themselves off from the rest (or even if parts of what we could call the liberal
democratic Internet do the same), the result over the long term will be slower
growth and a smaller GDP per capita in less well-connected nations. Some people
might look at this situation and be convinced that excluding people in non-liberal
democracies from the economic potential of the Internet is not right. In normative
terms, these people might deserve to be connected, at the very least so that they
can benefit from the same economic boon as those in more well connected
advanced liberal democracies. In other words, average Internet users in liberal
democracies should care about Internet fragmentation because it is essentially an
issue of equality of opportunity.Other people might only be convinced by the idea
that poverty, inequality, and relative deprivation, while by no means sufficient
causes of terrorism, insurgency, aggression and unrest, are likely to contribute to
the potential for an increasingly conflictual world. Most average Internet users in
Liberal democracies would likely agree that preventing flashes of unrest (like the
current ISIL conflict in Iraq and Syria) is better than having to expend blood and
treasure to try and fix them after they have broken out. Preventive measures can
include ensuring solid GDP growth through global interconnection in every country,

even if this is not, as I mentioned before, going to be enough to fix every problem
every time. Overall, the dangers of a fragmented Internet are real and the average
user in liberal democracies should care. With truly global forces at play, it is
daunting to think of what the average user might do to combat fragmentation.
Really only one step is realistic. Users need to recognize that the system works best
and contributes most to the content and material well-being of all Internet users
when it approaches its ideal technical design of universal interoperability. Societies
will rightly determine that some things need to be walled off, blocked or filtered
because this digital content has physical world implications that are not acceptable
(child pornography, vitriolic hate speech, death threats, underage bullying on social
media, etc.). However, in general, citizens should resist Internet fragmentation
efforts in any form by putting pressure on their national politicians, Internet Service
Providers, and content intermediaries, like Google, to respect the fundamental (and
fundamentally beneficial) universally interoperable structure of the Internet. To do
otherwise is to accept the loss of potential future global prosperity and to encourage
a world that is unequal and prone to conflict and hardship.

The impact of economic decline is great power war.

James, 2014

Harold, Princeton history professor,Debate: Is 2014, like 1914, a prelude to world

war?, 7-2, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/read-and-vote-is-2014like-1914-a-prelude-to-world-war/article19325504/
Some of the dynamics of the pre-1914 financial world are now re-emerging. Then an
economically declining power, Britain, wanted to use finance as a weapon against
its larger and faster growing competit ors, Germany and the United States. Now America is in
turn obsessed by being overtaken by China according to some calculations, set to become the
worlds largest economy in 2014. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, financial
institutions appear both as dangerous weapons of mass destruction , but also as potential
instruments for the application of national power. In managing the 2008 crisis, the dependence of foreign banks on
U.S. dollar funding constituted a major weakness, and required the provision of large swap lines by the Federal
Reserve. The United States provided that support to some countries, but not others, on the basis of an explicitly

Geo-politics is intruding
into banking practice elsewhere. Before the Ukraine crisis, Russian banks were trying to acquire assets
political logic, as Eswar Prasad demonstrates in his new book on the Dollar Trap.

in Central and Eastern Europe. European and U.S. banks are playing a much reduced role in Asian trade finance.
Chinese banks are being pushed to expand their role in global commerce. After the financial crisis, China started to
build up the renminbi as a major international currency. Russia and China have just proposed to create a new credit

The next
stage in this logic is to think about how financial power can be directed to national
advantage in the case of a diplomatic tussle. Sanctions are a routine (and not terribly successful)
rating agency to avoid what they regard as the political bias of the existing (American-based) agencies.

part of the pressure applied to rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. But financial pressure can be much more
powerfully applied to countries that are deeply embedded in the world economy. The test is in the Western
imposition of sanctions after the Russian annexation of Crimea. President Vladimir Putins calculation in response is
that the European Union and the United States cannot possibly be serious about the financial war. It would turn into
a boomerang: Russia would be less affected than the more developed and complex financial markets of Europe and

The threat of systemic disruption generates a new sort of uncertainty, one

that mirrors the decisive feature of the crisis of the summer of 1914 . At that time,
no one could really know whether clashes would escalate or not. T hat feature contrasts
America.

remarkably with almost the entirety of the Cold War, especially since the 1960s, when the strategic doctrine of

The idea of
network disruption relies on the ability to achieve advantage by surprise, and to win
at no or low cost. But it is inevitably a gamble, and raises prospect that others
Mutually Assured Destruction left no doubt that any superpower conflict would inevitably escalate.

might, but also might not be able to, mount the same sort of operation. Just as in
1914, there is an enhanced temptation to roll the dice, even though the game may
be fatal.

Internet Freedom

1AC Internet Freedom

NSA spying has undermined American foreign policy. It
undercut any credibility to push for democratic freedom in
repressive regimes, repressive surveillance is growing
worldwide as a result.
Schneier 15

Bruce Schneier a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
Law School, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory
Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the CTO at Resilient
Systems, Inc 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and
Control Your World. P. 106
In 2010, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton gave a speech declaring Internet freedom a
major US foreign policy goal. To this end, the US State Department funds and supports a variety of
programs worldwide, working to counter censorship, promote encryption, and enable anonymity, all designed " to
ensure that any child, born anywhere in the world, has access to the global Internet
as an open platform on which to innovate, learn, organize, and express herself free
from undue interference or censorship." This agenda has been torpedoed by the
awkward realization that the US and other democratic governments conducted the same
types of surveillance they have criticized in more repressive countries. Those
repressive countries are seizing on the opportunity, pointing to US surveillance as a
justification for their own more draconian Internet policies: more surveillance, more
censorship, and a more isolationist Internet that gives individual countries more
control over what their citizens see and say . For example, one of the defenses the
government of Egypt offered for its plans to monitor social media was that "the US
listens in to phone calls, and supervises anyone who could threaten its national
security." Indians are worried that their government will cite the US's actions to justify surveillance in that
country. Both China and Russia publicly called out US hypocrisy. This affects Internet freedom
worldwide. Historically, Internet governancewhat little there waswas largely left to the
United States, because everyone more or less believed that we were working for the security of the Internet
instead of against it. But now that the US has lost much of its credibility, Internet
governance is in turmoil. Many of the regulatory bodies that influence the Internet are trying to figure out
what sort of leadership model to adopt. Older international standards organizations like the International
Telecommunications Union are trying to increase their influence in Internet governance and develop a more

This is the cyber sovereignty movement, and it threatens to

fundamentally fragment the Internet. It's not new, but it has been given an
enormous boost from the revelations of NSA spying. Countries like Russia, China,
and Saudi Arabia are pushing for much more autonomous control over the portions
of the Internet within their borders. That, in short, would be a disaster. The Internet
is fundamentally a global platform. While countries continue to censor and control,
today people in repressive regimes can still read information from and exchange
ideas with the rest of the world. Internet freedom is a human rights issue, and one
that the US should support.
nationalist set of rules.

Further, this hypocrisy has created the conditions that will

accelerate the global rise of authoritarianism.
Chenoweth & Stephan 2015
Erica Chenoweth, political scientist at the University of Denver.& Maria J. Stephan,
Senior Policy Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic
Council.7-7-2015, "How Can States and Non-State Actors Respond to Authoritarian
Resurgence?," Political Violence @ a Glance,
http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/07/07/how-can-states-and-non-stateactors-respond-to-authoritarian-resurgence/
Chenoweth: Why is authoritarianism making a comeback? Stephan: Theres obviously no
single answer to this. But part of the answer is that democracy is losing its allure in parts of the
world. When people dont see the economic and governance benefits of democratic transitions, they lose hope.
Then theres the compelling stability first argument. Regimes around the world, including China
and Russia, have readily cited the chaos of the Arab Spring to justify heavyhanded policies and consolidating their grip on power . The color revolutions that toppled
autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine inspired similar dictatorial retrenchment. There is nothing
new about authoritarian regimes adapting to changing circumstances. Their
resilience is reinforced by a combination of violent and non-coercive measures. But
authoritarian paranoia seems to have grown more piqued over the past decade .
Regimes have figured out that people power endangers their grip on power and they are cracking down .
Theres no better evidence of the effectiveness of civil resistance than the measures
that governments take to suppress itsomething you detail in your chapter from my new book.
Finally, and importantly, democracy in this country and elsewhere has taken a hit lately.
Authoritarian regimes mockingly cite images of torture, mass surveillance, and the catering to
the radical fringes happening in the US political system to refute pressures to democratize
themselves. The financial crisis here and in Europe did not inspire much confidence in democracy and we are
seeing political extremism on the rise in places like Greece and Hungary. Here in the US we need to get
our own house in order if we hope to inspire confidence in democracy abroad.

American surveillance is the primary driver behind this

authoritarian accelleration. The plan is necessary to restore US
credibility.
Jackson, 2015
Dean Jackson is an assistant program officer at the International Forum for
Democratic Studies. He holds an M.A. from the University of Chicagos Committee
on International Relations, 7-14-2015, "The Authoritarian Surge into Cyberspace,"
International Forum For Democratic Studies,
http://www.resurgentdictatorship.org/the-authoritarian-surge-into-cyberspace/
This still leaves open the question of what is driving authoritarian innovation in cyberspace .

Deibert identifies

increased government emphasis on cybersecurity as one driver : cybercrime and terrorism

are serious concerns, and governments have a legitimate interest in combatting them. Unfortunately, when
democratic governments use mass surveillance and other tools to police
cyberspace, it can have the effect of providing cover for authoritarian regimes to
use similar techniques for repressive purposesespecially, as Deibert notes, since former NSA
contractor Edward Snowdens disclosure of US mass surveillance programs. Second, Deibert
observes that authoritarian demand for cybersecurity technology is often met by
private firms based in the democratic worlda group that Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls the

Corporate Enemies of the Internet. Hacking Team, an Italian firm mentioned in the RSF report, is just one
example: The Guardian reports that leaked internal documents suggest Hacking Teams clients include the
governments of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

in a world where Big Brother and Big Data share so many of the
same needs, the political economy of cybersecurity must be singled out as a major
driver of resurgent authoritarianism in cyberspace. Given these powerful forces, it will be
Deibert writes that

difficult to reverse the authoritarian surge in cyberspace. Deibert offers some possible solutions: for starters, he
writes that the political economy of cybersecurity can be altered through stronger export controls, smart
sanctions, and a monitoring system to detect abuses. Further, he recommends that cybersecurity trade fairs open
their doors to civil society watchdogs who can help hold governments and the private sector accountable. Similarly,
Deibert suggests that opening regional cybersecurity initiatives to civil society participation could mitigate
violations of user rights. This might seem unlikely to occur within some authoritarian-led intergovernmental
organizations, but setting a normative expectation of civil society participation might help discredit the efforts of

Deibert concludes with a final recommendation that society develop

models of cyberspace security that can show us how to prevent disruptions or
threats to life and property without sacrificing liberties and rights. This might
restore democratic states to the moral high ground and remove oppressive regimes
rhetorical cover, but developing such models will require confronting powerful vested interests
and seriously examining the tradeoff between cybersecurity and Internet freedom.
Doing so would be worth it: the Internet is far too important to cede to authoritarian
control.
bad actors.

The impact the failure of global democratic consolidation

causes extinction.
Diamond, 1995
Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Promoting Democracy in the
1990s, December, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the
former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal
drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with

Nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on
Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered . Most of these new and
unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or
absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness.
LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that
govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another.
They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders.
Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and
they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor
terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use
on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading
partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more
environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the
destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal
authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones.

obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely

and the rule of law,

the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international
prosperity can be built.

because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights,
democracies are

security and

1AC Plan
Plan: The United States federal government should limit the
scope of its domestic surveillance under Section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to communications whose
sender or recipient is a valid intelligence target and whose
targets pose a tangible threat to national security.

Solvency

1AC Solvency
The plan solves, limiting the purposes of 702 collection to a
tangible threat to national security is critical to solve
overcollection.
Sinha, 2014
G. Alex Sinha is an Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch
and the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union, July 2014
With Liberty to Monitor All How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism,
Law, and American Democracy Human Rights Watch,
http://www.hrw.org/node/127364
Narrow the purposes for which all foreign intelligence surveillance may be
conducted and limit such surveillance to individuals, groups, or entities who pose a
tangible threat to national security or a comparable state interest. o Among other steps, Congress
should pass legislation amending Section 702 of FISA and related surveillance authorities to
narrow the scope of what can be acquired as foreign intelligence information,
which is now defined broadly to encompass, among other things, information related to
the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States. It should be restricted to what is
necessary and proportionate to protect legitimate aims identified in the ICCPR, such as national security. In
practice,

this should mean that the government may acquire information only from
individuals, groups, or entities who pose a tangible threat to national security
narrowly defined, or a comparable compelling state interest.

And, this limit solves without damaging counterterrorism.

Laperruque 2014,

Jake, CDTs Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security. Previously served as a law
clerk for Senator Al Franken on the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the
Law, and as a policy fellow for Senator Robert Menendez. "Why Average Internet
Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy
& Technology., 7-22-2014, https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-usersshould-demand-significant-section-702-reform/
There are sensible reforms that can significant limit the
collateral damage to privacy caused by Section 702 without impeding national
security. Limiting the purposes for which Section 702 can be conducted will narrow
the degree to which communications are monitored between individuals not
suspected of wrongdoing or connected to national security threats . Closing retention
loopholes present in the Minimization Guidelines governing that surveillance will ensure that when
Americans communications are incidentally collected, they are not kept absent
national security needs. And closing the backdoor search loophole would ensure
that when Americans communications are retained because they communicated
with a target of Section 702 surveillance, they couldnt be searched unless the
standards for domestic surveillance of the American are met.
Where Do We Go From Here?

And, the plan eliminates the collection of communication

about targets -that solves upstream collection.
Nojeim, 2014
Greg, Director, Project on Freedom, Security & Technology Comments To The Privacy
And Civil Liberties Oversight Board Regarding Reforms To Surveillance Conducted
Pursuant To Section 702 Of Fisa April 11, 2014
https://d1ovv0c9tw0h0c.cloudfront.net/files/2014/04/CDT_PCLOB-702Comments_4.11.13.pdf
Collection of communications about targets that are neither to nor from targets
should be prohibited. The Government takes the position that Section 702 permits it to collect not only
C.

communications that are to or from a foreign intelligence target, but also communications that are about the
target because they mention an identifier associated with the target.17 The practice directs the focus of
surveillance away from suspected wrongdoers and permits the NSA to target communications between individuals

Because this is inconsistent with the legislative

history of the statute, and raises profound constitutional and operational problems,
PCLOB should recommend that about collection be ended, and that Section 702
surveillance be limited to communications to and from targets . Section 702 authorizes the
with no link to national security investigations.

government to target the communications of persons reasonably believed to be abroad, but it never defines the
term target. However, throughout Section 702, the term is used to refer to the targeting of an individual rather
content of a communication.18 Further, the entire congressional debate on Section 702 includes no reference to
collecting communications about a foreign target, and significant debate about collecting communications to or

To collect about communications, the NSA engages in upstream

surveillance on the Internet backbone,20 meaning on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows
past,21 temporarily copying the content of the entire data stream so it can be
searched for the same selectors used for the downstream or PRISM surveillance .
from a target.19

As a result, the NSA has the capability to search any Internet communication going into or out of the U.S.22 without

Direct access creates direct opportunity for abuse,

and should not be permitted to a military intelligence agency . This dragnet scanning also
particularized intervention by a provider.

results in the collection of multi-communication transactions, (MCTs) which include tens of thousands wholly
domestic communications each year.23 The FISC required creation of new minimization rules for MCTs in 2011, but
did not limit their collection.24 The mass searching of communications content inside the United States, knowing
that it the communications searched include tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications each year,

Abandoning collection of communications about

targets would remove any justification for upstream collection, eliminate the serious
problems posed by direct government access to the Internet infrastructure,
eliminate the collection of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications in
contravention of the statute, an make surveillance under Section 702 consistent
with the congressional intent.
raises profound constitutional questions.

And, these limits restore US leadership.

Edgar, 2015
Timothy H. Edgar is a visiting scholar at the Brown Universitys Watson Institute for
International Studies. He was the first-ever director of privacy and civil liberties for
the White House National Security Staff. Under George W. Bush, he was the first
deputy for civil liberties for the director of national intelligence, from 2006 to 2009.
He was the national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union from
2001 to 2006. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Dartmouth College, 4-132015, "The Good News About Spying," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2015-04-13/good-news-aboutspying

The United States should also pivot from its defensive position and take the lead on
global privacy. The United States has an impressive array of privacy safeguards, and it has even imposed new
ones that protect citizens of every country. Despite their weaknesses, these safeguards are still
the strongest in the world. The U.S. government should not be shy about trumpeting
them, and should urge other countries to follow its lead. It could begin by engaging
with close allies, like the United Kingdom, Germany, and other European countries,
urging them to increase transparency and judicial supervision of their own
communications surveillance activities.

Finally, the plan is a critical step to fight the politics of fear

and regain privacy rights.
Snowden, 2015,
Edward J. Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and National
Security Agency contractor, is a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. 64-2015, "Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance," New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/opinion/edward-snowden-the-world-says-no-tosurveillance.html
Though we have come a long way, the right to privacy the foundation of the freedoms
enshrined in the United States Bill of Rights remains under threat. Some of the worlds most
popular online services have been enlisted as partners in the N.S.A.s mass
surveillance programs, and technology companies are being pressured by governments around the world to
work against their customers rather than for them. Billions of cellphone location records are still
being intercepted without regard for the guilt or innocence of those affected. We have
learned that our government intentionally weakens the fundamental security of the Internet with back doors that

Metadata revealing the personal associations and

interests of ordinary Internet users is still being intercepted and monitored on a
scale unprecedented in history: As you read this online, the United States
government makes a note. Spymasters in Australia, Canada and France have exploited recent tragedies
transform private lives into open books.

to seek intrusive new powers despite evidence such programs would not have prevented attacks. Prime Minister
David Cameron of Britain recently mused, Do we want to allow a means of communication between people which
we cannot read? He soon found his answer, proclaiming that for too long, we have been a passively tolerant

At the turning of the

millennium, few imagined that citizens of developed democracies would soon be
required to defend the concept of an open society against their own leaders. Yet the
balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a postterror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy . For the
first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away
from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason. With each court victory, with every
change in the law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear. As a
society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it
protects.
society, saying to our citizens: As long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.