Nsa negative

International Surveillance Matters more

(___)

(__) The aff can’t solve internet freedom because it doesn’t stop surveillance of foreign targets, which is what matters to the rest of the world.

Fontaine, President of the Center for a New American Security, 2014
(Richard, "Bringing Liberty Online Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden Era." Center for a New American Security (9/2014).http://www.cnas.org/internetfreedom#.VaClavlViko

Despite the international outrage, and both public and private criticism of U.S. surveillance policies, the U.S. government has continued its Internet freedom–related activities, albeit at a lower public volume. In early 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry, addressing the Freedom Online Coalition conference in Estonia, called for an “open, secure, and inclusive Internet.”33 U.S. Internet freedom programming continues: the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor alone planned to expend roughly $18 million in 2014 on anti-censorship technology, secure communications, technology training and rapid response to bloggers under threat.34 In June, the United States sponsored a successful U.N. Human Rights Council resolution reaffirming that the same rights that people have offline, including freedom of expression, must be protected online, regardless of frontiers.35 While continuing to execute the Internet freedom agenda, U.S. officials have attempted to reconcile their government’s surveillance practices with its expressed desire for greater online freedom. This is challenging, to say the least. U.S. officials draw a critical distinction between monitoring communications for purposes of protecting national security and surveillance aimed at repressing political speech and activity. While this distinction is intuitive to many Americans, it is likely to be lost on many others, particularly where autocratic regimes consider domestic political dissent to be a national security threat. At its bluntest, the American position is that it is legitimate, for example, for the U.S. government, but not for the Chinese government, to surveil Chinese citizens. This is and will remain a tough sell.

International Surveillance Matters More

(__) Limits on domestic surveillance will not solve American leadership, they don’t limit foreign surveillance and aren’t credible because its all secret.

Fontaine, President of the Center for a New American Security, 2014
(Richard, "Bringing Liberty Online Reenergizing the Internet Freedom Agenda in a Post-Snowden Era." Center for a New American Security (9/2014).http://www.cnas.org/internetfreedom#.VaClavlViko

Secretary Kerry has defended the Obama administration’s reforms to signals intelligence collection, saying that they are based on the rule of law, conducted pursuant to a legitimate purpose, guided by proper oversight, characterized by greater transparency than before and fully consistent with the American vision of a free and open Internet.36 In March 2014, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scott Busby addressed the linkage between surveillance and Internet freedom and added two principles to Kerry’s – that surveillance should not be arbitrary but rather as tailored as possible, and that decisions about intelligence collection priorities should be informed by guidance from an authority outside the collection agency.37 In addition, the U.S. government has taken other steps to temper the international reaction. For example, the Department of Commerce opted to relinquish its oversight of ICANN – the organization that manages domain name registries – to the “global Internet community.”38

Such moves are destined to have only a modest effect on foreign reactions. U.S. surveillance will inevitably continue under any reasonably likely scenario (indeed, despite the expressions of outrage, not a single country has said that it would cease its surveillance activities). Many of the demands – such as for greater transparency – will not be met, simply due to the clandestine nature of electronic espionage. Any limits on surveillance that a government might announce will not be publicly verifiable and thus perhaps not fully credible. Nor will there be an international “no-spying” convention to reassure foreign citizens that their communications are unmonitored. As it has for centuries, statesponsored espionage activities are likely to remain accepted international practice, unconstrained by international law. The one major possible shift in policy following the Snowden affair – a stop to the bulk collection of telecommunications metadata in the United States – will not constrain the activity most disturbing to foreigners; that is, America’s surveillance of them. At the same time, U.S. officials are highly unlikely to articulate a global “right to privacy” (as have the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and some foreign officials), akin to that derived from the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment, that would permit foreigners to sue in U.S. courts to enforce such a right.39 The Obama administration’s January 2014 presidential directive on signals intelligence refers, notably, to the “legitimate privacy interests” of all persons, regardless of nationality, and not to a privacy “right.”40

International Surveillance Matters More

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(__) The aff can’t solve credibility, curtailing domestic surveillance won’t solve surveillance of people around the world.

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.

So far I have focused on the limited credibility of domestic oversight. If we accept the view that all persons, regardless of citizenship, have privacy rights, then there is a further set of difficulties to overcome. To begin with, we lack an established set of norms that overseers can utilize to regulate international surveillance. Such norms will not be easy to generate given competing conceptions of privacy (China, for instance, is unlikely to consent to a norm that forbids it from operating its so-called Great Firewall). We also confront grave enforcement difficulties. It is hard to see who could fairly adjudicate between the interests of a particular state (for example, the United States) and a foreign national (for example, an Iraqi). It is hard to foresee support for an international regulatory body. Not only the United States but also countries such as China and Russia are likely to balk at sharing intelligence with an international regulator whose internal controls may be less robust than theirs and whose members may be drawn from rival states. Yet if compliance with international norms were allowed to be voluntary, then little would prevent foreign powers from monitoring peoples and organizations as they see fit. In this event, curtailing the NSA's surveillance operations would not remedy the loss of privacy experienced by persons around the world, since their communications would still be monitored by other nations.

(__) Foreign and domestic surveillance affect soft power

Champion, writes editorials on international affairs, 2014
(Marc, “U.S. soft power takes a hit in wake of report,” The Japan Times, 12/16/14, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/12/16/commentary/world-commentary/u-s-soft-power-takes-a-hit-in-wake-of-report/#.VYhSy9NVjZF)

A second area where the U.S. is suffering severe damage to its image is from the National Security Agency’s claim to have the collection of Internet metadata from citizens anywhere and everywhere. As with the U.S. renditions policy, America’s closest allies collude in this collection effort and have suffered a public backlash as a result. Again, the publics of these countries aren’t wholly naive: They know that governments spy on other governments, as well as on criminals and terrorists. Indeed, they mostly support spying on terrorists. But the NSA revelations were disruptive, because they created the perception that the U.S. was using its dominance of the Internet to collect data on ordinary citizens across the globe. Again, according to the Pew global survey, majorities disapprove of the U.S. monitoring foreign citizens in all except five countries (one of which was the U.S.). Americans should hardly be surprised: More than 60 percent of them find it unacceptable for the U.S. to spy on its own citizens — so why would Germans or Italians feel otherwise?