Nsa negative

Oversight works now

(__) 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.

Oversight works now

(__) Oversight of section 702 is working now.

Cordero,Director, National Security Studies Georgetown Law , 2014
Carrie 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.

Privacy Losses are Inevitable

(___)

(__) 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.

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.