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Answers to: Surveillance Violates 4^th Amendment

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(__)NSA programs don’t violate the Fourth Amendment because they information has been given to a third-party.

Herman & Yoo, 2014
Yoo, 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

(__) 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.

Answers to Surveillance hurts Freedom

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(__) 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.