Nsa affirmative

Answers to Internet Freedom Doesn’t Spur Democracy

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(__) US norms on internet freedom can change global behavior. Not all nations are holdouts and plan still moves the needle everywhere.

Fontaine and Rogers, Senior Fellow & Research Assocaite at the Center for New American Security, 2011

(Richard & Will, “Internet Freedom A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age” – June, 2011 - http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_InternetFreedom_FontaineRogers_0.pdf

The Bush and Obama administrations have both sought to promote Internet freedom by shaping international norms. Developing international norms is a long-term, global objective. Some countries that currently repress that Internet access – like China, Iran and Burma – are unlikely to be moved by normative trends in the near term; statements at the United Nations and policy declarations supporting Internet freedom are highly unlikely to change their current policies. But promoting Internet freedom is not only a near-term effort, and current efforts may pay off in the long run. Many countries have not yet fully developed their own Internet policies or thought through all of the implications of Internet freedom and repression even in the short run – including states in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Shaping the behavior of those states should be an important goal of the United States and likeminded partners.

(__) Internet freedom solves. It is key to global democracy.

Tkacheva et al., Researchers at the RAND Corporation, 2013
(Olesya, and Lowell H. Schwartz, Martin C. Libicki, Julie E. Taylor, Jeffrey Martini, and Caroline Baxter, RAND Corporation, Internet Freedom and Political Space, Report prepared for USDOS)

Online information can undermine the stability of non- democratic regimes by triggering an information cascade. The impact of protests is frequently proportional to the number of protesters who appear on the streets. The Internet can facilitate social protests by enabling citizens to anonymously express their true opinions and coordinate collective action, which can create a domino effect. Online mobilization in both Egypt and Russia triggered a wave of protests with long-term consequences—most notably the stunningly swift collapse of the Mubarak regime. Although social media in Egypt did not cause the popular upris- ing that came to center in Tahrir Square, it substantially increased the number of people who participated in the first demonstration. The size of the crowd in the Square caught Egyptian authori- ties by surprise and triggered the defection of some high-ranking army officials. In Russia, the information about electoral fraud triggered a wave of online mobilization that manifested itself in a series of mass demonstrations. Syria’s activists used the Internet to publicize elite defection from the regime, albeit with more limited success against a brutal and determined foe. • The Internet can make political coalitions more inclusive by opening up deliberations that cut across socioeconomic cleav- ages, thereby spreading information to people who do not normally interact on a daily basis. This conclusion emerges pri- marily from the review of theoretical literature on the diffusion of information online and the literature on social movements. While weak ties facilitate the diffusion of information online, strong ties create peer pressure that contributes to offline social mobilization.

Answers to Internet Freedom is about Profits

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(__) The US internet freedom agenda is about promoting human rights and freedom of expression.

Sinha, Fellow at Human Rights Watch, 2015
(G. Alex From the article “Better Privacy Protections Key to US Foreign Policy Coherence” – Defense One – March 25^th - http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/03/better-privacy-protections-key-us-foreign-policy-coherence/108469/)

G. Alex Sinha, Aryeh Neier fellow with the US Program at Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.. For all its interest in promoting human rights around the world, you’d think the United States would be more sensitive to the ways its own surveillance policies undermine those very rights. Over the last few years, U.S. officials say they have spent more than $125 million to advance Internet freedom, which the State Department describes as a “foreign policy priority.” The U.S. rightly links Internet freedom with the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and association, as well as with the work of human rights defenders. It makes sense, therefore, that the U.S. also actively funds human rights defenders, and calls out other governments for mistreating them. Yet surveillance conducted by the U.S. government—some of it unconstitutional and contrary to international human rights law—compromises Internet freedom, undermines the rights the government seeks to promote, and directly harms human rights defenders.

Answers to International Surveillance matters more

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(__) We’ve lost the moral high ground and ability to work with civil society groups around the world to ensure democratic progress.

Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab @ School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto 2015,
(Ron,. He was a co-founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, 7-1-2015, "Cyberspace Under Siege," Journal Of Democracy, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v026/26.3.deibert.html#back

While the value of Snowden’s disclosures in helping to start a long-needed discussion is undeniable, the revelations have also had unintended [End Page 74] consequences for resurgent authoritarianism and cyberspace. First, they have served to deflect attention away from authoritarian-regime cyberespionage campaigns such as China’s. Before Snowden fled to Hong Kong, U.S. diplomacy was taking an aggressive stand against cyberespionage. Individuals in the pay of the Chinese military and allegedly linked to Chinese cyberespionage were finding themselves under indictment. Since Snowden, the pressure on China has eased. Beijing, Moscow, and others have found it easy to complain loudly about a double standard supposedly favoring the United States while they rationalize their own actions as “normal” great-power behavior and congratulate themselves for correcting the imbalance that they say has beset cyberspace for too long.

Second, the disclosures have created an atmosphere of suspicion around Western governments’ intentions and raised questions about the legitimacy of the “Internet Freedom” agenda backed by the United States and its allies. Since the Snowden disclosures—revealing top-secret exploitation and disruption programs that in some respects are indistinguishable from those that Washington and its allies have routinely condemned—the rhetoric of the Internet Freedom coalition has rung rather hollow. In February 2015, it even came out that British, Canadian, and U.S. signals-intelligence agencies had been “piggybacking” on China-based cyberespionage campaigns—stealing data from Chinese hackers who had not properly secured their own command-and-control networks.28

Third, the disclosures have opened up foreign investment opportunities for IT companies that used to run afoul of national-security concerns. Before Snowden, rumors of hidden “backdoors” in Chinese-made technology such as Huawei routers put a damper on that company’s sales. Then it came out that the United States and allied governments had been compelling (legally or otherwise) U.S.-based tech companies to do precisely what many had feared China was doing—namely, installing secret backdoors. So now Western companies have a “Huawei” problem of their own, and Huawei no longer looks so bad.