Nsa affirmative

NSA Surveillance doesn’t stop terrorism (Terror DA Ans)

(___) Their argument is a fallacy. Surveillance doesn’t work, hasn’t stopped terrorism and their evidence is propaganda.

Van Buren, State Department whistleblower, 2014,
(Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. 1-14-2014, "Peter Van Buren: We Have to Destroy Our Constitution to Save It," Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics, https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/peter-van-buren-we-have-to-destroy-our-constitution-to-save-it/)

9) We’ve stayed safe. Doesn’t that just prove all the government efforts have worked?

No, that’s called false causality. There simply is no evidence that it’s true, and much to the contrary. It’s the same as believing government efforts have prevented Martian attacks or wild lions in our bedrooms. For one thing, we already know that more NSA spying would not have stopped 9/11; most of the needed information was already held by the U.S. government and was simply not properly shared or acted upon. 9/11 was a policy failure, not a matter of too-little snooping. Today, however, it remains a straw-man justification for whatever the NSA wants to do, a way of scaring you into accepting anything from the desecration of the Fourth Amendment to taking off our shoes at airport security. But the government uses this argument endlessly to promote what it wants to do. Even the NSA’s talking points recommend their own people say: “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.” At the same time, despite all this intrusion into our lives and the obvious violations of the Fourth Amendment, the system completely missed the Boston bombers, two of the dumbest, least sophisticated bro terrorists on the planet. Since 9/11, we have seen some 364,000 deaths in our schools, workplaces, and homes caused by privately owned firearms, and none of the spying or surveillance identified any of the killers in advance. Maybe we should simply stop thinking about all this surveillance as a matter of stopping terrorists and start thinking more about what it means to have a metastasized global surveillance system aimed at spying on us all, using a fake argument about the need for 100% security in return for ever more minimal privacy. So much has been justified in these years—torture, indefinite detention, the Guantanamo penal colony, drone killings, wars, and the use of Special Operations forces as global assassination teams—by some version of the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. It’s worth getting it through our heads: there has never been an actual ticking time bomb scenario. The bogeyman isn’t real. There’s no monster hiding under your bed.

NSA Surveillance does not stop terrorism- extension

(__) Mass Surveillance is less effective than traditional law enforcement.

Schneier, fellow at Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2015
(Bruce 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.)

Mass surveillance didn’t catch underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in 2006, even though his father had repeatedly warned the U.S. government that he was dangerous. And the liquid bombers (they’re the reason governments prohibit passengers from bringing large bottles of liquids, creams, and gels on airplanes in their carry-on luggage) were captured in 2006 in their London apartment not due to mass surveillance but through traditional investigative police work. Whenever we learn about an NSA success, it invariably comes from targeted surveillance rather than from mass surveillance. One analysis showed that the FBI identifies potential terrorist plots from reports of suspicious activity, reports of plots, and investigations of other, unrelated, crimes.

This is a critical point. Ubiquitous surveillance and data mining are not suitable tools for finding dedicated criminals or terrorists. We taxpayers are wasting billions on mass-surveillance programs, and not getting the security we’ve been promised. More importantly, the money we’re wasting on these ineffective surveillance programs is not being spent on investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: tactics that have been proven to work. The NSA's surveillance efforts have actually made us less secure.

Mass surveillance and data mining are much more suitable for tasks of population discrimination: finding people with certain political beliefs, people who are friends with certain individuals, people who are members of secret societies, and people who attend certain meetings and rallies. Those are all individuals of interest to a government intent on social control like China. The reason data mining works to find them is that, like credit card fraudsters, political dissidents are likely to share a well-defined profile. Additionally, under authoritarian rule the inevitable false alarms are less of a problem; charging innocent people with sedition instills fear in the populace.

Surveillance causes false positives

NSA surveillance fails to prevent terrorism – false positives overwhelm government resources.

Schneier, fellow at Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2015
(Bruce 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.)

The US intelligence community also likens finding a terrorist plot to looking for a needle in a haystack. And, as former NSA director General Keith Alexander said, “you need the haystack to find the needle.” That statement perfectly illustrates the problem with mass surveillance and bulk collection. When you’re looking for the needle, the last thing you want to do is pile lots more hay on it. More specifically, there is no scientific rationale for believing that adding irrelevant data about innocent people makes it easier to find a terrorist attack, and lots of evidence that it does not. You might be adding slightly more signal, but you’re also adding much more noise. And despite the NSA’s “collect it all” mentality, its own documents bear this out. The military intelligence community even talks about the problem of “drinking from a fire hose”: having so much irrelevant data that it’s impossible to find the important bits. We saw this problem with the NSA’s eavesdropping program: the false positives overwhelmed the system. In the years after 9/11, the NSA passed to the FBI thousands of tips per month; every one of them turned out to be a false alarm. The cost was enormous, and ended up frustrating the FBI agents who were obligated to investigate all the tips. We also saw this with the Suspicious Activity Reports —or SAR — database: tens of thousands of reports, and no actual results. And all the telephone metadata the NSA collected led to just one success: the conviction of a taxi driver who sent $8,500 to a Somali group that posed no direct threat to the US — and that was probably trumped up so the NSA would have better talking points in front of Congress.

Mass Surveillance creates false positives- extensions

(__) Surveillance causes false positives that overwhelm law enforcement.

Parra-Arnau and Castelluccia, Privatics research team, 2015
(Javier & Claude, “Dataveillance and the False-Positive Paradox”. 2015. INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes (France), https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01157921/document)

We observe an extremely large number of false positives, except in the scenario where the distributions of terrorists and innocents are orthogonal, as effectively captured by the cosine distance. In order to be orthogonal, the terrorist profiles and features have to be unique and very distinctive from other people profiles. Defining such profiles is challenging since scientists do not have access to the data of many terrorists. Besides, current results tend to show that terrorists have personality traits that are indistinguishable from traits of the general population [11]. Also, it is very likely that terrorists will use tools such as encryption tools or proxies, in order to perturb their profiles.

• Our results show that the total cost increases linearly with the ratio of terrorists, but the rate of increase is relatively low in the six scenarios considered. As depicted in Fig. 7, the total cost is similar regardless of the percentage of terrorists. This is a quite interesting observation because this means that, when the security agency has to decide the 9 budget, it will not need to be very accurate in estimating the percentage of terrorists within the population. On the other hand, this figure also shows that the efficiency of the system increases with the number of suspects, but is very low when the number of terrorist is small compared to the population size, which is fortunately the case. Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if the number of persons to identified is high, which happens in McCarthy-type national paranoia or political espionage [12].

In closing, this paper demonstrates that dataveillance is not a very economical solution to fight against terrorism. More false positive will only overstress technologies, thus causing even more work for signals-intelligence agents, who are already overloaded [13]. In fact, the Charlie Hebdo terrorists were known by the French security agency prior to their attack. They were not followed and tracked anymore for budget and resource reasons. One might wonder how a dataveillance system that generates so many false positive, and is so easy to circumvent, will help improving the situation.