Nsa affirmative

NSA 1AC (Short Version) (1/6)

Observation 1 – The government engages in mass surveillance

1. The USA Freedom Act did not reform the NSA’s mass collection of domestic communication. The agency still has authority to gather data under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

Goitein, Co-Director Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program 2015,
(Elizabeth, , 6-5-2015, "Who really wins from NSA reform?," MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/freedom-act-who-really-wins-nsa-reform)

Even under USA Freedom, however, the government is still able to pull in a great deal of information about innocent Americans. Needless to say, not everyone in contact with a suspected terrorist is guilty of a crime; even terrorists call for pizza delivery. Intelligence officials also may need to obtain records – like flight manifests – that include information about multiple people, most of whom have nothing to do with terrorism. Some of this “overcollection” may be inevitable, but its effects could be mitigated. For instance, agencies could be given a short period of time to identify information relevant to actual suspects, after which they would have to destroy any remaining information. USA Freedom fails to impose such limits. More fundamentally, bulk collection of business records is only one of the many intelligence activities that abandoned the individualized suspicion approach after 9/11. Until a few years ago, if the NSA, acting within the United States, wished to obtain communications between Americans and foreigners, it had to convince the FISA Court that the individual target was a foreign power or its agent. Today, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA may target any foreigner overseas and collect his or her communications with Americans without obtaining any individualized court order. Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the NSA’s activities when it conducts surveillance overseas, the standards are even more lax. The result is mass surveillance programs that make the phone metadata program seem dainty in comparison. Even though these programs are nominally targeted at foreigners, they “incidentally” sweep in massive amounts of Americans’ data, including the content of calls, e-mails, text messages, and video chats. Limits on keeping and using such information are weak and riddled with exceptions. Moreover, foreign targets are not limited to suspected terrorists or even agents of foreign powers. As the Obama administration recently acknowledged, foreigners have privacy rights too, and the ability to eavesdrop on any foreigner overseas is an indefensible violation of those rights. Intelligence officials almost certainly supported USA Freedom because they hoped it would relieve the post-Snowden pressure for reform. Their likely long-term goal is to avoid changes to Section 702, Executive Order 12333, and the many other authorities that permit intelligence collection without any individualized showing of wrongdoing. Privacy advocates who supported USA Freedom did so because they saw it as the first skirmish in a long battle to rein in surveillance authorities. Their eye is on the prize: a return to the principle of individualized suspicion as the basis for surveillance. If intelligence officials are correct in their calculus, USA Freedom may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. But if the law clears the way for further reforms across the full range of surveillance programs, history will vindicate the privacy advocates who supported it. The answer to what USA Freedom means for our liberties lies, not in the text of the law, but in the unwritten story of what happens next.

2. The NSA has massively expanded its surveillance. Since 2008, American internet communication have been intercepted far more often than legitimate surveillance targets.

Gellman, Washington Post Staff Write, 2014
Barton 7-5-2014, "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are," Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents. The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

NSA 1AC (Short Version) (2/6)

Observation 2: This creates massive privacy violations

1. These privacy violations are more dangerous than any risk of terrorism

Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 2014
Bruce 1-6-2014, "Essays: How the NSA Threatens National Security," Schneier On Security, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_threaten.html

We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool.

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.

NSA 1AC (Short Version) (3/6)

2. Privacy is a gateway right, it enables all of our other freedoms.

PoKempne, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, 2014,
(Dinah, , “The Right Whose Time Has Come (Again): Privacy in the Age of Surveillance” 1/21/14 http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/essays/privacy-in-age-of-surveillance)

Technology has invaded the sacred precincts of private life, and unwarranted exposure has imperiled our security, dignity, and most basic values. The law must rise to the occasion and protect our rights. Does this sound familiar? So argued Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article announcing “The Right to Privacy.” We are again at such a juncture. The technological developments they saw as menacing—photography and the rise of the mass circulation press—appear rather quaint to us now. But the harms to emotional, psychological, and even physical security from unwanted exposure seem just as vivid in our digital age.Our renewed sense of vulnerability comes as almost all aspects of daily social life migrate online. At the same time, corporations and governments have acquired frightening abilities to amass and search these endless digital records, giving them the power to “know” us in extraordinary detail.

In a world where we share our lives on social media and trade immense amounts of personal information for the ease and convenience of online living, some have questioned whether privacy is a relevant concept. It is not just relevant, but crucial.

Indeed, privacy is a gateway right that affects our ability to exercise almost every other right, not least our freedom to speak and associate with those we choose, make political choices, practice our religious beliefs, seek medical help, access education, figure out whom we love, and create our family life. It is nothing less than the shelter in which we work out what we think and who we are; a fulcrum of our autonomy as individuals.

The importance of privacy, a right we often take for granted, was thrown into sharp relief in 2013 by the steady stream of revelations from United States government files released by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, and published in the Guardian and other major newspapers around the world. These revelations, supported by highly classified documents, showed the US, the UK, and other governments engaged in global indiscriminate data interception, largely unchecked by any meaningful legal constraint or oversight, without regard for the rights of millions of people who were not suspected of wrongdoing.

NSA 1AC (Short Version) (4/6)

We find the current state of affairs troubling and offer the following Plan: The United States federal government will limit the scope of its domestic surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to communications whose sender or recipient is a valid intelligence target and whose targets pose a tangible threat to national security.

NSA 1AC (Short Version) (5/6)

Observation 3 – Our plan solves.

1. Limiting the scope of the Section 702 authority is critical to solve overcollection of American communications.

Laperruque, Fellow on Privacy, Surveillance, and Security at Center for Democracy and Technology, 2014,
(Jake, "Why Average Internet Users Should Demand Significant Section 702 Reform," Center For Democracy & Technology., 7-22-2014, https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demand-significant-section-702-reform/

Where Do We Go From Here?

There are sensible reforms that can significant limit the collateral damage to privacy caused by Section 702 without impeding national security.  Limiting the purposes for which Section 702 can be conducted will narrow the degree to which communications are monitored between individuals not suspected of wrongdoing or connected to national security threats.  Closing retention loopholes present in the Minimization Guidelines governing that surveillance will ensure that when Americans’ communications are incidentally collected, they are not kept absent national security needs.  And closing the backdoor search loophole would ensure that when Americans’ communications are retained because they communicated with a target of Section 702 surveillance, they couldn’t be searched unless the standards for domestic surveillance of the American are met.

NSA 1AC (Short Version (6/6)

2. The plan eliminates the collection of communication “about” targets that prevents upstream collection.

Nojeim, Director, Project on Freedom, Security & Technology, 2014

Greg, Comments To The Privacy And Civil Liberties Oversight Board Regarding Reforms To Surveillance Conducted Pursuant To Section 702 Of Fisa April 11, 2014 https://d1ovv0c9tw0h0c.cloudfront.net/files/2014/04/CDT_PCLOB-702-Comments_4.11.13.pdf

C. Collection of communications “about” targets that are neither to nor from targets should be prohibited.

The Government takes the position that Section 702 permits it to collect not only communications that are to or from a foreign intelligence target, but also communications that are “about” the target because they mention an identifier associated with the target.17 The practice directs the focus of surveillance away from suspected wrongdoers and permits the NSA to target communications between individuals with no link to national security investigations.

Because this is inconsistent with the legislative history of the statute, and raises profound constitutional and operational problems, PCLOB should recommend that “about” collection be ended, and that Section 702 surveillance be limited to communications to and from targets. Section 702 authorizes the government to target the communications of persons reasonably believed to be abroad, but it never defines the term “target.” However, throughout Section 702, the term is used to refer to the targeting of an individual rather content of a communication.18 Further, the entire congressional debate on Section 702 includes no reference to collecting communications “about” a foreign target, and significant debate about collecting communications to or from a target.19

To collect “about” communications, the NSA engages in “upstream” surveillance on the Internet backbone,20 meaning “on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past,”21 temporarily copying the content of the entire data stream so it can be searched for the same “selectors” used for the downstream or “PRISM” surveillance. As a result, the NSA has the capability to search any Internet communication going into or out of the U.S.22 without particularized intervention by a provider. Direct access creates direct opportunity for abuse, and should not be permitted to a military intelligence agency.

This dragnet scanning also results in the collection of “multi-communication transactions,” (MCTs) which include tens of thousands wholly domestic communications each year.23 The FISC required creation of new minimization rules for MCTs in 2011, but did not limit their collection.24 The mass searching of communications content inside the United States, knowing that it the communications searched include tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications each year, raises profound constitutional questions.

Abandoning collection of communications “about” targets would remove any justification for upstream collection, eliminate the serious problems posed by direct government access to the Internet infrastructure, eliminate the collection of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications in contravention of the statute, an make surveillance under Section 702 consistent with the congressional intent.