Nsa affirmative

Answers to NSA not Invasive

(___)

(__) Section 702 is a unique invasion of privacy, incidental collection is extremely broad and poorly defined.

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/

Section 702 Surveillance Is Fundamentally More Invasive

While incidental collection of the communications of a person who communicates with a target is an inevitable feature of communications surveillance, it is tolerated when the reason for the surveillance is compelling and adequate procedural checks are in place.  In other instances of communications surveillance conducted in the US, surveillance requires court approval of a target, and that target must be a suspected wrongdoer or spy, a terrorist, or another agent of a foreign power.  Section 702 requires neither of these elements.

Under Section 702, targeting can occur for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information even though there is no court review of any particular target.  Instead, the super secret FISA court merely determines whether the guidelines under which the surveillance is conducted are reasonably designed to result in the targeting of non-Americans abroad and that “minimization guidelines” are reasonable.    This means incidental surveillance may occur purely because someone communicated with an individual engaged in activities that may have broadly defined “foreign intelligence” value.  For example, the communications of someone who communicates with a person abroad whose activities might relate to the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs can be collected, absent any independent assessment of necessity or accuracy.

As another example, under traditional FISA – for intelligence surveillance in the U.S. of people in the U.S.  – your communications could be incidentally collected only if you were in direct contact with a suspected agent of a foreign power, and additionally if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had affirmed this suspicion based on probable cause.  Under Section 702, your personal information could be scooped up by the NSA simply because your attorney, doctor, lover, or accountant was a person abroad who engaged in peaceful political activity such as protesting a G8 summit.

Answers to NSA not Invasive

(___)

(___) NSA programs can access online user accounts and personal communication across the globe.

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/

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless. In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts. The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection. Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks. No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.

Answer to Privacy Invasions Inevitable

(___)

(__) Privacy is not dead, its just complex – we need to figure out the balance.

Richards, Professor of Law, Washington University. 2015,
Neil M., “Four Privacy Myths” Revised form, "A World Without Privacy?" (Cambridge Press, Austin Sarat, ed. 2015), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2427808

My purpose in these examples is not to pick on these organizations. On the contrary, when used appropriately, privacy rules like trade and government secret protection can advance important social interests. I am trying instead to make a point that is easy to overlook: When the very entities that are used as examplars of the “Death of Privacy” use suites of robust legal tools to preserve their own privacy, it makes no sense to claim that privacy is dead. On the contrary, these examples show that privacy is a complex phenomenon, and that we should be talking about the balance between different kinds of privacies and different rules for managing flows of information rather than privacy’s demise. When viewed from this perspective, neither Facebook nor the NSA reject privacy; on the contrary, they have a complicated relationship to privacy, embracing (like to many other people and institutions) privacy for themselves but somewhat less privacy for others, especially where they have institutional incentives to make money or protect government interests.