Nsa affirmative

Answers to Security Comes First

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(__) Can’t trade privacy for security, rights are presumptively more important.

Moore, Associate Professor Information School Program on Values in Society University of Washington, 2011
(Adam D. "Privacy, security, and government surveillance: WikiLeaks and the new accountability." Public Affairs Quarterly (2011): 141-156.)

One could easily challenge Premise 2—there are numerous harms associated with allowing surveillance that are conveniently minimized or forgotten by the "nothing to hide" crowd. Daniel Solove notes that "privacy is threatened not by singular egregious acts but by a slow series of small, relatively minor acts, which gradually begin to add up."24 Solove also points out, as I have already highlighted, that giving governments too much power undermines the mission of providing for security—the government itself becomes the threat to security. The point was put nicely by John Locke: "This is to think, that Men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions."25 It is also important to note the risk of mischief associated with criminals and terrorists compared to the kinds of mischief perpetrated by governments—even our government. In cases where there is a lack of accountability provisions and independent oversight, governments may pose the greater security risk.

Moreover, there is sensitive personal information that we each justifiably withhold from others, not because it points toward criminal activity, but because others simply have no right to access this information. Consider someone's sexual or medical history. Imagine someone visiting a library to learn about alternative lifestyles not accepted by the majority. Hiding one's curiosity about, for example, a gay lifestyle may be important in certain contexts. This is true of all sorts of personal information like religious preferences or political party affiliations.

Consider a slight variation of a "nothing to hide" argument related to what might be called physical privacy. Suppose there was a way to complete body cavity searches without harming the target or being more than a mere nuisance. Perhaps we search the targets after they have passed out drunk. Would anyone find it plausible to maintain a "nothing to hide" view in this case? I think not—and the reason might be that we are more confident in upholding these rights and policies that protect these rights than we are of almost any cost-benefit analysis related to security. Whether rights are viewed as strategic rules that guide us to the best consequences, as Mill would argue, or understood as deontic constraints on consequentialist sorts of reasoning, we are more confident in them than in almost any "social good" calculation. I am not saying that rights are absolute—they are just presumptively weighty. This line of argument is an attack on the first premise of the "nothing to hide" position. Rights are resistant to straightforward cost-benefit or consequentialist sort of arguments. Here we are rejecting the view that privacy interests are the sorts of things that can be traded for security.

Answers to Security Comes First

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(__) Security does not trump privacy.

Moore, Associate Professor Information School Program on Values in Society University of Washington, 2011
(Adam D. "Privacy, security, and government surveillance: WikiLeaks and the new accountability." Public Affairs Quarterly (2011): 141-156.)

The "Nothing to Hide" Argument

According to what might be called the “security trumps” view, whenever privacy and security conflict, security wins—that is, security is more fundamental and valuable than privacy. First, without arguments, it is not clear why a “security trumps” view should be adopted over a “privacy trumps” view. Privacy or perhaps self-ownership seems at least as fundamental or intuitively weighty as security. Foreshadowing things to come, it is not at all clear—at least in some cases—that privacy does not enhance security and vice versa. Suppose that rights afforded their holders specific sorts of powers. For example, Fred’s privacy rights generate in him a god-like power to completely control access to his body and to information about him. If we had such powers, we would also have increased security. Furthermore, if we had complete security in our bodies and property, including informational security, we would have secured privacy as well. The tension between privacy and security arises because these values cannot be protected by individuals acting alone. Nevertheless, it is important to note that as these services are contracted out to other agents, like governments, we grant these parties power over us—power that may undermine security and privacy. Continuing with the “security trumps” argument, it would seem odd to maintain that any increase in security should be preferred to any increase in privacy or any decrease in privacy is to be preferred to any decrease in security. Such a view would sanction massive violations of privacy for mere incremental and perhaps momentary gains in security. Also, given that others will provide security and power is likely a necessary part of providing security, we have strong prudential reasons to reject the “security trumps” view. If those who provide security were saints, then perhaps there would be little to worry about. The cases already presented are sufficient to show that we are not dealing with saints.

Answers to “Posner – Balancing Good”

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(__) The Constitution enshrines fundamental principles as side constraints that guide cost-benefit policy analysis. It’s not just a question of balancing — Posner is wrong.

Cole, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, 2007

(David, 2007 (“‘How to Skip the Constitution’: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, January 11^th, Available Online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jan/11/how-to-skip-the-constitution-an-exchange/, Accessed 06-28-2015)

More generally, Judge Posner shies away from his own constitutional theory when he says that to declare a practice constitutional is not the same as saying that it is desirable as a policy matter. That is certainly true as a theoretical matter, at least where one’s constitutional theory is not reducible to one’s policy preferences. But as my review points out, Posner views questions of constitutionality as simply a matter of weighing all the costs and benefits, which is surely the same utilitarian calculus the policymaker would use to determine whether a practice is desirable. Under Posner’s approach, then, it’s hard to see why there would be any room between what is desirable and what is constitutional.

Judge Posner accuses me, in effect, of subscribing to the same constitutionalism-as-policy approach that he uses by asserting, without evidentiary support, that my constitutional views simply track my own policy preferences; “the rest is rhetoric.” But I believe that there is a critical distinction between constitutionalism and mere policy preferences. In fact, our Constitution gives judges the authority to declare acts of democratically elected officials unconstitutional on the understanding that they do not simply engage in the same cost-benefit analyses that politicians and economists undertake.

My own view is that the very sources Judge Posner dismisses—text, precedent, tradition, and reason—are absolutely essential to principled constitutional decision-making. Posner suggests that because none of these elements necessarily provides a determinate answer to difficult questions, we may as well abandon them for his seat-of-the-pants, cost-benefit approach. It is true that text, precedent, tradition, and reason do not determine results in some mechanistic way. That is why we ask judges, not machines, to decide constitutional cases. But these sources are nonetheless critically important constraints on and guides to constitutional decision-making. They are what identify those principles that have been deemed fundamental—and therefore constitutional—over our collective history. That there are differences over principle in no way excludes the need for reasoned argument about them.

Answers to Mass Surveillance Solves Discrimination

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(__) No, Mass Surveillance is discriminatory – privacy is critical to stop this.

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

On the one hand, the increased efficiency of sorting enabled by the information revolution has many useful applications. Largedataset analytics has many powerful applications that don’t even use personal data, such as weather and traffic forecasting, the design of better automotive components, spell-checkers, and search engines.77 Analytics based on personal data are useful, too, enabling better decisions in the medical, credit and insurance contexts, as well as the prevention of terrorism and other crimes.78 But this increased power to sort can be used for bad or morally ambiguous purposes as well. Lawyers have another word for this kind of sorting, which is “discrimination.” Consider the use of consumer profiles to determine the likelihood we would buy products at a given price. Such relatively simple analytic techniques could enable a website (say, like Amazon.com) in which all prices were optimized to the highest value we might be willing to pay. Sophisticated analytics could also raise the spectre of a new kind of “redlining” – the denial or discrimination of services to people on the basis of race or other suspect criteria. Of course, predictive analytics need not use race directly; they could be designed to ignore race and use other variables that correlate with race. Or perhaps such algorithms might not use race indirectly, but impose a brutal individualized economic rationalism upon us all as consumers and citizens.

Thankfully, the strong form of that society is not upon us yet, but some of its weaker cousins are. And if we dismiss the problems caused by privacy or personal data as nothing more than bad people hiding bad deeds, we will miss the transformative power effects of the digital revolution entirely. For better or worse, we use the term “privacy” as a shorthand to capture all of the issues raised by personal data. As a result, privacy is not just for those of us with something to hide. Of course, we all have something to hide. But more fundamentally, questions of privacy include many of the most fundamental questions of civil liberties, economic, and political power in a digital society. From that perspective, privacy is for everyone.

Answers to Mass Surveillance Solves Discrimination

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(__) Surveillance exacerbates existing inequality.

Magi, Librarian, University of Vermont- Burlington, 2011
(Trina J. "Fourteen Reasons Privacy Matters: A Multidisciplinary Review of Scholarly Literature1." The Library 81.2 (2011)

Privacy helps prevent sorting of people into categories that can lead to lost opportunities and deeper inequalities.—Many scholars are concerned that the gathering of data about individuals and the sorting of people into categories can lead to lost opportunities, deeper inequalities, destabilized political action, and victimization by error, oversimplification, and decontextualization. Using the panopticon metaphor, Gandy discusses what he calls the “panoptic sort,” a “discriminatory process that sorts individuals on the basis of their estimated value or worth” and “reaches into every aspect of individuals’ lives in their roles as citizens, employees, and consumers” [33, p. 1]. Gandy claims the panoptic sort is a defensive technology more concerned with avoiding risk and loss than with realizing a gain [33, p. 17]. Such sorting has been facilitated by computer technology that has made it cost-effective to collect, store, and analyze data, and match it with other data sets. Gandy is troubled by the fact that those in power use this information to predict future behavior of an individual not on the basis of the behavior of that particular individual but rather on the more general basis of the past behavior of other individuals in the group or class to which the person has been assigned based on some attributes [33, p. 144]. Based on this sorting, individuals will be presented with limited options from which to choose, leading to an increased knowledge gap between the haves and the have-nots and a generalized lowering of the average level of public understanding [33, p. 2]. Reiman agrees that the panopticon is a more fitting metaphor than the fishbowl for this new threat to privacy, because the modern means of collecting information gathers various publicly observable activities that are dispersed over space and time and makes them visible from a single point [27, p. 196]. Many writers express concern about the way administrative systems for collecting data about people must necessarily oversimplify the nature of individuals and communities. James Scott says “a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae” [35, p. 23], yet when governments collect standardized records and documents, the information in these records easily becomes the only information to be considered by the state. “An error in such a document can have far more power—and for far longer—than can an unreported truth,” he says [35, p. 83].