Nsa affirmative

Privacy is a Gateway Right

(__) Privacy is a gateway right. Surveillance threatens it.

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.

The promise of the digital age is the effortless, borderless ability to share information. That is its threat as well. As the world’s information moves into cyberspace, surveillance capabilities have grown commensurately. The US now leads in ability for global data capture, but other nations and actors are likely to catch up, and some already insist that more data be kept within their reach. In the end, there will be no safe haven if privacy is seen as a strictly domestic issue, subject to many carve-outs and lax or non-existent oversight.

Privacy is key to Autonomy

(___)

(__) Privacy links rational agency and moral autonomy.

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

Gavison admits that there have always been some autonomous individuals in totalitarian societies, and therefore privacy may not be necessary for autonomy. But she says the fact that most people require privacy is enough to justify it as a value, because “we are not all giants, and societies should enable all, not only the exceptional, to seek moral autonomy” [16, p. 450]. Charles Fried describes a “most basic” form of complete privacy in which privacy serves not to protect things we will share only with friends but to protect certain thoughts from the whole world. Although the sharing of certain thoughts with a lover or friend, he says, would be a “hostile act,” the thinking of those thoughts is completely consistent with friendship and love because “these thoughts, prior to being given expression, are mere unratified possibilities for action” [29, p. 485]. Only when we express thoughts do we adopt them and choose to make them part of ourselves, he says, and this is why privacy is essential to the freedom to define ourselves. Julie Inness also talks about privacy providing a sphere of autonomy in which a person can develop a self-concept as an originator of love, liking, and care [30, p. 107].

In their theory of privacy as a fundamental moral right, Alfino and Mayes contend that a person requires personal space in order to reason about his/her choices, that reasoning activity is what links rational agency and moral autonomy, and that to deprive a person of her ability to reason is to fundamentally interfere with a person’s capacity for self-government. According to this framework, privacy is “the condition of having secured one’s personal space, by which we mean the right to exercise our practical reason without undue interference from others” [18]

Surveillance Hurts Freedom

(___)

(__) Surveillance threatens human freedom and dignity.

Cohen, Ph.D., ethicist and political analyst, 2014
(Elliot D.. Technology of Oppression: Preserving Freedom and Dignity in an Age of Mass, Warrantless Surveillance.. DOI: 10.1057/9781137408211.0011. )

The threat posed by mass, warrantless surveillance technologies

Presently, such a threat to human freedom and dignity lies in the technological erosion of human privacy through the ever-evolving development and deployment of a global, government system of mass, warrantless surveillance. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a systematic means of spying on, and ultimately manipulating and controlling, virtually every aspect of everybody's private life—a thoroughgoing, global dissolution of personal space, which is supposed to be legally protected. In such a governmental state of "total (or virtually total) information awareness," the potential for government control and manipulation of the people's deepest and most personal beliefs, feelings, and values can transform into an Orwellian reality—and nightmare.

As will be discussed in Chapter 6, the technology that has the potential to remove such scenarios from the realm of science fiction to that of true science is currently being developed. This is not to deny the legitimate government interest in "national security"; however, the exceptional disruption of privacy for legitimate state reasons cannot and should not be mistaken for a usual and customary rule of mass invasion of people's private lives without their informed consent. Benjamin Franklin wisely and succinctly expressed the point: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." In relinquishing our privacy to government, we also lose the freedom to control, and act on, our personal information, which is what defines us individually, and collectively, as free agents and a free nation. In a world devoid of freedom to control who we are, proclaiming that we are "secure" is an empty platitude.

Surveillance Hurts Freedom

(__) Government Surveillance risks total invasion of liberty.

Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School 15
(Bruce, Inc 3/2/15, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. P. 106)

The biggest cost is liberty, and the risk is real enough that people across political ideologies are objecting to the sheer invasiveness and pervasiveness of the surveillance system. Even the politically conservative and probusiness Economist magazine argued, in a 2013 editorial about video surveillance, that it had gone too far: "This is where one of this newspaper's strongly held beliefs that technological progress should generally be welcomed, not feared, runs up against an even deeper impulse, in favour of liberty. Freedom has to include some right to privacy: if every move you make is being chronicled, liberty is curtailed.'

ACCUSATION BY DATA

In the 17th century, the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.

Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police in the old Soviet Union, declared, "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." Both were saying the same thing: if you have enough data about someone, you can find sufficient evidence to find him guilty of something. It's the reason many countries' courts prohibit the police from engaging in "fishing expeditions." It's the reason the US Constitution specifically prohibits general warrants documents that basically allow the police to search for anything. General warrants can be extremely abusive; they were used by the British in colonial America as a form of social control.

Ubiquitous surveillance means that anyone could be convicted of lawbreaking, once the police set their minds to it. It is incredibly dangerous to live in a world where everything you do can be stored and brought forward as evidence against you at some later date. There is significant danger in allowing the police to dig into these large data sets and find "evidence" of wrongdoing, especially in a country like the US with so many vague and punitive laws, which give prosecutors discretion over whom to charge with what, and with overly broad material witness laws. This is especially true given the expansion of the legally loaded terms "terrorism," to include conventional criminals, and "weapons of mass destruction," to include almost anything, including a sawed-off shotgun. The US terminology is so broad that someone who donates $10 to Hamas's humanitarian arm could be considered a terrorist.

Surveillance puts us at risk of abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. The definition of "wrong" is often arbitrary, and can quickly change. For example, in the US in the 1930s, being a Communist or Socialist was a bit of an intellectual fad, and not considered wrong among the educated classes. In the 1950s, that changed dramatically with the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy, when many intelligent, principled American citizens found their careers destroyed once their political history was publicly disclosed. Is someone's reading of Occupy, Tea Party, animal rights, or gun rights websites going to become evidence of subversion in five to ten years?