Nsa affirmative

Surveillance causes a Chilling Effect

(___)

(__) Surveillance creates conformity, that chills dissent.

Desai, Associate Professor of Law and Ethics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014
Deven "Constitutional Limits on Surveillance: Associational Freedom in the Age of Data Hoarding." Notre Dame L. Rev. 90 (2014): 579.

As scholars of association might say, with surveillance the room to disagree about what the common good is diminishes. n261 [*623] One way to think of the problem is as the need for anonymity. Christopher Slobogin has explained that perspective: "Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open society. Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society." n262 He calls this problem "public privacy." n263 That seeming oxymoron captures the need to be public, yet private from government oversight. It is anonymity to the government that matters. That anonymity may be based on protections from direct surveillance or protections from the government accessing third party, private sector records of recent and past communications and acts. Julie Cohen has shown why that is so. n264 Surveillance changes behaviors, because "the experience of being watched will constrain, ex ante, the acceptable spectrum of belief and behavior." n265 Instead of robust, diverse, and challenging ideas, we will favor the "the bland and the mainstream." n266 We end up with a diminished "capacity to act and to decide," which leads to "the highest possible degree of compliance with [what the state determines is] the model ... citizen." n267 This problem is a type of chilling effect. n268

Surveillance causes a Chilling Effect

(___)

(__) Surveillance destroys democracy because it chills free expression and dissent.

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. 190)

Surveillance has a potentially enormous chilling effect on society. US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized this in her concurring opinion in a 2012 case about the FBI's installing a GPS tracker in someone's car. Her comments were much broader: "Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government's unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantity of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society. “ Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen wrote that "omnipresent invasive listening creates fear. And that fear is the enemy of reasoned, ordered liberty." Surveillance is a tactic of intimidation.

In the US, we already see the beginnings of this chilling effect. According to a Human Rights Watch report, journalists covering stories on the intelligence community, national security, and law enforcement have been significantly hampered by government surveillance. Sources are less likely to contact them, and they themselves are worried about being prosecuted. Human Rights Watch concludes that stories in the national interest that need to be reported don't get reported, and that the public is less informed as a result. That's the chilling effect right there. Lawyers working on cases where there is some intelligence interest—foreign government clients, drugs, terrorism—are also affected. Like journalists, they worry that their conversations are monitored and that discussions with their clients will find their way into the prosecution's hands.

Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain subjects; they’re careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad. A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the first Snowden articles were published found that people didn't want to talk about the NSA online. A broader Harris poll found that nearly half of Americans have changed what they research, talk about, and write about because of NSA surveillance. Surveillance has chilled Internet use by Muslim Americans, and by groups like environmentalists, gun-rights activists, drug policy advocates, and human rights workers. After the Snowden revelations of 2013, people across the world were less likely to search personally sensitive terms on Google.

A 2014 report from the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights noted, "Even the mere possibility of communications information being captured creates an interference with privacy, with a potential chilling effect on rights, including those to free expression and association.

Fear Magnifies Privacy Loss

(___)

(__) Fear and perception magnify privacy loss.

Heymann, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, 2015,
(Philip B, “An Essay On Domestic Surveillance” Lawfare Research Paper Series Vol 3.2, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Lawfare-Philip-Heymann-SURVEILLANCE-for-publ-10-May-2015.pdf)

The presence of fear, even unreasonable fear, has important effects on the confident and free social and political life on which democracy depends. Fear of discovery alone could easily affect with whom I associate, for example, or what use I make of psychiatrists or drugs. The fear is far deeper and more lasting if a warrant from a judge is not required. Internal agency processes are not an adequate substitute. The deep suspicions that are valuable in an agency charged with preventing terrorism or preventing crime have a dark side; they will infect its judgment of when there is a genuine need to see the required information. Important consequences turn on the citizens’ trust that data the government has acquired will not be used without there being a “real” need for its use. Much of the population would not trust any such assurance by the NSA or the FBI alone.

Perceptions of government prying do matter. Whether a dramatic growth in the capacity for, and fruits of, government surveillance would be experienced as harmful to individual freedom, civil society and democratic institutions depend on more than how the information would, in fact, be used. Fear also depends on what other potential uses citizens would suspect; the exercise of individual liberty and autonomy additionally depend on what citizens suspect might happen with that information and the precautionary steps – curtailment of entirely lawful activities, for example – citizens might take. Attitudes toward government and one’s freedoms also depend upon a number of broader contextual factors: the extent of the perceived danger sought to be prevented; the current level of suspicion or trust in the government; the history and culture of privacy in the society; and much else. Some few would argue that the loss of privacy might not be a concern at all. After all, most people do not harbor a crime or a scandal that they must hide behind claims to privacy; their lives are too proper for that. But those voices are a small minority; for most people, the value of privacy is to protect the possibility of association and, particularly, intimacy with others, irrespective of whether one has anything to hide in the way of crime or scandal.

One fact is clear. The fear and the prospect of rapidly expanding government surveillance in the United States are plainly there on the near horizon. The children of the Snowden age take it for granted that they are being monitored and they fear the social effects of that monitoring.