Nsa affirmative

Answer to “Nothing to Hide”

(__)

(__) Privacy is not about hiding bad deeds, but is essential for individuality and self-determination,

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

A second reason why the “Nothing to Hide” argument is misleading is that it reduces privacy to an individual’s right to hide big secrets. Such a crude reduction of the issue ignores both the complexity of privacy, as well as the social value that comes from living in a society that not everything about us is publicly available all of the time. This is the insight of legal scholar Daniel Solove in his book “Nothing to Hide.” Solove shows how thinking of privacy as the hiding of discreditable secrets by individuals is a mistake because privacy is about more than hiding secrets, and can mean a wide variety of things. Moreover, he notes that “privacy is “often eroded over time, little bits dissolving almost imperceptibly until we finally begin to notice how much is gone.”64 Privacy, in this view, is a social value rather than merely an individual one. Rather than thinking about privacy as merely the individual right to hide bad deeds, we should think more broadly about the kind of society we want to live in. A society in which everyone knew everything about everyone else would be oppressive because it would place us all under the glare of publicity all the time; there would be no “free zones for individuals to flourish.”65 Legal scholar Julie Cohen goes further, arguing that privacy is necessary for humans to be able to decide who they are. In Cohen’s account, our selves are fluid, constantly being built and changed by our activities, thoughts, and interactions with other people. Privacy, in her view, shelters the development of our dynamic selves “from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable.” Privacy protects our ability to manage boundaries between ourselves and others so that self-determination is possible.66 It helps us avoid the calculating, quantifying tyranny of the majority. Privacy is thus essential for individuality and self-determination, with substantial benefits for society.

Economy Advantage – Internal Link Magnifier

Additionally, NSA surveillance has created a global move towards “data nationalisation” which threatens to fragment the internet.

Omtzigt, Dutch politician, 2015,
(Pieter Herman “Explanatory memorandum by Mr Pieter Omtzigt, rapporteur” Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Mass surveillance Report, 1/26/2015, http://website-pace.net/documents/19838/1085720/20150126-MassSurveillance-EN.pdf)

108. In response to growing discontent with US surveillance, one political response has been to push for more “technological sovereignty” and “data nationalisation”. The Snowden disclosures have therefore had serious implications on the development of the Internet and hastened trends to “balkanize” the Internet to the detriment of the development of a wide, vast and easily accessible online network. The Internet as we knew it, or believed we knew it, is a global platform for exchange of information, open and free debate, and commerce. But Brazil and the European Union, for example, announced plans to lay a $185 million undersea fibre-optic cable between them to thwart US surveillance. German politicians also called for the development of a “German internet” for German customers’ data to circumvent foreign servers and the information to stay on networks that would fully be under Germany’s control.

159 Russia passed a law obliging internet companies to store the data of Russian users on servers in Russia.160 After a six-month inquiry following the Snowden disclosures, the European Parliament adopted a report on the NSA surveillance programme in February 2014 161, which argues that the EU should suspend bank data and ‘Safe Harbour’ agreements on data privacy (voluntary data protection standards for non-EU companies transferring EU citizens’ personal data to the US) with the United States. MEPs added that the European Parliament should only give its consent to the EU-US free trade deal (TTIP) that is being negotiated, if the US fully respects EU citizens’ fundamental rights. The European Parliament seeks tough new data protection rules that would place US companies in the difficult situation of having to check with EU authorities before complying with mandatory requests made by US authorities. The European Parliament’s LIBE Committee also advocated the creation of a “European data cloud” that would require all data from European consumers to be stored or processed within Europe, or even within the individual country of the consumer concerned. Some nations, such as Australia, France, South Korea, and India, have already implemented a patchwork of data-localisation requirements according to two legal scholars.162

Economy Advantage – Internal Link Expander

This regional fragmentation of the internet would collapse the global economy and create the necessary conditions for global instability.

Jardine, Center for International Governance Innovation Research Fellow, 2014
(Eric, 9-19-2014, "Should the Average Internet User in a Liberal Democracy Care About Internet Fragmentation? ," Cigi, https://www.cigionline.org/blogs/reimagining-internet/should-average-internet-user-liberal-democracy-care-about-internet-fragme)

Even though your average liberal democratic Internet user wouldn’t see it, at least at the content level, the fragmentation of the Internet would matter a great deal. If the Internet was to break apart into regional or even national blocks, there would be large economic costs in terms of lost future potential for global GDP growth. As a recent McKinsey & Company report illustrates, upwards of 15 to 25 percent of Global GDP is currently determined by the movement of goods, money, people and data. These global flows (which admittedly include more than just data flows) contribute yearly between 250 to 400 billion dollars to global GDP growth. The contribution of global flows to global GDP growth is only likely to grow in the future, provided that the Internet remains a functionally universal system that works extraordinarily well as a platform for e-commerce. Missing out on lost GDP growth harms people economically in liberal democratic countries and elsewhere. Average users in the liberal democracies should care, therefore, about the fragmentation of the broader Internet because it will cost them dollars and cents, even if the fragmentation of the Internet would not really affect the content that they themselves access.

Additionally, the same Mckinsey & Company report notes that countries that are well connected to the global system have GDP growth that is up to 40 percent higher than those countries that have fewer connections to the wider world. Like interest rates, annual GDP growth compounds itself, meaning that early gains grow exponentially. If the non-Western portions of the Internet wall themselves off from the rest (or even if parts of what we could call the liberal democratic Internet do the same), the result over the long term will be slower growth and a smaller GDP per capita in less well-connected nations. Some people might look at this situation and be convinced that excluding people in non-liberal democracies from the economic potential of the Internet is not right. In normative terms, these people might deserve to be connected, at the very least so that they can benefit from the same economic boon as those in more well connected advanced liberal democracies. In other words, average Internet users in liberal democracies should care about Internet fragmentation because it is essentially an issue of equality of opportunity.

Other people might only be convinced by the idea that poverty, inequality, and relative deprivation, while by no means sufficient causes of terrorism, insurgency, aggression and unrest, are likely to contribute to the potential for an increasingly conflictual world. Most average Internet users in Liberal democracies would likely agree that preventing flashes of unrest (like the current ISIL conflict in Iraq and Syria) is better than having to expend blood and treasure to try and fix them after they have broken out. Preventive measures can include ensuring solid GDP growth through global interconnection in every country, even if this is not, as I mentioned before, going to be enough to fix every problem every time.