Nsa affirmative

Limiting Section 702 Solves

(__) Limiting Section 702 searches will adequately constrain the NSA to protect citizens..

Human Rights Watch, 2014,
"Letter to President Obama Urging Surveillance Reforms," 1-16-2014 https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/16/letter-president-obama-urging-surveillance-reforms

Adopt the review group’s recommendation to limit the scope of collection under 702 and any other authority that authorizes surveillance abroad to what is “directed exclusively at the national security of the United States or [its] allies” and ensure that surveillance is not used for illegitimate ends such as commercial gain.[4] Under Section 702, the US can collect “foreign intelligence information.” But this term is defined extremely broadly to include things that need only “relate to” terrorism, intelligence activities of another government, the national defense, or the foreign affairs of the United States. The content of communications can be obtained, not just metadata, as can communications “about” the targets. Indeed, according to media reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA taps into main communication links of data centers around the world and collects millions of records every day, including metadata text, audio, and video.[5] This type of over-collection cannot possibly be proportionate or necessary to US national security goals.

(__) Limiting surveillance to tangible threats is an effective reform.

Nojeim, Director, Project on Freedom, Security & Technolog, 2014

Greg, y Comments To The Privacy And Civil Liberties Oversight Board Regarding Reforms To Surveillance Conducted Pursuant To Section 702 Of Fisa April 11, 2014 https://d1ovv0c9tw0h0c.cloudfront.net/files/2014/04/CDT_PCLOB-702-Comments_4.11.13.pdf

To address the problem of overbreadth in Section 702 collection, PCLOB should recommend that Section 702 surveillance be conducted only for carefully defined national security purposes. While there are different ways to do this, the best way would be to turn the “use restrictions” in PPD-28 that govern bulk collection into the permissible purposes for Section 702 surveillance. This would require that collection pursuant to Section 702 only occur for purposes of detecting and countering: (1) espionage and other threats and activities directed by foreign powers or their intelligence services against the United States and its interests, (2) threats to the United States and its interests from terrorism, (3) threats to the United States and its interests from the development, possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass destruction, (4) cybersecurity threats, (5) threats to U.S. or allied Armed Forces or other U.S or allied personnel, and (6) transnational criminal threats, including illicit finance and sanctions evasion related to the other purposes named above. This change would provide significant comfort to non-U.S. persons abroad who are concerned about the impact on their human rights that Section 702 surveillance would otherwise have. Indeed, it would increase the likelihood that Section 702 surveillance would meet human rights standards.

Plan Solves PRISM

(___)

(__) The plan would eliminate major parts of PRISM and Upstream collection.

Liu, Nolan & Thompson, Legislative Attorneys at the Congressional Research Service 2015,
(Edward C; Andrew and Richard M. “Overview of Constitutional Challenges to NSA Collection Activities” Congressional Research Service May 21, 2015 http://fas.org:8080/sgp/crs/intel/R43459.pdf)

PRISM and Upstream Acquisition of Internet Communications

Contemporaneously with the origination of the telephony metadata program in 2001, the NSA also began acquiring Internet-based communications of overseas targets without the use of a traditional law enforcement warrant or an electronic surveillance order under Title I of FISA.90 Ultimately, new statutory authority for this type of acquisition was provided, at first, temporarily under the Protect America Act (PAA) of 2007;91 and on a longer term basis by the FAA.92 According to a partially declassified 2011 opinion from the FISC, NSA collected 250 million Internet communications per year under this program.93 Of these communications, 91% were acquired “directly from Internet Service Providers,” referred to as “PRISM collection.”94 The other 9% were acquired through what NSA calls “upstream collection,” meaning acquisition while Internet traffic is in transit from one unspecified location to another.95 NSA also has two methods for collecting information about a specific target: “to/from” communications collection, in which the target is the sender or receiver of the Internet communications; and “about” communications collection, in which the target is only mentioned in communications between non-targets.96 The Obama Administration also acknowledged to the FISC that technical limitations in the “upstream” collection result in the collection of some communications that are unrelated to the target or that may take place entirely between persons located in the United States.97

The PRISM and upstream collections differ from the telephony metadata program in two key respects. First, the PRISM and upstream collections acquire the contents of those communications. Second, as this program targets the “to/from” and “about” communications of foreigners who are abroad, the collection of Internet-based communications may be considered by some to be more discriminating than the bulk collection of telephony metadata.

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Answers to Reforming domestic surveillance alone doesn’t solve

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(__) Domestic surveillance and foreign surveillance standards shouldn’t be exactly the same, innovation in domestic protections create broader privacy rights.

Margulies, professor at Roger Williams University School of Law,, 2015
(Peter, 7-4-2015, "Sweeping Claims and Casual Legal Analysis in the Latest U.N. Mass Surveillance Report," Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/sweeping-claims-and-casual-legal-analysis-latest-un-mass-surveillance-report

Ironically, the Emmerson report's insistence on identical standards for domestic and international surveillance actually sabotages efforts to protect privacy.  States are most likely to try innovative measures to protect privacy when these measures protect state nationals within the state’s territory.  If those measures also keep the homeland safe, a state may well expand them to include aspects of international surveillance.  Enforcing a lockstep approach to domestic and international surveillance chills that experimentation.

(__) Structural differences make domestic surveillance different.

Posner, Professor of Law, University of Chicago, 2014,
(Eric A., Statement to the Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Board March 14, 2014 http://lawfare.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/staging/s3fs-public/uploads/2014/03/Eric-A.-Posner.pdf)

The case for requiring the U.S. government to respect the privacy of Americans is greater than the case for requiring it to respect the privacy of foreigners because the U.S. government has coercive power over Americans, while it almost never does over foreigners. Thus, the U.S. government could misuse private information in order to inflict harm against Americans, but not against foreigners, who benefit from the protection of their own governments.

Answers to Reforming domestic surveillance alone doesn’t solve

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(__) Obama has already extended equal privacy to non-US persons, that solves foreign privacy invasions.

Ratnam, senior staff writer at Foreign Policy, 2015,
(Gopal, 2-3-2015, "Obama’s Surveillance Reform Extends Unmatched Privacy to Foreigners," Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/03/obamas-surveillance-reform-extends-unmatched-privacy-to-foreigners/)

Though criticized by advocates for not going far enough, an Obama administration report Tuesday on steps to protect privacy and civil liberties has nevertheless achieved at least one thing: extending to foreigners the same protections available to Americans. The report on surveillance reform, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), banned U.S. spy agencies from disseminating information about foreigners to other countries’ intelligence agencies without considering their privacy. “Intelligence community personnel are now specifically required to consider the privacy interests of non-U.S. persons when drafting and disseminating intelligence,” the report said. The report on surveillance reform also said that U.S. intelligence agencies last year obtained secret court permissions to seize phone records in 164 cases where they had sufficient suspicion to seek such approvals. The number of targets tracked last year fell from the 423 queried by intelligence agencies in 2013, according to data released by the intelligence. Following former government contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that U.S. spy agencies were snooping in on emails and phone calls of foreigners, including several heads of state, President Barack Obama in January 2014 said U.S. intelligence agencies must protect the privacy of foreigners on par with that of Americans. “You can’t simply say, ‘Oh, this is not a U.S. person’ and disseminate his or her personal information,” the ODNI’s top lawyer, Bob Litt, told reporters. Instead, Litt said, officials must examine a non-citizen’s information and determine if releasing it is essential for foreign intelligence purposes. The decision to give equal privacy protections to foreigners is unprecedented in the annals of global spying, said David Medine, chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent U.S. agency charged with protecting such rights. “There’s no country on the planet that has gone this far to improve the treatment of non-citizens in government surveillance,” Medine said. “That alone is remarkable after the events of the last year and half because in most countries non-citizens are fair game” for spying.

Answers to Domestic alone doesn’t solve

(__) Domestic surveillance limits are modelled, that solves foreign surveillance.

Deeks, Associate Professor, University of Virginia Law School, 2015
(Ashley.. "An International Legal Framework for Surveillance." Virginia Journal of International Law 55 (2015): 2014-53)

In considering the inspiration for the norms that should emerge, the Article argues that the most promising source of new international norms is domestic law. Domestic laws can and do serve as the basis for international legal developments, particularly in the face of highly politicized issues, non-reciprocal incentive structures, issue complexity, and different conceptions of the proper legal framework — all of which are present in the surveillance debate.5 Further, domestic surveillance laws have been test-driven in the real world and reflect concerted efforts by particular polities to balance liberty and security. As a result, the Article draws from the domestic surveillance laws of various states to extract six procedural principles that states should adopt on the international plane. The norms that first emerge will not immediately constitute customary international law (“CIL”), but will serve as the grain of sand around which the pearl of CIL can form.

In effect, this Article rejects both an aggressively cynical approach to foreign surveillance and an unduly optimistic view that states will converge around robust international privacy protections in the short term. The cynics assume that whatever pressures currently exist to modify the status quo will diminish in short order, overtaken by subsequent geopolitical crises.

6 The optimists argue that states should develop the substantive principle of privacy contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), and have robust aspirations for what that principle should contain.7 Both of these approaches are flawed, normatively and predictively. The cynics underestimate both the enduring nature of human rights pressures on states and the benefits to states of creating new international legal rules in this area. The optimists underestimate the difficulty of agreeing on concrete, substantive norms in a multilateral setting among states with varied incentives. For this reason, states should focus first on establishing procedural limitations that reduce (though not eliminate) differences between their treatment of citizens and foreigners.