Nsa affirmative

Topicality Domestic (JV & V Only)

1. We Meet —the plan limits the surveillance of domestic communication which the NSA has been collecting “incidentally” via Section 702.

Tushnet 15,
Mark professor of law at Harvard Law School., 2015, "The Presidential Empire," Dissent Magazine, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-presidential-empire

Edward Snowden’s revelations brought home the fact that one of the main tasks of the National Surveillance State is indeed surveillance. Much of what Snowden brought to public attention were modernized versions of classical espionage conducted by U.S. spies outside the United States. That sort of espionage was completely consistent with U.S. law. Technology meant, though, that surveillance outside the United States inevitably included information about activities by U.S. citizens both outside the nation’s borders and within them. The statutes creating the framework for this surveillance have provisions aimed at limiting its domestic use to cases with a substantial connection to international terrorism. But, Snowden showed us, those provisions were not fully effective, and the scale of modern surveillance meant that even reasonably effective protections against domestic surveillance still left large numbers of innocent people subject to it.

2. Counter-Interpretation – Domestic surveillance deals with information transmitted within a country

HRC 14
Human Rights Council 2014 IMUNC2014 https://imunc.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/hrc-study-guide.pdf

Domestic surveillance: Involves the monitoring, interception, collection, analysis, use, preservation, retention of, interference with, or access to information that includes, reflects, or arises from or a person’s communications in the past, present or future with or without their consent or choice, existing or occurring inside a particular country.

3. Prefer our interpretation—

1. 
   Aff ground—they over limit because they take out all NSA and surveillance agency affs, which are core of the topic
   
2. 
   They overlimit—very few affs that meet their interpretation would also have solvency advocates.
   

4. Default to reasonability—we don’t have to win offense on t, but competing interpretations causes a race to the bottom

Topicality NSA Can be Domestic (JV & V)

(___)

(__) Even if the law tried to limit the NSA’s domestic surveillance, it didn’t work.

Vladeck, professor of law at American University, 2015,
(Stephen, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security. Steve is a Washington College of Law, 6-1-2015, "Forget the Patriot Act – Here Are the Privacy Violations You Should Be Worried About," Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/section-215-patriot-act-expires-surveillance-continues-fisa-court-metadata/)

The answer, we now know, has everything to do with technology. Although the government is only allowed to “target” non-citizens outside the United States, it is inevitable, given how it collects information under both of these regimes, that the communications of U.S. citizens and non-citizens lawfully present in the United States will also be collected, albeit “incidentally,” as the government puts it. After all, when thousands of unrelated emails and other electronic communications are bundled together in a packet that travels through an Internet switch that’s physically located in the United States (for the 2008 statute) or overseas (for Executive Order 12333), it’s simply not possible for the government to only collect the communications between non-U.S. citizens and leave the others untouched, any more so than it’s possible for a vacuum to segregate particles of dirt.

To be sure, the U.S. government doesn’t dispute that it routinely collects the communications of U.S. citizens. Instead, it has argued that any potential for abuse is mitigated by so-called “minimization requirements” — procedural rules that require the relevant intelligence agency to take steps to avoid the improper retention and use of communications collected under these authorities. The government’s defense, as we’ve come to learn, is flawed in two vital respects: First, as several since-disclosed opinions from the FISA Court have made clear, the government’s minimization requirements under the 2008 statute were often too skimpy, allowing the retention and use of information that both the statute and the Fourth Amendment prohibit. Second — and perhaps more importantly — even where the minimization rules were legally sufficient, there have been numerous instances in which government officials violated them, with the FISA Court only discovering the abuses after they were voluntarily reported by Justice Department lawyers. As a result, the government collected and retained a large volume of communications by U.S. citizens that neither Congress nor the Constitution allowed it to acquire

Answers to – Topicality Domestic (JV & V)

(___)

(__) Modern communication blurs the line between Foreign and Domestic.

Sanchez, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, 2014
Julian,, 6-5-2014, "Snowden: Year One," Cato Unbound, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/05/julian-sanchez/snowden-year-one

The second basic fact is that modern communications networks obliterate many of the assumptions about the importance of geography that had long structured surveillance law. A “domestic” Internet communication between a user in Manhattan and a server in Palo Alto might, at midday in the United States, be routed through nocturnal Asia’s less congested pipes, or to a mirror in Ireland, while a “foreign” e-mail service operated from Egypt may be hosted in San Antonio. “What we really need to do is all the bad guys need to be on this section of the Internet,” former NSA director Keith Alexander likes to joke. “And they only operate over here. All good people operate over here. All bad guys over here.” It’s never been quite that easy—but General Alexander’s dream scenario used to be closer to the truth. State adversaries communicated primarily over dedicated circuits that could be intercepted wholesale without much worry about bumping into innocent Americans, whereas a communication entering the United States could generally be presumed to be with someone in the United States. The traditional division of intelligence powers by physical geography—particularized warrants on this side of the border, an interception free-for-all on the other—no longer tracks the reality of global information flows.

Answers to —Topicality Domestic (JV & V)

(___)

(__) “Domestic” has no limiting value — the NSA has a classified definition of “US person.”

Schulberg and Reilly, reporters for the Huffington Post, 2015

(Jessica and Ryan J, reporter who covers the Justice Department and the Supreme Court for The Huffington Post, 2015 (“Watchdog Finds Huge Failure In Surveillance Oversight Ahead Of Patriot Act Deadline,” Huffington Post, May 21^st, Available Online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/21/section-215-oversight_n_7383988.html, internal Tweet URL https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/601395637184286720, Accessed 06-05-2015)

The government's requests were also not limited to material about individuals involved in an FBI investigation. And while defendants of the program insist that information on Americans is gathered as an incidental byproduct rather than a targeted effort, Abdo noted that the definition of a “U.S. person” is still classified in the recently released report:

Alex Abdo @AlexanderAbdo

The FBI has a classified understanding of "U.S. persons" . . .

7:34 AM - 21 May 2015