The United States Congress should restrict the National Security Agency’s ability to collect “bulk data” without a warrant

AT Cybersecurity Adv- Heg Impact

Threat of cyber attacks are over hyped – the U.S. is economy and military is resistant to attacks.

Lewis ‘6

James A. Lewis is director of the technology and public policy program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The War on Hype”. February 19, 2006. San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/19/INGDDH8E2V1.DTL&ao=all

Americans receive a steady stream of warnings and alarms about new and horrific perils that await them. Pandemics, dirty bombs, cyber attacks, bioterror and other exotic threats are always on the verge of being unleashed onto a shamefully unprepared republic. Yet, judging from statistics on life expectancy, violent deaths and war, we live in much less perilous times than any generation before us. Avian flu, for example. We are cautioned that a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, is only months away. One World Health Organization estimate says 2 million to 7 million people will die in the next pandemic. But it is not 1918. The WHO reports that since 2003, there have been 152 cases of avian flu, resulting in 83 deaths. A flu pandemic has been regularly predicted since 1997 and (knock on wood) it has never arrived. Or cyber terror. In 1995, the first in a long series of warnings of an "electronic Pearl Harbor" was made. Although terrorists have launched many attacks since 1995, none has involved cyber terror. The closest thing to a cyber attack occurred in Australia, when a disgruntled employee who had designed the computer system for a sewage treatment plant was able to penetrate the network after 49 consecutive attempts that went unnoticed and release raw sewage. The government report on the incident says this produced an unbearable smell for several days. Residents were unhappy, but able to control their terror. Cyber terror was at first suspected in the 2003 Northeast blackout. The cause turned out to be incompetence and falling trees. The widespread blackout did not degrade U.S. military capabilities, did not damage the economy, and caused neither casualties nor terror. One lesson to draw from this is that large, modern economies are hard to defeat. Their vulnerability -- to cyber attack or dirty bombs or the other exotic weapons -- is routinely exaggerated. Yes, computer networks are vulnerable to attack, but nations are not equally vulnerable. Countries like the United States, with its abundance of services and equipment and the ability and experience in restoring critical functions, are well equipped to overcome an attack.

The Heg debate is OVER- U.S. decline is not only inevitable, it has arrived. The U.S. must accept China’s ascendancy.

Christopher Layne 2012 (is Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University; ISQ* peer reviewed: ISI Journal Citation Reports® Ranking: 2010: International Relations: 10 / 73; Political Science: 18 / 139 Impact Factor: 1.523) “This Time It's Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana” International Studies Quarterly, 1-11

The Cold War's end stifled the burgeoning late 1980s' debate about America's relative decline while triggering a new debate about unipolarity. In the Great Recession's aftermath, a verdict on those debates now can be rendered. First, it turns out the declinists were right after all. The United States' power has declined relatively. By 2014, the US share of global GDP will shrink to 18%, which is well below the "normal" post-World War II share of 22% to 25% (Nye 1991, 2011). Just as the 1980s declinists predicted, chronic budget and current account deficits, overconsumption, undersaving, and deindustrialization have exacted their toll on the American economy. Judgment also now can be rendered on the debate between balance of power realists and unipolar stability theorists. As balance of power realists predicted, one new great power already has emerged to act as a counterweight to American power, with others waiting in the wings. In contrast to unipolar stability theorists who said unipolarity would extend well into the twenty-first century, balance of power realists predicted that unipolarity would come to an end around 2010. Instead of looking at the trend lines fueling China's rise and America's decline, unipolar stability theorists were wrong because they relied on static measures of national power and failed to grasp the velocity of China's rise. If, indeed, it has not already done so, sometime this decade---perhaps as early as 2016-China's GDP will surpass the United States'. No longer is China an emerging great power; it is a "risen" one. The debate about unipolarity is over. The balance of power realists have won. Tbe distribution of power in international political system is shifting dramatically. The US grand strategy must respond to the emerging constellation of power. Yet, US policymakers and many security studies scholars are in thrall to a peculiar form of denialism. First, they believe the world still is unipolar even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is not. Second, they believe that even if unipolarity were to end, there would be no real consequences for the United States because it will still be the "pivotal" power in international politics, and the essential features of the "liberal order" -the Pax Americana-will remain in place even though no longer buttressed by the US economic and military power that have undergirded it since its inception after World War II. This is myopic. Hegemonic decline always has consequences. As the twenty-first century's second decade begins, history and multipolarity are staging a comeback. The world figures to become a much more turbulent place geopolitically than it was during the era of the Pax Americana. Accepting the reality of the Unipolar Exit---coming to grips with its own decline and the end of unipolarity symbolized by China's rise-will be the United States' central grand strategic preoccupation during the next ten to fifteen years.

And it doesn’t resolve any conflicts

Fettweis 11

Christopher, Professor of Political Science @ Tulane, Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace, pg. 172-174

The primary attack on restraint, or justification of internationalism, posits that if the United States were to withdraw from the world, a variety of ills would sweep over key regions and eventually pose threats to U.S. security and/or prosperity. These problems might take three forms (besides the obvious if remarkably unlikely, direct threats to the homeland.). generalized chaos, hostile imbalances in Eurasia, and/or failed states. Historian Arthur Schlesinger was typical when he worried that restraint would mean "a chaotic, violent, and ever more dangerous planet." All of these concerns either implicitly or explicitly assume that the presence of the United States is the primary reason for international stability, and if that presence were withdrawn chaos would ensue. In other words, they depend upon hegemonic-stability logic. Simply stated, the hegemonic stability theory proposes that international peace is only possible when there is one country strong enough to make and enforce a set of rules. At the height of Pax Romana between 27 BC and 180 AD, for example, Rome was able to bring unprecedented peace and security to the Mediterranean. The Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century brought a level of stability to the high seas. Perhaps the current era is peaceful because the United States has established a de facto Pax Americana where no power is strong enough to challenge its dominance, and because it has established a set of rules that are generally in the interests of all countries to follow. Without a benevolent hegemon, some strategists fear, instability may break out around the globe.."'. Unchecked conflicts could cause humanitarian disaster and, in today's interconnected world, economic turmoil that would ripple throughout global financial markets. If the United States were to abandon its commitments abroad, argued Art, the world would "become a more dangerous place' and, sooner or later, that would 'redound to America's detriment."' If the massive spending that the United States engages in actually provides stability in the international political and economic systems, then perhaps internationalism is worthwhile. There are good theoretical and empirical reasons, however, to believe that U.S hegemony is not the primary cause of the current era of stability. First of all, the hegemonic-stability argument overstates the role that the United States plays in the system. No country is strong enough to police the world on its own. The only way there can be stability in the community of great powers is if self-policing occurs, if states have decided that their interests are served by peace. if no pacific normative shift had occurred among the great powers that was filtering down through the system, then no amount of international constabulary work by the United States could maintain stability. Likewise, if it is true that such a shift has occurred, then most of what the hegemon spends to bring stability would he wasted. The 5 percent of the world's population that live in the United States simply could not force peace upon an unwilling 95. At the risk of beating the metaphor to death, the United States maybe patrolling a neighborhood that has already rid itself of crime. Stability and unipolarity may be simply coincidental. In order for U.S. hegemony to he the reason for global stability, the rest of the world would have to expect reward for good behavior and fear punishment for bad. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not always proven to he especially eager to engage in humanitarian interventions abroad. Even rather incontrovertible evidence of genocide has not been sufficient to inspire action. Hegemonic stability can only take credit for influencing those decisions that would have ended in war without the presence, whether physical or psychological, of the United States. Ethiopia and Eritrea are hardly the only states that could go to war without the slightest threat of U.S. intervention. Since most of the world today is free to fight without U.S. involvement, something else must be at work. Stability exists in many places where no hegemony is present. Second, the limited empirical evidence we have suggests that there is little connection between the relative level of U.S. activism and international stability. During the 1990s the United States cut back on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998 the United States was spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990,72 To internationalists, defense hawks, and other believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible peace dividend" endangered both national and global security. "No serious analyst of American military capabilities;' argued Kristol and Kagan, 'doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America's responsibilities to itself and to world peac&'73 If the pacific trends were due not to U.S. hegemony but a strengthening norm against interstate war, however, one would not have expected an increase in global instability and violence. The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: The world grew' more peaceful while the United States cut its forces. No state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-capable Pentagon, or at least none took any action that would suggest such a belief. No militaries were enhanced to address power vacuums; no security dilemmas drove mistrust and arms races; no regional balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military was diminished. The rest of the world acted as if the threat of international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction in U.S. capabilities. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its military spending under President Clinton, and it kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped spending back up. No complex statistical analysis should be necessary to reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. It is also worth noting for our purposes that the United States was no less safe.