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

1NC AT IFreedom- Alt Causes/Solvency

Reversing surveillance doesn’t solve ifreedom

Fontaine 14 Richard Fontaine is the President of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He served as a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow at CNAS from 2009-2012 and previously as foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain for more than five years. He has also worked at the State Department, the National Security Council and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/CNAS_BringingLibertyOnline_Fontaine.pdf

Such moves are destined to have only a modest effect on foreign reactions. U.S. surveillance will inevitably continue under any reasonably likely scenario (indeed, despite the expressions of outrage, not a single country has said that it would cease its surveillance activities). Many of the demands – such as for greater transparency – will not be met, simply due to the clandestine nature of electronic espionage. Any limits on surveillance that a govern - ment might announce will not be publicly verifiable and thus perhaps not fully credible. Nor will there be an international “no-spying” convention to reassure foreign citizens that their communications are unmonitored. As it has for centuries, state- sponsored espionage activities are likely to remain accepted international practice, unconstrained by international law. The one major possible shift in policy following the Snowden affair – a stop to the bulk collection of telecommunications metadata in the United States – will not constrain the activ - ity most disturbing to foreigners; that is, America’s surveillance of them. At the same time, U.S. offi - cials are highly unlikely to articulate a global “right o privacy” (as have the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and some foreign officials), akin to that derived from the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment, that would permit foreigners to sue in U.S. courts to enforce such a right. 39 The Obama administration’s January 2014 presidential directive on signals intelligence refers, notably, to the “ legiti - mate privacy interests” of all persons, regardless of nationality, and not to a privacy “right.

US surveillance tech industry destroys i-freedom signal

MacKinnon 4/3/12 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/03/The_Worlds_No_1_Threat_to_Internet_Freedom Rebecca MacKinnon is a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the Board of Directors of the Global Network Initiative[1] and the Committee to Protect Journalists,[2] and is currently director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.
Internet Freedom Starts at Home The United States needs to practice what it preaches online. Implied though not explicit in Obama's remarks was the idea that if Iran's Internet were freer and more open, Iran's relationship with the world generally -- and the United States in particular -- would be different. Cases like Iran are the main driver of Washington's bipartisan consensus around the idea that a free and open global Internet is in the United States' strategic interest. Yet more than two years after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her first speech declaring "Internet freedom" to be a major component of U.S. foreign policy, it turns out that many of the most sophisticated tools used to suppress online free speech and dissent around the world are actually Made in the USA. American corporations are major suppliers of software and hardware used by all sorts of governments to carry out censorship and surveillance -- and not just dictatorships. Inconveniently, governments around the democratic world are pushing to expand their own censorship and surveillance powers as they struggle to address genuine problems related to cybercrime, cyberwar, child protection, and intellectual property. Even more inconveniently, the U.S. government is the biggest and most powerful customer of American-made surveillance technology, shaping the development of those technologies as well as the business practices and norms for public-private collaboration around them. As long as the U.S. government continues to support the development of a surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human rights and civil liberties implications of its business -- even rewarding secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies -- the world's dictators will remain well supplied by a robust global industry. American-made technology has turned up around the Middle East and North Africa over the past year -- from Syria to Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, from pre-revolutionary Tunisia to Egypt -- in contexts that leave no doubt that the software and hardware in question were being used to censor dissenting speech and track activists. While much of this technology is considered "dual use" because it can be used to defend computer networks against cyberattack as well as to censor and monitor political speech, some members of Congress are seeking to prevent its use for political repression. To that end, the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), which passed through the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights last week, takes aim not only at U.S.-headquartered companies but also overseas companies funded by U.S. capital markets.

Nonunique – cyber security bill

MacKinnon 4/3/12 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/03/The_Worlds_No_1_Threat_to_Internet_Freedom Rebecca MacKinnon is a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the Board of Directors of the Global Network Initiative[1] and the Committee to Protect Journalists,[2] and is currently director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

Meanwhile, as GOFA moves forward, Congress is considering several cybersecurity bills that would authorize Internet service providers and other companies not only to monitor private communications passing over their networks, but also to share private communications with the National Security Agency and other federal entities or with any other agency of the federal government designated by the Department of Homeland Security -- and with less due process and judicial oversight than ever before. While acknowledging that cybersecurity is a legitimate goal, groups focused on the defense and protection of Internet users' rights, including the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have expressed deep-seated concerns about the extent to which these bills open the door even wider for civil liberties violations. GOFA's supporters argue that one has to start somewhere and that focusing on the relationship between U.S. companies and authoritarian dictatorships is the best way to obtain bipartisan consensus to pass legislation. That is no doubt true. But if the American people continue to allow the U.S. government and American industry to forge increasingly unaccountable and opaque relationships around the exchange and use of citizens' private information, the damage will extend well beyond American democracy and civil liberties. The business norms and technological innovations born of such opaque and unaccountable relationships will keep dictators supplied with handy tools for decades to come.

Allies’ monitoring destroys i-freedom signal

Hanson 10/25/12, Nonresident Fellow, Foreign Policy, Brookings http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/10/25-ediplomacy-hanson-internet-freedom

Another challenge is dealing with close partners and allies who undermine internet freedom. In August 2011, in the midst of the Arab uprisings, the UK experienced a different connection technology infused movement, the London Riots. On August 11, in the heat of the crisis, Prime Minister Cameron told the House of Commons: Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality. This policy had far-reaching implications. As recently as January 2011, then President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, ordered the shut-down of Egypt’s largest ISPs and the cell phone network, a move the United States had heavily criticized. Now the UK was contemplating the same move and threatening to create a rationale for authoritarian governments everywhere to shut down communications networks when they threatened “violence, disorder and criminality.” Other allies like Australia are also pursuing restrictive internet policies. As OpenNet reported it: “Australia maintains some of the most restrictive Internet policies of any Western country…” When these allies pursue policies so clearly at odds with the U.S. internet freedom agenda, several difficulties arise. It undermines the U.S. position that an open and free internet is something free societies naturally want. It also gives repressive authoritarian governments an excuse for their own monitoring and filtering activities. To an extent, U.S. internet freedom policy responds even-handedly to this challenge because the vast bulk of its grants are for open source circumvention tools that can be just as readily used by someone in London as Beijing, but so far, the United States has been much more discreet about criticising the restrictive policies of allies than authoritarian states.

Alt causes – snowden other violations AND broader internet control – they will also inevitably regulate other stuff that’s illegal takes out the signal

China Post, 9/29/14 [http://www.chinapost.com.tw/life/science-&-technology/2014/09/29/418280/Inventor-of.htm]
LONDON--The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the Internet and ensure users' privacy. “If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life,” Berners-Lee said at the London “Web We Want” festival on the future of the internet. “If a Government can block you going to, for example, the opposition's political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power.” “Suddenly the power to abuse the open Internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies.” Berners-Lee, 59, is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a body that develops guidelines for the development of the Internet. He called for an Internet version of the “Magna Carta,” the 13th century English charter credited with guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms. Concerns over privacy and freedom on the Internet have increased in the wake of the revelation of mass government monitoring of online activity following leaks by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. A ruling by the European Union to allow individuals to ask search engines such as Google to remove links to information about them, called the “right to be forgotten,” has also raised concerns over the potential for censorship. “There have been lots of times that it has been abused, so now the Magna Carta is about saying ... I want a web where I'm not spied on, where there's no censorship,” Berners-Lee said. The scientist added that in order to be a “neutral medium,” the Internet had to reflect all of humanity, including “some ghastly stuff.” “Now some things are of course just illegal, child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank, that's illegal before the web and it's illegal after the web,” Berners-Lee added.

Comcast outweighs

Sasso Sept 14 (Brendan; FCC Chief: Cable Companies Are Wrong About Internet Competition; www.nationaljournal.com/tech/fcc-chief-comcast-is-wrong-about-internet-competition-20140904; kdf)

September 4, 2014 Most Americans lack any real choice in accessing high-speed Internet, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday. Comcast and other cable giants have argued that the industry is already plenty competitive. Consumers in many areas can choose to access the Internet from a DSL provider or on their smartphones, the cable companies argue. While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler didn't mention Comcast by name, he said those other options don't deliver the speeds that consumers need today. To reliably stream high-definition video, as consumers expect, providers must deliver speeds of at least 25 megabits per second, Wheeler said. In most areas, that means the only option is the local cable company. "At 25 Mbps, there is simply no competitive choice for most Americans," the FCC chief said. "Stop and let that sink in. Three-quarters of American homes have no competitive choice for the essential infrastructure for 21st century economics and democracy. Included in that is almost 20 percent who have no service at all." The conclusion doesn't bode well for Comcast's bid to buy Time Warner Cable. The deal would unite the top two cable providers, creating a new behemoth controlling a large portion of the nation's high-speed Internet access. But Comcast frequently notes that its network doesn't overlap with Time Warner Cable, meaning the merger would not actually create fewer choices for any consumers. Comcast didn't respond to a request to comment. The speech could also have implications for the agency's net-neutrality regulations. Wheeler noted that, historically, the absence of competition has "forced the imposition of strict government regulation in telecommunications." But he made it clear that he would prefer a competitive market with light regulation than heavy regulation of monopolies. One of the consequences of past monopoly regulation was the "thwarting of the kind of innovation that competition stimulates," Wheeler said.

Guantanamo, and drones outweigh

Mainen, 11 - policy analyst at the Institute for Gulf Affairs (Matthew, “Morally Usurped by Brutal Monarchs,” http://mainen.blogspot.com/2011/08/morally-usurped-by-brutal-monarchs.html)
President Obama entered office pledging to restore America’s moral standing in the world. But his response to the Arab Spring has thus far has left much to be desired. This week, however, the president allowed the U.S. unprecedented embarrassment as it stood on the sidelines as two of the world’s worst human rights violators – Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – along with Kuwait withdrew their ambassadors from Syria following its intensified crackdown. It’s time to reclaim the initiative.

The president’s cautious position is understandable. His predecessor’s hawkish Mideast policy in response to the unprecedented environment created by the September 11 attacks and rise of international Islamic extremism challenged ties with Europe and temporarily destabilized Iraq.

Obama’s policies, however, are far from dovish, and have not adequately mended ties with the Muslim world. He reneged on his campaign pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He intensified drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, killing many civilians. And in an insult to American values, he personally approved Bahrain’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy activists behind closed doors.