Negative 1nc

2nc – circumvention

Legal restrictions on the state fail – security is driven by politics, not law

Rana 12- Ph.D. in political science at Harvard and a J.D. at Yale Law School

(Aziz Rana, July 2012, “Who Decides on Security?”, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1417)//Yak

But this mode of popular involvement comes at a key cost. Secret information generally is treated as worthy of a higher status than information already present in the public realm—the shared collective information through which ordinary citizens reach conclusions about emergency and defense. Yet, oftentimes, as with the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, although the actual content of this secret information is flawed,322 its status as secret masks these problems and allows policymakers to cloak their positions in added authority. This reality highlights the importance of approaching security information with far greater collective skepticism; it also means that security judgments may be more Hobbesian—marked fundamentally by epistemological uncertainty as opposed to verifiable fact—than policymakers admit.

If the objective sociological claims at the center of the modern security concept are themselves profoundly contested, what does this mean for reform efforts that seek to recalibrate the relationship between liberty and security? Above all, it indicates that the central problem with the procedural solutions offered by constitutional scholars—emphasizing new statutory frameworks or greater judicial assertiveness—is that they mistake a question of politics for one of law. In other words, such scholars ignore the extent to which governing practices are the product of background political judgments about threat, democratic knowledge, professional expertise, and the necessity for insulated decision-making. To the extent that Americans are convinced that they face continuous danger from hidden and potentially limitless assailants—danger too complex for the average citizen to comprehend independently—it is inevitable that institutions (regardless of legal reform initiatives) will operate to centralize power in those hands presumed to enjoy military and security expertise. Thus, any systematic effort to challenge the current framing of the relationship between security and liberty must begin by challenging the underlying assumptions about knowledge and security upon which legal and political arrangements rest. Without a sustained and public debate about the validity of security expertise, its supporting institutions, and the broader legitimacy of secret information, there can be no substantive shift in our constitutional politics. The problem at present, however, is that it remains unclear which popular base exists in society to raise these questions. Unless such a base fully emerges, we can expect our prevailing security arrangements to become ever more entrenched.

International intelligence gathering circumvents domestic restrictions

Bauman et al, 14 – professor at the University of Leeds (Zygmunt, “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance” International Political Sociology (2014) 8, 121–144)
The potential field of suspicion is massive in the sense that it has no end and spreads through networks. But it is not massive in terms of global reach or the surveillance of everyone. This is indeed the main argument made by the different intelligence services. They say that they have objective criteria to restrict their searches and that they cover only foreign intelligence (cf. US-FISA and FISC, GCHQ requirements, French internal directives)—thus, communications involving a “foreigner” at one end will be examined, in priority, in a special circuit. However, it also seems that the system may identify suspicious behaviors of nationals (and will in those cases have to ask for a warrant in the UK and US jurisdictions). The bulk collection of data and the visualization through networks makes it impossible to be certain about the difference between nationals and foreigners. Legality requirements threaten the functioning of the system and so they presume that the law must adjust, not the system. To avoid this “complication,” transnational networking between different services has enabled a blurring of the boundaries of domestic and foreign jurisdiction. It seems that the different services in charge of their own national security, working through the gathering and exchange of information, ask other security services to perform some of their tasks, bypassing limitations on foreign intelligence by using “a citizen privacy shopping” to exchange surveillance of their own citizen with another service. In this way, what is national and what is foreign becomes mostly irrelevant for transnationally organized operations.

The federal government will sub-contract surveillance

Lyon, 15 - director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Surveillance Research Chair, Professor Sociology and Law at Queen’s University (David, The Snowden Stakes: Challenges for Understanding Surveillance Today. Surveillance & Society 13(2): 139-152. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
The second issue is that it is hard to pin down exactly who is conducting surveillance. Although the term ‘state’ surveillance is common in everyday parlance, those who stand in for ‘state’ employees are many and varied, and this follows from the point above about the blurring between public and private sectors. Snowden’s own position before his departure with the documents illustrates this. He worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, whose expertise was subcontracted to the NSA. Didier Bigo (e.g. 2008; see also Ball and Snider 2013; Bauman et al. 2014: 124-131; Lyon and Topak 2013) has for some time drawn attention to the ways in which “security professionals” now form an international network, operating in different countries but with extensive cooperation. These are intelligence agents, technical experts, police (both public and private), advisers and others whose immediate genesis lies in post-9/11 international antiterrorism cooperation but has now expanded into a clearly discernible network of some considerable influence.

Importantly, older distinctions break down as this network of “unease managers” (as Bigo calls them) develops. They connect public and private agencies, internal and external security, national and international interests and so on. This development grows alongside the digitization of security and surveillance such that, paradoxically, ‘national’ security is no longer ‘national’ in “…its acquisition or even analysis, of data…” which helps to blur “…the lines of what is national as well as the boundaries between law enforcement and intelligence” (Bauman et al. 2014: 125). This issue is related to the one mentioned above, about the uncertainty of who actually carries out surveillance, although the further point here is that a loose affiliation of professional organizations can be identified. They work together, learning from each other and developing their own protocols, rationales and surveillance practices.

As the examples from the US show, similar surveillance practices occur across the board, whether in the DHS, CIA, FBI or the NSA (or, for that matter, in the UK’s GCHQ or Canada’s CSEC). These ‘acronym’ policing and intelligence organizations also rely on similar subcontracting organizations that also display similar technical, statistical and political-economic activities (see Ball and Snider 2013). Both policing and intelligence agencies have military connections that also influence their practices and as well the traffic is two way: information handling is crucial to each, such that policing becomes more data-heavy (Haggerty and Ericson 1997) and also more inflected by military method (Brodeur 2010). In all cases it is also clear that such organizations do not just react to perceived threats to national security or to criminal acts. They actively construct the target populations and refine the rationales for so-doing. This is where the commercial connections with technology corporations also become centrally significant, in conjunction with government actors. Policy influences and is influenced by the corporate and technical approaches and practices. At an organizational and network level, then, relationships are manifold and complex.