Negative 1nc

--xt international outsourcing

Multiple redundant paths for surveillance – circumvention is easy via cooperation with other states

Keiber, 15 – professor of political science at Otterbein University (Jason, “Surveillance Hegemony” Surveillance & Society 13(2): 168-181. http://www.surveillanceand- society.org
In order to situate the NSA activity within the broader context of US surveillance abroad, the paper makes two claims. First, the US exercises surveillance hegemony. Hegemony requires material power (e.g. technological capability) and a normative and institutional framework that supports and provides legitimacy to that power. Since 9/11 strong anti-terrorism norms have evolved calling on states to develop domestic capacity to keep track of “bad guys” and share information with other states. There are institutions that promulgate this norm—such as the United Nations—and many more that facilitate information sharing on suspected terrorists more generally.

Surveillance hegemony is the reason why the US can rely on myriad avenues for surveillance.1 The hegemonic triad of material power, legitimizing norms, and supporting international institutions greases the wheels of US efforts to get information on suspected and known terrorists throughout the world. In addition to secretive efforts like the NSA’s, hegemony is reflected in surveillance programs with other states conducted more above board. I review two of these programs in this paper.

This leads to the second claim. US surveillance hegemony fosters an information ecology that connects secret and public surveillance efforts. Information gains in one part of the ecology has effects for other programs in the system. NSA activity cannot be fully understood without understanding how the information with which it works interacts within this information ecology.

In fleshing out US surveillance hegemony, the paper brings an International Relations (IR) perspective to Surveillance Studies to emphasize the interaction of states and the role of international norms and organizations. IR is well suited to note the ways in which states cooperate, clash, and project power abroad to collect information on individuals living in other sovereign states. In addition, focusing on the US’s surveillance hegemony acts as a corrective to the obsession with NSA power. While the NSA disclosures display US technology and willingness to go-it-alone, much of the US surveillance apparatus is actually a product of cooperation and negotiation with other states and is fostered by norms and institutions.

The US has formal surveillance sharing agreements with 37 countries

Keiber, 15 – professor of political science at Otterbein University (Jason, “Surveillance Hegemony” Surveillance & Society 13(2): 168-181. http://www.surveillanceand- society.org
The extraordinary material surveillance capabilities of the US is perhaps most easily “measured” by its exorbitant funding. Nearly a third of the US’s $52.6 billion intelligence budget is dedicated to fighting terrorism (Gellman and Miller 2013).4 The NSA in particular gets one fifth of the overall budget. This money sustains a talented workforce and produces cutting edge surveillance techniques. These capabilities are often put to use covertly and unilaterally. The US, however, can also influence others to participate in its broader, strategic surveillance efforts. One of the more striking examples of secret cooperation is the recently disclosed RAMPART-A program in which over a dozen countries allow the US to install equipment to “congested” cables so that the US can intercept phone and internet traffic (Gallagher 2014). With some caveats, both the US and the host country reportedly get access to the fruits of that surveillance. In general there are 37 states that are “approved SIGINT partners” (Greenwald 2014).

Domestic limits won’t challenge US surveillance hegemony

Keiber, 15 – professor of political science at Otterbein University (Jason, “Surveillance Hegemony” Surveillance & Society 13(2): 168-181. http://www.surveillanceand- society.org
The second takeaway concerns the future. US surveillance hegemony suggests—and the recently disclosed NSA activity makes clear—an ambition to insinuate state power into the lives of people across the globe. Even if the US makes reforms to address these concerns domestically, the US is unlikely to significantly dial down its foreign surveillance activity. Underpinned as it is by hegemony, the US has coopted others—particularly the UK (MacAskill et al. 2013)—into playing integral roles in global surveillance. The goal, it seems, is to make populations everywhere “legible” to the US (Scott 1998). This “conquest of illegibility” is quintessentially a state making activity. If the present continues on the trajectory of more surveillance by states over individuals globally, surveillance will be normalized as a global phenomenon dealt with by international—not domestic—states structures. It could be argued that what we are seeing is an instance of international state formation along a particular dimension of state power. There are obvious implications for those concerned with privacy and the democratic deficit of international state power. While privacy concerns may seem increasingly quaint in the digital age, global publics will surely clamor for more accountability and transparency. Whether or not enough pressure builds for states to make meaningful changes remains to be seen.

The transnational nature of intelligence gathering means intelligence elites circumvent domestic limits

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)
These ways of gathering and sharing information have paradoxical effects on national security requirements. National security is no longer national in its acquisition, or even analysis, of data and allies’ different national security imperatives may clash, causing trust to disappear. Digitization creates big data gathered at a transnational scale, blurring the lines of what is national as well as the boundaries between law enforcement and intelligence. These trends encourage the move from the judicial framework of criminal policing to preventive, preemptive and predictive approaches and from a high degree of certainty about a small amount of data to a high degree of uncertainty about a large amount of data. The hybridization of private and public actors destabilizes socialization through national state interests and secrecy, opening possibilities for major leaks by persons with different values.

To put this more theoretically, the change and uncertainty surrounding the categories of “foreign” and “domestic” is dispersing them through the webs of connections and transforming the sovereign line that separated them clearly into a Mobius strip (Bigo 2001). By projecting national security “inside out”—through a transnational alliance of the professionals of national security and sensitive data, both public and private—an unexpected “outside in” effect of suspicion is created for all Internet subjects. Many of these “data subjects” react and reject the situation in which all Internet users are treated as potential suspects, rather than as innocent in principle.

The practices of large-scale surveillance by the NSA and its counterparts must thus be understood, not as media-driven scandal which will soon pass, but as indicators of a much larger transformation affecting the way the boundaries of national security function. This is due to the conjunction of three processes that have become interwoven: transnationalization, digitization, and privatization.

This conjunction creates an overarching effect of dispersion that challenges the very idea of a reason of state conducted by a “state” in which the government determines national interests and national security and asks its own services to operate accordingly. Even if it has always rested on exaggerated claims about autonomy and self-determination, the concept of reason of state is now less and less encapsulated in the formula of a national security performed by intelligence services socialized into secrecy and public responsibility, patriotism, and suspicion of services in other nations. Rather, we see the transformation of a reason of state through the emergence of a digitized reason of state performed by a heterogeneous complex of professionals, of sensitive information hybridizing private and public actors. The transnational nature of gathering information that crosses the boundaries of states dissociates the discursive, homogeneous nature of national security interests while reconstructing an aggregate of professionals. These professionals exchange information through digital technologies, produce intelligence according to their own interests, and despise the idea that the rights of all Internet users can create limitations to their projects.

Consequently these transnational guilds of professionals are directly challenging the authority of the professionals of politics which, in principle at least, and within the limits of an international order, had the capacity and authority to define the content of national interests and security (Bigo 2013). They also challenge the authority of national citizens by reconfiguring the ideas of privacy, secrecy of communication, presumption of innocence, and even democracy. It may not be going too far to suggest that what we still call national security has been colonized by a new nobility of intelligence agencies operating in an increasingly autonomous transnational arena.

Domestic protections fail – surveillance reform requires international oversight due to intelligence cooperation

Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN) ICT = Information and Communications Technology
What these various examples underscore is that we cannot simply focus on domestic institutions and domestic laws if we are to bring surveillance practices within an effective regime of oversight and accountability. Some form of international treaties is likely required, with international oversight bodies. Early in the life-cycle of the Snowden revelations there was speculation about the existence of “no spy” agreements between members of the Five Eyes alliance58, protecting the citizens of each country from spying from other members. Although there seem to be informal practices and conventions, the United States has publicly and emphatically denied any formal agreements.59 Whatever we might think about these relationships “based on decades of familiarity, transparency, and past performance between the relevant policy and intelligence communities”, these are not legal protections.60 They are secret, of uncertain scope, can be discarded in the interests of national sovereignty61, exist to protect the interests of the state and not the citizens of that state, and are in no way subject to independent oversight.

--xt private outsourcing

The state will outsource surveillance to private corporations

Verde Garrido, 15 – Berlin Forum on Global Politics (BFoGP), Germany (Miguelángel, “Contesting a Biopolitics of Information and Communications: The Importance of Truth and Sousveillance After Snowden” Surveillance & Society, 13(2): 153-167. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
• States outsource prior state functions, such as surveillance, censorship, and policing of information and communications, to corporations; although numerous corporations perform these functions as their raison d'être, in the case of others, ‘outsourcing’ does not necessarily imply that the corporation in question is a contractor, since corporations can also be legally coerced to perform these functions under national security claims;

Snowden’s revelations have evidenced that the NSA and the GCHQ collaborate with a number of global internet corporations, even if the exact terms in which these collaborations occur continue to be unclear (New York Times 7th June 2013). In addition, a number of corporations gather information and provide analyses and advice to states as commercial services—for example, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc and Lockheed Martin to the US government (New York Times 9th June 2013). Furthermore, an international surveillance technology industry is expanding: various corporations specialize in providing states with advanced communication surveillance technologies. This global trade, calculated to be worth 3 to 5 billion US dollars a year, has already reached an annual growth rate of 20 per cent (Amnesty International 4th April 2014). These facts show, without a doubt, a swelling neoliberalization of state functions, especially those concerned with security and intelligence, as well as a number of industries that commercialize the monitoring, collection, and meticulous processing of vast amounts of information and communications.

AT: Fiat

Legalism means executive agencies use creative wordplay to stick to the letter of the plan, but interpret it differently

Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES” 11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalism-isn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
LEGALISM AND WORDPLAY: Don’t be “led astray” by common definitions

How does Margo’s concept of legalism account for the surveillance community’s misleading wordplay? Take for example the doublespeak NSA and Department of Defense (DoD) officials use when they talk about surveillance rules. A Defense Intelligence Agency “intelligence law handbook” explains that a DoD document regulating NSA conduct has special definitions of commonly used words, so that analysts should “adjust their vocabulary” lest they be led astray by relying on commonly understood definitions.

One such word is “collect”. When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper whether the NSA collects any information at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper said “no, not wittingly.” We now know, as the Senate and Clapper both knew at the time, that the NSA does in fact collect such information. Yet, in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Clapper refused to admit that he had lied to Congress. Rather, he justified his answer with a legalism. He said that “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no.” Clapper indicated that his response to Wyden turned on a definition of “collect:” “There are honest differences on the semantics of what — when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.”

Clapper thinks that “collect” doesn’t mean “gather.” It means “taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.”

To understand surveillance, you must also free your mind from traditional definitions of other words, including “target,” “relevant,” “incidental.” As cryptographer Matt Blaze once said, crafting a question to get meaningful answers from the NSA is a lot like crafting a wish to get a genie to give you what you actually want. The agency is warping language in order to make rules mean something very different from what ordinary people would take them to mean. Do these word games demonstrate respect for rules, or subversion of them? I think it’s subversion.

Legal complexity and creative lawyering mean it’s easy to find a loophole

Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN)
In addition to secrecy, and sometimes working in conjunction with it, legal complexity undermines accountability. One aspect of this complexity, within Canada, is the different institutions that deal with national security concerns, including the RCMP, CSIS and CSEC. Oversight of each is handled differently, with limited ability to coordinate between oversight bodies even in relation to the ways in which these bodies cooperate and assist one another.17⁠ However, the complexity that I want to highlight here concerns law reform itself, given these interrelationships. That is, even if the state pursues public law reform rather than secret legal interpretations, it is often difficult to understand the full implications of legal changes. Instead of understanding themselves as participants in an open, transparent, and public debate, lawyers concerned about civil liberties need to approach proposed legislation with a “hacker” mentality, looking for non-obvious ways to read the legislation in order to locate the little-understood legal vulnerabilities the government might exploit behind its wall of secrecy and protective official statements.

Fiat doesn’t solve – the executive will interpret their actions as compliant with the plan

Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN)
Without an accountability mechanism that allows for the government’s interpretation of the law to effectively be contested as well as for a final determination by an objective body, like a court, then “lawfulness” turns out to simply mean a claim to operate within one’s own interpretation of the law. Oversight, on this model, means independent assurance that one’s activities conform to one’s own interpretation of the law. To be subject merely to one’s own interpretation of the law looks a lot like getting to be one’s own judge, and it lies in deep tension with the ideal of law as an objective constraint on state power.

This unilateralism is exacerbated by several other layers of secrecy that remove a number of potential informal constraints that can operate to ensure balanced, rather than biased, legal advice. People seek legal advice because they want to do things and need to find out how to do them legally. There is a natural pressure, in such a context, to provide a permissive interpretation of the law. Many factors typically operate to provide a countervailing pressure but most of these depend upon the understanding of the parties involved that the actions taken pursuant to that legal advice will be public and can be called into question by those affected by them. If there is reason to think that those affected can argue that the actions taken are in fact contrary to law, then there is a risk of legal liability that will factor into the original advice offered. More generally, public scrutiny through the press and academia provide another set of informal constraints, albeit less direct. But state surveillance operations, both in terms of general programs and in terms of particular operations, are secret. If surveillance is secret, then the people likely affected by the surveillance are in no position to contest it, and this removes one of the informal constraints that can operate to provide balance in determining the lawfulness of the surveillance. In other words, the layers of secrecy surrounding state surveillance structurally enable one-sided legal advice.

If the legal opinions establishing lawfulness are secret, if the activities at issue are secret, if the legal opinions are ones that even those tasked with oversight must defer to, then the “lawfulness” of surveillance is very one-sided indeed. The systematic effect of this on civil liberties should not be underestimated. David Cole has argued, for example, that post 9/11 it has been civil society groups that have been one of the most important guardians of constitutional and rule-of-law values, and not the more “formal mechanisms of checks and balances” in the US.13 Such groups cannot perform this function when they have no way of knowing the legal opinions and actions of the state, apart from what they learn from whistleblowers.

Creative lawyering guarantees circumvention

Redmond, 14 – J.D. Candidate, 2015, Fordham University School of Law (Valerie, “I Spy with My Not So Little Eye: A Comparison of Surveillance Law in the United States and New Zealand” FORDHAM INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 37:733
In the United States, the current state of surveillance law is a product of FISA, its amendments, and its strictures. An evaluation of US surveillance law proves that inherent loopholes undercut FISA’s protections, which allows the US Government to circumvent privacy protections.182 The main problems are the insufficient definition of surveillance, the ability to spy on agents of foreign powers, the lack of protection against third party surveillance, and the ability to collect incidental information.183

First, a significant loophole arises in the interpretation of the term “surveillance.”184 In order for information collection to be regulated by FISA, it must fall under FISA’s definition of surveillance.185 This definition does not apply to certain National Security Letters, which are secret authorizations for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) to obtain records from telephone companies, credit agencies, and other organizations if they merely certify that the information is relevant to an international terrorism investigation.186 National Security Letters are regularly used to circumvent FISA’s warrant procedures.187

Additionally, FISA’s definition of surveillance is antiquated because it distinguishes between data acquired inside of the United States and outside of the United States.188 This distinction allows the NSA to process surveillance that is received from other countries irrespective of whether the target is a US citizen.189 Therefore, the NSA is unrestrained when a communication is not physically intercepted within the United States.190

AT: NSA compliance culture

The intelligence community hasn’t followed the rules – it has a history of non-compliance since 9/11

Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES” 11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalism-isn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
Margo Schlanger has written a great article forthcoming in the Harvard National Security Journal about intelligence legalism, an ethical framework she sees underlying NSA surveillance. Margo makes the case that NSA and the executive branch haven’t been asking what the right surveillance practices should be, but rather what surveillance practices are allowed to be. She takes the concept of legalism from political theorist Judith Shklar: “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules.” In the model of legalism that Margo sees the NSA following, any spying that is not legally prohibited is also right and good because ethics is synonymous with following the rules. Her critique of “intelligence legalism” is that the rules are the bare minimum, and merely following the rules doesn’t take civil liberties concerns seriously enough.

My question is whether legalism serves as a moral code for US Intelligence Community (IC) leadership, or only as a smokescreen. I believe the evidence shows that since 9/11,the IC, and specifically the NSA has not followed the rules. Rather, the agency has resorted to legalistic justifications in pursuit of other goals—namely whatever might be useful in countering terrorism. Before 9/11, the agency may have been focused on complying with FISA. But after that day, the NSA’s approach was that it “could circumvent federal statutes and the Constitution so long as there was some visceral connection to looking for terrorists.” In other words, since 9/11, the moral center of gravity in the surveillance world has focused on doing whatever is necessary for hunting terrorists, not following the rules.

Compliance claims are putting lipstick on a pig – creative lawyering will subvert the intent of the plan

Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES” 11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalism-isn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
In February of 2014, The NSA sent out two of its senior lawyers, Director of Compliance John DeLong and its General Counsel Rajesh De, to make the pitch that the agency is actually an intensely-regulated, closely-watched, and law-abiding good citizen. It is true that today, in response to NSA failures to follow FISC post-collection rules, the agency has a large bureaucracy devoted to compliance, headed by Mr. DeLong. Margo calls this bureaucratic structure an “Office of Goodness”, because the compliance office is tasked with furthering a value not primary for the NSA and it wouldn’t be there unless the NSA believed compliance to be A Good Thing. The first part of that argument, at least, makes sense. I have no doubt that compliance is a major expense for NSA or that today the agency takes it very, very seriously. But I don’t know whether the NSA leadership supports the compliance department because they think its ethical to do so, or because they think its politically necessary to preserve NSA’s relationship with the FISA court judges it pissed off, and who have to continue to approve at least some of NSA’s surveillance activities.

Either way, if the public laws that Congress passes don’t mean what they say, then compliance is just lipstick on a pig. Chris Sprigman wrote about this here at Just Security, and he sees the culture of lawyering at the NSA, far from assuring the agency’s lawfulness, as actually aiding and abetting the essential lawlessness of the mass surveillance programs.

“There is a danger here that the role of the NSA’s lawyers – and this goes for both De and DeLong – creates the appearance but not the reality of lawfulness, and, in the end, does not vindicate the law, but subverts it.”

If Chris is right that De and DeLong and the agency’s other lawyers have very little, if any, input into the Administration’s interpretation of the agency’s legal authority (and neither lawyer has claimed to have such input), then NSA lawyers aren’t empowered, they are rubber stamps. De is the agency’s general counsel, responsible to ensure that the agency’s employees operate within the law. Yet he emphasizes repeatedly that he relies on the expansive interpretation of the NSA’s authority that he says has been approved by Congress, and the courts, and the Administration. De hasn’t engaged with the arguments that the agency is overrunning whatever surveillance authority Congress and the courts have actually given it.

Margo argues that legalism actually both crowds out the consideration of policy and interests (as opposed to law and rights), and legitimates the surveillance state, making it less susceptible to policy reform. Chris says that De and DeLong’s approach to agency lawyering is actually lawlessness in disguise. Who is right, and does it matter for reform?

AT: FISC review

The intelligence community can bend the FISC to justify any result – regardless of statutory rules otherwise

Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES” 11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalism-isn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
This disorganized scramble to get something, anything, on paper and then lock it away so no one could see how crappy it is demonstrates neither an ethical respect for rules nor the empowerment of lawyers. And if these machinations could be forgiven in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, things didn’t get better as the years wore on. Instead, as a whole, the IC and the FISA court have worked together to rubber stamp surveillance decisions, not just when the rules allow it, as Margo suggests, but also when the rules prohibit it.

Just take a look at judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s sloppy 2004 FISA court opinion approving one aspect of STELLARWIND, the collection of all American Internet transactional data, under the FISA pen register/trap and trace statute. For the first time in American history, a judge in a secret court set up just for the Intelligence Community was ruling that Congress authorized domestic bulk collection. It’s a big deal.

But, at NSA’s behest, the judge overlooked the clues that showed the pen register statute was written for targeted, and not mass, collection. As Orin Kerr writes, key words of the pen register statute prove it was written for micro-scale surveillance, not the macro-scale.

The pen register statute requires a mere certification of “relevance.” As Christopher Sprigman and I have said, relevance is a concept that is fundamentally incompatible with the mass collection of data. For hundreds of years, government has asked judges to authorize the collection of evidence based on a “relevance” standard. Those efforts always involve some argument linking specific evidence sought to a specific instance of suspected wrongdoing. In this framework, the mass collection of all data unconnected to any suspected wrongdoing could never meet the relevance standard. The entire enterprise makes a mockery of the concept of relevance.

Under the pen register statute, the authorizing judge has almost no opportunity for pre- or post-collection oversight. The court is not allowed to investigate the basis for the certification. Nor does the statute authorize the judge to put any controls on the government’s subsequent use of bulk collected data. Failure to provide post-collection oversight would be just crazy for a statute that lets the government collect everything on everyone—another sign that’s just not what the pen register statute does. Even Kollar-Kotelly was uncomfortable with this lack of rules, and—over government objections—only authorized the bulk collection in conjunction with usage rules to ensure that NSA and other government agencies would not abuse the privilege. Yet, the statute did not so empower the judge, and the NSA didn’t follow Kollar-Kotelly’s rules anyway.

This isn’t legalism. It’s simply cowardice: allowing fear of terrorism to trump law. And this 2004 opinion was the basis for the 2006 approval of STELLARWIND’s phone records collection under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, but despite the use of a different statute, that judge didn’t even bother to write an opinion justifying her reasoning. Surprise, surprise: the NSA didn’t follow those rules either.

The attitude hasn’t changed. In December of 2013, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked Deputy Attorney General James Cole about a pending version of the USA FREEDOM Act intended by all sponsors to end NSA dragnet collection of Americans’ communication data. Cole said that, despite the Senators’ intentions, their reform efforts wouldn’t necessarily inhibit the NSA’s surveillance capabilities. “[I]t’s going to depend on how the court interprets any number of the provisions that are in [the legislation].” Comments like this betray a serious problem inside the executive branch. The Administration and the intelligence community believe they can do whatever they want, regardless of the laws Congress passes, so long they can convince one of the judges appointed to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to agree. This isn’t legalism, or even the rule of law. As I wrote at the time, it’s collusion within the IC to reach a predetermined result, a common law coup d’etat.

Impact – presumption

Presume neg – governmental reform is a total failure – even allowing fiat, the net effect of the plan is to strengthen the surveillance state

Greenwald, 14 – constitutional lawyer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Snowden story for the Guardian; he also runs The Intercept (Glenn, The Intercept, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD” 11/19 https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/
All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.

The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co-opt the entire reform process. That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence committees and a special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy.

Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: Enact something that is called “reform”—so that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes almost nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able to point to something called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest.

Vote neg on presumption –opportunity cost theory dictates that even if there’s a risk of the affirmative advantages, they aren’t worth voting for

Greenwald, 14 – constitutional lawyer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Snowden story for the Guardian; he also runs The Intercept (Glenn, The Intercept, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD” 11/19 https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/
There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of “public advocates” at the FISA court to contest the claims of the government; the prohibition on the NSA holding Americans’ phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking specific records from the telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and reducing the agency’s “contact chaining” analysis from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue (as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill was a net-positive as a first step toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with characteristic insight, that the bill is so larded with ambiguities and fundamental inadequacies that it would forestall better options and advocates for real reform should thus root for its defeat.

Impact – soft surveillance

Surveillance is rooted in fear of the other rooted in citizenship – ending federal surveillance based on the domestic category reinforces social surveillance

Patel, 12 – Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Salford (Tina, Surveillance, Suspicion and Stigma: Brown Bodies in a Terror-Panic Climate. Surveillance & Society 10(3/4): 215-234. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
The surveillance of bodies is viewed in this paper to be the prolonged observation of person(s) who are considered to be at risk of causing potential harm or threat. Surveillance can be carried out by ‘hard’ means, such as CCTV, biometric gathering, data mining and profiling systems, or by ‘soft’ means, for instance the enhanced gaze of the public in everyday interactions. A variety of factors are used to inform markers of risk, including biological and social variables, as well as wider political features of the given context. With its selective nature, the surveillance of bodies is about pre-determining and reinforcing ideas of ‘suspect bodies’—those persons who, for whatever reason, are marked out as a problem. Ultimately they are of enemy status, a threat to the well-being and social order of society. A key component of surveillance is suspicion. Norris and Armstrong (1999: 112) provide us with a list of seven types of suspicion, which can be used to highlight the (legitimate and illegitimate) use of suspicion in surveillance strategies. Writing in 1999 at ‘the brink of the millennium’, Norris and Armstrong (1999: 59) argued that ‘we are approaching the maximum surveillance society’. I argue that in 2012 we are much closer to this state of surveillance than one would expect within the short space of time between Norris and Armstrong’s work and this paper. Not only are we the objects of an interconnected ‘surveillance assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Haggerty and Ericson 2000), as used by official ‘big brother’ crime-prevention bodies, but we are also subjected to the everyday enhanced gaze of fellow citizens, i.e. big brother’s army of little brothers, if to take from Norris, Moran and Armstrong’s discussion (1999: 100).

There are a variety of concerns regarding the selective nature and suspect marking powers of surveillance. These concerns are rooted in claims made about the infringements on (discrimination and privacy) rights. The promise of greater safety and security has been used to convincingly sell surveillance. Fuelled by an overwhelming fear of crime (Norris, Moran and Armstrong 1998: 90) and increasing ‘moral panics’ (Cohen 2002) about ‘Islamic terrorists’ (Jackson 2006), the allure of safety promised by increased surveillance allows mainstream society to be distracted from the over-focus nature of surveillance and ultimately how whilst enabling some, it also constrains others (Hier and Greenberg 2007). Dubious yet widely believed claims made about the crime fighting benefits of surveillance along with an equally dubious belief in ‘technological neutrality … – if people have nothing to hide they have no need to fear’ lead to the general public’s dismissal of civil liberty concerns (Norris, Moran and Armstrong 1998: 91).

Within the current terror-panic climate,1 it is argued that a ‘convenient opportunity’ for increased surveillance emerged (Haggerty and Gazso 2005: 169), which resulted in the normalisation of a more routine and intrusive surveillance system. This occurred despite an inability to actually assure our security (Ball and Webster 2003). In using ‘colour-coded suspicion’ (Norris and Armstrong 1999: 123), terror-related surveillance over-focuses on all those of middle Eastern appearance, or of South Asian or Arabic heritage and of the Muslim faith, or, what I term in this paper ‘brown bodies’, who are marked out as members of a ‘suspect community’—a label which is applied on a regular basis, despite the lack of any actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing on their part. Terror-related labels, i.e. anti-Western, the enemy within, illegal immigrant, sympathiser of terrorist activity, radicalised student etc., are presented as truth within the white imagination. This has serious implications for the status of brown bodies in society. Spalek, El Awa and McDonald (2009) argue that brown bodies experience enhanced, discriminatory and unnecessary surveillance on all levels, and that the consequences lead to further limited freedoms.2 This paper will begin by considering established knowledge on the surveillance of bodies in relation to deviance, selectivity and control. In particular, there is an examination of hard and soft surveillance, and the allocation of stigma on brown bodies within the current terror-panic climate. Using the findings of a small qualitative study which examined racialised experiences of surveillance in Manchester (England), this paper then reports on the perception, impact and challenges to these surveillance methods.

Surveillance Within The Terror Panic Context

Surveillance controls and disciplines bodies (Gilliom 2001), and has often been presented as an effective way to reduce crime—although actual firm evidence to confirm whether this is actually the case has yet to be provided, as Skinns (1998) notes in his study of crime rates and CCTV use. Although we are all under some form of surveillance, a select population are constructed as especially deviant and are placed under enhanced surveillance. The problem with this lies in how categories of deviance are constructed, and especially how notions of fear, panic and bias go on to determine who is labelled as deviant, or as an undesirable body unwanted within a given space, or unwanted per se. Surveillance therefore is much more than a tool to be used in the ‘fight against crime’. It is a means by which spaces are ‘sanitised’—they are purified of perceived troublesome others (McCahill 2002). Existing work on hard surveillance (usually CCTV surveillance) and control of spaces has focused on urban regeneration projects, city centre locales and consumerism to argue that surveillance acts as a cleansing mechanism privileging some, such as potential consumers,3 over others (see for instance Coleman and Sim 2000; Norris and Armstrong 1999). This paper builds on this body of literature to argue that sanitising-surveillance practices are used as a means to satisfy a racial/ethnic citizenship and social ordering agenda. This involves marking out some groups are ‘dirty bodies’. Here, a set of particular markers are used to identify dirty bodies, for example, skin tone and dress. Such markers are used to label bodies, and therefore need to be fairly simplistic—as to be readily understood and easily applied by all those undertaking surveillance, including members of the general public. In this sense, surveillance has a more sinister side than the (crime control) one that is often presented to us.4 Its ‘social sorting’ function ‘produce[s] coded categories through which persons and groups of persons may be sorted…and provided differential treatments’ (Lyon 2006: 404). Surveillance is therefore also about ‘social justice’ (Lyon 2003a: 1).

Soft surveillance exists because of firm categories of citizenship that reinforce group divisions and xenophobia

Patel, 12 – Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Salford (Tina, Surveillance, Suspicion and Stigma: Brown Bodies in a Terror-Panic Climate. Surveillance & Society 10(3/4): 215-234. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
On another level, brown bodies are also subjected to everyday forms of ‘citizen surveillance practices’, i.e. person-to-person gaze (stares) in public spaces undertaken by ‘ordinary’ citizens (Finn 2011: 413). This gaze goes beyond the usual ‘hate stares’ (McVeigh 1998) often reserved for BMEs—which say, ‘you’re different’ and ‘you do not belong here’ (McVeigh 1998: 12). Rather, it is motivated by suspicion and fear, so that brown bodies are labelled as deviant, and constructed as morally and legally problematic, not only in their expected criminality, i.e. as a terrorist, but also in terms of their citizenship as a whole. Citizen surveillance is something that is actively encouraged, as demonstrated with the comments made by Michael Roach, former Assistant Director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, who, following the London bombings in 2005, asked the public to use their mobile phone cameras to photograph figures of middle Eastern appearance, who were acting suspiciously (AAP 2005 and Lateline 2005 in Pugliese 2006: para. 14). The ‘success’ of citizen surveillance is rooted in the ‘permission to hate’ context (Perry 2001: 79) which presents citizen-to-citizen surveillance as one’s national and civic duty, and in doing so actively reproduces and reinforces ethnic based social divisions and structures of power (Finn 2011). Although always the subject of ‘colouring’ and boundaries, these brown bodies have moved from being ‘a little bit foreign’ to being seen as the ‘anti-British’ threatening other (i.e. terrorist). Brown bodies are therefore ‘casted out’ as they are subjected to stigmatisation, surveillance and expulsion (Razack 2008: 5). This also keeps society as a whole in a ‘permanent state of emergency’, marked by ‘practices of exceptionalism’ (Bigo 2009: 47). Such ‘colour-coded suspicion’ (Norris and Armstrong 1999: 123) is common. In the mainstream however, it is viewed as an acceptable response to a specific risk—a fear about ‘new terrorism’. Even when faults are exposed, problematic action is excused, as demonstrated in the shooting of 27 year old Jean Charles de Menezes in London’s Stockwell Tube station on July 22nd 2005 (Justice4Jean 2011), and the Metropolitan Police force’s use of the element of ‘error’ and the ‘what if’ rationale (Sir Ian Blair, quoted in NBC News 2005).10

AT: Threats real

It’s not objective – all truth claims are political, and theirs are supported by the ideology of sovereignty

Shaw, 99 - Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria (Karena, “Feminist Futures: Contesting the Political” 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 569, lexis)
Again, however, the key question is why we should read these struggles one way rather than another. It is here that I think the most significant political stakes of contemporary theory reside. Crucially, this is not a question that can be answered by piling up empirical evidence, given that empirical evidence is always already framed by theoretical commitments. Nor is this to say that all readings are equally plausible. The question of how to read contemporary events and processes is essentially a political question. If we fail to open this question, a question that cannot be opened if we assume sovereignty, we will continue to impose sovereignty whether or not it is the appropriate response to contemporary circumstances. This, in turn, will leave us trapped within the mythology and logics of sovereignty, potentially facilitating further violences in its name.

Their 1ac scenarios are ideologically constructed to fit the interests of the security state – reject their claim to expertise

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

Yet although these sociological views have become commonplace, the conclusions that Americans should draw about security requirements are not nearly as clear cut as the conventional wisdom assumes. In particular, a closer examination of contemporary arguments about endemic danger suggests that such claims are not objective empirical judgments, but rather are socially complex and politically infused interpretations. Indeed, the openness of existing circumstances to multiple interpretations of threat implies that the presumptive need for secrecy and centralization is not selfevident. And as underscored by high profile failures in expert assessment, claims to security expertise are themselves riddled with ideological presuppositions and subjective biases. All this indicates that the gulf between elite knowledge and lay incomprehension in matters of security may be far less extensive than is ordinarily thought. It also means that the question of who decides—and with it the issue of how democratic or insular our institutions should be—remains open as well.

Clearly, technological changes, from airpower to biological and chemical weapons, have shifted the nature of America’s position in the world and its potential vulnerability. As has been widely remarked for nearly a century, the oceans alone cannot guarantee our permanent safety. Yet in truth, they never fully ensured domestic tranquility. The nineteenth century was one of near continuous violence, especially with indigenous communities fighting to protect their territory from expansionist settlers.312 But even if technological shifts make doomsday scenarios more chilling than those faced by Hamilton, Jefferson, or Taney, the mere existence of these scenarios tells us little about their likelihood or how best to address them. Indeed, these latter security judgments are inevitably permeated with subjective political assessments—assessments that carry with them preexisting ideological points of view—such as regarding how much risk constitutional societies should accept or how interventionist states should be in foreign policy.

AT: Pinker

State violence is increasing—Pinker doesn’t assume modern warfare.

Gray 15. (John, former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author. “John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war,” The Guardian. 3/13/2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining)//CB

The picture of declining violence presented by this new orthodoxy is not all it seems to be. As some critics, notably John Arquilla, have pointed out, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on declining fatalities on the battlefield. If these deaths have been falling, one reason is the balance of terror: nuclear weapons have so far prevented industrial-style warfare between great powers. Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not prevented war in the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. No serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of non combatants, whereas around half of the more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished in the violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category.

If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars. Neocolonial warfare in south-east Asia, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam war, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria, Russian cyber-attacks in the Baltic states and the proxy war between the US and Russia that is being waged in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts in which great powers have been involved in continuous warfare against each other while avoiding direct military conflict.

While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well-organised states that can at some point negotiate peace, it is now more often a many-sided conflict in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power to end. The protagonists are armed irregulars, some of them killing and being killed for the sake of an idea or faith, others from fear or a desire for revenge and yet others from the world’s swelling armies of mercenaries, who fight for profit. For all of them, attacks on civilian populations have become normal. The ferocious conflict in Syria, in which methodical starvation and the systematic destruction of urban environments are deployed as strategies, is an example of this type of warfare.

It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the “Holocaust-by-bullets” – the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet Union, during the second world war – was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million. Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear. Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be “apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history” (the italics are Pinker’s). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision.

Violence, mass incarceration, and torture are increasing.

Gray 15. (John, former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author. “John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war,” The Guardian. 3/13/2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining)//CB

Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state.

It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced more traditional types of warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism to include assassination by unaccountable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by drones is part of this shift. A metamorphosis in the nature is war is under way, which is global in reach. With the state of Iraq in ruins as a result of US-led regime change, a third of the country is controlled by Isis, which is able to inflict genocidal attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with near-impunity. In Nigeria, the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practise a type of warfare featuring mass killing of civilians, razing of towns and villages and sexual enslavement of women and children. In Europe, targeted killing of journalists, artists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to recognise any distinction between combatants and civilians. Whether they accept the fact or not, advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred.

Deaths on the battlefield have fallen and may continue to fall. From one angle this can be seen as an advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and intensity with which violence is being employed, the Long Peace can be described as a condition of perpetual conflict.

Pinker’s method is flawed—his studies are based on anecdotes instead of statistical analyses.

Taleb 12. (Nassim, essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Former professor of Risk Engineering at NYU. “The ‘Long Peace’ is a Statistical Illusion.” 2012. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf)//CB

It turned out, the entire exchange with S. Pinker was a dialogue de sourds. In my correspondence and exchange with him, I was under the impression that he (Pinker) simply misunderstood the difference between inference from symmetric, thin-tailed random variables an one from asymmet- ric, fat-tailed ones --the 4th Quadrant problem. I thought that I was making him aware of the effects from the complications of the distribution. But it turned out things were worse, a lot worse than that.

Pinker doesn’t have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. Science is not about making claims about a sample, but using a sample to make general claims and discuss properties that apply outside the sample.

Take M* the observed arithmetic mean from the realizations (a sample path) for some process, and M the "true" mean. When someone says: "Crime rate in NYC dropped between 2000 and 2010", the claim is about M* the observed mean, not M the true mean, hence the claim can be deemed merely journalistic, not scientific, and journalists are there to report "facts" not theories. No scientific and causal statement should be made from M* on "why violence has dropped" unless one establishes a link to M the true mean. M* cannot be deemed "evidence" by itself. Working with M* cannot be called "empiricism".