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Specter Proposal CP HJPV
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Notes
Blanket immunity/amnesty in this context means that telecommunications companies arent subject to lawsuits regarding
illegal surveillance whether that be government enforced surveillance or corporate surveillance.
PRISM was what the TSP became although it doesnt fulfill the original role of the program.
One slight problem with the CP is that the solvency evidence for the specific amendment to the bill is very limited, but the
good news is that the original piece of evidence is very solid
This should be paired with a corporations fill in circumvention argument.
Returning the current program back to the TSP would also allow for a legislative check on executive surveillance. This is
because the whole reason that the TSP was removed was because Bush found another way to collect data without a
legislative check. The original TSP allows for the Congress to check the executive on surveillance issues.
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Negative
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1nc
The United States Federal government should amend the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008 to remove blanket immunity provisions for
telecommunications companies. The United States federal
government should oversight of the Planning Tool for Resource
Integration, Synchronization, and Management (PRISM) program to
the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
The CP allows for FISA effectiveness and Congressional oversightsolves all sqou NSA overstretch and the terror DA
HLR, 09 (Harvard Law Review, Student run publication with articles from professors, judges, practitioners, and
students; February 2009; Harvard Law Review, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Feb., 2009), pp. 1271-1278; Electronic Surveillance
Congress Grants Telecommunications Companies Retroactive Immunity from Civil Suits for Complying with NSA
Terrorist Surveillance Program. Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-261, 122 Stat. 2436; JSTOR)//JPM
Senator Specter subsequently proposed an amendment that would "substitute

the U.S. Government as a party defendant for the telephone companies," thereby
shielding them from liability while still allowing courts to rule on the legality of
the TSP and the constitutional questions raised by the President's assertions of
executive authority.25 Government substitution would be dependent upon a
finding by the FISA court that the telecommunications companies acted "in good
faith."26 The Senate rejected this amendment by a vote of sixty-eight to thirty.27
Ultimately, the Senate passed the bill and sent it back to the House with the
blanket immunity provision intact.28 On June 19, 2008, Representative Silvestre Reyes introduced the
FISA Amendments Act of 200829 in the House.30 This bill was substantially the same as the version passed by the Senate.31 On
June 20, the House voted to pass the bill.32 The Senate subsequently considered the
House bill and rejected three more amendments that would have altered or
eliminated the retroactive immunity provision.33 On July 9, the Senate passed the House bill by a vote of sixty-nine to twentyeight.34 The President signed the bill into law the next day.35 The final version of the immunity provision states that
courts should dismiss any suit against an electronic service provider alleged to
have provided assistance "in connection with an intelligence activity involving
communications that was . . . designed to detect or prevent a terrorist atack .. .
against the United States"36 if the Attorney General certifies that one of two conditions imet. Suits should be dismissed
if the Attorney General certifies either that the company was acting pursuant to a
"written request or directive" from the government indicating that such activity was "(i) authorized by the President; and
(ii) determined to be lawful,"37 or else that the company "did not provide the alleged assistance."38 The Act provides for a "substantial
evidence" standard for judicial review of the Attorney General's certifications.39
Additionally, the Act provides that courts may limit public disclosure of any
certificationr supplemental materials that would prove harmful to national
security.40 The blanket immunity provision retroactively validates presidential
directives to private parties that ordered them to conduct potentially illegal
actions.41 This result is problematic for several reasons. First, it undermines the
statutory framework that Congress originally established in FISA. Second, it
undermines the ability of Congress to play a meaningful role in determining the
proper procedures for gathering intelligence, as it weakens the requirement that
the Administration get statutory approval before fundamentally changing
surveillance policy. Finally, it greatly reduces the chances that a court will be able to
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review the legality of the TSP and the constitutionality of the President's
assertions of executive authority. Proponents of the blanket immunity provision argued that it was necessary for a number of reasons, including
fairness and national security.42 However, the amendment proposed by Senator Specter would
have addressed most of these concerns while avoiding many of the
problems of the blanket immunity provision. Congress should have
adopted this amendment instead. When Congress enacted FISA, it
attempted to establish a clear and exclusive framework for all parties to follow
when the government seeks the aid of private companies in conducting electronic
surveillance.43 Members of the Bush Administration appear to have acknowledged that the TSP operated outside this
statutory framework,44 but they argue that the TSP was nevertheless legally justified both by the Authorization for
Use of Military Force45 (AUMF) passed by Congress in 2001 and by the President's inherent
authority under Article II of the Constitution.46 The blanket immunity
provision undermines FISA by granting retroactive immunity to
telecommunications companies without requiring any showing that
they reasonably believed that assisting the intelligence agencies was
legal;47 the Attorney General merely has to certify that the company was told by
the government that its actions were legal.48 Since the Administration appears to
have based its legal reasoning upon executive authority rather than compliance
with FISA,49 neither the companies nor the President needed to believe they were
complying with FISA in order for the companies to receive immunity. Congress
has therefore allowed the Administration and private companies to act outside of
the statutory framework that Congress created. The effectiveness of FISA as a
comprehensive scheme governing electronic surveillance is undermined if the
President can circumvent its procedures simply by asserting that he has the
executive authority to act outside of its framework. FISA's effectiveness will
be further undermined if telecommunications companies are willing
to cooperate with intelligence agencies even when FISA procedures
have not been followed. Furthermore, as the intelligence community increasingly
relies on the help of private companies to conduct electronic surveillance, it is
essential that a range of government actors - including Congress - gets to weigh
in on important policy considerations, including the proper balance between
individual privacy rights and national security.50 Congress can and should
serve as a check on the executive, as the executive branch may be
"institutionally predisposed" to value security over civil liberties.51 It is
therefore important that Congress establish the proper procedures for the
Administration to follow when it works with the private sector to conduct
electronic surveillance, and that Congress then makes sure that these procedures
are followed. When the Administration and private parties act outside of the
statutory framework, they should pay a price, even if Congress would have
approved of their actions had its approval been sought; in this case, that price
should be civil liability. There is nothing wrong with Congress changing FISA at
the request of the Administration; in other provisions of the Act, Congress does
just that - it updates and changes the procedures for conducting electronic
surveillance.52 However, in order for Congress to play a meaningful role in
determining surveillance policy, the Administration should have to
seek Congress's approval before making a major policy change and
acting outside the statutory framework. Despite its intention to limit extralegal abe able to determine the validity of the
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Administration's argument that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to conduct electronic surveillance without congressional approval and that this authority is
supplemented by the AUMF.55 Regardless of whether the Administration's arguments would hold up in court, a decision one way or the other would provide more certainty to all parties
the Administration would know whether it has to follow FISA

under all circumstances; Congress would know to what extent it can
limit the President's ability to conduct surveillance; and the
telecommunications companies would know whether they can rely on
the Administration's assertions that providing assistance is legal. Also,
since any pending lawsuits will almost certainly be dismissed, individuals whose
privacy rights were violated will be unable to vindicate those rights in court .56 Because
of these problems, Congress should not have enacted the blanket immunity provision unless
it was absolutely necessary, which it was not. Proponents of blanket immunity
argued that it was necessary both to prevent unfairly punishing
telecommunications companies that tried to assist the government in
preventing another terrorist attack57 and to ensure the cooperation of
telecommunications companies in the future.58 However, The amendment
proposed by Senator Specter would have accomplished both of these
goals while avoiding some of the problems inherent in the blanket
immunity provision. Under this amendment, any telecommunications company that
complied with the government and acted in good faith would be shielded from
liability. If the FISA court found that a company did act in good faith, then the
government would take its place in any lawsuits.59 According to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, it would be
proper to hold the government accountable because "if the companies acted
reasonably and in good faith at the direction of the Government but ended up
breaking the law, the Government truly is the morally proper party to the case."60
Furthermore, some companies had threatened that if they were not given immunity, they
would refuse to cooperate with the government in the future "except under strict
compulsion."61 The Specter amendment would enable most carriers to escape
liability through a showing arrangements, Congress has signaled to both the
Administration and the telecommunications companies that they can ignore the
statutory framework without suffering adverse consequences. As a result, the
Administration is likely to rely more on informal agreements with
telecommunications companies,53 and Congress's role in making policy and
providing oversight will be diminished. Finally, the blanket immunity provision will
also likely prevent any judicial rulings on the underlying legal issues at stake .54 No court
involved:
will of good faith, thereby providing them with the desired immunity and encouraging their future cooperation. In addition to addressing many of the concerns of the proponents of blanket
the Specter amendment would also have reduced some of the problems
caused by the blanket immunity provision. First, by protecting companies only
after a judicial finding that they acted in reasonable good faith, Congress would
have sent a clear signal to private companies that they must determine for
themselves whether a government request for assistance is legal. Congress would
also have sent a message to the President that he cannot ignore existing statutes
and authorize private parties to commit potentially unlawful actions without
being subjected to intense judicial scrutiny. Congress would therefore have
encouraged both the Administration ad the private sector to comply with FISA.
As a result, Congress would have reasserted its role in determining the proper
surveillance procedures by holding parties accountable for circumventing those
procedures. The Specter amendment may also have allowed courts to rule
directly on the legality of several aspects of the TSP. Finally, the amendment
immunity,
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would have given private citizens the "ability to vindicate their rights in court
regarding wiretapping abuses of the past."62 Senator Specter's amendment
presented Congress with an opportunity to encourage both the executive branch
and the private sector to follow the law, to provide some accountability for what
appear to be extensive violations of the law, and to reassert itself as an important
player in the debate over how to conduct electronic surveillance. Congress could
have achieved these goals without making any major sacrifices in terms of
fairness or national security. Yet Congress, at the behest of the Administration and
the telecommunications industry, instead chose to provide blanket immunity to
the telecommunications companies and virtually ensure that important legal
questions about the TSP will remain unanswered.63 Although it is important to
encourage cooperation between telecommunications companies and the
intelligence agencies, it is also important for Congress to play a role in
determining the proper balance between security and civil liberties rather than
leaving such a determination to the Administration.64 By allowing the
Administration and telecommunications companies to ignore FISA with
impunity, Congress has abdicated this responsibility.
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Solves: PRISM
Blanket immunity is the biggest problem facing domestic surveillance
pre-req to aff solvency
EFF, 2008 (Electronic Frontier Foundation, leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital
world; 2008; Archive: The Case Against Retroactive Amnesty for Telecoms; https://www.eff.org/pages/case-againstretroactive-amnesty-telecoms)//JPM
The litigation against AT&T and other companies is based upon clear, first-hand
whistleblower documentary evidence authenticated in court by AT&T itself in the
course of unsuccessfully trying to protect the documents as trade secret s that for
years on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over
the massive fiber-optic links of sixteen separate companies routed through AT&Ts
Internet hub in San Francisco hundreds of millions of private, domestic
communications have been illegally copied in their entirety by AT&T and
knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple splitters into a secret room
controlled exclusively by the NSA. The whistleblower also discovered that there
were at least five other such rooms in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle
and Atlanta. Any filtering of the information took place only after the entire fiberoptic data stream was copied and diverted into the secret room. As Judge Walker has
held, it
simply
cannot be
credibly
suggested that the Governments
telephone company partners in a massive, ongoing, wholesale

dragnet of millions upon millions of domestic e-mail, text message
and phone communications were under the excusable
misimpression that this surveillance dragnet only incidentally
might sweep in the occasional domestic-to-domestic
communications . To the contrary, the AT&T whistleblower who installed and maintained the
splitter technology (and whose documents and affidavit are at the core of the case against AT&T) has made it
clear that the system clearly was designed to capture and did in fact capture hundreds
of millions of ordinary domestic communications, and had the technical capability to analyze
them in real time. Furthermore, independent experts have confirmed that the location of
these splitters in San Francisco is inconsistent with surveillance aimed solely at
international or foreign traffic. There are apparently no foreign communications
cables that emerge from the sea near San Francisco or near another of the secret room locations
confirmed in the whistleblowers documents, hundreds of miles from the seashore in Atlanta, Georgia! A federal
court should weigh these facts.
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Solves: NSA Overreach

Blanket amnesty allows the government to retroactively exempt
telecommunications companies from legal consequences to
conducting mass surveillance means even if the plan can solve
for NSA surveillance, they will be circumvented by companies,
only the CP solves.
Amnesty provisions for the telecom industry are a prereq to
combating NSA overreach
-Indicting blanket amnesty was what originally led to the creation of the FISC
Greenwald, 13 (Glen, journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books
on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences
reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to his collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, Glenns column
was featured at The Guardian and Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F.
Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his
investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting; 6/6/13; "Digital
blackwater": the National Security Administration, telecommunications companies and state-corporate crime;
http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ps/retrieve.do?
sgHitCountType=None&sort=RELEVANCE&docType=Report&prodId=AONE&tabID=T002&searchId=R1&resultListTyp
e=RESULT_LIST&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&contentSegment=&currentPosition=1&searchResultsType=Single
Tab&inPS=true&userGroupName=lom_umichanna&docId=GALE%7CA403918836&contentSet=GALE
%7CA403918836)//JPM
In this article, we
provide a framework for demonstrating the illegality of the NSA

surveillance programmes by arguing that these activities should be considered
acts of state-facilitated state-corporate crime. That is, we contend that the broad and
blanket surveillance of US citizens (Americans) who are not suspected of any criminal offence should be
considered criminal activity that is occurring through the collusion of state and corporate entities. Specifically, w e
maintain that the NSA's spying on Americans' electronic communications, in
partnership with Verizon, Google, and other telecommunications companies, is
(1) in violation of the right to privacy, as outlined by numerous international
human rights treaties; (2) unlawfully secretive and thus lacks the transparency
guaranteed by international human rights treaties and (3) antithetical to
democracy by unlawfully attacking and seeking to punish whistle-blowers , thereby
silencing discourse, shirking accountability and ultimately undermining the rule of law .
In addition, we maintain that it is the weak system of checks and balances offered by the
FISA Court, and specifically the changes made to it as a result of the USA
PATRIOT Act 2001, that has facilitated the state and corporate mass surveillance
system. Using the definition of state-corporate crime developed by Aulette and Michalowski (1993), we intend to
highlight the dangers of these relationships for liberty, justice and democracy. State-Corporate Crime Given
that this issue is devoted to examining state-corporate crime, we offer only a brief review of the concept
of state-corporate crime and the two types outlined by Michalowski and Kramer (2006).
Michalowski and Kramer (2006: 20) define state-corporate crime as illegal or socially injurious actions
that result from a mutually reinforcing interaction between (1) policies and/or
practices in pursuit of goals of one or more institutions of political governance
and (2) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more
institutions of economic production and distribution. Michalowski and Kramer distinguish
between state-initiated and state-facilitated corporate crime and stress the importance of closely examining the
interrelationships between state and corporate actors. They argue, State-initiated
corporate crime
occurs when corporations employed by a government engage in organizational
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deviance at the direction of, or with the tacit approval of, that government. Statefacilitated corporate crime occurs when government institutions of social control
are guilty of clear failure to create regulatory institutions capable of restraining
deviant business activities, either because of direct collusion between business
and government or because they adhere to shared goals whose attainment would
be hampered by aggressive regulation. (Michalowski and Kramer 2006: 21) Although the
NSA surveillance can be seen as an example of both types, we focus here on
examining the mass surveillance of telecommunications data as state-facilitated,
documenting the direct collusion between telecommunications companies and
the government and the weak legislative privacy protections that allow such
companies to collect large amounts of personal, private data about individuals.
The NSA, Telecommunications Companies and Illegal Spying: A Brief History The NSA has long coupled
with the corporate sector to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans. As
Bamford (2008) wrote, the "rocky marriage" between the NSA and telecommunications
companies began in the days following World War I, when cable companies
turned over telegraph messages to the NSA. Project Minaret was a programme of
the 1970s in which Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Western Union and other companies
gave the NSA all incoming and outgoing US telephone calls and telegrams (Chaterjee 2013b). For decades,
telecommunications leaders like AT&T "... have had a very secret, very cozy relationship with the NSA through the
National Security Agency Advisory Board (NSAAB), made up of top company executives" (Bamford 2008). Project
Minaret, and others like it,
led to a series of congressional hearings in 1975. The Senate

Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,
which was chaired by Frank Church of Idaho, resulted in the creation of the FISA. FISA created a
special court, known as the FISA Court, which approves actions to gain
intelligence via electronic surveillance of foreign powers or agents of foreign
powers (Chaterjee 2013b). Eleven federal circuit judges, appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court, make up the FISA Court, which meets in secret . Proceedings from the FISA Court are not
made public. Targets of FISA-approved searches are not notified that they have been targeted unless they are to be
prosecuted. Thus, any
searches that result from FISA Court approval remain unknown

to the public, and even to much of the Congress (Bamford 2008). They are not so
secret, however, to the many private corporations with whom the NSA
collaborates for intelligence gathering. FISA has been amended several times,
each time weakening its provisions. The USA PATRIOT Act (1) eliminated the
requirement that gathering foreign intelligence be the primary purpose of a
warrant, replacing it with the language that it be a "significant purpose " (Keenan
2005). Keenan (2005: 104) explained, "When foreign-intelligence gathering needs to be
merely 'a significant purpose', it is more likely that the government will be able to
use the lower standard to end-run the privacy protections of the Constitution." As
a result of the USA PATRIOT Act changes to FISA, there has been a dramatic increase in warrants
issued by the court. The number of warrants requested and granted increased 75
per cent between 2000 and 2004, and in 2002, FISA warrants outnumbered
traditional federal search warrants for the first time (Keenan 2005). Bamford (2008) describes
how, by 2008, the NSA was not only the largest and the costliest spy organization in the world but it had also become the
most intrusive. No longer a "backwater agency whose director had to fight to sit at the same table with the CIA chief', the
NSA currently has tens of thousands of employees and more than 50 buildings equipped with the most sophisticated
technology (Bamford 2008: 13). Every
day the NSA intercepts and stores 1.7 billion emails,

phone calls, texts and other electronic information. Its new data centre in Utah is 5.7 times the
size of the US Capitol (Kelley 2012). As early as the summer of 2002, AT&T technician Mark Kline noted that the NSA
was doing something illegal. Kline explained, "it
appears the NSA is capable of conducting what

amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet--
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whether that be people's email, Web surfing, or any other data ... A lot of this was
domestic" (in Bamford 2008: 191). Much of this huge volume of data collected
through the NSA's NARUS system located at AT&T's San Francisco
office came from the telecommunications company's partners, like
Sprint and Qwest
(Electronic Frontier Foundation n.d.). Moreover, "
America's two major
telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have outsourced the bugging

of their entire networks--carrying billions of American
communications every day--to two mysterious companies with very
troubling foreign connections " (Bamford 2008: 236), both formed in Israel and having no
oversight by Congress. NSA-Corporate Programmes as State-Facilitated State-Corporate Crime In this section, we
demonstrate how the NSA's spying programmes meet the criteria to be considered state-facilitated state-corporate crime.
Facilitated by state through weakening of checks and balances Post 9/11, the
growth in the amount of

data being collected, as well as technological advancements, overwhelmed the
NSA and prompted the need for more private contractors to do the increasing
amount of data analysis. According to retired Air Force General and former director of the NSA, Michael V.
Hayden, "the government's massive data collection and surveillance system was
largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon
Valley and private defense contractors" (quoted in Hirsh 2013). As Bamford (2008: 197) noted, "The
NSA's new willingness to outsource eavesdropping, plus the warrantless
eavesdropping and other new programs, thus became a giant boon to a growing
fraternity of contractors who make their living off the NSA." The fact that the US national
security functions have been delegated increasingly to corporations reflects a
wider pattern of privatization and deregulation that has been gaining momentum
since the Reagan administration. Not only has the national intelligence apparatus
increasingly relied on private contractors, but the leadership of the national
intelligence agencies is essentially the same as those with whom the government
has contracted for surveillance services. These people are "... ideological allies", who are
" sympathetic to industry's interests. In this new environment,
corporations and private entities of all sorts enjoy a new measure of
sovereignty and the capacity to determine for themselves what they
will and will not disclose to the public " (Gup 2007: 24). Put simply, this is the
"power elite" about whom sociologist Mills (1956) cautioned as having
disproportionate power and influence. For example, Booz Allen Hamilton, a privately
owned consulting company located in Virginia worth an estimated $5 billion
annually, is one of the largest of the companies that contracts with the
government to conduct surveillance. The current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James
Clapper, is a former Booz Allen executive. The company's current vice chairman, Mike McConnell, was the DNI in the
George W. Bush administration (Goldman 2013). There
seems to be no end to the expansion of

the government-corporate spying programme. A 2012 investigative report by
Wired magazine revealed that the NSA is building a massive supercomputing
facility in the Nevada desert (Bamford 2012, 2013). Former NSA employees who have
examined the FISA order asking Verizon to provide information to the NSA note
that as few as 40 and as many as 79 companies likely received similar orders in
2013 alone (Eisler and Page 2013). In November 2013, Snowden revealed additional documentation
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demonstrating that the NSA relies on relationships with corporations to obtain

the vast amount of data it collects from fibre-optic cables (MacAskill and Rushe 2013). In a
presentation prepared by the NSA's Special Source Operations Division, the
opening section states the agency's goal to "Leverage unique key corporate
partnerships to gain access to high-capacity international fiber-optic cables,
switches and/or routes throughout the world" (MacAskill and Rushe 2013).
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--Ext. Congressional Oversight Solvency

Solely executive control of surveillance ineffective- invades privacy and
needs legislative checks
Bendix and Quirk, 15 (William, assistant professor of political science at Keene State College. His
research focuses on Congress, legislative deliberation, and homeland security and civil liberties policies; Phil Lind Chair
in U.S. Politics and Representation at the University of British Columbia and a former research associate at the
Brookings Institution. His work focuses on debate and deliberation in Congress and the mass public; March 2015;
Secrecy and negligence:
How Congress lost control of domestic surveillance; Issues in Governance Studies Vol. 68;
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/02-secrecy-negligence-congres-surveillance-bendixquirk/ctibendixquirksecrecyv3.pdf)//JPM
During the last five years of legislative debates over the PATRIOT Act, Congress
has failed to define or control surveillance policy. Prior to the Snowden leaks,
most members had little awareness of NSA activities and Congress had little
capacity to impose constraints. Now, more than 18 months after Snowden
exposed the mass seizure of phone records, not much has changed . To a great extent, the
source of difficulty has been the inadequacy of the institutional arrangements for
legislative deliberation on secret programs. Some members have declined
opportunity to learn about domestic-spying practices, while others have opposed
placing restrictions on the NSA for fear of giving terrorists any tactical
advantage. If Congress had conducted thorough, informed deliberations at all stages,
we suspect it would have endorsed extensive collection of communication
records, but it would have also imposed limitations and constraints to minimize
the harm to privacy interests. Instead, it gave the executive branch essentially
unfettered authority to operate a massively intrusive program.
Congressional oversight fills in for FISA failures

HLR, 08 (Harvard Law Review, Student run publication with articles from professors, judges, practitioners, and
students; June 2008; Vol. 121, No. 8; NOTE: SHIFTING THE FISA PARADIGM: PROTECTING CIVIL LIBERTIES BY
ELIMINATING EXANTE JUDICIAL APPROVAL; http://www.harvardlawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/pdfs/shifting_the_FISA_paradigm.pdf)//JPM
The testimony during the initial FISA hearings of two former Attorneys General,
themselves responsible for authorizing foreign intelligence surveillance in the
pre-FISA arrangement, is instructive. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark observed
that we greatly exaggerate the safety and value of a requirement that all
wiretaps . . . be approved by a judicial officer. Arguing that [t]he idea that there can be a
meticulous review of these applications by the Judiciary is contrary to our
experience, he put primary emphasis on political checks through reporting
requirements and congressional oversight and standard-setting.91 Additionally,
former Attorney General Elliot Richardson noted the important role in assuring
that this sensitive tool is not abused to be played by the Senate, via both direct oversight and the
confirmation of the Attorney General and Director of the FBI.92 More importantly, the legislative history suggests that the most
consequential element of FISA is not its judicial review provisions. Rather,
FISAs crucial move was to institute a reliance on the use of public laws, publicly
debated and adopted, which specify under what circumstances and under what
restrictions electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes can be
conducted.93 The reliance on political checks proposed in this Note avoids the
problem identified by Congress when it initially enacted FISA and raised by the
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TSP that the substantial safeguards respecting foreign intelligence electronic

surveillance [then] embodied in classified Attorney General procedures were not
enough to overcome the inappropriateness of relying solely on executive branch
discretion to safeguard civil liberties.94 Here, the Executive is subject not merely to
internally created standards that it might change or ignore at will, but also to
those set down by the statute, which were themselves created through the public
weighing of important public policy concerns that Congress performs.95
Congress is better situated constitutionally and better equipped
institutionally to make the sort of value judgments and political
determinations that are necessary to fulfill FISAs purposes. If
[t]he government may abuse FISA in situations like that involving
the L.A. Eight, when intrusive electronic surveillance is undertaken
based on political activities, rather than on support for terrorist
activities,96 it seems that Congress will be much better than courts
at sniffing out such violations and fashioning broader and more
flexible remedies . If one hopes to realize the core purpose of FISA as
described by the ACLU, to prevent future presidents from intercepting the
international communications of American citizens whose privacy ought to be
protected under [our] Constitution ever again97 then a new approach is
needed.
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--Ext. FISA Effectiveness Solvency

An effective FISA court threads the needle between stopping terror
attacks and maintaining civil liberties
Blum, 08 (Stephanie, attorney for the Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security.
She is currently on a detail to the Department of Justice. Ms. Blum holds a M.A. in security studies from the U.S. Naval
Postgraduate Schools Center for Homeland Defense and Security, a J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School,
and a B.A. in political science from Yale University. She has published a book and various articles on homeland security
issues. She would like to thank Professor Robert Chesney and the participants at the annual national security law junior
faculty workshop for their suggestions. The views in this article are the authors and do not necessarily represent the
views of the U.S. Government to include the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice; 2008;
WHAT REALLY IS AT STAKE WITH THE FISA AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2008 AND IDEAS FOR FUTURE
SURVEILLANCE REFORM; http://128.197.26.34/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/pilj/vol18no2/documents/182BlumArticle.pdf, HeinOnline)//JPM
FISA does provide some added protection for U.S. citizens and permanent
resident aliens (referred to as U.S. persons in FISA). To obtain a FISA warrant targeting a U.S. person, there
must also be probable cause to believe that the person is knowingly engaged in
activities that involve or may involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the
United States.48 In other words, while suspicion of illegal activity is not
required in the case of aliens who are not permanent residents as applied to
them, membership in a terrorist group or Applications for FISA warrants go to
federal judges that comprise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Like a grand
jury proceeding, the FISC conducts its business ex parte, meaning the
government is the only party present at its proceedings. Appeals from the FISC
go to the FISCR. The FISC has jurisdiction to hear applications for, and to grant
court orders approving, electronic surveillance or physical searches anywhere in
the United States to obtain foreign intelligence information under FISA. In order for
an executive official to get a FISA warrant to conduct electronic surveillance, the FISC
must approve several requirements: (1) probable cause that the target is an agent
of a foreign power or a foreign power (and the additional requirements discussed above if the target is
a U.S. person);50 (2) probable cause that the target is using or about to use the facility
to be monitored;51 (3) applicable minimization procedures designed to
minimize the acquisition and retention, and to prevent the dissemination, of
information concerning U.S. persons that is unrelated to foreign-intelligence;52
(4) a certification that the information sought cannot reasonably be obtained by
normal investigative techniques,53 and (5) the Attorney General must approve
the application and a high-ranking intelligence official must certify that a
significant purpose of the surveillance is to gain foreign intelligence
information.54 If the target is a U.S. person, the basis for the aforementioned
review is subject to review for clear error.55
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--Ext. Removing Blanket Immunity Solvency

Blanket immunity provisions allow for companies to hide NSA
overreach prereq to aff solvency
Masnick, 14 (Mike, founder and CEO of Floor64 and editor of the Techdirt blog; Jul 9th 2014; Senate
Intelligence Committee Approves Dangerous Cybersecurity Bill;
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140708/18003227819/senate-intelligence-committee-approves-dangerouscybersecurity-bill.shtml)//JPM
We've written about the
Senate's dangerous CIPA bill -- which is Congress' latest (bad) attempt to

help increase the NSA-led surveillance state by giving companies blanket
immunity if they share private information with the government... all in the name
of overhyped "cybersecurity." We, of course, have been through this fight before,
with the CISPA bill, which passed in the House a few times, but couldn't get any
traction in the Senate. This time around, the (really bad) Senate version passed out of
the Senate Intelligence Committee by a 12-3 vote (held in secret, of course). Not surprisingly,
two of the three who voted against it are Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. By now you
should know: if Ron Wyden and Mark Udall are against something related to surveillance, you should be against it too
(and the opposite is true as well). The
"good" news is that despite the overwhelming support

by the NSA's biggest cheerleaders on the rest of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, it seems unlikely that the bill will have enough support in the overall
Senate. And it will hopefully remain that way. This bill is a dangerous one, that is
solely designed to give the NSA and some companies additional legal "cover" for
aiding the NSA's surveillance efforts. Thanks to Snowden's revelations,
companies are, in general, a lot less willing to do that these days anyway, but
giving those companies blanket liability to do so is a bad, bad idea. And while
there's still little to no evidence that the "cybersecurity threat" is anywhere close
to as big as what the FUDmongers insist it is, even if that is true, no one has yet
explained what laws actually get in the way of having companies share critical
cybersecurity information as needed. And, if such laws really do exist, any solution
should to just be narrowly focused on fixing those laws, rather than granting
broad immunity for sharing just about any info.
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AT: Signal/Perception Solvency Deficits

Congressional oversight is a stronger IL to NSA perception and
legitimacy
Schneier, 15, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at
the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an
Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Chief Technology Officer at Resilient
Systems, Inc (Bruce, Data
and Goliath: the Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and

Control Your World, Ch. 13)//AK
Congress must commit to meaningful NSA reform. We need
comprehensive strategic oversight by independent government agencies , based on full
More members of
transparency. We need meaningful rules for minimizing data gathered and stored about Americans, rules that require the
NSA to delete data to which it should not have access. In the 1970s, the Church Committee investigated intelligence
gathering by the NSA, CIA, and FBI. It was able to reform these agencies only after extensive research and discovery. We
need a similar committee now. We need to convince President Obama to adopt the recommendations of his own NSA
review group. And we need to give the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board real investigative powers. Those
recommendations all pertain to strategic oversight of mass surveillance. Next, lets consider tactical oversight. One
primary mechanism for tactical oversight of government surveillance is the warrant process. Contrary to what many
government officials argue, warrants do not harm security. They
are a security mechanism, designed

to protect us from government overreach. Secret warrants dont work nearly as well. The judges
who oversee NSA actions are from the secret FISA Court. Compared with a
traditional court, the FISA Court has a much lower standard of evidence before it
issues a warrant. Its cases are secret, its rulings are secret, and no one from the other side ever presents in front of
it. Given how unbalanced the process it is, its amazing that the FISA Court has shown as much backbone as it has in
standing up to the NSA (despite almost never rejecting a warrant request). Some
surveillance orders
bypass this process entirely. We know, for example, that US Cellular received only two judicially approved
wiretap orders in 2012and another 10,801 subpoenas for the same types of information without any judicial oversight
whatsoever. All of this needs to be fixed. Start
with the FISA Court. It should be much more

public. The FISA Courts chief judge should become a position that requires
Senate confirmation. The court should publish its opinions to the extent possible. An official public
interest advocate should be assigned the task of arguing against surveillance
applications. Congress should enact a process for appealing FISA rulings, either to some appellate court or to the
Supreme Court. But more steps are needed to put the NSA under credible tactical
oversight. Its internal procedures are better suited to detecting activities such as
inadvertent and incorrect surveillance targeting than they are to detecting people who deliberately
circumvent surveillance controls, either individually or for the organization as a whole. To rectify
this, an external auditor is essential. Making government officials personally
responsible for overreaching and illegal behavior is also important. Not a single
one of those NSA LOVEINT snoops was fired, let alone prosecuted. And Snowden
was rebuffed repeatedly when he tried to express his concern internally about the
extent of the NSAs surveillance on Americans. Other law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, have
their own internal oversight mechanisms. Here, too, the more transparency, the better. We have always given the police
extraordinary powers to investigate crime. We do this knowingly, and we are safer as a society because of it, because we
regulate these actions and have some recourse to ensure that the police arent abusing them. We can argue about how well
these are working in the US and other countries, but the general idea is a sound one.
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Ext. Terror Net Benefit

The CP doesnt decrease domestic surveillance, clearly we dont link
to the Terror DA.
CP resurrects the TSP- solves terror attacks
Sessions, 5/20/15 (Jeff, Senator from Alabama, former practicing attorney in Russellville, Alabama, United
States Attorney for Alabamas Southern District, a position he held for 12 years. Sessions was elected Alabama Attorney
General in 1995, serving as the states chief legal officer until 1997, when he entered the United States Senate; Why
Should Terrorists Be Harder to Investigate than Routine Criminals?;
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418675/why-should-terrorists-be-harder-investigate-routine-criminals-jeffsessions)//JPM
The 9/11 attacks exposed the dangerous wall separating the intelligence and lawenforcement communities. In response, Congress developed a number of tools to
eliminate those barriers so that critical information could be timely and
appropriately shared to address radical Islamic terrorism . Among them was Section 215 of the
USA Patriot Act. In 2006, the National Security Agency transitioned the bulk telephonemetadata acquisition program authorized under the presidents Terrorist
Surveillance Program to the business-records court-order authority of
Section 215 . Since shortly after 9/11, this program has been helping to
keep Americans safe by acquiring non-content call records, i.e.,
telephone numbers and the date, time, and duration of a call. This
program has yielded invaluable intelligence that has helped prevent
attacks and uncovered terrorist plots.
The TSP in its current form (PRISM) wont stop attacks a revival of
the original program is needed
Taylor, 13 (Robert, writer for PolicyMic; 7/19/13; PRISM Probably Never Stopped and Never Will Stop a
Terrorist Attack; http://mic.com/articles/49449/prism-probably-never-stopped-and-never-will-stop-a-terroristattack)//JPM
Thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know many of the dirty details
behind the U.S. government's surveillance programs and the creation of a vast
surveillance and data storage system. Not only has Snowden helped further
unturn the rock of secrecy behind these surveillance programs but his revelations
and leaks have helped spark the debate about the proper balancing of freedom
and security. If we are to supposedly accept these unprecedented powers and
violations of civil liberties, does this type of mass surveillance at least actually
keep us safe? While the official party line, repeated ad nauseum, is that the NSA
surveillance program has helped stop "dozens" of terrorist attacks, a closer look
at the claims made by the White House and the program's defenders cast serious
doubt about the program's actual effectiveness. In a recent congressional hearing, Senators Mark
Udall and Ron Wyden released a joint statement calling on NSA head General Keith Alexander "Emperor
Alexander" of the covert national security state to be more forthcoming about
the surveillance program. The senators argue that the attacks Alexander claims
were thwarted "appear to have been identified using other collection methods.
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The public deserves a clear explanation. They also could have been one of the
FBI's many, many "terrorism" sting operations. Washington's Blog cites numerous sources
including an NSA veteran, Fortune Management, Wired, and constitutional and military law expert Jonathan Turley
which show that the
NSA PRISM program, and other Orwellian surveillance programs,

are useless and ineffective, resulting in false information and are actually
hindering the process of good police work and intelligence gathering. It didn't
stop the Boston Bombing or 9/11 either. Apparently the more eyes Big Brother has,
the less he actually sees. The surveillance state is, after all, a massive centrallyplanned government bureaucracy so one shouldn't be surprised by incompetence.
Do we really want to entrust the government this type of surveillance power "to
keep us safe" when it doesn't even know who it's killing with drone strikes ?
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Ext. Politics Net Benefit

Blanket immunity provisions unpopular in Congress
McGarity et al 13 (Thomas O., CPR Member Scholar, Prof. at UT, Editor of the Texas Law Review, leading
scholar in the fields of both administrative law and environmental law; Sidney A. Shapiro, Prof. Law at Wake Forest,
Frank U. Fletcher Chair of Administrative Law; Nicholas Vidargas, former Policy Analyst with the Center for Progressive
Reform, honors attorney fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, Office of Regional Counsel, in San
Francisco, where he worked on enforcement of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act and on Clean Water Act rulemaking, and where he initiated the first enforcement action under the Clean Air Act
General Duty Clause in Region 9, Stanford University Grad; March 2013; Sweeping Corporate Immunity for the Fuel
Industry: The Next Front in the Corporate Accountability Wars;
http://www.progressivereform.org/articles/Corporate_Immunity_Fuel_Industry_1303.pdf)//JPM
The latest battle in the corporate accountability wars is an effort to

persuade Congress to grant blanket immunity to entire industries
that might face litigation for defective products or corporate
negligence that endangers human health, imperils the environment,
and damages private property . The concept of sweeping corporate
immunity from state tort law a twisted cousin of federal preemption legislation that
also dismisses the rights of victims of corporate negligence was born in
response to the hugely successful tobacco litigation of the 1980s and 1990s, and
later attempts at comprehensive litigation against gun manufacturers and the
fast food industry.
Blanket immunity provisions specifically unpopular in CongressSpecter and Feinstein
Nakashima, 07 (Ellen, writer for The Washington Post, national security reporter for The Washington Post.
She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties. She previously served as a Southeast Asia
correspondent for the paper. She wrote about the presidential candidacy of Al Gore and co-authored a biography of Gore,
and has also covered federal agencies, Virginia state politics and local affairs. She joined the Post in 1995; Nov. 1, 2007;
Roadblock for Telecom Immunity; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103103126.html)//JPM
In a blow to the Bush administration, the
Senate Judiciary Committee's top Democrat and

Republican expressed reluctance yesterday to granting blanket immunity to
telecommunications carriers sued for assisting the government's warrantless
surveillance program. Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and the ranking Republican, Sen.
Arlen Specter (Pa.), had said that before even considering such a proposal, they would
need to see the legal documents underpinning the program, which began after
Sept. 11, 2001, and were put under court oversight in January. On Tuesday, the committee
was given access to some of the documents. But Leahy said yesterday that he had a "grave
concern" about blanket immunity, saying that "it seems to grant . . . amnesty for
telecommunications carriers for warrantless surveillance activities." The
activities seem to be "in violation of the privacy rights of Americans" and of
federal domestic surveillance law, he said, noting that he is still "carefully
considering" what is in the documents. The immunity provision sought by the
White House would wipe out about 40 lawsuits that accuse AT&T, Verizon
Communications and Sprint Nextel of invading Americans' privacy and
constitutional rights by assisting the government in domestic surveillance
without a warrant. The Senate intelligence committee approved the provision
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two weeks ago as part of a larger bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which governs some aspects of domestic surveillanc e. The Judiciary
Committee will take up the bill next. Immunity "is designed to shield this administration
from accountability for conducting surveillance outside the law," Leahy said. Dismissing
the lawsuits would eliminate "perhaps the only avenue" for "an honest
assessment" of the legality of the warrantless surveillance program , he said. Specter
agreed that the "courts ought not to be closed" to such lawsuits. "If, at this late date,
the Congress bails out whatever was done before -- and we can't even discuss
what has been done -- that is just an open invitation for this kind of conduct in
the future," he said. Specter added that he thinks the carriers "have a strong, equitable case" but that his
inclination is toward indemnification, where the government would assume any financial penalties. Sen. Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the immunity provision was one of "two big issues" she had
with the bill, and she suggested that limiting damages might be an alternative.
She noted that the lawsuits could cost carriers as much as $30 billion in penalties
-- a problem if taxpayers were to pick up the tab. Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L.
Wainstein told the committee that immunity was a question of "fairness" for the carriers. He
also said that proceeding with the cases risks the divulgence of classified
information. The government has invoked a claim of state secrets to stop the
litigation. "If we don't prevail with state secrets," Wainstein said, "then there's no
guarantee that that information is not going to get out. In fact, even just the filing of lawsuits
and the allegations made can actually end up . . . compromising sensitive sources
and methods."
Blanket amnesty for telecommunications companies are unpopular in
Congress- Blue America lobby
Klein, 08 (Howie, writer for HuffPo; 7/18/2008; Blue America Thanks Some Of The Patriots Who Stood Up For
The Constitution; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howie-klein/blue-america-thanks-some_b_111919.html)//JPM
"The
House of Representatives, with the support of Republican Scott Garrett, recently passed a bill that
would grant President Bush and future administrations unprecedented powers to spy on
American citizens without a warrant or review by any judge or court. The new law
would also let our nation's largest telecom companies off the hook for knowingly
violating the law and releasing their customers' private information at the behest
of George Bush. "Our constitutional right to protection against unsupervised
searches was written into our Bill of Rights for good reason by Founders whom
we rightly celebrate. "Neither President Bush nor Scott Garrett are as wise as James Madison. "It is
unfortunate that it appears that the telecom industry has managed to falsely conflate its
quest for retroactive immunity for lawbreaking with the issue of national security.
The Founding Fathers understood that our safety as a nation depended on our
being a nation of laws. Retroactive immunity undermines the rule of law, and
therefore undermines our principles and security as a nation. "The President, his
advisers, and his rubber stamps in Congress , including Scott Garrett, have demonstrated a
pattern of disregard for the laws of the United States. This bill not only immunizes
telecom companies from lawsuits, but it would also block the American people
from ever knowing the full extent of the Bush Administration's illegal behavior. "I
urge my fellow Democrats in the Senate to vote against this unnecessary and
deeply troubling law. "I believe that Congress must protect the rights of citizens and
the laws of our country from career politicians in Washington too willing to cave
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to special interests and endanger the fundamental rights that we, as Americans,
hold so dear." State Senator Andrew Rice (D-OK) is running a strong campaign against one
of the most extremist members of the U.S. Senate , James Inhofe, who raked in $12,550
from the Telecoms this year and was determined to grant them retroactive
immunity -- and positively giddy about giving the government the right to listen in to all phone conversations and
read all e-mails without a court order. Andrew disagrees -- strongly: "Congress must remain vigilant in
order to protect Americans from another terrorist attack. However, the bill that is
before Congress this week bargains away the privacy of law-abiding American
citizens while protecting the companies that allegedly participated in the
President's illegal wiretapping program. The Senate should stick to the narrow fix it set out to
accomplish by making it clear that the government does not have to obtain a warrant to listen to foreign-to-foreign
communications. Instead, this
bill allows a significant expansion of the Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act so that government can eavesdrop on the
international communications of innocent American citizens. Since losing my brother on
9/11, I have vowed to improve America's anti-terrorism capability without sacrificing the freedoms that so many
Americans have died to protect." Rick Noriega is running in that big ole state just south of Oklahoma. His opponent,
rubber stamp corporate shill John Cornyn has taken $15,250 from the Telecom
industry this year and he is as eager as Inhofe to grant them retroactive
immunity. Rick has thought about the issue more seriously and from a different
perspective than just helping out campaign contributors. "Many times throughout my
lifetime I have sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States . This isn't a part-time
Constitution. We as a nation cannot grant anyone sweeping amnesty if they break
the rules. It's appalling that my opponent, John Cornyn, puts his special interest
campaign contributors ahead of the Constitution. Texans have had enough.
Americans will not accept an abuse of power, and they will not accept corporations getting away with breaking the law.
We already have a law in place that balances national security concerns while
adhering to the Constitution. This is not the time to compromise the privacy of
the American people and not the time to disregard the Constitution of United
States. I regret that the Senate has voted this way." Jim Himes is standing firmly with his state's
senior senator, Chris Dodd on this issue. Fake moderate Chris Shayes is once again eager to rubber stamp the BushCheney agenda, somehow trying to say that granting Bush the ability to wiretap all American citizens without a court order
makes us "safe." Jim sees right through that craven, partisan posturing: "In
Congress, I will always stand up for the

fundamental American belief that no man, and no corporation, is above the law . As always, this is a
matter for the courts to decide-- not for Congress, and absolutely not for the same Bush Administration who may have
violated the law in the first place. It
is great to see so many American citizens of all

backgrounds coming together to stand up for the rule of law and in opposition to
retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies who may have illegally
spied on American citizens at the Bush Administration's request. I am disappointed that Chris Shays and so
many others continue to stand with President Bush by refusing to stand up for this most fundamental of American
principles." Jon Tester (D-MT) was
a populist underdog who ran for the Senate in 2006

against an Insider Democrat backed by Chuck Schumer and the Beltway
Establishment. He beat him in the primary, beat an entrenched Republican
incumbent in November and has gone on to represent the interests of regular Montana folks in DC. His statement
about the this fight was an inspiration and may well have influenced his Montana colleague: " It deals with the
freedoms that so many people have fought and died for. If we want to get serious
about the War on Terror, we need to make the investments to fight the war on
terror. We ought not be taking rights away from honest citizens. If we've got terror cells
around the world, then let's invest in human intelligence. Let's invest in our Special Forces. Let's go after 'em, and let's be
serious, and not get sidetracked by Iraq. Right now, we're
taking rights away from honest people. If

they think you fall into their list, you're a target. By the time they figure out
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there's a terror cell, they can get a warrant.... The government ought not be taking
away our freedoms." Darcy Burner is running against a corporate hack and
rubber stamp in Washington, Dave Reichert, who is all about rewarding his
corporate donors with retroactive immunity. Reichert took $6,000 for the
Telecoms so far this year and thinks they should not be accountable for crimes they may have committed. Darcy has
been one of the most outspoken opponents of this bill; watch the 30 second video. After the bill passed in the House, she
didn't despair; she start rallying for action: Like many of you, I'm
incredibly disappointed with

today's vote on retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies . I've
made my position on this issue very clear, and I've been happy to be fighting to ensure that we
uphold the Constitution through all of this. But the real question is what we do
going forward. We need to make sure that we elect people to Congress who are
going to defend the Constitution
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--A2: Sqou Solves

Blanket immunity and the other problems of the 2008 FAA exist in
the sqou
Byellin, 7/10/15 (Jeremy, attorney practicing in the areas of family law and estate planning; Today in 2008:
the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 are signed into law; http://blog.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/legalresearch/today-in-2008-the-fisa-amendments-act-of-2008-are-signed-into-law/#sthash.eBlyln0M.dpuf)//JPM
mass surveillance programs have become increasingly

visible to the public over the past several years, thanks in part to
disclosures by parties such as Wikileaks and Edward Snowden . Just because the
public is more aware of these programs doesnt mean that they have
stopped operating, or that the laws purported to authorize them arent still
fully in effect. In fact, one such law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, is marking
the seventh anniversary of its enactment and has since that time even
survived a Supreme Court challenge. The amendments, signed into law by President
George W. Bush on July 10, 2008, provide a slew of tools to further facilitate the
operation many of these surveillance programs. For example, the act releases
telecommunication companies from any legal liability for furnishing
information to or otherwise assisting the Attorney General or the Director
of National Intelligence. Furthermore, the act prevents the states from
investigating or requiring disclosure from telecommunication companies
over any such assistance provided to the federal government. Beyond
protecting telecoms, the act also allows the government to destroy any
records of the searches and surveillance it performs, whereas government
agencies are normally required to retain records for a period of ten years.
While the act allows for the surveillance of foreigners who are abroad , most pertinent to the
surveillance of U.S. citizens, the Amendments Act authorizes the
wiretapping of Americans who are also overseas. These last two provisions
were the primary subject of the aforementioned Supreme Court case
challenging the acts constitutionality: 2013s Clapper v. Amnesty International. In Clapper, a
group of attorneys with clients who have faced or are facing terrorism
charges, a group of journalists, and a human rights organization (Amnesty
International), all sued challenging the constitutionality of the amendments,
claiming that they all engaged and continue to engage in sensitive
communications with individuals believed to be the target of surveillance
under the act.
The U.S. Governments
The CISA* bill will maintain sqou blanket immunity and government
overreach only the CP checks
*The CISA bill has been introduced but not passed the Senate or House
-The argument is that even though its marketed as a cyber security bill, its really more of a surveillance bill, so
if the opponent asks you why its relevant say that
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Jaycox, 3/19/15 (Mark, Legislative Analyst for EFF, educated at Reed College, spent a year abroad at the
University of Oxford (Wadham College), and concentrated in Political History, Former legislative research assistant for
Lexis Nexis; Senate Intelligence Committee Advances Terrible "Cybersecurity" Bill Surveillance Bill in Secret Session;
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/03/senate-intelligence-committee-advances-terrible-cybersecurity-billsurveillance)//JPM
The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a terrible cybersecurity bill called the
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) to the Senate floor last week. The new chair (and
huge fan of transparency) Senator Richard Burr may have set a record as he kept the bill
secret until Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the newest Senate Intelligence bill is
one of the worst yet. Cybersecurity bills aim to facilitate information sharing
between companies and the government, but their broad immunity clauses for
companies, vague definitions, and aggressive spying powers make them secret
surveillance bills. CISA marks the fifth time in as many years that Congress has tried to pass "cybersecurity"
legislation. Join us now in killing this bill. The newest Senate Intelligence bill joins other
cybersecurity information sharing legislation like Senator Carper's Cyber Threat
Sharing Act of 2015. All of them are largely redundant. Last year, President Obama signed
Executive Order 13636 (EO 13636) directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to
expand current information sharing programs. In February, he signed another
Executive Order encouraging regional cybersecurity information sharing and
creating yet another Cyber Threat Center. Despite this, members of Congress like
Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr continue to introduce bills that
would destroy privacy protections and grant new spying powers to companies.
New Countermeasures and Monitoring Powers Aside from its redundancy, the Senate Intelligence bill grants two new
authorities to companies. First, the bill authorizes companies to launch countermeasures (now called "defensive
measures" in the bill) for a "cybersecurity purpose" against a "cybersecurity threat." "Cybersecurity purpose" is so broadly
defined that it means almost anything related to protecting (including physically protecting) an information system, which
can be a computer or software. The same goes for a "cybersecurity threat," which includes anything that "may result" in an
unauthorized effort to impact the availability of the information system. Even with the changed language, it's
still
unclear what restrictions exist on "defensive measures." Since the definition of
"information system" is inclusive of files and software, can a company that has a
file stolen from them launch "defensive measures" against the thief's computer?
What's worse, the bill may allow such actions as long as they don't cause "substantial"
harm. The bill leaves the term "substantial" undefined. If true, the
countermeasures "defensive measures" clause could increasingly encourage
computer exfiltration attacks on the Interneta prospect that may appeal to
some "active defense" (aka offensive) cybersecurity companies, but does not favor
the everyday user. Second, the bill adds a new authority for companies to monitor
information systems to protect an entity's hardware or software. Here again, the
broad definitions could be used in conjunction with the monitoring clause to spy
on users engaged in potentially innocuous activity. Once collected, companies can
then share the information, which is also called cyber threat indicators, freely
with government agencies like the NSA. Sharing Information with NSA Such sharing will
occur because under this bill, DHS would no longer be the lead agency making
decisions about the cybersecurity information received, retained, or shared to
companies or within the government. Its new role in the bill mandates DHS send
information to agencieslike the NSA"in real-time." The bill also allows
companies to bypass DHS and share the information immediately with other
agencies, like the intelligence agencies, which ensures that DHS's current privacy
protections wont be applied to the information. The provision is ripe for
improper and over-expansive information sharing. Overbroad Use of Information Once the
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information is sent to any
government agency (including local law enforcement), it can use the

information for reasons other than for cybersecurity purposes. The provisions
grant the government far too much leeway in how to use the information for noncybersecurity purposes. The public wont even know what information is being
collected, shared, or used because the bill will exempt all of it from disclosure
under the Freedom of Information Act. In 2012, the Senate negotiated a much tighter definition in
Senator Lieberman's Cybersecurity Act of 2012. The definition only allowed law enforcement to
use information for a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an
imminent threat of death, or a serious threat to a minor. The Senate Intelligence
Committee's billat the minimumshould've followed the already negotiated
language. Near-Blanket Immunity The bill also retains near-blanket immunity for
companies to monitor information systems and to share the information as long
as it's conducted according to the act. Again, "cybersecurity purpose" rears its overly
broad head since a wide range of actions conducted for a cybersecurity purpose
are allowed by the bill. The high bar immunizes an incredible amount of activity.
Existing private rights of action for violations of the Wiretap Act, Stored
Communications Act, and potentially the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would
be precluded or at least sharply restricted by the clause . It remains to be seen
why such immunity is needed when just a few months ago, the FTC
and DOJ noted they would not prosecute companies for sharing such
information. It's also unclear because we continue to see companies freely
share information among each other and with the government both publicly via
published reports, information sharing and analysis centers, and private
communications.
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--A2: Circumvention
CP avoids circumvention- civil justice system
McGarity et al 13 (Thomas O., CPR Member Scholar, Prof. at UT, Editor of the Texas Law Review, leading
scholar in the fields of both administrative law and environmental law; Sidney A. Shapiro, Prof. Law at Wake Forest,
Frank U. Fletcher Chair of Administrative Law; Nicholas Vidargas, former Policy Analyst with the Center for Progressive
Reform, honors attorney fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, Office of Regional Counsel, in San
Francisco, where he worked on enforcement of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act and on Clean Water Act rulemaking, and where he initiated the first enforcement action under the Clean Air Act
General Duty Clause in Region 9, Stanford University Grad; March 2013; Sweeping Corporate Immunity for the Fuel
Industry: The Next Front in the Corporate Accountability Wars;
http://www.progressivereform.org/articles/Corporate_Immunity_Fuel_Industry_1303.pdf)//JPM
The civil justice system not only serves as a backstop for federal regulation, it supports federal
regulation and makes it more effective. Professor Thomas McGarity describes the
informational interactions between regulatory agencies and the courts as
feedback loops ... in which each institution draws on information, experience
and different incentives of the other.62 Immunity legislation eliminates this
possibility that the civil justice system will make the regulatory system more
effective. As a result of tort actions, Congress is informed of problems in the regulatory
system. Consider, for example, how the civil justice system prompted legislation
and regulation in response to the Ford Explorer/Firestone tire problem. In 2000,
Congress passed the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability and
Documentation (TREAD) Act, which required NHTSA to develop a new system for gathering and analyzing
reports of tire, equipment, and motor vehicle defects.63 Regulatory agencies obtain technical data,
analyses of the state of the science from the relevant literature, and other
information that can inform subsequent regulatory decisions. At the same time, the
courts look to the agencies for analysis of the risks and benefits of regulated
products, as well as regulatory standards that can factor into decisions about
whether regulated parties have met their duty of care. Feedback loops have
unquestionably improved the quality of decision-making in both institutions.64
Immunity legislation destroys the feedback loop, unwisely limiting the useful
information that is obtained from the tort system. Tort claims filed in state courts are a primary
source of information for agencies about potential holes or gaps in the regulatory protection system. Simply by virtue of
a claim having been filed, the tort system provides signals that defects may exist or existing safety standards may be
inadequate. The
availability of damages in state tort lawsuits can give injured

citizens the incentive to come forward and share potentially valuable
information.65 At each successive step in the litigation process, tort suits provide additional
opportunities for the development of information that could be useful to federal
agencies.66 Pre-trial discovery can turn up technical data about the risks posed by a product or practice. The
discovery process can also uncover useful information about decisions made by manufacturers concerning safety and
environmental decisions, thereby adding a level of public accountability. Regulatory
agencies may also be

informed by expert testimony given in discovery or at trial when the testimony is
bolstered by the experts analysis of the state of the science. In addition, expert
analysis of the specific facts that give rise to tort claims sheds light on how
injuries actually occur in the real world.67 Finally, jury decisions, whether in favor of injured
plaintiffs or manufacturer defendants, provide insight about evolving social norms,
information that can be useful to agencies when they analyze the potential
impacts of proposed regulations. Immunity legislation would destroy this vital
source of information about corporate misconduct in areas subject to the
immunity shield. Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the MTBE litigation, for example, uncovered dozens of smoking
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gun documents showing that the petroleum companies knew full well that MTBE was contaminating groundwater, that
it caused that water to be unfit for drinking, and that they had not disclosed information to EPA. If
Congress
passes the DFA, there will be no civil justice actions to ferret out evidence of
corporate misconduct relating to ethanol and future fuel additives. Adequate
protection of public health depends on the continued existence of state common
law as a complement to federal regulation. Common law has a unique ability to
provide corrective justice and is a useful way to fill regulatory gaps caused by
outdated or imperfect regulation. States have traditionally enjoyed primary authority to protect the
health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. Federal immunity legislation such as sweeping fuel
immunity efforts weaken this fundamental principle of American government in
a simplistic effort to relieve corporate defendants of liability for producing
dangerous products.
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---A2: Companies Protected under SSD

Federal judges agree- SSD doesnt stop the telecom. Industry from
presenting defenses in courts
The federal judge who is considering all of the lawsuits against communications
carriers has already held that the common law state secrets privilege does not
prevent phone companies like AT&T from presenting their defenses to the court,
in camera and ex parte. To the extent that Congress wants to ensure this result, EFF urges Congress to
clarify that FISAs existing security procedures, codified at 18 USC 1806(f ), already
permit defendants in the pending cases to present all relevant evidence in their
defense. EFF has shared such draft language with key Members of Congress and staff.
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---A2: President has the Authority

Judicial branch checks the executive simple checks and balances
The courts should be allowed to determine whether the President has exceeded
his powers by obtaining wholesale access to the domestic communications of
millions of ordinary Americans from AT&T and the other communications
companies, based on the claim that Article II of the Constitution and the Authorization for Use of Military
Force in Afghanistan allowed both the President and the companies to ignore the Fourth
Amendment, FISA, and multiple other privacy statutes.
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---A2: Common Law Doctrines Shield Defendants

Common law doesnt overrule specific Congressional rules like
Blanket Amnesty
Generally in law, common
law immunities do not trump specific legal duties imposed

by statute, such as the specific statutory duties Congress has long imposed on
telecommunications companies to protect their customers privacy and records.
Specifically, in the pending case against AT&T, the judge consistent with this venerable hierarchy
of legal authority already has ruled unequivocally that: AT&T cannot seriously
contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the
alleged domestic dragnet was legal. Even so, the communications company
defendants can and should have the opportunity to present these defenses to the
courts, and the courts not Congress preemptively should decide whether they
are sufficient. Again, the court should decide.
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---A2: Hurts Companies Reputation/Consumer Base

Wont hurt companies- risk already exists, no empirics
There is no evidence that this litigation has or will reduce the defendant
companies bottom lines or customer base, and vague assertions that the pending
litigation might result in reputational damage to the defendant companies is
utterly belied by the facts. Despite nearly two years of very public litigation in which
AT&T has lost motions at every turn, AT&T just announced record profits for the
third quarter of 2007: a 41% increase over the previous year. AT&T publicly
attributed its success to signing a record number of new customers . As to possible
threats faced by the companies and their personnel here and abroad, permitting the litigation to proceed
will not increase such risk as already may exist . Ironically, telecommunications
companies recent hand-in-glove participation in national security surveillance
has been perhaps most effectively broadcast around the globe by the
Administration, including statements by the Director of National Intelligence ,
along with other senior Bush Administration officials. Silencing the pending suits will not expunge
these admissions from the public record. Further, it strains credulity to suggest that
the foreign enemies of the nation have not been aware for decades of this
obviously necessary partnership
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---A2: Legal In-Roads Check

The attorney generals check on blanket amnesty is a rubber stamp
Single, 08 (Ryan, blogger and journalist covering tech business, tech policy, civil liberty and privacy issues. His
work has appeared extensively in Wired.com, and Singel co-founded the Threat Level blog; 6/19/08; Dems Agree to
Expand Domestic Spying, Grant Telecoms Amnesty; http://www.wired.com/2008/06/dems-agree-to-e/)//JPM
Under the longstanding rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the government was free to
engage in dragnet wiretapping outside the United States, but in order to tap
communications inside the country, the government needed court approval and
individualized warrants if an Americans communications would be caught.
Additionally, the bill grants amnesty to the nations telecoms that are being sued for
allegedly breaking federal wiretapping laws by turning over billions of Americans
call records to government data-mining programs and giving the government
access to internet and phone infrastructure inside the country. The bill strips the
right of a federal district court to decide whether the companies violated federal
laws prohibiting wiretapping without a court order. Instead, the attorney general
would need only certify to the court either that a sued company did not
participate, or that the government provided some sort of written request to the
companies that said that the president authorized the program and that his
lawyers deemed it to be legal. That would be presented to federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker, who
is overseeing the more than 40 consolidated cases against the telecoms. Walkers authority would be
limited to judging whether the preponderance of the evidence is that the
companies did get a written request, and if he finds that to be true as the Senate
Intelligence Committee has already publicly stated he must dismiss the cases. Thats immunity,
and its unconstitutional, according to the ACLUs Caroline Fredrickson. "The telecom companies
simply have to produce a piece of paper we already know exists, resulting in
immediate dismissal," Fredrickson said in a written statement. "Thats not accountability.
Loopholes and judicial theater dont do our Fourth Amendment rights justice."
Hoyer, under pressure from so-called Blue Dog Democrats wanting to avoid being
labeled soft on terrorism in the fall campaigns, justified the bill as a necessary
compromise. "It is the result of compromise, and like any compromise is not perfect, but I believe it strikes a sound
balance," Hoyer said in a press release announcing the deal. Thats a significant change for Hoyer, who in March in a
House floor speech opposed blanket immunity, saying "I submit that a reasonable responsible Congress would not
seek to immunize conduct without knowing what conduct or misconduct it is immunizing." The
bill itself oddly

admits that the governments surveillance activities included more than the
previously admitted "Terrorist Surveillance Program." That program, admitted by the president
after The New York Times revealed it in December 2005, targeted Americans to intercept their international phone calls
and e-mails without getting court approval. In a provision authorizing an oversight investigation, the bill refers to the
"Presidents Surveillance Program," of which the so-called TSP was just one part. That
all but confirms what

many have reported and suspected: that there was much more unilateral
surveillance than the president or his lawyers have ever admitted.
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Affirmative
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Blanket Immunity Plank
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Fails 2ac
Legal in roads to blanket immunity allow for functional checks
against overstretch- Attorney General specifically answers their
author
Sanchez, 08 (Julian, American libertarian writer living in Washington, D.C.. Currently a Senior fellow at the Cato
Institute, he previously covered technology and privacy issues as the Washington Editor for Ars Technica;
There are 50 ways to leave your lover, but only
five ways for a company to be entitled to

immunity under the FISA Amendments Act. Three are versions of "they provided
assistance, but it was lawful under the statutes in effect at the time ." Another is
not to actually have provided any assistance. The final , and most contentious, is the new
form of retroactive amnesty provided by the law: The attorney general can assert
that the company provided assistance calculated to prevent a terrorist attack on
the United States in the wake of 9/11, pursuant to a written directive from a high
administration official assuring them that the surveillance had been authorized
by the president and determined to be legal. Mukasey's certification says only that one or
more of these excuses applies to all the defendants in the consolidated wiretap
litigation, asserting that the public disclosure of any more specific information
about the grounds for immunity "would cause exceptional harm to the National
Security of the United States." It's therefore impossible to know which of the defendant telecoms provided
assistance, or under what circumstances. The attorney general also denied EFF's contention
that, in addition to narrowly targeted eavesdropping on suspected Al Qaeda affiliates, there
was any broader program of "dragnet collection on the content of plaintiffs'
communications." Precisely what this latter contention means is unclear: As Ars
noted last week, there is some legal controversy over when, precisely, the
"collection" of a communication takes place. Therefore Mukasey's denial could
mean that, despite the evidence provided by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, there was no blanket
interception of communications for keyword analysis. But it could as easily mean that
the attorney general does not believe that whatever form of "inside the box" analysis of
those communications NSA conducted counts as "collection" for the purposes of
FISA or the Fourth Amendment.
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Doesnt Solve Terrorism 2ac

Telecommunication blanket immunity is key to stop terror attackstheir author
Etzioni, 3/9/15 (Amitai, prof. of IR at George Washington, senior adviser to the Carter White House and taught at
Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley; Do Tech Companies Owe It to the
Public to Cooperate With Surveillance?; http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/tech-companies-owe-itto-the-public-to-cooperate-with-surveillance/387094/)//JPM
For decades,
the communication companies, led by AT&T, played a key
(and quiet) role in helping to protect national security . The government

regularly gained access to their communication hubs and collected billions of
phone records, email messages, and other communications to search for patterns
that would identify which people pose a risk to the United States . This close cooperation
lasted throughout the Cold War and intensified after 9/11. Edward Snowden shattered this cozy
relationship by publicly revealing the details of these arrangements and by
claiming that they led to abuses. The Snowden revelations greatly troubled the
corporations involved for more reasons than one. Some nations, like Brazil, considered setting up
their own versions of the Internet to protect their citizens from American snooping a move that would harm
the business of companies such as Google and Facebook that greatly benefit from
the unified World Wide Web. (Google is used by 1.17 billion people worldwide, while 1.35 billion use
Facebook.) These same corporations also feared that Americans would stop using
their services if they felt that their privacy was compromised. Many of their CEOs
hold the libertarian view that that government regulations are a costly burden
and that the government that governs least governs best. And they still seem to
hold on to the vision that cyberspace is a new world that can govern itself. Hightech corporations decided to use high-power encryption methods that will secure
privacy for their customersand that law enforcement and security agencies will be
unable or at least will find it very difficult to crack. Some of these measures are
designed so that even the companies themselves cannot decrypt the messages .
Hence even if a court ruled that there are compelling reasons to seek the records of
a person who is suspected to be a terrorist or a serial killer, the companies would
be unable to decode the messages.
Cooperation with telecommunications companies are vital to
stopping terror attacks
CBS, 08 (CBS News; 2/12/2008; Bush: No More Debate Over Spy Program;
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-no-more-debate-over-spy-program/)//JPM
President Bush pressured the House on Wednesday to pass new rules for monitoring terrorists' communications, saying
"terrorists
are planning new attacks on our country ... that will make Sept. 11 pale
by comparison." Mr. Bush said he would not agree to giving the House more time to
debate a measure the Senate passed Tuesday governing the government's ability
to work with telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on phone calls and emails between suspected terrorists. The bill gives phone companies retroactive
protection from lawsuits filed on the basis of cooperation they gave the
government without court permission - something Mr. Bush insisted was included in the bill. About
40 lawsuits have been filed against telecom companies by people alleging violations of wiretapping and privacy laws. The
House did not include the immunity provision in a similar bill it passed last year. " In
order to be able to
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discover ... the enemy's plans, we need the cooperation of

telecommunication companies ," Mr. Bush said. " If these companies are
subjected to lawsuits that could cost them billions of dollars, they
won't participate. They won't help us. They won't help protect
America ."
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Econ DA
Blanket immunity provisions stops the Telecom. Industry from being
subject to expensive lawsuits and upholds governmental cooperation
key to the overall industry (same card as below)
Etzioni, 3/9/15 (Amitai, prof. of IR at George Washington, senior adviser to the Carter White House and taught at
Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley; Do Tech Companies Owe It to the
Public to Cooperate With Surveillance?; http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/tech-companies-owe-itto-the-public-to-cooperate-with-surveillance/387094/)//JPM
the communication companies, led by AT&T, played a key (and quiet)

role in helping to protect national security. The government regularly gained
access to their communication hubs and collected billions of phone records, email
messages, and other communications to search for patterns that would identify
which people pose a risk to the United States . This close cooperation lasted
throughout the Cold War and intensified after 9/11. Edward Snowden shattered
this cozy relationship by publicly revealing the details of these arrangements and
by claiming that they led to abuses. The Snowden revelations greatly troubled the
corporations involved for more reasons than one. Some nations, like Brazil, considered setting up their
own versions of the Internet to protect their citizens from American snooping a move that would harm the
business of companies such as Google and Facebook that greatly benefit from the
unified World Wide Web. (Google is used by 1.17 billion people worldwide, while
1.35 billion use Facebook.) These same corporations also feared that Americans
would stop using their services if they felt that their privacy was compromised.
Many of their CEOs hold the libertarian view that that government regulations
are a costly burden and that the government that governs least governs best. And
they still seem to hold on to the vision that cyberspace is a new world that can
govern itself.
For decades,
Spills over to the global economy
Chi et al, 2014 (Jian, China Unicom; Wenji Chen, China Center for Information Industry Development;
Yaoqiang Han, China Center for Information Industry Development; Jing Li; Master Candidate
School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking
University; Research on Fourth Generation 4G Mobile Communication Industry Spillover Effect Empirical Case Study
of Beijing; file:///Users/jpmickyd/Downloads/lemcs0573.pdf)//JPM
AbstractAlong
with the development of information technology, the impact of

information on global economic and social has become more and more profound.
Mobile communication (4G) industry has brought huge spillovers
to the economic and social benefits.
This paper combines theoretical analysis and empirical
research to analyze its spillovers effect. It uses the input-output model to carry an empirical study of mobile
communications (4G) spillovers effect. At last, from the perspective of both qualitative and quantitative, it analyzes the
contribution of mobile communication (4G) industry to the economy and society. Keywords- mobile communications
(4G); spillovers effect; empirical research I. INTRODUCTION With the accelerating informatization all around the
world, the
application of information technology not only promote the optimal

allocation of global resources and innovation of development model, but also
profoundly affect the politics, economy and culture of society. National Twelfth
Five-Year Development Plan proposes to speed up the upgrading of industrial
restructuring to cope with the increasingly fierce international competition,
which presents new challenges to industrial technological innovation.
Information and communication industry as a support, high permeability basic
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industries, the development of the whole economy and society has a considerable
contribution rate. As a supportive and high permeability basic industry,
telecommunication industry makes a considerable contribution to
the development of the whole economy and society . 4G technology is
an important component of the
next generation of information technology, which has become a
world economy . The world's major telecom operators will or have started to deploy 4G
commercial network. By 2015, the global industry scale of communication, including 4G,
will reach 1.5 billion Yuan.
new growth point of
<Extend Econ Impact>
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---Ext. Telecom K2 Econ

Telecommunications key to overall US econ growth
Hogendorn, 10 (Christaan, Associate Professor of Economics

Wesleyan University; May 2010; Rutgers Center for Research
in Regulated Industries Eastern Conference, Skytop, PA; Spillovers and
Network Neutrality;
http://chogendorn.web.wesleyan.edu/spillovers.pdf)//JPM
Magnitude of GPT Spillovers. Several
studies find that spillovers from GPTs, and from information

very large and affect entire economies. Jorgenson and Stiroh
one sixth of the United States productivity growth from
technology (IT) in particular, are

(1999) estimate that
199096 was attributable to IT . Rller and Waverman (2001) find that up to one third
of OECD economic growth
197090
is attributable to
telecommunications infrastructure . Czernich et al. (2009) find that an increase of

10% in broadband penetration increases annual GDP growth by 0.91.5
percentage points. Jorgenson et al. (2008) show that U.S. productivity growth in
the early 2000s was based on a wide variety of industries adopting new forms of
IT in production. Indeed, most research on economic growth and GPTs suggests
that economies need GPTs in order to grow. (LCB, Jovanovic and Rousseau 2005)
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TSP Plank
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Fails 2ac
TSP fails to solve attacks worse than the sqou, guts FISA
effectiveness
Anderson, 08 (Austin, J.D./M.B.A from Ohio State Moritz College of Law
and Fisher College of Business, Class of 2009. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in
Political Science from Baylor University in 2004; 2008; The Terrorist Surveillance Program: Assessing the Legality of
the Unknown; http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2012/02/Anderson.pdf)//JPM
Despite the dearth of information regarding the TSP, commentators
have frequently condemned

the program as a violation of FISA.34 These critics assert that the procedures codified in
FISA represent the sole method through which the executive branch can conduct
electronic surveillance, a relationship unchanged by subsequent legislation. It is
generally accepted that the president has the power to conduct electronic surveillance.36
However, this power is not unlimited: the Constitution serves as a fundamental
check on the executives power to conduct electronic surveillance.37 Furthermore,
Congress enacted FISA to regulate the executive branchs use of electronic
surveillance when gathering foreign intelligence information.38 The real debate
centers on the degree to which FISA regulates or limits the executives power to
conduct electronic surveillance. The U.S. Code explicitly states that FISA is the exclusive means by
which electronic surveillance . . . may be conducted.39 In light of this language, critics argue that FISA regulations
governed the activities conducted through the TSP.40 However, FISA
contains a provision that

permits Congress to amend the Act through subsequent legislation.41 The Bush
administration believes that, since Congress empowered the president to conduct
the war in Afghanistan through the AUMF, it amended FISA by implication to
allow the TSP.42 However, critics deny the contention that the AUMF, or any other
statute, has repealed the procedural constraints on electronic surveillance
contained in FISA.43 In countering the presidents claims, critics frequently employ a variety of interpretive
tactics. Critics are quick to point out that the law disapproves of repeals by
implication.44 Commentators assert that Congress would not silently amend
FISA through a statute that never once refers to the NSA, electronic surveillance
of U.S. citizens, or FISA itself.45 In fact, Congress has amended FISA five times since
the September 11th attacks without any mention of the AUMF.46 Critics also reject
the administrations assertion that the AUMF impliedly repeals FISA based on a
simple dissection of the plain meaning of the AUMF.47 The AUMF authorizes the president to
use all necessary and proper force to defend the U.S. against terrorists.48 In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the administration
convinced the Supreme Court that the detention of enemy combatants was a necessary and appropriate force to
fighting a war.49 Here, the administration arguably encounters more difficulty in characterizing electronic surveillance
as force. dThe
administrations attempts to broadly interpret the language of the

AUMF appear to be inconsistent with Congress intent. While the Court is not likely
to consider congressional reaction, Congress response to the TSP provides some
evidence of congressional intent. Senator Tom Daschle stated that the government considered granting
the president authorization to use appropriate force in the United States and against those nations [that support
terrorists]. . . , before ultimately deciding to limit the authorization to appropriate force against those nations.50
Senator Daschle explained that the
Senate rejected the former language because it would

have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just
overseaswhere we all understood he wanted authority to actbut right here in
the United States.51 The Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision could provide useful insight in grasping how the
Supreme Court is likely to interpret the AUMF. In Hamdi, the Supreme Court interpreted the clause in the AUMF that
authorizes the president to
use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations .

. . he determines planned . . . the terrorist attacks.52 The Court held that the
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clause necessary and appropriate force provided the president with the
authority to detain enemy combatants because the detention of troops was a
fundamental incident of waging war.53 Some critics contend that the use of electronic
surveillance is not a fundamental incident to war. On its face, a more likely interpretation is that
the act of capturing a prisoner of war on the battlefield is far easier to classify as a
fundamental incident of waging war than intercepting communication between
U.S. citizens and suspected terrorists abroad.54 Furthermore, wiretaps gather a
broader range of information without discerning whether the content has any
relation to national security.55 The existence of a congressionally approved
manner of using wiretaps necessitates the finding that this less discerning
method of gathering information is not a fundamental incident to war.56 As
previously noted, FISA contains two exceptions that provide conditions where the
government may conduct electronic surveillance without first obtaining a
warrant.57 Some critics believe that the presence of the second exception reinforces the
illegitimacy of the TSP. Suzanne Spaulding, who served as the executive director of the National Commission
on Terrorism, noted: FISA anticipates situations in which speed is essential. It allows
the government to start eavesdropping without a court order and to keep it going
for a maximum of three days. And while the FISA application process is often burdensome in routine
cases, it can also move with remarkable speed when necessary, with applications written and approved in just a few
hours.58 Additionally, the special court overseeing FISA warrants has been extremely accommodating over the years;
through December 25, 2005, only four of 5,645 applications for warrants were denied.59 Critics contend that the
collective weight of these arguments proves that Congress did not amend FISA through the AUMF. With FISA surviving
without amendment, the TSP was subject to the procedural guidelines established in the Act. The TSP indisputably
operated outside the FISA regulations; therefore, critics conclude that the program was a clear violation of federal law.
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Ext. Fails
CP cant solve privacy infringes on 1st and 4th amendment rights
the Unknown; http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2012/02/Anderson.pdf)//JPM
The Bush administration and critics of the
TSP predictably differ as to the programs

constitutionality. The Department of Justice warns that congressional intrusion
into the Presidents implied power to gather intelligence could be
unconstitutional.80 Alternatively, critics assert that Congress operated within its
constitutional power in enacting FISA81 and that the TSP raises First and Fourth
Amendment issues.82 The presidents powers are established in Article II of the U.S.
Constitution.83 Among those powers granted to the president are the powers to act as the
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and to tend to the United States
foreign affairs.84 The Justice Department proposes that the duty to protect the
U.S. from foreign enemies is entwined within these constitutionally-guaranteed
powers.85 The right to collect intelligence follows the duty to protect the U.S.
from its enemies: the president needs information to make informed decisions
regarding matters of national security. The Supreme Court has frequently determined that the
president has authority to employ espionage to gather information necessary to protect the country.86 Consequently, the
Bush administration has warned that any attempt to limit the presidents power to obtain foreign intelligence could be
an unconstitutional infringement on the executives Article II power.87 Many critics
maintain the TSP is

unconstitutional despite the presidential power to guard the U.S. from foreign
enemies.88 Some dissenters doubt the administrations assertion that the
Constitution grants the president the power to gather foreign intelligence;89
however, even assuming that the administration does have this power, some critics
argue that congressional authority to legislate in the field of foreign intelligence
is well established.90 Therefore, they insist FISA is the product of constitutionally
permissible congressional action.91
Prefer empirics- previous court cases prove its illegal and violates
FISA
the Unknown; http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2012/02/Anderson.pdf, HeinOnline)//JPM
The response to the revelation of the TSP in The New York Times has been
significant.161 Several law schools across the nation have held symposia on the
topic.162 Members of Congress, from both parties, introduced a number of bills
on the topic in 2006. In January 2007, The New York Times described the
controversy as 13 months of bruising national debate.163 Perhaps the most
relevant response to the TSP is the recent litigation challenging the abandoned
programs legality. In August 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union won a
judgment against the National Security Agency.164 In the opinion, District Judge
Taylor found the TSP unconstitutional in that it violated the Fourth Amendment
and FISA.165 The administration appealed the case, and the Sixth Circuit
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vacated the district courts judgment in July 2007.166 The Circuit Courts
decision turned on the Plaintiffs standing, rather than the constitutionality of
the TSP.167 Another case, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Inc. v. Bush, has
made national headlines in 2007.168 Al-Haramain sued the Bush administration
for allegedly conducting warrantless surveillance on the organization and its
directors.169 The district court denied the governments motion to dismiss or, in
the alternative, for summary judgment, a decision from which the Defendants
appealed.170 The case appeared before the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit on August 15, 2007, for oral arguments,171 and the Court held that
Plaintiffs could not establish standing because the state secrets privilege
presently empowered the government to withhold evidence.172 However, the
Ninth Circuit remanded the case to the district court for a determination on the
issue of whether FISA could preempt the state secrets privilege.173

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Specter Proposal CP HJPV

Senator Specter subsequently proposed an amendment that would "substitute

the Administration would know whether it has to follow FISA

suggested that the Governments

telephone company partners in a massive, ongoing, wholesale

Solves: NSA Overreach

provide a framework for demonstrating the illegality of the NSA

led to a series of congressional hearings in 1975. The Senate

searches that result from FISA Court approval remain unknown

day the NSA intercepts and stores 1.7 billion emails,

appears the NSA is capable of conducting what

(Electronic Frontier Foundation n.d.). Moreover, "

America's two major

telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have outsourced the bugging

growth in the amount of

seems to be no end to the expansion of

demonstrating that the NSA relies on relationships with corporations to obtain

--Ext. Congressional Oversight Solvency

Congressional oversight fills in for FISA failures

TSP that the substantial safeguards respecting foreign intelligence electronic

--Ext. FISA Effectiveness Solvency

--Ext. Removing Blanket Immunity Solvency

Senate's dangerous CIPA bill -- which is Congress' latest (bad) attempt to

"good" news is that despite the overwhelming support

AT: Signal/Perception Solvency Deficits

and Goliath: the Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and

are a security mechanism, designed

with the FISA Court. It should be much more

Ext. Terror Net Benefit

NSA PRISM program, and other Orwellian surveillance programs,

Ext. Politics Net Benefit

The latest battle in the corporate accountability wars is an effort to

Senate Judiciary Committee's top Democrat and

bill allows a significant expansion of the Foreign

Congress, I will always stand up for the

is great to see so many American citizens of all

a populist underdog who ran for the Senate in 2006

taking rights away from honest people. If

incredibly disappointed with

--A2: Sqou Solves

mass surveillance programs have become increasingly

information is sent to any

government agency (including local law enforcement), it can use the

availability of damages in state tort lawsuits can give injured

agencies may also be

---A2: Companies Protected under SSD

---A2: President has the Authority

---A2: Common Law Doctrines Shield Defendants

law immunities do not trump specific legal duties imposed

---A2: Hurts Companies Reputation/Consumer Base

---A2: Legal In-Roads Check

bill itself oddly

all but confirms what

Blanket Immunity Plank

five ways for a company to be entitled to

Doesnt Solve Terrorism 2ac

the communication companies, led by AT&T, played a key

(and quiet) role in helping to protect national security . The government

discover ... the enemy's plans, we need the cooperation of

the communication companies, led by AT&T, played a key (and quiet)

Spills over to the global economy

with the development of information technology, the impact of

This paper combines theoretical analysis and empirical