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Bulk Data Affirmative

1AC Inherency/Solvency
Recent passage of the USA Freedom Act by the US Congress
may have been a step in the right direction, but it did not go
nearly far enough in protecting the privacy of United States
citizens. It left many programs that sustain bulk data
collection untouched, meaning we are still at risk. We should
take steps toward real reform.
KEVIN GOSZTOLA JUNE 7, 2015 AT 8:00 AM PDT The US Surveillance State
Now That USA Freedom Act is Law http://firedoglake.com/2015/06/07/podcast-theus-surveillance-state-now-that-usa-freedom-act-is-law/
The USA Freedom Act was signed into law this past week. It was viewed as both a
victory for those concerned with privacy and restricting the National Security
Agencys mass surveillance and also as a law that did not go far enough in
restricting spy agencies. In fact, the USA Freedom Act further codified the post-9/11
legal framework for surveillance and resurrected Patriot Act provisions, which
expired for a couple days. The law did do away with the NSAs control of all
Americans domestic call records. On the other hand, it left other programs, policies
and practices, which NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the public,
entirely untouched. For example, backdoor searches under Section 702 of the
FISA Amendments Act can continue, which means the NSA can collect emails,
browsing and chat history of US citizens without a warrant.

Strengthening the USA Freedom Act is necessary including

definitions of SST selector and minimization procedures,
second hop provisions and other transparency measures.
These measures would effectively rein in dragnet surveillance
by the NSA.
David Greene 2015 David Greene, Senior Staff Attorney and Civil Liberties
Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How The Second Circuits Decision
Affects the Legislative Landscape - Electronic Frontier Foundation - May 11, 2015 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/aclu-v-clapper-and-congress-how-secondcircuits-decision-affects-legislative
Above all, it is clear that Congress must do more to rein in dragnet surveillance by
the NSA. Clean Reauthorization First, the Second Circuits opinion should stop the
idea of a "clean reauthorization" (a reauthorization with no reforms) of Section 215,
which is set to expire June 1. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
and Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr introduced S. 1035, a bill that would
extend the current language of Section 215 through 2020, thereby continuing the
mass spying rubber-stamped by the FISA Court. The morning of the Second Circuit
decision, both Senators took to the Senate floor to vehemently defend the bulk
collection program and push for a clean reauthorization. But a clean reauthorization
is much more complicated now. Congress cant pretend that the Second Circuit's
narrow reading of relevant to an authorized investigation doesnt exist. Its likely

that if Congress merely does a clean reauthorization of Section 215, then the
district court in ACLU v. Clapper will enjoin the government from using Section 215
as authorization for the call records dragnet, because the district court is bound by
the Second Circuit decision. However, if a reauthorization made it clear that
Congress intended to reject the Second Circuits narrow reading of the law, it could
cause further confusion and the government could argue that Congress has fully
embraced the dragnet. Were encouraging people to call Congress and tell their
lawmakers to reject Senator McConnell's clean reauthorization in order to avoid the
risk that Congress might reject the Second Circuits decision The USA Freedom Act
Must Be Strengthened In light of the Second Circuits decision, EFF asks Congress to
strengthen its proposed reform of Section 215, the USA Freedom Act. Pending those
improvements, EFF is withdrawing our support of the bill. Were urging Congress to
roll the draft back to the stronger and meaningful reforms included in the 2013
version of USA Freedom and affirmatively embrace the Second Circuits opinion on
the limits of Section 215. Most importantly, the Second Circuits correct
interpretation of the law should be expressly embraced by Congress in order to
avoid any confusion going forward about what the key terms in the statute mean,
especially the terms relevant and investigation. This recognition could be in the
bill itself or, less preferably, in legislative history. The House Judiciary Committee
has already included such language in its report to the full House of
Representatives, but now the Senate must include the language in the bill or in its
own legislative history. This easy task will make sure that the law is not read as
rejecting the Second Circuits reading and will help ensure that the USA Freedom Act
actually accomplishes its goal of ending bulk collection. The House Report on USA
Freedom, issued today, takes a step forward by stating that: Congress decision to
leave in place the relevance standard for Section 501 orders should not be
construed as Congress intent to ratify the FISA Courts interpretation of that term.
These changes restore meaningful limits to the relevance requirement of Section
501, consistent with the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
in ACLU v. Clapper. Ensuring that the Senate doesn't move away from the legislative
history should be a top priority as the bill moves forward. But thats the bare
minimum Congress must do. The Second Circuit, and especially Judge Sacks
concurrence, noted a lack of both transparency and a true adversary in the FISA
Court. The 2014 and 2013 USA Freedom Act had stronger FISA Court reforms,
particularly around the creation of a special advocate who would argue against the
government in the FISA Court. The Second Circuits opinion also emphasizes that
typical subpoenas seek only records of "suspects under investigation, or of people
or businesses that have contact with such subjects." Under the current USA
Freedom Act, the government can collect records of a "second hop,"the numbers,
and associated metadata, that have been in contact with the numbers collected
initiallywithout any additional authorization. The bill should be changed so that
the government must file another application for any further records it wants to
collect. Automatically obtaining a "second hop" is unacceptable because it sweeps
in too many peoples records. The current USA Freedom Act is also out-of-sync with
the courts narrow view of permissible collection of records because it lacks a
rigorous definition of the "specific selection term" the government can use to
identify the records it wants to collect. This can be addressed by two changes: (1)

drawing upon last year's definition in the USA Freedom Act; and, (2) closing down
potential loopholes like the definition of "address" or the use of a "person" to
include a corporate person. Restoring Important Parts of 2013s USA Freedom Act
This is also an opportunity and a new context for Congress to address the
shortcomings of the newly introduced USA Freedom Act that we previously wrote
about. Congress should put back key provisions that were dropped along the way as
well as remove those that were introduced at the behest of the intelligence
community. First, the "super minimization" procedures, which were key privacy
procedures that mandated the deletion of any information obtained about a person
not connected to the investigation, should be reintroduced. Key provisions
establishing a higher legal standard and compliance assessment for the use of pen
register/trap-and-trace devices, legal standing to sue the government over
surveillance practices, and the original transparency provisions allowing
government and corporate disclosure of surveillance orders should also be
resuscitated.

USA Freedom Act legislation was extremely watered down and

it lacks the reform necessary to establish US credibility and
leadership on internet freedom. Additional changes are
required and will solve.
Noel Brinkerhoff With Support of Obama Administration, House NSA
Surveillance Reform Bill Includes Gaping Loopholes AllGov May 26 2014http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/with-support-of-obama-administrationhouse-nsa-surveillance-reform-bill-includes-gaping-loopholes-140526?
news=853242)
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives claim they have addressed the
problems of theNational Security Agencys (NSA) notorious bulk collection of data,
made so famous last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the legislation
adopted to end this controversial practice contains huge loopholes that could allow
the NSA to keep vacuuming up large amounts of Americans communications
records, all with the blessing of the Obama administration. Dubbed the USA
Freedom Act, the bill overwhelmingly approved by the House (303 to 121) was
criticized for not going far enough to keep data out of the hands of government.
This so-called reform bill wont restore the trust of Internet users in the U.S. and
around the world, Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch
(HRW), said. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S. credibility and leadership on
Internet freedom will continue to fade. Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato
Institute, a libertarian think tank, warned that the changes could mean the
continuation of bulk collection of phone records by another name. The core
problem is that this only ends bulk collection in the sense the intelligence
community uses that term, Sanchez told Wired. As long as theres some kind of
target, they dont call that bulk collection, even if youre still collecting millions of
recordsIf they say give us the record of everyone who visited these thousand
websites, thats not bulk collection, because they have a list of targets. HRW says
the bill, which now goes to the Senate for consideration, contains ambiguous

definitions about what can and cannot be collected by the agency. For instance, an
earlier version more clearly defined the scope of what the NSA could grab under
Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which has formed the legal basis for gathering the
metadata of phone calls. Under an earlier version of the USA Freedom Act, the
government would have been required to base any demand for phone metadata or
other records on a specific selection term that uniquely describe[s] a person,
entity, or account. Under the House version, this definition was broadened to mean
a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account,
address, or device, used by the government to limit the scope of information
sought, according to Human Rights Watch. This definition is too open-ended and
ambiguous to prevent the sort of creative interpretation by intelligence agencies
that has been used to justify overbroad collection practices in the past, the group
claims. The New America Foundations Open Technology Institute is similarly
disappointed in the final House bill. Taken together, the Institute wrote, the
changes to this definition may still allow for massive collection of millions of
Americans private information based on very broad selection terms such as a zip
code, an area code, the physical address of a particular email provider or financial
institution, or the IP address of a web hosting service that hosts thousands of web
sites.

1AC Plan
The United States federal government should substantially
curtail its domestic surveillance by increasing restrictions on
bulk collection of domestic phone, internet, email, and-or
associated electronic records. This should include, at least,
requiring use of a specific selection term to satisfy the
reasonable, articulable suspicion standard, requiring super
minimization procedures that delete information obtained
about a person not connected to the investigation, and
requiring meaningful disclosure and limitation of so-called
backdoor searches currently authorized under Section 702 of
the FISA Amendments Act.

1AC Econ Advantage

Advantage: Economy
Sluggish economic growth dooms recovery
Donald Lambro, 6-11-2015, "DONALD LAMBRO: Failing U.S. economy,"
Washingtion Times, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/11/donaldlambro-failing-us-economy/?page=all
stories youve read lately about the surging job market should include one of
these cautionary notes: This report omits all negative data, or read down to the very bottom
All of the euphoric

where weve buried the bad stuff. Consider The Washington Posts front-page headline last week that gushingly
characterized the Labor Departments minimal monthly employment numbers as a jobs boom. The Bureau of

May. However, this isnt anywhere near

a hiring boom, especially in a country of nearly 160 million workers, many of whom still cant find a good fullLabor Statistics says that the economy produced 280,000 new jobs in

time job. In 1983, after a severe recession when unemployment climbed to more than 10 percent at one point, the
Reagan economy created 1.1 million jobs just in September. Thats a jobs boom. But this isnt not when there

are still more than 8.6 million workers without jobs who want them, says the Business Insider. To be
fair, The Washington Post admitted that not everything was coming up roses, and that there is room for
improvement on the jobs front. But it buried those negative figures at the end of a very long story. Among them:
About 2.5 million people have been out of work for six months or longer, while nearly 7 million are in part-time jobs
even though they would like [and need] full-time positions . Youve got a lot of people who are trading one
struggle, which is unemployment, for another struggle, which is underemployment, Jason Richardson, research

This is still a weak economy

2 percent to low-3 percent range

director at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, told the newspaper.

that cant seem to get its economic growth rate above

where the really big employment numbers come from.

the

With the Obama economys growth rate

plunging to minus 0.7 percent in the first quarter, economists arent looking for a strong job surge anytime soon.
Global forecasters look at President Obamas dismal record and wonder why the largest economy in the world
cannot break out of its economic lethargy. The International Monetary Fund said last week that it doesnt see the

IMFs forecast for the

urged the Federal Reserve to delay raising interest rates until mid2016 because of the economys subpar performance. U.S. business executives are just as
pessimistic about the economys future, according to a survey of 128 CEOs for the Business Roundtables
Economic Outlook report. Its findings: The countrys CEOs say they intend to hire and invest at a
significantly lower rate over the next six months. Equally worrisome, theyre forecasting that the Obama
economy will expand at a tepid 2.5 percent this year. These results are consistent with an economy
that operates below its potential capacity, said Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, in a
U.S. economy doing any better than, at best, a pathetic 2.5 percent this year. In fact, the
United States was so dour that it

conference call with reporters. Industrial production is down and we view that as a concern, he said.

Pervasive surveillance costs the US billions, severely harms

competitiveness and has led to a wave of protectionism. Now
is the time for reform.
DANIEL CASTRO AND ALAN MCQUINN | JUNE 2015 Beyond the USA
Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness
http://www2.itif.org/2015-beyond-usa-freedom-act.pdf?
_ga=1.86597016.1417756247.1435604368
Almost two years ago, ITIF described how revelations about pervasive digital
surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community could severely harm the
competitiveness of the United States if foreign customers turned away from U.S.made technology and services.1 Since then, U.S. policymakers have failed to take
sufficient action to address these surveillance concerns; in some cases, they have

even fanned the flames of discontent by championing weak information security

practices. 2 In addition, other countries have used anger over U.S. government
surveillance as a cover for implementing a new wave of protectionist policies
specifically targeting information technology. The combined result is a set of
policies both at home and abroad that sacrifices robust competitiveness of the U.S.
tech sector for vague and unconvincing promises of improved national security. ITIF
estimated in 2013 that even a modest drop in the expected foreign market share for
cloud computing stemming from concerns about U.S. surveillance could cost the
United States between $21.5 billion and $35 billion by 2016.3 Since then, it has
become clear that the U.S. tech industry as a whole, not just the cloud computing
sector, has underperformed as a result of the Snowden revelations. Therefore, the
economic impact of U.S. surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIFs initial $35
billion estimate. This report catalogues a wide range of specific examples of the
economic harm that has been done to U.S. businesses. In short, foreign customers
are shunning U.S. companies. The policy implication of this is clear: Now that
Congress has reformed how the National Security Agency (NSA) collects bulk
domestic phone records and allowed private firmsrather than the governmentto
collect and store approved data, it is time to address other controversial digital
surveillance activities by the U.S. intelligence community. 4

The damage to our economy will be significant and lasting.

Surveillance programs doom the future competitiveness of
American technology and other companies.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
It is abundantly clear that the NSA surveillance programs are currently having a
serious, negative impact on the U.S. economy and threatening the future
competitiveness of American technology companies. Not only are U.S. companies
losing overseas sales and getting dropped from contracts with foreign companies
and governmentsthey are also watching their competitive advantage in fastgrowing industries like cloud computing and webhosting disappear, opening the
door for foreign companies who claim to offer more secure alternative products to
poach their business. Industry efforts to increase transparency and accountability as
well as concrete steps to promote better security by adopting encryption and other
best practices are positive signs, but U.S. companies cannot solve this problem
alone. Its not blowing over, said Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith at a recent
conference. In June of 2014, it is clear it is getting worse, not better.98 Without
meaningful government reform and better oversight, concerns about the breadth of
NSA surveillance could lead to permanent shifts in the global technology market
and do lasting damage to the U.S. economy.

Economic decline leads to global conflict and instability

Auslin 09 (Michael, Resident Scholar American Enterprise Institute, and
Desmond Lachman Resident Fellow American Enterprise Institute, The Global
Economy Unravels, Forbes, 3-6, http://www.aei.org/article/100187)
global
chaos followed hard on economic collapse. The mere fact that parliaments across the globe, from
What do these trends mean in the short and medium term? The Great Depression showed how social and

America to Japan, are unable to make responsible, economically sound recovery plans suggests that they do not
know what to do and are simply hoping for the least disruption. Equally worrisome is the adoption of more statist

The threat of
instability is a pressing concern . China, until last year the world's fastest growing economy, just
reported that 20 million migrant laborers lost their jobs. Even in the flush times of recent years, China faced
upward of 70,000 labor uprisings a year. A sustained downturn poses grave and
possibly immediate threats to Chinese internal stability . The regime in Beijing may be faced
economic programs around the globe, and the concurrent decline of trust in free-market systems.

with a choice of repressing its own people or diverting their energies outward, leading to conflict with China's

Russia, an oil state completely dependent on energy sales, has had to put down riots in its
Far East as well as in downtown Moscow . Vladimir Putin's rule has been predicated on squeezing civil
liberties while providing economic largesse. If that devil's bargain falls apart, then wide-scale repression
inside Russia, along with a continuing threatening posture toward Russia's neighbors,
is likely. Even apparently stable societies face increasing risk and the threat of internal or possibly external
neighbors.

conflict. As Japan's exports have plummeted by nearly 50%, one-third of the country's prefectures have passed
emergency economic stabilization plans. Hundreds of thousands of temporary employees hired during the first part
of this decade are being laid off. Spain's unemployment rate is expected to climb to nearly 20% by the end of 2010;
Spanish unions are already protesting the lack of jobs, and the specter of violence, as occurred in the 1980s, is

Europe as a whole
will face dangerously increasing tensions between native citizens and immigrants, largely from
haunting the country. Meanwhile, in Greece, workers have already taken to the streets.

poorer Muslim nations, who have increased the labor pool in the past several decades. Spain has absorbed five
million immigrants since 1999, while nearly 9% of Germany's residents have foreign citizenship, including almost 2

A prolonged
global downturn, let alone a collapse, would dramatically raise tensions inside these
countries. Couple that with possible protectionist legislation in the United States, unresolved ethnic
and territorial disputes in all regions of the globe and a loss of confidence that world leaders
actually know what they are doing. The result may be a series of small explosions that
coalesce into a big bang.
million Turks. The xenophobic labor strikes in the U.K. do not bode well for the rest of Europe.

Protectionism escalates into dangerous confrontations that

lead to extinction
Panzer 8 Michael J. Panzner, Faculty New York Institute of Finance. Specializes
in Global Capital Markets. MA Columbia, Financial Armageddon: Protect Your Future
from Economic Collapse, Revised and Updated Edition [Paperback], p. 137-138
Continuing calls for curbs on the flow of finance and trade will inspire the United States and other nations to spew forth

protectionist legislation like the notorious Smoot-Hawley bill. Introduced at the start
of the Great Depression, it triggered a series of tit-for-tat economic responses,
which many commentators believe helped turn a serious economic downturn into a prolonged
and devastating global disaster . But if history is any guide, those lessons will have been long forgotten
during the next collapse. Eventually,

fed by a mood of desperation and growing public anger,

restrictions on trade, finance, investment, and immigration will almost certainly

intensify.

Authorities and ordinary citizens will likely scrutinize the cross-border movement of Americans and outsiders

many nations will

make transporting or sending funds to other countries exceedingly difficult . As desperate
alike, and lawmakers may even call for a general crackdown on nonessential travel. Meanwhile,

officials try to limit the fallout from decades of ill-conceived, corrupt, and reckless policies, they will introduce controls on foreign
exchange. Foreign individuals and companies seeking to acquire certain American infrastructure assets, or trying to buy property
and other assets on the cheap thanks to a rapidly depreciating dollar, will be stymied by limits on investment by noncitizens.

Those efforts will cause spasms to ripple across economies and markets,
disrupting global payment, settlement, and clearing mechanisms . All of this will, of
course, continue to undermine business confidence and consumer spending. In a world
of lockouts and lockdowns, any link that transmits systemic financial pressures across markets through arbitrage or portfolio-based
risk management, or that allows diseases to be easily spread from one country to the next by tourists and wildlife, or that otherwise

The rise in
isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and
facilitates unwelcome exchanges of any kind will be viewed with suspicion and dealt with accordingly.

dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas, and other key
commodities as well as factors of production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from
less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic industries or basic necessities such as
food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence
in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply . Disputes over the
misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more
commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to full-scale military

encounters , often with minimal provocation . In some instances, economic conditions

will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and
religious differences . Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from
domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other
countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist
groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing
the threat of random violence to a whole new level.

Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive

saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also
take on a new, more heated sense of urgency.

China will likely assume an increasingly belligerent

posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt colonization of its
neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of
allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts . Some observers, like John
Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an intense confrontation between the
United States and China is inevitable at some point. More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological.
Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles soaked in blood.

Long-

simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly , spurring the basest of

human instincts and triggering genocidal acts . Terrorists employing biological or
nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and
bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret
stepped-up conflicts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a
new world war.

Economics is the best explanation for the functioning of

conflict
Gartzke 12
Erik Gartzke is Associate Professor of Political Science and Yonatan Lupu is a Ph.D. candidate in political
science, both at the University of California, San Diego, International Security, Spring 2012, 36:4,
Trading on Preconceptions, http://pages.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_is_2012.pdf

The most traditional approach to the relationship between economic relations and conflict focuses on
explaining how economic ties linking nations change the incentives of actors in the

international system. Beginning in the modern era, scholar-statesmen such as Richard Cobden
and Norman Angell argued that interdependence, primarily in the form of interstate trade, raises
the opportunity costs of war, thus making contests less likely. The logic of these arguments
is that a war between trading partners would likely disrupt that trade, forcing states to seek other
markets. This would require a shift to different, less lucrative, trade partners.3 Others argue that, as

trade increases, states can achieve gains more efficiently through economic means
than through warfare. In other words, when states can grow their economies through
international commerce, there is a decreased incentive to attempt to do so through
territorial conflict.4 Open financial and goods markets may also create similar disincentives for
states to fight.5

international trade is associated with a decreased likelihood of conflict

has found significant empirical support. A series of studies using events data found that
higher levels of trade interdependence (defined as trade/gross domestic product [GDP]) are
associated with lower probabilities of interstate war.6 Other studies have built on
this research to demonstrate that the finding is robust to alternate specifications of the
The notion that

temporal domain and unit of analysis.7 The relationship between trade and conflict is likely more
complex than initially theorized. First, high levels of trade dependence may embolden a states
opponents.8 Responding to this critique, Patrick McDonald argues that scholars must shift their focus
from aggregate trade flows to the extent to which states pursue free trade policies.9 Han Dorussen
offers another important theoretical refinement, noting that the opportunity costs of conflict created by
different types of trade vary significantly. Two factors he points to that raise the opportunity costs of
conflict created by trade are lower factor mobility and higher asset specificity.10 Finally, the effects of
trade interdependence may be contingent on the mediating effects of democracy.11
One strain of research focuses on ways that trade may make conflict less likely through mechanisms
other than raising the opportunity costs of war. Etel Solingen, for example, argues that trade allows

domestic actors to build cross-national coalitions that both promote greater

interdependence and cause convergent transformations in state preferences.12
Along related lines, Paul Papayoanou argues that economic relations create strong
domestic-level interests that delimit a leaders ability to credibly counter external
threats or challenges. 13 Building on these arguments, several scholars have
constructed what is sometimes known as the commercial peace or capitalist
peace view of the relationship between economics and war. They argue that
interdependence mollifies the effects of states security dilemmas by creating
common interests and reducing uncertainty. Although the bulk of the work on
interdependence and conflict focuses on trade,14 other forms of transnational

economic relations are also crucial. Erik Gartzke, Quan Li, and Charles Boehmer
argue that, along with trade, interstate monetary policy cooperation and capital flows
reduce the likelihood of conflict by allowing states in crisis situations to send costly
signals without needing to resort to violence or crisis escalation that may precipitate
violence.15 Building on this, Gartzke argues that interdependencedefined as including trade,
development, open financial markets, and monetary policy coordination reduces conflict by (1)
aligning states interests, which gives them less to fight over; (2) providing a means
of peacefully securing resources; and (3) allowing states to foresee the costs of
fighting, which facilitates bargaining and compromise.16

Growth solves conflict best studies prove

Jedidiah Royal 10, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S.
Department of Defense, Economic Integration, Economic Signalling And The
Problem Of Economic Crises, in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and
Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215
periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external
conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic
Less intuitive is how

decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered
at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins

rhythms in the
global economy are associated with the rise and fall of pre-eminent power and the
often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next . As such, exogenous
shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see
also Gilpin, 10981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of
miscalculation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power
could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to
challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Seperately, Polllins (1996) also shows that global economic
(2008) advances Modelski and Thompsons (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that

cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium, and small
powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security
conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copelands (1996,2000) theory of trade expectations
suggests that future expectation of trade is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and

interdependent states are likely to gain pacific

benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations .
However, if the expectation of future trade decline , particularly for difficult to replace items such as
energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases , as states will be inclined to use
force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for
decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by
security behavior of states. He argues that

interdependent states. Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed

Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between

internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic
downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and
conflict at a national level.

mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover,

the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and
external conflicts self-reinforce each other . (Blomberg & Hess, 2002, p.89). Economic decline has
also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has the
capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of
a sitting government. Diversionary

theory suggests that, when facing unpopularity

arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to

create a rally round the flag effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995), and Blomberg, Hess and Thacker
(2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated.
Gelpi (1997) Miller (1999) and Kisanganie and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary
tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are
generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has
provided evidence showing that

periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and

are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force .

thus weak presidential popularity,

1AC Internet freedom Advantage

Advantage: Internet Freedom
Failure to reform NSA bulk data collection undermines US
interests in promoting internet freedom; and will bleed over
into foreign policy credibility in general.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Mandatory data localization proposals are just one of a number of ways that foreign
governments have reacted to NSA surveillance in a manner that threatens U.S.
foreign policy interests, particularly with regard to Internet Freedom. There has been
a quiet tension between how the U.S. approaches freedom of expression online in
its foreign policy and its domestic laws ever since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
effectively launched the Internet Freedom agenda in January 2010.170 But the NSA
disclosures shined a bright spotlight on the contradiction: the U.S. government
promotes free expression abroad and aims to prevent repressive governments from
monitoring and censoring their citizens while simultaneously supporting domestic
laws that authorize surveillance and bulk data collection. As cybersecurity expert
and Internet governance scholar Ron Deibert wrote a few days after the first
revelations: There are unintended consequences of the NSA scandal that will
undermine U.S. foreign policy interests in particular, the Internet Freedom
agenda espoused by the U.S. State Department and its allies.171 Deibert
accurately predicted that the news would trigger reactions from both policymakers
and ordinary citizens abroad, who would begin to question their dependence on
American technologies and the hidden motivations behind the United States
promotion of Internet Freedom. In some countries, the scandal would be used as an
excuse to revive dormant debates about dropping American companies from official
contracts, score political points at the expense of the United States, and even justify
local monitoring and surveillance. Deiberts speculation has so far proven quite
prescient. As we will describe in this section, the ongoing revelations have done
significant damage to the credibility of the U.S. Internet Freedom agenda and
further jeopardized the United States position in the global Internet governance
debates. Moreover, the repercussions from NSA spying have bled over from the
Internet policy realm to impact broader U.S. foreign policy goals and relationships
with government officials and a range of other important stakeholders abroad. In an
essay entitled, The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks,
international relations scholars Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore argue that a
critical, lasting impact of information provided by leakers like Edward Snowden is
the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually
doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the governments public
rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook
Washingtons covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their

own.172 Toward the end of the essay, Farrell and Finnemore suggest, The U.S.
government, its friends, and its foes can no longer plausibly deny the dark side of
U.S. foreign policy and will have to address it head-on. Indeed, the U.S. is currently
working to repair damaged bilateral and multilateral relations with countries from
Germany and France to Russia and Israel,173 and it is likely that the effects of the
NSA disclosures will be felt for years in fields far beyond Internet policy.174

Additionally, failure to reform bulk internet data collection is

used as justification by countries, like China, for expansion of
internet censorship
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Moreover, revelations of what the NSA has been doing in the past decade are
eroding the moral high ground that the United States has often relied upon when
putting public pressure on authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran to
change their behavior. In 2014, Reporters Without Borders added the United States
to its Enemies of the Internet list for the first time, explicitly linking the inclusion
to NSA surveillance. The main player in [the United States] vast surveillance
operation is the highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA) which, in the light
of Snowdens revelations, has come to symbolize the abuses by the worlds
intelligence agencies, noted the 2014 report.207 The damaged perception of the
United States208 as a leader on Internet Freedom and its diminished ability to
legitimately criticize other countries for censorship and surveillance opens the door
for foreign leaders to justifyand even expand their own efforts.209 For example,
the Egyptian government recently announced plans to monitor social media for
potential terrorist activity, prompting backlash from a number of advocates for free
expression and privacy.210 When a spokesman for the Egyptian Interior Ministry,
Abdel Fatah Uthman, appeared on television to explain the policy, one justification
that he offered in response to privacy concerns was that the US listens in to phone
calls, and supervises anyone who could threaten its national security.211 This type
of rhetoric makes it difficult for the U.S. to effectively criticize such a policy.
Similarly, Indias comparatively mild response to allegations of NSA surveillance
have been seen by some critics as a reflection of Indias own aspirations in the
world of surveillance, a further indication that U.S. spying may now make it easier
for foreign governments to quietly defend their own behavior.212 It is even more
difficult for the United States to credibly indict Chinese hackers for breaking into
U.S. government and commercial targets without fear of retribution in light of the
NSA revelations.213 These challenges reflect an overall decline in U.S. soft power
on free expression issues.

Internet freedom is key to solve all impacts

Genachowski and Bollinger 2013 (Julius [Chairman of the FCC] and Lee
[President of Columbia U]; The plot to block internet freedom; Apr 16;
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/16/plot_block_internet_freedom?page=full
The Internet has created an extraordinary new democratic forum for people around the world to express their
opinions. It is revolutionizing global access to information: Today, more than 1 billion people
worldwide have access to the Internet, and at current growth rates, 5 billion people -- about 70 percent of
the world's population -- will be connected in five years. But this growth trajectory is not
inevitable, and threats are mounting to the global spread of an open and truly
"worldwide" web. The expansion of the open Internet must be allowed to continue:
The mobile and social media revolutions are critical not only for democratic institutions' ability to
solve the collective problems of a shrinking world, but also to a dynamic and
innovative global economy that depends on financial transparency and the free flow
of information. The threats to the open Internet were on stark display at last December's World Conference on
International Telecommunications in Dubai, where the United States fought attempts by a number of countries -including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia -- to give a U.N. organization, the International Telecommunication Union

over the objection of the United States

and many others, 89 countries voted to approve a treaty that could strengthen the
power of governments to control online content and deter broadband deployment. In
Dubai, two deeply worrisome trends came to a head. First, we see that the Arab Spring and similar events
have awakened nondemocratic governments to the danger that the Internet poses to
their regimes. In Dubai, they pushed for a treaty that would give the ITU's imprimatur to governments'
(ITU), new regulatory authority over the Internet. Ultimately,

blocking or favoring of online content under the guise of preventing spam and increasing network security.
Authoritarian countries' real goal is to legitimize content regulation, opening the door for governments to block any
content they do not like, such as political speech. Second, the basic commercial model underlying the open Internet
is also under threat. In particular, some proposals, like the one made last year by major European network
operators, would change the ground rules for payments for transferring Internet content. One species of these
proposals is called "sender pays" or "sending party pays." Since the beginning of the Internet, content creators -individuals, news outlets, search engines, social media sites -- have been able to make their content available to
Internet users without paying a fee to Internet service providers. A sender-pays rule would change that,
empowering governments to require Internet content creators to pay a fee to connect with an end user in that
country. Sender pays may look merely like a commercial issue, a different way to divide the pie. And proponents of
sender pays and similar changes claim they would benefit Internet deployment and Internet users. But the opposite
is true: If a country imposed a payment requirement, content creators would be less likely to serve that country.

The loss of content would make the Internet less attractive and would lessen
demand for the deployment of Internet infrastructur e in that country. Repeat the
process in a few more countries, and the growth of global connectivity -- as well as its
attendant benefits for democracy -- would slow dramatically. So too would the benefits
accruing to the global economy. Without continuing improvements in transparency and information
sharing, the innovation that springs from new commercial ideas and creative breakthroughs is sure to be severely

American Internet service providers have joined with the broader

U.S. technology industry, civil society, and others in opposing these changes . Together,
we were able to win the battle in Dubai over sender pays, but we have not yet won the
war. Issues affecting global Internet openness, broadband deployment, and free speech will return in upcoming
inhibited. To their credit,

international forums, including an important meeting in Geneva in May, the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy
Forum. The massive investment in wired and wireless broadband infrastructure in the United States demonstrates
that preserving an open Internet is completely compatible with broadband deployment. According to a recent UBS
report, annual wireless capital investment in the United States increased 40 percent from 2009 to 2012, while
investment in the rest of the world has barely inched upward. And according to the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation, more fiber-optic cable was laid in the United States in 2011 and 2012 than in any year since
2000, and 15 percent more than in Europe.

All Internet users lose something when some

countries are cut off from the World Wide Web. Each person who is unable to connect to
the Internet diminishes our own access to information. We become less able to
understand the world and formulate policies to respond to our shrinking planet .
Conversely, we gain a richer understanding of global events as more people connect around the world, and those
societies nurturing nascent democracy movements become more familiar with America's traditions of free speech
and pluralism. That's why we believe that the Internet should remain free of gatekeepers a nd
that no entity -- public or private -- should be able to pick and choose the information web users can receive. That is
a principle the United States adopted in the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 Open Internet Order. And
it's why we are deeply concerned about arguments by some in the United States that broadband providers should
be able to block, edit, or favor Internet traffic that travels over their networks, or adopt economic models similar to

We must preserve the Internet as the most open and robust

platform for the free exchange of information ever devised. Keeping the Internet
open is perhaps the most important free speech issue of our time.
international sender pays.

Otherwise extinction is inevitable

Eagleman 10 [David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of
Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the
Initiative on Neuroscience and Law and author of Sum (Canongate). Nov. 9, 2010,
Six ways the internet will save civilization,
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/12/start/apocalypse-no]
Many great civilisations have fallen, leaving nothing but cracked ruins and
scattered genetics. Usually this results from: natural disasters, resource depletion,
economic meltdown, disease, poor information flow and corruption. But were
luckier than our predecessors because we command a technology that no one
else possessed: a rapid communication network that finds its highest
expression in the internet. I propose that there are six ways in which the net has
vastly reduced the threat of societal collapse. Epidemics can be deflected by
telepresence One of our more dire prospects for collapse is an infectious-disease
epidemic. Viral and bacterial epidemics precipitated the fall of the Golden
Age of Athens, the Roman Empire and most of the empires of the Native
Americans. The internet can be our key to survival because the ability to
work telepresently can inhibit microbial transmission by reducing humanto-human contact. In the face of an otherwise devastating epidemic, businesses
can keep supply chains running with the maximum number of employees working
from home. This can reduce host density below the tipping point required for an
epidemic. If we are well prepared when an epidemic arrives , we can fluidly
shift into a self-quarantined society in which microbes fail due to host scarcity.
Whatever the social ills of isolation, they are worse for the microbes than for us.
The internet will predict natural disasters We are witnessing the downfall
of slow central control in the media: news stories are increasingly becoming
user-generated nets of up-to-the-minute information. During the recent
California wildfires, locals went to the TV stations to learn whether their
neighbourhoods were in danger. But the news stations appeared most concerned
with the fate of celebrity mansions, so Californians changed their tack: they
uploaded geotagged mobile-phone pictures, updated Facebook statuses and
tweeted. The balance tipped: the internet carried news about the fire more

quickly and accurately than any news station could. In this grass-roots,
decentralised scheme, there were embedded reporters on every block, and the
news shockwave kept ahead of the fire. This head start could provide the extra
hours that save us. If the Pompeiians had had the internet in 79AD, they could have
easily marched 10km to safety, well ahead of the pyroclastic flow from Mount
Vesuvius. If the Indian Ocean had the Pacifics networked tsunami-warning
system, South-East Asia would look quite different today. Discoveries are
retained and shared Historically, critical information has required constant
rediscovery. Collections of learning -- from the library at Alexandria to the entire
Minoan civilisation -- have fallen to the bonfires of invaders or the wrecking ball of
natural disaster. Knowledge is hard won but easily lost. And information that
survives often does not spread. Consider smallpox inoculation: this was under
way in India, China and Africa centuries before it made its way to Europe . By the
time the idea reached North America, native civilisations who needed it
had already collapsed. The net solved the problem. New discoveries catch
on immediately; information spreads widely. In this way, societies can optimally
ratchet up, using the latest bricks of knowledge in their fortification against risk.
Tyranny is mitigated Censorship of ideas was a familiar spectre in the last
century, with state-approved news outlets ruling the press, airwaves and copying
machines in the USSR, Romania, Cuba, China, Iraq and elsewhere. In many
cases, such as Lysenkos agricultural despotism in the USSR, it directly
contributed to the collapse of the nation. Historically, a more successful
strategy has been to confront free speech with free speech -- and the
internet allows this in a natural way. It democratises the flow of information by
offering access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation,
the bloggers of every political stripe. Some posts are full of doctoring and
dishonesty whereas others strive for independence and impartiality -- but all are
available to us to sift through. Given the attempts by some governments to build
firewalls, its clear that this benefit of the net requires constant vigilance. Human
capital is vastly increased Crowdsourcing brings people together to solve
problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the worlds population is involved. We
need expand human capital. Most of the world not have access to the education
afforded a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who
has educational opportunities, uncountable others do not. This squandering of
talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of problem
solvers. The net opens the gates education to anyone with a computer. A
motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the worlds knowledge -from the webs of Wikipedia to the curriculum of MITs OpenCourseWare . The new
human capital will serve us well when we confront existential threats
weve never imagined before. Energy expenditure is reduced Societal
collapse can often be understood in terms of an energy budget: when energy
spend outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. This has taken the form of
deforestation or soil erosion; currently, the worry involves fossil-fuel
depletion. The internet addresses the energy problem with a natural ease.
Consider the massive energy savings inherent in the shift from paper to electrons -as seen in the transition from the post to email. Ecommerce reduces the need to

drive long distances to purchase products. Delivery trucks are more ecofriendly than individuals driving around, not least because of tight packaging and
optimisation algorithms for driving routes. Of course, there are energy costs to the
banks of computers that underpin the internet -- but these costs are less than the
wood, coal and oil that would be expended for the same quantity of information
flow. The tangle of events that triggers societal collapse can be complex, and there
are several threats the net does not address. But vast, networked communication
can be an antidote to several of the most deadly diseases threatening civilisation.
The next time your coworker laments internet addiction, the banality of tweeting or
the decline of face-to-face conversation, you may want to suggest that the net may
just be the technology that saves us.

Chinese censorship is unsustainablewill weaken economic

growth and soft power
C. Custer, 12-18-2012, Chinese cultural expert, degree in East Asian studies,
Tech In Asia, "Web of Failure: How China's Internet Policies Have Doomed Chinese
Soft Power," Tech in Asia, https://www.techinasia.com/failure-china-internet-policiesdoomed-chinese-soft-power
A Death Blow to Business China: Taking the inter out of the internet.Whats
effective in fostering stability is, Ill admit, debatable, but its less debatable that
Chinas internet policies have had a strong negative impact on businesses . If the
recent blocking of foreign VPNs proves to be the new normal and we have every
sign that that is the case I expect numerous foreign businesses to move some or
all of their operations out of China. In addition to the fact that many businesses use
blocked web services for communication and marketing, VPNs provide a crucial
layer of security to corporate communications by encrypting the connection of
those using the service. Without that layer of security, companies worried about
cyber attacks, IP theft, and corporate espionage are going to be pretty exposed, and
some of them will inevitably decide that the advantages of doing business in China
are outweighed by the potential costs of having products or plans stolen by
competitors.
(True, many businesses use their own VPNs rather than the commercially-available
ones that are currently blocked. But the Chinese government has said that all
foreign-run VPNs are illegal unless they register with and are approved by MIIT,
which none of them have.)But the Great Firewall doesnt just damage foreign
companies in China, it is also crippling to Chinese companies that are looking to
expand globally. Without access to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter,
Chinese web companies are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to
everything from market research to actual marketing. And although companies can
establish overseas offices or find other ways to circumvent censorship and access
these platforms, with all of them so widely blocked in China, theres little impetus
for Chinese developers to try to work with them. Chinese startups are focused on
developing products that work with Chinese social platforms like Weibo, and thats
great, but it ultimately limits the scalability and global relevance of their products.
At present, Chinas regulatory environment might encourage the development of

some truly remarkable domestic services, but it is difficult to imagine a globally

dominant web startup from China because the Chinese internet is so thoroughly
walled off from the rest of the world.Soft Power in Chains
Of course, the Great Firewall does more than just prevent Chinese web services
from going global; it is also a huge hindrance for Chinese cultural exports . I was
reminded of this just recently while writing about the award Koreas Ministry of
Culture gave to Google because Youtube has been such an effective platform to
spread Korean culture. In China, the success of Korean pop star PSYs Gangnam
Style video prompted a lot of discussion about whether China could ever produce its
own PSY. Im not sure what the answer to that question is, but it is irrelevant,
because even if China could produce its own PSY, it could never export it. PSYs
song exploded in large part because his video went viral on Youtube which
surprise, surprise is blocked in China.Now granted, even if VPNs were totally
blocked, a Chinese PSY could just fly out of China with a USB stick and upload his
video to Youtube from abroad. But I highly doubt the global response would be the
same, because whether were aware of it or not, a big part of enjoying any cultural
experience is interaction. Gangnam Style was catchy and weird certainly China
can produce something like that but it ultimately also got the Western media to
interact with Korea and Korean culture, and we all learned a little something about
the Gangnam district and Korean satire along the way.That is the part of Gangnam
Style that China could never produce, because the government actively discourages
that sort of interaction. While it wants to promote Chinese culture, it does not
believe that pop music and certainly not politically satirical pop music has any
place in that promotional effort. Instead, the government pushes Confucius and
other valuable-but-unappealing-and-mostly-irrelevant aspects of Chinese culture to
Westerners while keeping its citizens and whatever culture they create quiet.
Chinese and foreign net users are carefully segregated, and while China is happy to
use foreign platforms to promote the party line through official channels like Xinhua,
it is unwilling to trust its own people with access to almost any foreign social
communication platforms.The problem (for Chinas government) is that culture
doesnt work that way. Great cultural works are rarely produced by the state; they
are produced by artists, creatives, academics, entrepreneurs and other regular
people. Chinese artists have produced many great works, but Chinas government is
generally not willing to let these people communicate directly with the outside
world. In an age where global communication and cultural broadcasting is simpler
and more direct than ever before, China has shackled its own soft power by
ensuring that its cultural producers have access to almost none of these new
platforms.True soft power in fact, true culture cannot come without discussion
and interchange. When was the last time you saw a really powerful movie or read a
really powerful book and then discussed it with no one? Culture is by definition a
discussion, an exchange, and a kind of ongoing communication. But Chinas
government has for the past several years been attempting to shove its own
message into the global internets cultural exchange while doing what it can to keep
the West out of Chinas culture and keep Chinese people from easily interacting with
the outside world. That is why Xinhua has a Twitter account but the average Zhou
cannot. Its also why Xinhuas Twitter account isnt actually following anyone. China

is interested in using social media services only to broadcast itself; it has no interest
in interacting with the outside world in a meaningful way.No Hope for the Future?
It is a terrible sign that Chinas crackdown on VPNs does not seem to have lessened
after the conclusion of the 18th Party Congress. And at the same time, despite a
couple years of massive expenditures in return for almost nothing in the way of
results, China has shown no signs of wanting to adjust its shut-up-and-let-me-talkdammit approach to soft power.Chinas state media frequently complains that the
West doesnt understand China, but China has steadfastly refused to use internet
platforms like Twitter and Facebook to attempt to increase that understanding in any
meaningful way. And although the government remains dedicated to improving
Chinese soft power, I have seen no signs that it is inclined to attempt a shift in
strategy anytime soon.In the long term, I suspect the Great Firewall will prove to be
domestically unsustainable. But until the wall comes down, Chinas attempts at soft
power are little more than a pipe dream, and its economic growth, especially in the
tech arena, is ultimately going to be limited by the severe barriers it has erected
between itself and the world at large.

Chinese soft power solves territorial conflicts that escalate

Zhang 2012 Wanfa Zhang is assistant professor in the Department of
Humanities and Communication at Florida Institute of Technology and previously
was a lecturer at China Foreign Affairs University, Asian Perspective, 2012, 36, "Has
Beijing Started to Bare Its Teeth? Chinas Tapping of Soft Power Revisited", 615-39
All the evidence above supports the thesis that Beijing has not slowed its charm
offensive, even while its hard power has been undergoing explosive growth.
Nevertheless, whether Beijing should or will continue with the current policy in the
future depends on an evaluation of its successes and failures. Evaluation of the
Policys Efficacy In the past, various scholars used a handful of metrics to assess the
efficacy of Chinas soft power. These efforts are laudable; however, due to various
limitations that Blanchard and Lu point out in their introduction to this special issue,
the metrics fail to reflect adequately the efficacy of Beijings soft-power enterprise.
In Chinas case, soft power operates at two levels: high-level strategic goals and
low-level tactical objectives. If measured separately, efficacy will rate high at the
strategic level but show mixed results at the tactical level. Successes with HighLevel Strategic Goals Beijing undoubtedly has achieved success so far if we
measure soft-power efficacy against its high-level goals: dissipating the China threat
theory and sustaining a peaceful international environment, especially around
Chinas borders, that can facilitate Chinas continuous rise and economic expansion.
Beijings grip on domestic political power is still secure and unchallenged. Granted
that the China threat theme has reared its head occasionally over the past few
years, but it has never become sufficiently influential to undercut the peaceful
international milieu that China badly covets. Moreover, although Chinas military
power has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s, other nations, especially

Chinas neighbors, have not found it necessary to form a straightforward anti-China

bloc. Nor have they engaged in a direct arms race with Beijing. All the hot spots
around China, notably North Korea and the South China Sea, are under control and
mostly stable even though we see occasional tensions, especially since the second
half of 2011. The explosive Taiwan issue has been defused due to the victory of the
prounification Nationalist Party in Taiwans 2008 elections and Beijings carefully
calibrated policy toward the island. And Chinas relations with its northern and
western neighbors in Central Asia are especially stable. An immediate national
security threat is unlikely in the near future. The world market remains open to
Chinese goods. Foreign investments, raw materials, and energy continue to flow
into China. Beijings success in presenting itself as a nonthreatening power has
made an indispensable contribution to these positive developments.

These conflicts escalate to extinction

Wittner 11 (Lawrence S. Wittner, Emeritus Professor of History at the State
University of New York/Albany, Wittner is the author of eight books, the editor or coeditor of another four, and the author of over 250 published articles and book
reviews. From 1984 to 1987, he edited Peace & Change, a journal of peace
research., 11/28/2011, "Is a Nuclear War With China Possible?",
www.huntingtonnews.net/14446)
While nuclear weapons exist, there remains a danger that they will be used. After
all, for centuries national conflicts have led to wars, with nations employing their
deadliest weapons. The current deterioration of U.S. relations with China might end
up providing us with yet another example of this phenomenon. The gathering
tension between the United States and China is clear enough. Disturbed by Chinas
growing economic and military strength, the U.S. government recently challenged
Chinas claims in the South China Sea, increased the U.S. military presence in
Australia, and deepened U.S. military ties with other nations in the Pacific region.
According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States was asserting our
own position as a Pacific power. But need this lead to nuclear war? Not necessarily.
And yet, there are signs that it could. After all, both the United States and China
possess large numbers of nuclear weapons. The U.S. government threatened to
attack China with nuclear weapons during the Korean War and, later, during the
conflict over the future of Chinas offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu. In the midst
of the latter confrontation, President Dwight Eisenhower declared publicly, and
chillingly, that U.S. nuclear weapons would be used just exactly as you would use a
bullet or anything else. Of course, China didnt have nuclear weapons then. Now
that it does, perhaps the behavior of national leaders will be more temperate. But
the loose nuclear threats of U.S. and Soviet government officials during the Cold
War, when both nations had vast nuclear arsenals, should convince us that, even as
the military ante is raised, nuclear saber-rattling persists. Some pundits argue that
nuclear weapons prevent wars between nuclear-armed nations; and, admittedly,
there havent been very manyat least not yet. But the Kargil War of 1999,
between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan, should convince us that

such wars can occur. Indeed, in that case, the conflict almost slipped into a nuclear
war. Pakistans foreign secretary threatened that, if the war escalated, his country
felt free to use any weapon in its arsenal. During the conflict, Pakistan did move
nuclear weapons toward its border, while India, it is claimed, readied its own nuclear
missiles for an attack on Pakistan. At the least, though, dont nuclear weapons deter
a nuclear attack? Do they? Obviously, NATO leaders didnt feel deterred, for,
throughout the Cold War, NATOs strategy was to respond to a Soviet conventional
military attack on Western Europe by launching a Western nuclear attack on the
nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Furthermore, if U.S. government officials really believed
that nuclear deterrence worked, they would not have resorted to championing Star
Wars and its modern variant, national missile defense. Why are these vastly
expensiveand probably unworkablemilitary defense systems needed if other
nuclear powers are deterred from attacking by U.S. nuclear might? Of course, the
bottom line for those Americans convinced that nuclear weapons safeguard them
from a Chinese nuclear attack might be that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is far greater
than its Chinese counterpart. Today, it is estimated that the U.S. government
possesses over five thousand nuclear warheads, while the Chinese government has
a total inventory of roughly three hundred. Moreover, only about forty of these
Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the United States. Surely the United States
would win any nuclear war with China. But what would that victory entail? A
nuclear attack by China would immediately slaughter at least 10 million Americans
in a great storm of blast and fire, while leaving many more dying horribly of sickness
and radiation poisoning. The Chinese death toll in a nuclear war would be far higher.
Both nations would be reduced to smoldering, radioactive wastelands. Also,
radioactive debris sent aloft by the nuclear explosions would blot out the sun and
bring on a nuclear winter around the globedestroying agriculture, creating
worldwide famine, and generating chaos and destruction.

Inherency/Solvency extension
Surveillance state is high now the USA Freedom Act changed
nothing
Solomon 6/5 Norman Solomon, Author, 'War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death', The USA Freedom Act Is a Virtual Scam,
Huffington Post, June 5th, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/theusa-freedom-act-is-a_b_7519046.htmlCR
Some foes of mass surveillance have been celebrating the final passage of

the USA Freedom Act, but

Thomas Drake sounds decidedly glum. The new law, he tells me, is "a new spy program." It restarts
some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act and further codifies systematic violations of Fourth Amendment rights.
In Oslo as part of a "Stand Up For Truth" tour, Drake warned at a public forum on Wednesday that "national
security" has become "the new state religion." Meanwhile, his Twitter messages were calling the USA Freedom Act
an "itty-bitty step" -- and a "stop/restart kabuki shell game" that "starts with restarting bulk collection of phone

Drake is a
former senior executive of the National Security Agency -- and a whistleblower who
records." That downbeat appraisal of the USA Freedom Act should give pause to its celebrants.

endured prosecution and faced decades in prison for daring to speak truthfully about NSA activities. He ran afoul of
vindictive authorities because he refused to go along with the NSA's massive surveillance program after 9/11. Drake

understands how the NSA operates from the highest strategic levels. He notes a
telling fact that has gone virtually unacknowledged by anti-surveillance
boosters of the USA Freedom Act: "NSA approved." So, of course, did the
top purveyor of mendacious claims about the U.S. government's
surveillance programs -- President Obama -- who eagerly signed the "USA
Freedom" bill into law just hours after the Senate passed it. A comparable
guardian of our rights, House Speaker John Boehner, crowed: "This
legislation is critical to keeping Americans safe from terrorism and
protecting their civil liberties." While some organizations with civil-liberties credentials have
responded to the USA Freedom Act by popping open champagne bottles at various decibels, more sober
assessments have also been heard. Just after senators approved the bill and sent it to the president, Demand
Progress issued a statement pointing out: "The Senate just voted to reinstitute certain lapsed surveillance
authorities -- and that means that USA Freedom actually made Americans less free." Another astute assessment
came from CREDO, saying that Congress had just created "sweeping new authorities for the government to conduct

the president signed the USA

Freedom Act into law while four U.S. "national security" whistleblowers -- Drake as well as
Coleen Rowley (FBI), Jesselyn Radack (Justice Department) and Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) -- were
partway through a "Stand Up For Truth" speaking tour from London to Oslo to
unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans." As it happened,

Stockholm to Berlin. Traveling as part of the tour, I've been struck by the intensity of interest from audiences in the
countries we've already visited -- Great Britain, Norway and Sweden -- where governments have moved to worsen
repressive policies for mass surveillance. Right now, many people in Europe and elsewhere who care about civil
liberties and want true press freedom are looking at the United States: to understand what an aroused citizenry
might be able to accomplish, seeking to roll back a dangerous accumulation of power by an ostensibly democratic

Let's not unwittingly deceive them -- or ourselves -- about how much

ground the U.S. surveillance state has lost so far.
government.

The USA Freedom Act does not do enough definitions need to

be tighter and backdoor searches must be eliminated.
New York Times 2015 More Excuses on the Patriot Act - May 1st http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/opinion/more-excuses-on-the-patriot-act.html?smid=fbshare&_r=2

Software designers have a term minimal viable product to describe early

versions of things like iPhone apps that they can rush to market. The idea is to get
something out and refine it as they go along. Thats the argument being made for a
measure in Congress that would modify the Patriot Act to make it somewhat harder
for the government to conduct mass surveillance of Americans without regard to
whether they committed any misdeeds. Sure, there are compromises, Americans
are told, but we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The bill is a
critical first step toward reining in surveillance by the National Security Agency
and is a basis for more reform, said Human Rights Watch. Except the Constitution is
not Candy Crush. The same idea lets do what we can and improve it later was
used to shove the original Patriot Act through Congress. It was used to justify the
inadequate changes later made to the act, many of which made it more intrusive on
Americans rights. In 2008, we got a reform of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, or FISA, that provided retroactive cover for the illegal surveillance
of innocent Americans conducted under President George W. Bush behind the false
flag of counterterrorism. The new bill, the USA Freedom Act, was passed by the
House Judiciary Committee on Thursday in a 25-to-2 vote and sent to the floor for
what seems like near-certain approval. It does contain useful changes to Section
215 of the Patriot Act, which was cynically misinterpreted by the Bush
administration to cover the collection of millions of telephone records in the United
States and elsewhere. Section 215 will expire on June 1 if Congress does not act, but
that is unlikely. The new bill would narrow the kinds of records, including so-called
metadata from phone calls, that the intelligence agencies can collect without
bothering to obtain a warrant even from the obliging FISA court, which virtually
always grants one. It adds transparency measures related to government
surveillance programs, and provides for more oversight of those programs. But
many of those provisions are weaker than in earlier versions of the bill, and weaker
than they need to be. The House committee rejected amendments designed to
provide greater safeguards for civil liberties including one from a Republican that
would have required the government to get a warrant before searching collected
communications for information about Americans. The bill does not end the bulk
collection of surveillance data under Section 215. Rather, it limits those operations,
which, in addition to eroding the Bill of Rights, have been shown to be worthless in
protecting America. The American Civil Liberties Union believes the bill doesnt
sufficiently tighten the definition of the terms used to justify data collection, or
properly limit the retention of information about people who are not suspected of
wrongdoing, or require meaningful disclosure of so-called backdoor searches of
databases by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It does not appoint an advocate
to argue before the FISA court on behalf of civil liberties; instead, it simply appoints
a panel of experts to advise the court, where only the government is allowed to
present a case, in secret.

USA Freedom Act is not enough to solve the worst instances of

NSA abuse. Issues include the definition of the specific
selection term, data minimization procedures, and the
backdoor search loophole of Section 702 of FISA.
SAM ADLER-BELL MAY 14, 2015 House Passes USA (Slightly More) Freedom Act
http://www.tcf.org/blog/detail/house-passes-usa-slightly-more-freedom-act
The bad news is, its not all clear that the above will substantially limit the
governments ability to collect most of what it wants to. First, the definition of
specific selection term for tangible things other than call detail records is much
less specific. In such cases, the term can be a person, account, address, personal
device, or any other specific identifier provided it is as limited as reasonably
practicable. That definition does not preclude the government from targeting an IP
address serving many people, interpreting person to include a corporate person, or
engaging in other hermeneutic wiggliness with the words specific identifier.
Moreover, the bill allows the government to collect a second hop of call records
metadata on people in contact with those identified under the first selection term
without additional authorization. There is also the question of how the Second
Circuits ruling impacts the USA Freedom Act. The Second Circuits opinion was
based in large part on a limited definition of the word relevant. That is, all the phone
records of every American cannot be considered relevant to to an authorized
investigation simply becauseas the FISC had interpreted the statutethey might
be at some point later on. In the worst-case scenario, the USA Freedom Act could be
interpreted as ratifying the FISCs definition of relevant rather than upholding the
Second Circuits. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)who withdrew support for the
bill after the Second Circuit rulingshas suggested a simple solution to this
problem: include the Second Circuits definition of the terms relevant and
investigation in the Senate version of the bill or in its legislative history. Another
issue is the bills minimization procedures, which only require the government to
destroy call detail records that it determines are not foreign intelligence information.
Last years Senate iteration of USA Freedom included more stringent procedures,
requiring the destruction of data on individuals who are not targets of an
investigation, suspected agents of a foreign power, contacts of same, or possessing
knowledge of same. Finally, the bill does not close what critics call the backdoor
search loophole enabled by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA). Section 702 authorizes the NSA to surveil non-U.S. persons in other
countries. In the process of 702 surveillance, however, the agency incidentally
sweeps up the communications of many Americans. As it stands, the government is
not required to get a warrant to perform a search of that incidentally collected data.
Most concerning, unlike the domestic phone records program, 702 authorizes the
collection of contentactual e-mails, text messages, and phone calls. Last summer,
the House passed (293 to 123) an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill
that would have outlawed warrantless backdoor searches of Americans
communications. Any serious surveillance reform bill should do the same.

The current version of the USA Freedom act is not enough. It

was watered down in the political process. The provisions of
the original USA Freedom act are necessary to actually solve
bulk data collection and restore us credibility and leadership.
Brian Ries 2014 Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress
Just Passed - Mashable - May 22, 2014
http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)
As a result, many of its initial supporters pulled their support. We supported the
original USA Freedom act, even though it didnt do much for non-US persons, Zeke
Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program told
Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the original version as a good step to
end bulk collection. However, in its current version, it's not even clear that this bill
does that at all, Johnson said. He added that Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in
the bill something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a law,
you can count on the administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W.
Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more positive
view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of
congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a statement.
"While we share the concerns of many including members of both parties who
rightly believe the bill does not go far enough without it we would be left with no
reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have
cemented bulk collection of Americans communications into law." The Electronic
Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." The ban on
bulk collection was deliberately watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,
said Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. We
withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of
large-scale, untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a
crime or terrorism. And Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights
Watch, said, This so-called reform bill wont restore the trust of Internet users in
the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S. credibility and
leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.

Section 702 is unreasonably broad is used to justify the

collection of communications from over 800,000 non targeted
accounts and the information is retained.
Jake Laperruque July 2014 https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demandsignificant-section-702-reform/

While the government has framed Section 702 as a targeted program that
primarily affects suspected terrorists rather than normal individuals a sentiment
echoed by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in a report which CDT and
others roundly criticized the Washington Post report tells a troublingly different
story: Based on a study of the largest sample of Section 702 data analyzed to date,
approximately 90% of the text messages, emails, instant messages, and other

communications retained by NSA, even after the application of minimization

procedures, are to or from accounts who are not surveillance targets. It is not
surprising that a large portion of these accounts belong to non-targets; electronic
surveillance of a target inevitably collects the communications of people who talk to
the target about matters unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance. Considering
the large number of individuals one regularly emails, texts, and calls, a 9:1 ratio
does not seem that extreme. However, while this inevitable incidental collection
might be tolerable in small levels when the surveillance target is suspected of
wrongdoing and communications monitoring is approved by a judge, it is difficult to
justify when the purpose of the surveillance is as broad as is authorized in Section
702, and the resulting scope is so enormous. Further, because the 9:1 ratio is based
on accounts, it might significantly underscore the number of non-targeted
individuals affected. As 89,138 persons were targets last year, the Post concluded
communications from over 800,000 non-targeted accounts were retained. The
actual number is likely much larger. As Julian Sanchez notes, while there are 89,138
persons targeted, most targeted persons (a term that can include corporations and
organizations) have many electronic communications accounts, meaning the
number of accounts targeted is likely much higher. This would place the number of
non-targeted accounts to or from which communications were retained in the
millions.

Original version of the USA Freedom Act prohibited bulk

collection of metadata. Version that passed is watered down
and not enough.
Human Rights Watch, MAY 22, 2014 US Senate: Salvage Surveillance
Reform House Bill Flawed http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/22/us-senate-salvagesurveillance-reform
It is up to the US Senate to salvage surveillance reform, Human Rights Watch said
today. The version of the USA Freedom Act that the US House of Representatives
passed on May 22, 2014, could ultimately fail to end mass data collection. The
version the House passed is a watered-down version of an earlier bill that was
designed to end bulk collection of business records and phone metadata. The
practice has been almost universally condemned by all but the US security
establishment. This so-called reform bill wont restore the trust of Internet users in
the US and around the world, said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at
Human Rights Watch. Until Congress passes real reform, US credibility and
leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade. The initial version of the bill
aimed to prohibit bulk collection by the government of business records, including
phone metadata. The bill only addressed one component of the surveillance
programs revealed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward
Snowden, that of US record collections. However, it had broad support as a first
step, including from Human Rights Watch. On May 7, a diluted version of the bill
passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee, followed by Intelligence
Committee approval on May 8. While better than alternative bills offered, the
version the House passed could leave the door wide open to continued

indiscriminate data collection practices potentially invading the privacy of millions

of people without justification, Human Rights Watch said.

Advantage - Economy

Uniqueness Econ fragile

US economy is in a fragile recovery
Gregg Greenberg 7/3/15, Author for The Street.com, US Economy picking up steam and will lift stocks,
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13204439/1/us-economy-picking-up-steam-and-will-lift-stocks.html

"The consumer is healing," said Hooper. "We're seeing more jobs, better
quality in jobs, and we should see a resulting pickup in retail spending.
And that should really help the economy." Hooper added that her datadependent view seems very much in line with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen's
outlook. Hooper expects the Fed to start raising rates at its September meeting, yet
she does not believe the Fed will go overboard in calendar year 2015. "We could see
just one and done for the year or potentially two and done for the year," said
Hooper. "This is very much a data-dependent decision-making process, the path not
just liftoff, and so our expectation is it's going to be low and long." As a result of the
Fed's move toward tightening, Hooper said she expects a step up in volatility,
although the choppiness won't hold back stocks from moving higher as a result of
the better performing economy. "We think the stock market will digest it fairly
quickly," said Hooper. " We are going to see higher volatility for a time but
likely a bias towards the upside. What we are likely to see is more
volatility and more downside potential in the bond market. That is, after
all, what the Fed has manipulated over the last few years of QE. So our
expectation is that's what is going to be more negatively affected." Although she
expects stocks to rise, Hooper does not advocate investors stay concentrated in
domestic large-cap names. The market will move too fast for that to work, in her
view. "They need to have exposure outside the U.S. and they need to have
adequate exposure within the U.S. across styles, across capitalizations because we
expect a lot of rotation among these sectors and these market capitalizations," said
Hooper. " This is going to be an environment that's really fast moving.
Asset classes are going to dominate for a time and then, of course, be
taken over by other asset classes." What would throw off her forecast? "If the
Fed acts in September, and many investors don't expect it, we could see a
disruption in the markets," said Hoooper. "Again, it's likely to impact bonds more
than stocks but it could be substantial."

Economy fragile
Chico Harlan, 5-29-2015, "U.S. economy shrinks in first quarter, raising
questions about underlying strength," Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/29/analysts-expectdecline-in-u-s-gdp-in-first-quarter/
The U.S. economy shrank at an annualized pace of 0.7 percent in the first three months of
the year, according to government data released Friday morning, a tumble for a

recovering nation that until recently seemed poised for takeoff. The contraction , the
countrys third in the aftermath of the Great Recession, pro vides a troubling picture of
an economy that many figured would get a lift from cheap oil, rapid hiring and growing

consumer confidence. Instead, consumers have proved cautious, and oil companies
have frozen investment all while a nasty winter caused havoc for transportation
and construction and a strong dollar widened the trade deficit. The numbers
released Friday were a revision of earlier figures that had shown GDP growing in the
first quarter at 0.2 percent. Markets had since expected the downward revision, in
large part because of recent data showing the trade deficit at a 6-year high.
Though the United States has shaken off nasty quarters in the past, including one
year ago, this time the rebound doesnt appear to be so dramatic. Halfway through the
second quarter, economists say growth again appears to be below expectations. Many
analysts expect the GDP to expand roughly 2 percent in the second quarter, while
the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta takes an even darker view, predicting an
expansion of just 0.8 percent. That would leave the United States with six months of
economic standstill. In 2014, the economy contracted 2.1 percent in the first
quarter. But growth was rapid for the rest of the year, expanding 4.6 percent in the
second quarter and 5 percent in the third. Really the interesting question is how
much of this will bounce back, said Jeremy Lawson, a chief economist at Standard
Life Investments, an asset management firm. My take is that activity will rebound
more slowly than it did last year. Some of these downward pressures are more
persistent than in the past.1

L Mass surveillance harms tech companies /econ

Lack of true data reform destroys the economy billions of
dollars in economic damage hurts tech companies, costs jobs
and raises the trade deficit. Also reinforces attempts at
protectionism.
Stuart Lauchlan 2015 ITIF life after NSA isnt any easier for cloud firms June
16, 2015 By http://diginomica.com/2015/06/16/itif-life-after-nsa-isnt-any-easier-forcloud-firms/
Those claims havent gone away despite the USA Freedom Act coming in
supposedly to reform the NSAs practices. Two years ago, the industry-funded think
tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimated that the
NSA surveillance would cost cloud computing companies somewhere around $21.5
billion to $35 billion. But last week it upped that figure to an unspecified amount.
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn, authors of a new ITIF report, say: Since then, it has
become clear that the US tech industry as a whole, not just the cloud computing
sector, has under-performed as a result of the Snowden revelations. Therefore, the
economic impact of US surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIFs initial $35
billion estimate. ITIF hit out at what it sees as a lack of strong enough action by the
US government to address the situation the impact of programs such as PRISM:
Foreign companies have seized on these controversial policies to convince their
customers that keeping data at home is safer than sending it abroad, and foreign
governments have pointed to US surveillance as justification for protectionist
policies that require data to be kept within their national borders. In the most
extreme cases, such as in China, foreign governments are using fear of digital
surveillance to force companies to surrender valuable intellectual property, such as
source code. In the short term, U.S. companies lose out on contracts, and over the
long term, other countries create protectionist policies that lock U.S. businesses out
of foreign markets. This not only hurts U.S. technology companies, but costs
American jobs and weakens the US trade balance.

The tech industry, especially cloud computing, is being

economically devastated by NSA surveillance regime. Many
examples prove.
Gerry Smith, 1/24/2015. Smith is a tech reporter for Huffington Post and was awarded an
honorable mention in the 2013 Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Business
Journalism. Huffington Post 'Snowden Effect' Threatens U.S. Tech Industry's Global
Ambitions http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/edward-snowden-techindustry_n_4596162.html

Election officials in India canceled a deal with Google to improve voter registration.
In China, sales of Cisco routers dropped 10 percent in a recent quarter. European
regulators threatened to block AT&T's purchase of the wireless provider Vodafone.
The technology industry is being roiled by the so-called Snowden Effect, as disclosures by

former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of American spying worldwide

The recent setbacks for Google, Cisco

and AT&T overseas have been attributed, in part, to the international outcry over the
companies' role in the NSA scandal. Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, said criticism
prompt companies to avoid doing business with U.S. firms.

over Silicon Valley's involvement in the government surveillance program was initially limited to European
politicians "taking advantage of this moment to beat up on the U.S." "But the reports from the industry are showing

The
impact of the Snowden leaks could threaten the future architecture of the modern
Internet. In recent years, computing power has shifted from individual PCs to the so-called
cloud -- massive servers that allow people to access their files from anywhere. The Snowden revelations
undermined trust in U.S.-based cloud services by revealing how some of the largest
American tech companies using cloud computing -- including Google and Yahoo -had their data accessed by the NSA. About 10 percent of non-U.S. companies have
canceled contracts with American cloud providers since the NSA spying program
was disclosed, according to a survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group. U.S. cloud providers
that it is more than that," he added. "This is more than just a flash in the pan. This is really starting to hurt."

could lose as much as $35 billion over the next three years as fears over U.S. government surveillance prompt
foreign customers to transfer their data to cloud companies in other countries, according to a study by the
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. " If

European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government , then maybe they
won't trust U.S. cloud providers either ," Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for digital affairs, said
last summer after the NSA revelations were made public. "If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for
American companies. If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right
now." European officials and companies have been especially troubled by the Snowden leaks because European
privacy laws are more stringent than those in the United States. After documents from Snowden revealed that the
NSA had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkels phone calls, she said Europeans should promote domestic
Internet companies over American ones in order to avoid U.S. surveillance. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter
Friedrich has suggested that people who are worried about government spying should stop using Google and
Facebook altogether. "Whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that
don't go through American servers," Friedrich said after Snowden leaked the NSA documents. Chris Lamoureux, the

customers have
requested that the company avoid storing their information in U.S.-based data
centers, hoping to make it more difficult for the NSA to gain access . "They've said, 'We
executive vice president of the company Veriday, told The WorldPost that some of his

don't want you to put our data in the U.S. because we're worried about what we're seeing and hearing over there
right now,'" said Lamoureux, whose Ottawa-based company develops web applications for banks, governments and
retailers. Some argue that President Barack Obama has added to the tech industry's troubles abroad by
emphasizing how the NSA surveillance program focused on people outside the United States, where most of Silicon
Valley's customers are located. "Those customers, as well as foreign regulatory agencies like those in the European
Union, were being led to believe that using US-based services meant giving their data directly to the NSA,"
journalist Steven Levy wrote in a recent article in Wired magazine. Hoping to reassure overseas customers,

major

tech companies (including AOL, which owns The Huffington Post Media Group) have asked the
Obama administration for permission to be more open about how they responded to
past requests for data from the U.S. government. They argue the government
snooped on their networks without their knowledge . Recent reports based on documents
provided by Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on Google and Yahoo customers,
unbeknownst to the companies, by secretly tapping cables that connect data
centers around the world. "The impression is that the tech industry is in league with
the U.S. government," Cate said. "But the industry would like to give the impression
that they're victims of the U.S. government, too. " On Wednesday, Microsoft said it would
offer customers who are wary about NSA surveillance the ability to store their data
outside the United States. Meanwhile, some foreign tech companies are trying to capitalize on the distrust
between U.S. tech firms and their customers around the world. Swisscom, a cloud provider in Switzerland, is
developing a service that would attract customers looking to store data under the country's strict privacy laws and
away "from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence services," Reuters reported. Germany's three largest email

providers have also created a new service, called "Email Made in Germany," designed to thwart the NSA by
encrypting messages through servers located within the country, The Wall Street Journal reported. But Cate said
that any businesses that try to avoid surveillance by boycotting U.S. tech companies are not really protecting their
data from the NSA. After all, intelligence agencies in France and Spain also spied on their own citizens, and passed
on that information to the NSA, according to documents from Snowden. "It doesn't make a difference what you do
with your data -- the NSA is going break into it," Cate said. "But that doesn't mean U.S. industry isn't going to get
hurt along the way."

US Tech companies losing billions after Snowden Scandal

Sam Gustin 12/10/13, reporter on business, technology, and public policy,

Time Magazine, NSA Spying Scandal could cost Tech Giants Billions,
http://business.time.com/2013/12/10/nsa-spying-scandal-could-cost-u-s-tech-giantsbillions/
The National Security Agency spying scandal could cost the top U.S. tech
companies billions of dollars over the next several years
experts.

, according to industry

In addition to consumer Internet companies, hardware and cloud-

storage giants

like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle

could suffer billions of dollars in

losses if international clients take their business elsewhere.

Now, the nations

largest Internet companies are calling for Congress and President Obama to reform the U.S. governments secret
surveillance programs. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook are facing intense scrutiny following
revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents about the NSAs
snooping programs. In particular, the tech giants have been stung by disclosures about a classified U.S. intelligence
system called PRISM, which the NSA used to examine data including e-mails, videos and online chats via
requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Snowdens disclosures

stoked privacy concerns about how the largest U.S. tech companies
handle their vast troves of user data.

Since then, the companies have strenuously denied that

they give the NSA direct or unfettered access to their computer servers, and theyve waged a public competition
to demonstrate their commitment to transparency. But recent reports have described how the NSA taps directly into
the networks of the tech giants, a disclosure that prompted outrage from top company executives, most notably
Eric Schmidt, Googles executive chairman. (MORE: AT&T to Shareholders: No NSA Snooping Data for You) After
Snowdens leak,

the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation

partisan, D.C.-based think tank,

(ITIF), a non-

published a report saying that U.S. cloud computing

providers could lose as much as $35 billion by 2016 because of the NSA
revelations . ITIF senior analyst Daniel Castro, the reports author, wrote that Snowdens
disclosures will likely have an immediate and lasting impact on the
competitiveness of the U.S. cloud computing industry if foreign
customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh
the benefits.

Analysts at Forrester, the respected tech industry research firm, went even further. In a blog

post, Forrester analyst James Staten projected a net loss for the Internet service provider industry of as much as
$180 billion by 2016, which would amount to a 25% decline in the overall information technology services market.
All from the unveiling of a single kangaroo-court action called PRISM, Staten wrote. His estimate includes domestic
clients, which could bypass U.S. cloud providers for international rivals, as well as non-U.S. cloud providers, which
could lose as much as 20% of their business due to foreign governments like Germany which have their own

secret snooping programs. With numbers at that scale, its not hard to understand why the top U.S. Internet
companies are vehemently protesting the governments secret surveillance programs. Silicon Valley executives
frequently tout their belief in idealistic principles like free speech, transparency and privacy. But it would be naive to
think that they also arent deeply concerned about the impact of the NSA revelations on the bottom line.
Businesses increasingly recognize that our governments out-of-control surveillance hurts their bottom line and
costs American jobs, Rep. Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican and outspoken critic of the NSAs secret
programs, told TIME by email. It violates the privacy of their customers and it erodes American businesses
competitive edge. On Monday, a coalition of the largest U.S. Internet companies launched a campaign to pressure
the government to reform its surveillance programs. People wont use technology they dont trust, said Microsoft
general counsel Brad Smith. Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.
Several tech CEOs, including Googles Larry Page, Yahoos Marissa Mayer and Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, are
personally throwing their weight behind the effort. (MORE: NSA Scandal: As Tech Giants Fight Back, Phone Firms
Stay Mum) Its the most high-profile effort yet by the tech titans to repair the damage to their corporate reputations
caused by the NSA revelations. The coalition is calling for limits on government authority to collect user information;
better oversight and accountability; greater transparency about the governments demands; respect for the free
flow of data across borders; and the avoidance of conflict between governments. Recent revelations about
government surveillance activities have shaken the trust of our users, and it is time for the United States
government to act to restore the confidence of citizens around the world, said Mayer, Yahoos CEO. Page, Googles
CEO, said: The security of users data is critical, which is why weve invested so much in encryption and fight for
transparency around government requests for information. This is undermined by the apparent wholesale collection
of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world. Mondays
statement by the leading Internet companies is the most forceful sign yet that they are serious about repairing the
damage done to their reputations and future business prospects by the NSA revelations. But one group of
companies that has also been implicated in the Snowden leaks remains conspicuously absent: The nations largest
telecom companies. Both AT&T and Verizon have remained stone-cold silent about their role in the NSAs programs.
Last week, AT&T said it planned to ignore a shareholder proposal calling for greater transparency about government
data requests.

The United States government is now at a crossroads. America

faces difficult choices about how to balance the vital imperatives of

national security and consumer privacy . For years, civil liberties groups warned that the
Internet giants posed the greatest risk to privacy in the digital age. After the Snowden revelations, its become clear
that the gravest threat to civil liberties comes not from the private sector, but from the U.S. government itself. U.S.
policymakers must decide if they wish to continue down the path toward an ever-more intrusive surveillance state
risking billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy or apply real oversight and reform to an intelligence
apparatus that has undermined confidence in the government and the nations most innovative and profitable
businesses.

US Tech industry is set to lose $35 Billion to foreign companies

in the next year
Allan Holmes 9/10/13, writer for Bloomberg and analyst of telecommunications,
cybersecurity and privacy, NSA Spying Seen Risking Billions in US Technology
Sales, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-10/nsa-spying-seenrisking-billions-in-u-s-technology-sales
Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- A congressional committees effective blacklisting of Huawei Technologies Co.s products
from the U.S. telecommunications market over allegations they can enable Chinese spying may come back to bite
Silicon Valley. Reports that the National Security Agency persuaded some U.S. technology companies to build socalled backdoors into security products, networks and devices to allow easier surveillance are similar to how the
House Intelligence Committee described the threat posed by China through Huawei. Just as the Shenzhen, Chinabased Huawei lost business after the report urged U.S. companies not to use its equipment, the NSA disclosures
may reduce U.S. technology sales overseas by as much as $180 billion, or 25 percent of information technology
services, by 2016, according to Forrester Research Inc., a research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The

National Security Agency will kill the U.S. technology industry

singlehandedly,

Rob Enderle, a technology analyst in San Jose, California, said in an interview.

These companies may be just dealing with the difficulty in meeting our

numbers through the end of the decade. Internet companies, network

equipment manufacturers and encryption tool makers receive significant
shares of their revenue from overseas companies and governments.

Cisco

Systems Inc., the worlds biggest networking equipment maker, received 42 percent of its $46.1 billion in fiscal
2012 revenue from outside the U.S., according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Symantec Corp., the biggest maker
of computer-security software based in Mountain View, California, reported 46 percent of its fiscal 2013 revenue of
$6.9 billion from markets other than the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Intel Corp., the worlds largest
semiconductor maker, reported 84 percent of its $53.3 billion in fiscal 2012 revenue came from outside the U.S.,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Exact Flipping The New York Times, the U.K.s Guardian and ProPublica
reported in early September that NSA has cracked codes protecting e-mail and Web content and convinced some
equipment and device makers to build backdoors into products. That followed earlier reports that the NSA was
obtaining and analyzing communications records from phone companies and Internet providers.

The

revelations have some overseas governments questioning their reliance

on U.S. technology. Germanys government has called for home-grown
Internet and e-mail companies. Brazil is analyzing whether privacy laws
were violated by foreign companies. India may ban e-mail services from
Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. , the Wall Street Journal reported. In June, China Daily labeled U.S.
companies, including Cisco, a terrible security threat. One year ago we had the same concern about Huawei,
James Staten, an analyst at Forrester, said in an interview. Now this is the exact flipping of that circumstance.
Tarnished Reputations An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report in August found U.S. providers
of cloud services -- which manage the networks, storage, applications and computing power for

companies

-- stand to lose as much as $35 billion a year as foreign companies,

spooked by the NSAs surveillance,

seek non-U.S. offerings.

Customers buy

products and services based on a companys reputation, and the NSA has
single-handedly tarnished the reputation of the entire U.S. tech
industry,

said Daniel Castro, the reports author and an analyst with the non-partisan research group in

Washington, in an e-mail. I suspect many foreign customers are going to be shopping elsewhere for their hardware
and software. Chips, Devices The latest disclosures were based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, the
former NSA contractor accused of espionage by the U.S. whos now in Russia under temporary asylum.

While

the NSA mentioned no company by name, agency documents posted on

the New York Times website said some companies were persuaded to
insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems,
networks and endpoint communications devices used by targets.

The

documents also said the NSA was trying to work with makers of chips used in Virtual Private Network and Web
encryption devices. The German magazine Der Spiegel separately reported the NSA cracked encryption codes to
listen in on the 1.4 billion smartphones in use worldwide, including Apple Inc.s iPhone. Google, Facebook Inc. and
Yahoo yesterday petitioned the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which rules on warrants for domestic
data, for permission to publish the types of requests theyve received from the NSA. The three companies were
among 22 that sent a letter in July to President Barack Obama and congressional leaders urging that the companies
be allowed to say more about their dealings with the agency. Companies Defense Cisco said it doesnt customize
equipment to enable surveillance. Ciscos product development practices specifically prohibit any intentional
behaviors or product features which are designed to allow unauthorized device or network access, exposure of
sensitive device information, or a bypass of security features or restrictions, John Earnhardt, spokesman for the
San Jose, California-based company, said in a statement. Symantec said in a statement that it learned of the NSAs

encryption cracking in the media. We had no prior knowledge about this program, said Anna Zvagelskaya, of
public relations firm Weber Shandwick, which represents Symantec. We have long held that Intel does not
participate in alleged government efforts to decrease security in technology, Lisa Malloy, an Intel spokeswoman,
said in an e-mail. Congress, Huawei While foreign firms may be more suspicious of some U.S.- made technologies,
the impact of the disclosures may be limited, said Charles Kolodgy, a security analyst with IDC. Its a worldwide
market and some companies may try to benefit from not being a U.S.-based company, but the real issue is
enterprises are trying to protect themselves in most cases from cyber criminals or malicious insiders or
competitors, he said in an interview. Theyre not so concerned with what a nation-state is doing, The marketleading gear is often market-leading because its the best. Weve gone past being able to source everything within a
country. The NSA revelations also may undermine congressional efforts to block U.S. sales of networking
equipment made by Huawei and ZTE Corp., Chinas second-largest phone-equipment maker, also based in
Shenzhen. A House Intelligence Committee report released in October 2012 said the companies close ties to the
Chinese government and its ability to build backdoors into U.S. computer networks might allow China to disrupt
power grids, financial networks or other critical infrastructure. That suspicion applies to almost every government
and technology company, William Plummer, a Huawei spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Threats to data

integrity are not limited to the acts of certain governments or the

equipment or services of companies with select countries of origin,

he said.

Plummer called the U.S. governments pursuit of Huawei an innuendo-driven political exercise and for industry
and government to leave political games behind and pursue real solutions to more secure networks and data.

NSA surveillance destroys high tech economic growth kills

cloud computing, sales, webhosting, and jobs.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
It is becoming clear that the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus may be at crosspurposes with our high-tech economic growth, declared Third Ways Mieke Eoyang
and Gabriel Horowitz in December 2013. The economic consequences [of the
recent revelations] could be staggering.25 A TIME magazine headline projected
that NSA Spying Could Cost U.S. Tech Giants Billions, predicting losses based on
the increased scrutiny that economic titans like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and
Yahoo have faced both at home and abroad since last June.26 The NSAs actions
pose a serious threat to the current value and future stability of the information
technology industry, which has been a key driver of economic growth and
productivity in the United States in the past decade.27 In this section, we examine
how emerging evidence about the NSAs extensive surveillance apparatus has
already hurt and will likely continue to hurt the American tech sector in a number of
ways, from dwindling U.S. market share in industries like cloud computing and
webhosting to dropping tech sales overseas. The impact of individual users turning
away from American companies in favor of foreign alternatives is a concern.
However, the major losses will likely result from diminishing confidence in U.S.
companies as trustworthy choices for foreign government procurement of products
and services and changing the business-to-business market.

Government surveillance practices harm the economic bottom

line of tech companies and US competitiveness.
Computer Business Review, former NSA contractor, 6-10-2015, "US
surveillance practices could cost tech firms over $35bn," No Publication,
http://www.cbronline.com/news/cybersecurity/data/us-surveillance-practices-couldcost-tech-firms-over-35bn-100615-4597407
The US government's data surveillance practices may hit technology firms harder
than expected. In 2013, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
(ITIF) estimated that the revelations of government surveillance by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden could cost the US tech sector between $21.5bn and
$35bn by 2016. In its latest report, the ITIF said the figure will likely far exceed the
original estimation due to the government's failure to reform its surveillance
practices. The think tank proposed a series of reforms designed to enhance security,
protect transparency, and increase cooperation and accountability in the worldwide
technology ecosystem. It recommended policymakers to strengthen information
security by opposing government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or
weaken encryption. They are urged to strengthen US mutual legal assistance
treaties and set up international legal standards for government access to
information. ITIF vice president and co-author of the report Daniel Castro said:
"Foreign customers are increasingly shunning U.S. companies, and governments
around the world are using U.S. surveillance as an excuse to enact a new wave of
protectionist policies. This is bad for U.S. companies, U.S. workers, and the U.S.
economy as a whole. "Now that Congress has passed the USA Freedom Act, it is
imperative that it turn its attention to reforming the digital surveillance activities
that continue to impact our nation's competitiveness."

Tech companies suffering mass losses because of mass data

surveillance kills the economy
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER MARCH 21, 2014 Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S.
Tech Companies
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottomline-of-tech-companies.html
SAN FRANCISCO Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil.
IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to
reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the
United States government. And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South
America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers,
suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these
providers to the National Security Agencys vast surveillance program. Even as
Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowdens leaks,
the more urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic. Technology
executives, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, raised the issue when they
went to the White House on Friday for a meeting with President Obama. It is

impossible to see now the full economic ramifications of the spying disclosures in
part because most companies are locked in multiyear contracts but the pieces
are beginning to add up as businesses question the trustworthiness of American
technology products. The confirmation hearing last week for the new N.S.A. chief,
the video appearance of Mr. Snowden at a technology conference in Texas and the
drip of new details about government spying have kept attention focused on an
issue that many tech executives hoped would go away. Despite the tech companies
assertions that they provide information on their customers only when required
under law and not knowingly through a back door the perception that they
enabled the spying program has lingered. Its clear to every single tech company
that this is affecting their bottom line, said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who predicted that the United
States cloud computing industry could lose $35 billion by 2016. Forrester Research,
a technology research firm, said the losses could be as high as $180 billion, or 25
percent of industry revenue, based on the size of the cloud computing, web hosting
and outsourcing markets and the worst case for damages. The business effect of
the disclosures about the N.S.A. is felt most in the daily conversations between tech
companies with products to pitch and their wary customers. The topic of
surveillance, which rarely came up before, is now the new normal in these
conversations, as one tech company executive described it. Were hearing from
customers, especially global enterprise customers, that they care more than ever
about where their content is stored and how it is used and secured, said John E.
Frank, deputy general counsel at Microsoft, which has been publicizing that it allows
customers to store their data in Microsoft data centers in certain countries. At the
same time, Mr. Castro said, companies say they believe the federal government is
only making a bad situation worse. Most of the companies in this space are very
frustrated because there hasnt been any kind of response thats made it so they
can go back to their customers and say, See, this is whats different now, you can
trust us again, he said. In some cases, that has meant forgoing potential revenue.
Though it is hard to quantify missed opportunities, American businesses are being
left off some requests for proposals from foreign customers that previously would
have included them, said James Staten, a cloud computing analyst at Forrester who
has read clients requests for proposals. There are German companies, Mr. Staten
said, explicitly not inviting certain American companies to join. He added, Its
like, Well, the very best vendor to do this is IBM, and you didnt invite them. The
result has been a boon for foreign companies.

NSA is killing Tech Industries

Zack Whittaker, 2015. It's official: NSA spying is hurting the US tech
economy ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/article/another-reason-to-hate-the-nsachina-is-backing-away-from-us-tech-brands/)
China is no longer using high-profile US technology brands for state purchases, amid ongoing revelations about
mass surveillance and hacking by the US government.

A new report confirmed key brands,

including Cisco, Apple, Intel, and McAfee

-- among others

-- have been

dropped from the Chinese government's list of authorized brands

, a Reuters

report said Wednesday. The number of approved foreign technology brands fell by a third, based on an analysis of
the procurement list. Less than half of those companies with security products remain on the list. Although a
number of reasons were cited,

domestic companies were said to offer "more product

guarantees" than overseas rivals in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks . Some
reports have attempted to pin a multi-billion dollar figure on the impact
the leaks. In reality,

of

the figure could be incalculable . The report confirms what many US

technology companies have been saying for the past year:

the activities by the NSA are

harming their businesses in crucial growth markets,

including China. The Chinese

government's procurement list changes coincided with a series of high profile leaks that showed the US government
have been on an international mass surveillance spree, as well as hacking expeditions into technology companies,
governments, and the personal cellphones of world leaders. Concerned about backdoors implanted by the NSA,
those revelations sparked a change in Chinese policy by forcing Western technology companies to hand over their
source code for inspection. That led to an outcry in the capital by politicians who in the not-so-distant past accused
Chinese companies of doing exactly the same thing.

The fear is that as the China-US

cybersecurity standoff continues , it's come too late for Silicon Valley companies, which are
Microsoft said in January at its fiscal
fourth-quarter earnings that China "fell short" of its expectations, which chief
executive Satya Nadella described as a "set of geopolitical issues" that the company
was working through. He did not elaborate. Most recently, HP said on Tuesday at its
fiscal first-quarter earnings call that it had "execution issues" in China thanks to the
"tough market" with increasing competition from the local vendors approved by the
already suffering financially thanks to the NSA's activities.

Chinese government. But one company stands out: Cisco probably suffered the worst
of all. Earlier this month at its fiscal second-quarter earnings, the
networking giant said it took a 19 percent revenue ding in China, amid
claims the NSA was installing backdoors and implants on its routers in
transit . China remains a vital core geography for most US technology giants with a global reach. But until
some middle-ground can be reached between the two governments, expect Silicon Valley's struggles in the country
to only get worse.

L Cloud Computing
Bulk internet data collection is uniquely devastating to the
cloud computing industry. Several expert surveys indicate
huge businesses loss.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Recent reports suggest that things are, in fact, moving in the direction that analysts
like Castro and Staten suggested.50 A survey of 1,000 [Information and
Communications Technology (ICT)] decision-makers from France, Germany, Hong
Kong, the UK, and the USA in February and March 2014 found that the disclosures
have had a direct impact on how companies around the world think about ICT and
cloud computing in particular.51 According to the data from NTT Communications,
88 percent of decision-makers are changing their purchasing behavior when it
comes to the cloud, with the vast majority indicating that the location of the data is
very important. The results do not bode well for recruitment of new customers,
either62 percent of those currently not storing data in the cloud indicated that the
revelations have since prevented them from moving their ICT systems there. And
finally, 82 percent suggested that they agree with proposals made by German
Chancellor Angela Merkel in February 2014 to have separate data networks for
Europe, which will be discussed in further detail in Part III of this report. Providing
direct evidence of this trend, Servint, a Virginia-based webhosting company,
reported in June 2014 that international clients have declined by as much as half,
dropping from approximately 60 percent of its business to 30 percent since the
leaks began.52

The tech industry, especially cloud computing, is being

economically devastated by NSA surveillance regime. Many
examples prove.
Gerry Smith, 1/24/2015. Smith is a tech reporter for Huffington Post and was awarded an
honorable mention in the 2013 Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Business
Journalism. Huffington Post 'Snowden Effect' Threatens U.S. Tech Industry's Global
Ambitions http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/edward-snowden-techindustry_n_4596162.html

Election officials in India canceled a deal with Google to improve voter registration.
In China, sales of Cisco routers dropped 10 percent in a recent quarter. European
regulators threatened to block AT&T's purchase of the wireless provider Vodafone.
The technology industry is being roiled by the so-called Snowden Effect, as disclosures by
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of American spying worldwide

The recent setbacks for Google, Cisco

and AT&T overseas have been attributed, in part, to the international outcry over the
prompt companies to avoid doing business with U.S. firms.

companies' role in the NSA scandal. Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, said criticism
over Silicon Valley's involvement in the government surveillance program was initially limited to European
politicians "taking advantage of this moment to beat up on the U.S." "But the reports from the industry are showing

The
impact of the Snowden leaks could threaten the future architecture of the modern
Internet. In recent years, computing power has shifted from individual PCs to the so-called
cloud -- massive servers that allow people to access their files from anywhere. The Snowden revelations
undermined trust in U.S.-based cloud services by revealing how some of the largest
American tech companies using cloud computing -- including Google and Yahoo -had their data accessed by the NSA. About 10 percent of non-U.S. companies have
canceled contracts with American cloud providers since the NSA spying program
was disclosed, according to a survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group. U.S. cloud providers
that it is more than that," he added. "This is more than just a flash in the pan. This is really starting to hurt."

could lose as much as $35 billion over the next three years as fears over U.S. government surveillance prompt
foreign customers to transfer their data to cloud companies in other countries, according to a study by the
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. " If

European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government , then maybe they
won't trust U.S. cloud providers either ," Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for digital affairs, said
last summer after the NSA revelations were made public. "If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for
American companies. If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right
now." European officials and companies have been especially troubled by the Snowden leaks because European
privacy laws are more stringent than those in the United States. After documents from Snowden revealed that the
NSA had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkels phone calls, she said Europeans should promote domestic
Internet companies over American ones in order to avoid U.S. surveillance. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter
Friedrich has suggested that people who are worried about government spying should stop using Google and
Facebook altogether. "Whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that
don't go through American servers," Friedrich said after Snowden leaked the NSA documents. Chris Lamoureux, the

customers have
requested that the company avoid storing their information in U.S.-based data
centers, hoping to make it more difficult for the NSA to gain access . "They've said, 'We
executive vice president of the company Veriday, told The WorldPost that some of his

don't want you to put our data in the U.S. because we're worried about what we're seeing and hearing over there
right now,'" said Lamoureux, whose Ottawa-based company develops web applications for banks, governments and
retailers. Some argue that President Barack Obama has added to the tech industry's troubles abroad by
emphasizing how the NSA surveillance program focused on people outside the United States, where most of Silicon
Valley's customers are located. "Those customers, as well as foreign regulatory agencies like those in the European
Union, were being led to believe that using US-based services meant giving their data directly to the NSA,"

major
tech companies (including AOL, which owns The Huffington Post Media Group) have asked the
Obama administration for permission to be more open about how they responded to
past requests for data from the U.S. government. They argue the government
snooped on their networks without their knowledge . Recent reports based on documents
provided by Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on Google and Yahoo customers,
unbeknownst to the companies, by secretly tapping cables that connect data
centers around the world. "The impression is that the tech industry is in league with
the U.S. government," Cate said. "But the industry would like to give the impression
that they're victims of the U.S. government, too. " On Wednesday, Microsoft said it would
offer customers who are wary about NSA surveillance the ability to store their data
outside the United States. Meanwhile, some foreign tech companies are trying to capitalize on the distrust
journalist Steven Levy wrote in a recent article in Wired magazine. Hoping to reassure overseas customers,

between U.S. tech firms and their customers around the world. Swisscom, a cloud provider in Switzerland, is
developing a service that would attract customers looking to store data under the country's strict privacy laws and
away "from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence services," Reuters reported. Germany's three largest email
providers have also created a new service, called "Email Made in Germany," designed to thwart the NSA by
encrypting messages through servers located within the country, The Wall Street Journal reported. But Cate said
that any businesses that try to avoid surveillance by boycotting U.S. tech companies are not really protecting their
data from the NSA. After all, intelligence agencies in France and Spain also spied on their own citizens, and passed

on that information to the NSA, according to documents from Snowden. "It doesn't make a difference what you do
with your data -- the NSA is going break into it," Cate said. "But that doesn't mean U.S. industry isn't going to get
hurt along the way."

L Sec 702
Sec 702 program destroys trust in American businesses and
competitiveness in the global marketplace
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Trust in American businesses has taken a significant hit since the initial reports on
the PRISM program suggested that the NSA was directly tapping into the servers of
nine U.S. companies to obtain customer data for national security investigations.28
The Washington Posts original story on the program provoked an uproar in the
media and prompted the CEOs of several major companies to deny knowledge of or
participation in the program.29 The exact nature of the requests made through the
PRISM program was later clarified,30 but the public attention on the relationship
between American companies and the NSA still created a significant trust gap,
especially in industries where users entrust companies to store sensitive personal
and commercial data. Last years national security leaks have also had a
commercial and financial impact on American technology companies that have
provided these records, noted Representative Bob Goodlatte, a prominent
Republican leader and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, in May 2014.
They have experienced backlash from both American and foreign consumers and
have had their competitive standing in the global marketplace damaged.31

L - Protectionism
NSA digital surveillance destroys US competitiveness and is
used to justify data protectionism and strains relations with
China
DANIEL CASTRO AND ALAN MCQUINN | JUNE 2015 Beyond the USA
Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness
http://www2.itif.org/2015-beyond-usa-freedom-act.pdf?
_ga=1.86597016.1417756247.1435604368
The ability of companiesboth tech and traditionalto easily share data across
borders has brought a vast array of benefits to countries, companies, consumers,
and economies through increased efficiency, decreased costs, and improved
services.26 And yet nations have continued to erect barriers to cloud computing
and cross-border data flows, much to their own detriment.27 While some defenders
of these policies have asserted that they are designed to increase the privacy or
security of their citizens data, it is clear that they are also motivated by misguided
self-interest. By creating rules that advantage domestic firms over foreign firms,
many countries believe they will build a stronger domestic tech industry or gain
short-term economic value, such as jobs in domestic data centers. In reality, these
policies unwittingly limit the ability of a countrys own firms to innovate by shielding
them from international competition.28 These policies not only limit the number of
services that a countrys citizens and businesses can enjoy, but also harm that
countrys productivity and competitiveness. Some countries used U.S. surveillance
laws to justify data protectionism even before Snowdens NSA revelations. For
example, when Rackspace built data centers in Australia in 2012, an Australian
competitor stirred up fears that the United States would use the Patriot Act to track
Australian citizens as a means to force Rackspace out of Australia.29 In addition,
this same Australian company funded a report calling on Australian policymakers to
impose additional regulations designed to put foreign cloud computing competitors
at a disadvantage.30 However, since the recent NSA revelations, the use of privacy
concerns to justify protectionist barriers has grown significantly. Amid growing antiU.S. sentiment, Europe has seen calls for data localization requirements,
procurement preferences for European providers, and even a Schengen area for
dataa system that keeps as much data in Europe as possibleas ways to
promote deployment of cloud services entirely focused on the European market.31
France and Germany have even started to create dedicated national networks:
Schlandnet for the former and the Sovereign Cloud for the latter. 32 The French
government has gone so far as to put 150 million ($200 million) into two start-ups,
Numergy and Cloudwatt, to create a domestic infrastructure independent of U.S.
tech giants.33 Furthermore, some groups have invoked U.S. cyberespionage to
argue that European citizens are not adequately protected and are calling for the
removal of the safe harbor agreementan agreement that allows Internet
companies to store data outside of the European Union. Yet if this were removed it
would cut Europeans off from many major Internet services. 34 There is also an
increasingly distressing trend of countries, such as Australia, China, Russia, and

India, passing laws that prevent their citizens personal information from leaving the
countrys borderseffectively mandating that cloud computing firms build data
centers in those countries or risk losing access to their markets. For example, in
2014 Russian implemented and Indonesia began considering policies that would
require Internet-based companies to set up local data centers.35 These policies are
often a veiled attempt to spur short term economic activity by creating data-center
jobs. However, this benefit is often outweighed by the substantial cost of building
unnecessary data centers, a cost that is eventually passed along to the countrys
citizens. Several U.S. tech giants, such Apple and Salesforce, have already started
to build their data centers abroad to appease foreign watchdogs and privacy
advocates.36 For example, Amazon started running Internet services and holding
data in Germany for its European business partners in an effort to downplay threats
of online spying.37 Protectionist policies in China have further strained the U.S. tech
industry. In January 2015, the Chinese government adopted new regulations that
forced companies that sold equipment to Chinese banks to turn over secret source
code, submit to aggressive audits, and build encryption keys into their products.38
While ostensibly an attempt to strengthen cybersecurity in critical Chinese
industries, many western tech companies saw these policies as a shot across the
bow trying to force them out of Chinas markets. After all, the Chinese government
had already launched a de-IOE movementIOE stands for IBM, Oracle and EMC
to convince its state-owned banks to stop buying from these U.S. tech giants. 39 To
be sure, the Chinese government recently halted this policy under U.S. pressure.40
However, the halted policy can be seen as a part of a larger clash between China
and the United States over trade and cybersecurity. Indeed, these proposed barriers
were in part a quid pro quo from China, after the United States barred Huawei, a
major Chinese computer maker, from selling its products in the United States due to
the fear that this equipment had back doors for the Chinese government.41 Since
the Snowden revelations essentially gave them cover, Chinese lawmakers have
openly called for the use of domestic tech products over foreign goods both to boost
the Chinese economy and in response to U.S. surveillance tactics. This system of
retaliation has not only led to a degradation of business interests for U.S. tech
companies in China, but also disrupted the dialogue between the U.S. government
and China on cybersecurity issues.42

Lack of true data reform destroys the economy billions of

dollars in economic damage hurts tech companies, costs jobs
and raises the trade deficit. Also reinforces attempts at
protectionism.
Stuart Lauchlan 2015 ITIF life after NSA isnt any easier for cloud firms June
16, 2015 By http://diginomica.com/2015/06/16/itif-life-after-nsa-isnt-any-easier-forcloud-firms/
Those claims havent gone away despite the USA Freedom Act coming in
supposedly to reform the NSAs practices. Two years ago, the industry-funded think
tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimated that the

NSA surveillance would cost cloud computing companies somewhere around $21.5
billion to $35 billion. But last week it upped that figure to an unspecified amount.
Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn, authors of a new ITIF report, say: Since then, it has
become clear that the US tech industry as a whole, not just the cloud computing
sector, has under-performed as a result of the Snowden revelations. Therefore, the
economic impact of US surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIFs initial $35
billion estimate. ITIF hit out at what it sees as a lack of strong enough action by the
US government to address the situation the impact of programs such as PRISM:
Foreign companies have seized on these controversial policies to convince their
customers that keeping data at home is safer than sending it abroad, and foreign
governments have pointed to US surveillance as justification for protectionist
policies that require data to be kept within their national borders. In the most
extreme cases, such as in China, foreign governments are using fear of digital
surveillance to force companies to surrender valuable intellectual property, such as
source code. In the short term, U.S. companies lose out on contracts, and over the
long term, other countries create protectionist policies that lock U.S. businesses out
of foreign markets. This not only hurts U.S. technology companies, but costs
American jobs and weakens the US trade balance.

A2 USA Freedom Act solved

Failure to meaningfully reform surveillance practices hurts the
economy; USA Freedom Act is not sufficient now to mitigate
the damage.
Rob Lever, 6-9-2015, "Snowden revelations costly for US tech firms, study says,"
No Publication, http://phys.org/news/2015-06-snowden-revelations-costly-techfirms.html
US technology companies are getting hit harder than anticipated by revelations
about surveillance programs led by the National Security Agency, a study showed
Tuesday. The study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a
Washington think tank, said the impact would be greater than its estimate nearly
two years ago of losses for the cloud computing sector. In 2013, the think tank
estimated that US cloud computing firms could lose between $22 billion and $35
billion in overseas business over three years. It now appears impossible to quantify
the economic damage because the entire sector has been tarnished by the scandal
from revelations in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden,
the report said. "These revelations have fundamentally shaken international trust in
US tech companies and hurt US business prospects all over the world," the report
said. Study co-author Daniel Castro said the impact is now open-ended, with the
NSA scandal having tarnished a wide range of US tech firms. Since 2013, he said,
"we haven't turned this around: it's not just cloud companies. It's all tech firms
implicated by this," he told AFP. "It doesn't show any signs of stopping." The
National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, on January 29,
2010 The National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, on
January 29, 2010 The report said foreign customers are increasingly shunning US
companies, and governments around the world "are using US surveillance as an
excuse to enact a new wave of protectionist policies." One survey cited by the
researchers found 25 percent of businesses in Britain and Canada planned to pull
company data out of the United States as a result of the NSA revelations. Some
companies in Europe do not want their data hosted in North America due to these
concerns, the researchers said. Meanwhile foreign companies have used the
revelations as a marketing opportunity. "There is also an increasingly distressing
trend of countries, such as Australia, China, Russia, and India, passing laws that
prevent their citizens' personal information from leaving the country's borders
effectively mandating that cloud computing firms build data centers in those
countries or risk losing access to their markets ." The report said several US tech
firms including Apple and Salesforce have already started to build data centers
abroad "to appease foreign watchdogs and privacy advocates." While this "data
nationalism" may create some jobs in the short term, Castro said that countries
enacting these policies "are hurting themselves in the long term by cutting
themselves off from the best technology." New law insufficient Castro said the
passage of a reform measure last week called the USA Freedom Act is not sufficient
to repair the reputation of US tech firms. The report recommends further reforms
including boosting transparency of surveillance practices, opposing government

efforts to weaken encryption and strengthening its mutual legal assistance treaties
with other nations. "Over the last few years, the US government's failure to
meaningfully reform its surveillance practices has taken a serious economic toll on
the US tech sector and the total cost continues to grow each day," Castro said.
Castro said the USA Freedom Act, which curbs bulk data collection among its
reforms, is "good legislation and a step in the right direction. We have ignored the
economic impact of US surveillance."

Tech industry is losing massive amounts of money because of

concerns over government surveillance; USA Freedom Act was
not enough to resolve this additional reforms are necessary.
TheHill, 6-9-2015, "Study: Surveillance will cost US tech sector more than $35B
by 2016," http://thehill.com/policy/technology/244403-study-surveillance-will-costus-tech-sector-over-35b-by-2016
A new study says that the U.S. tech industry is likely to lose more than $35 billion
from foreign customers by 2016 because of concerns over government surveillance.
In short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies, the authors of a new
study from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation write. The U.S.
governments failure to reform many of the NSAs surveillance programs has
damaged the competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector and cost it a portion of the
global market share, they said. The think tanks report found that the cost to the
tech sector associated with ongoing concerns over surveillance programs run out of
the U.S. was likely to far exceed $35 billion by 2016, an earlier estimate set by the
group. The group said that lawmakers must enact additional reforms to surveillance
policy if they wish to help the tech sector regain the trust of foreign customers. That
includes opposing backdoors, which allow law enforcement to access otherwise
encrypted data, and signing off on trade agreements, including the controversial
Trans-Pacific Partnership, that ban digital protectionism. The studys authors found
that the revelations about broad U.S. surveillance programs acted as a justification
for foreign policymakers to enact protectionist policies aimed at aiding their own
domestic technology sectors. Foreign companies have also used the information
about U.S. surveillance programs to their advantage. Some European companies
have begun to highlight where their digital services are hosted as an alternative to
U.S. companies, the authors write. American companies, they found, have lost
contracts to foreign competitors over fears about mass surveillance. Earlier this
month, President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, a bill that reformed the three
Patriot Act provisions that authorized the bulk, warrantless collection of Americans
phone records. The bill was widely supported by technology companies, including
giants like Apple and Google.

IL- Spillover
Economic impact of NSA spills over into other industries
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
The economic impact of NSA spying does not end with the American cloud
computing industry. According to The New York Times, Even as Washington
grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowdens leaks, the more
urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic.59 In the past year, a
number of American companies have reported declining sales in overseas markets
like China (where, it must be noted, suspicion of the American government was
already high before the NSA disclosures), loss of customers including foreign
governments, and increased competition from non-U.S. services marketing
themselves as secure alternatives to popular American products. There is already
significant linking NSA surveillance to direct harm to U.S. economic interests. In
November 2013, Cisco became one of the first companies to publicly discuss the
impact of the NSA on its business, reporting that orders from China fell 18 percent
and that its worldwide revenue would decline 8 to 10 percent in the fourth quarter,
in part because of continued sales weakness in China.60 New orders in the
developing world fell 12 percent in the third quarter, with the Brazilian market
dropping roughly 25 percent of its Cisco sales.61 Although John Chambers, Ciscos
CEO, was hesitant to blame all losses on the NSA, he acknowledged that it was
likely a factor in declining Chinese sales62 and later admitted that he had never
seen as fast a decline in an emerging market as the drop in China in late 2013.63
These numbers were also released before documents in May 2014 revealed that the
NSAs Tailored Access Operations unit had intercepted network gearincluding
Cisco routersbeing shipped to target organizations in order to covertly install
implant firmware on them before they were delivered.64 In response, Chambers
wrote in a letter to the Obama Administration that if these allegations are true,
these actions will undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability of
technology companies to deliver products globally.65

All sectors of the economy suffer from bulk internet data

collection by the NSA. Examples like Brazil and Germany
Boeing has lost billion dollar contracts
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf

American companies are also losing out on business opportunities and contracts
with large companies and foreign governments as a result of NSA spying. According
to an article in The New York Times, American businesses are being left off some
requests for proposals from foreign customers that previously would have included
them.70 This refers to German companies, for example, that are increasingly
uncomfortable giving their business to American firms. Meanwhile, the German
government plans to change its procurement rules to prevent American companies
that cooperate with the NSA or other intelligence organizations from being awarded
federal IT contracts.71 The government has already announced it intends to end its
contract with Verizon, which provides Internet service to a number of government
departments.72 There are indications that Verizon is legally required to provide
certain things to the NSA, and thats one of the reasons the cooperation with
Verizon wont continue, a spokesman for the German Interior Ministry told the
Associated Press in June.73 The NSA disclosures have similarly been blamed for
Brazils December 2013 decision to award a $4.5 billion contract to Saab over
Boeing, an American company that had previously been the frontrunner in a deal to
replace Brazils fleet of fighter jets.74 Welber Barral, a former Brazilian trade
secretary, suggested to Bloomberg News that Boeing would have won the contract
a year earlier,75 while a source in the Brazilian government told Reuters that the
NSA problem ruined it for the Americans.76 As we will discuss in greater depth in
the next section, Germany and Brazil are also considering data localization
proposals that could harm U.S. business interests and prevent American companies
from entering into new markets because of high compliance costs.

Competitiveness key to leadership

Competitiveness is a prerequisite to foreign policy and US
leadership
Liberthal & OHanlon, 2012 (Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Director of the China
Center and senior fellow in Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development at
Brookings, and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Director of the Foreign Policy program at
Brookings, July 10, 2012, The Real National Security Threat: America's Debt
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/07/10-economy-foreign-policylieberthal-ohanlon
Lastly, American economic weakness undercuts U.S. leadership abroad. Other
countries sense our weakness and wonder about our purported decline. If this
perception becomes more widespread, and the case that we are in decline becomes
more persuasive, countries will begin to take actions that reflect their skepticism
about America's future. Allies and friends will doubt our commitment and may
pursue nuclear weapons for their own security, for example; adversaries will sense
opportunity and be less restrained in throwing around their weight in their own
neighborhoods. The crucial Persian Gulf and Western Pacific regions will likely
become less stable. Major war will become more likely. When running for
president last time, Obama eloquently articulated big foreign policy visions: healing
America's breach with the Muslim world, controlling global climate change,
dramatically curbing global poverty through development aid, moving toward a
world free of nuclear weapons. These were, and remain, worthy if elusive goals.
However, for Obama or his successor, there is now a much more urgent big-picture
issue: restoring U.S. economic strength. Nothing else is really possible if that
fundamental prerequisite to effective foreign policy is not reestablished.

Plan solves growth

Decisive policy steps to reform digital surveillance are
necessary to re-establish global technology leadership, and
restore competitiveness and economic growth.
DANIEL CASTRO AND ALAN MCQUINN | JUNE 2015 Beyond the USA
Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness
http://www2.itif.org/2015-beyond-usa-freedom-act.pdf?
_ga=1.86597016.1417756247.1435604368
When historians write about this period in U.S. history it could very well be that one
of the themes will be how the United States lost its global technology leadership to
other nations. And clearly one of the factors they would point to is the long-standing
privileging of U.S. national security interests over U.S. industrial and commercial
interests when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. This has occurred over the last few
years as the U.S. government has done relatively little to address the rising
commercial challenge to U.S. technology companies, all the while putting
intelligence gathering first and foremost. Indeed, policy decisions by the U.S.
intelligence community have reverberated throughout the global economy. If the
U.S. tech industry is to remain the leader in the global marketplace, then the U.S.
government will need to set a new course that balances economic interests with
national security interests. The cost of inaction is not only short-term economic
losses for U.S. companies, but a wave of protectionist policies that will
systematically weaken U.S. technology competiveness in years to come, with
impacts on economic growth, jobs, trade balance, and national security through a
weakened industrial base. Only by taking decisive steps to reform its digital
surveillance activities will the U.S. government enable its tech industry to effectively
compete in the global market.

A2 Econ resilient
No resiliency
Nouriel Roubini (professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of
Business, is co-founder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics (RGE)) and
Michael Moran (RGE's vice president, executive editor, and chief geostrategy
analyst) October 11, 2010 Avoid the Double Dip
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/avoid_the_double_dip?page=0,0
Roughly three years since the onset of the financial crisis, the U.S. economy
increasingly looks vulnerable to falling back into recession. The United States is
flirting with "stall speed," an anemic rate of growth that, if it persists, can lead to
collapses in spending, consumer confidence, credit, and other crucial engines of
growth. Call it a "double dip" or the Great Recession, Round II: Whatever the term,
we're talking about a negative feedback loop that would be devilishly hard to break.
If Barack Obama wants a realistic shot at a second term, he'll need to act quickly
and decisively to prevent this scenario. Near double-digit unemployment is the root
of the problem. Without job creation there's a lack of consumer spending, which
represents 40 percent of domestic GDP. To date, the U.S. government has
responded creatively and massively to the near collapse of the financial system,
using a litany of measures, from the bank bailout to stimulus spending to low
interest rates. Together, these policies prevented a reprise of the Great Depression.
But they also created fiscal and political dilemmas that limit the usefulness of
traditional monetary and fiscal tools that policymakers can turn to in a pinch. With
interest rates near zero percent already, the Federal Reserve has few bullets left in
its holster to boost growth or fend off another slump. This lack of available good
options was patently on display in August when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke
with a tinge of resignation about new "quantitative easing" interventions in the
mortgage and bond markets -- a highly technical suggestion that, until the recent
crisis, amounted to heresy among Fed policymakers. It certainly hasn't helped that
the U.S. federal deficit has reached heights that make additional stimulus spending,
of the kind that helped kindle the mini-recovery of early 2010, politically impossible.

No resiliency
RAMPELL 11 economics reporter for The New York Times; wrote for the
Washington Post editorial pages and financial section (Catherine, Second Recession
in U.S. Could Be Worse Than First. August 7.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/a-second-recession-could-be-muchworse-than-the-first.html?pagewanted=all)
If the economy falls back into recession, as many economists are now warning, the

bloodletting could be a lot more painful than the last time around.
But the economy is much
weaker than it was at the outset of the last recession in December 2007,
with most major measures of economic health including jobs, incomes,
output and industrial production worse today than they were back then .
Given the tumult of the Great Recession, this may be hard to believe.

And growth has been so weak that almost no ground has been recouped ,
even though a recovery technically started in June 2009. It would be disastrous if we entered
into a recession at this stage, given that we havent yet made up for the last recession, said
Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics. When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left
Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse,
policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options
available. Anxiety and uncertainty have increased in the last few days after the decision by Standard & Poors to
downgrade the countrys credit rating and as Europe continues its desperate attempt to stem its debt crisis.
President Obama acknowledged the challenge in his Saturday radio and Internet address, saying the countrys
urgent mission now was to expand the economy and create jobs. And Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said
in an interview on CNBC on Sunday that the United States had a lot of work to do because of its long-term and
unsustainable fiscal position. But he added, I have enormous confidence in the basic regenerative capacity of the
American economy and the American people. Still, the numbers are daunting. In the four years since the

the civilian working-age population has grown by about 3

percent. If the economy were healthy, the number of jobs would have
grown at least the same amount. Instead, the number of jobs has shrunk.
recession began,

Today the economy has 5 percent fewer jobs or 6.8 million than it had before the last recession began. The
unemployment rate was 5 percent then, compared with 9.1 percent today.

Even those Americans

who are working are generally working less; the typical private sector worker has a shorter
workweek today than four years ago. Employers shed all the extra work shifts and weak or extraneous employees

As shown by unusually strong productivity

gains, companies are now squeezing as much work as they can from their
newly lean and mean work forces. Should a recession return, it is not clear how many
additional workers businesses could lay off and still manage to function. With fewer jobs and fewer
hours logged, there is less income for households to spend, creating a
huge obstacle for a consumer-driven economy. Adjusted for inflation, personal income is
that they could during the last recession.

down 4 percent, not counting payments from the government for things like unemployment benefits. Income levels
are low, and moving in the wrong direction: private wage and salary income actually fell in June, the last month for

Consumer spending, along with housing, usually drives a

recovery. But with incomes so weak, spending is only barely where it was when the recession began. If the
which data was available.

economy were healthy, total consumer spending would be higher because of population growth. And with
construction nearly nonexistent and home prices down 24 percent since December 2007, the country does not have
a buffer in housing to fall back on. Of all the major economic indicators, industrial production as tracked by the
Federal Reserve is by far the worst off. The Feds index of this activity is nearly 8 percent below its level in
December 2007. Likewise, and perhaps most worrisome, is the track record for the countrys overall output.
According to newly revised data from the Commerce Department, the economy is smaller today than it was when
the recession began, despite (or rather, because of) the feeble growth in the last couple of years. If the economy

Economists refer to the

difference between where the economy is and where it could be if it met
its full potential as the output gap. Menzie Chinn, an economics
professor at the University of Wisconsin, has estimated that the economy
was about 7 percent smaller than its potential at the beginning of this
year. Unlike during the first downturn, there would be few policy remedies
available if the economy were to revert back into recession. Interest rates
cannot be pushed down further they are already at zero. The Fed has already
were healthy, it would be much bigger than it was four years ago.

flooded the financial markets with money by buying billions in mortgage securities and Treasury bonds, and
economists do not even agree on whether those purchases substantially helped the economy. So the Fed may not
see much upside to going through another politically controversial round of buying. There

are only so
many times the Fed can pull this same rabbit out of its hat, said Torsten
Slok, the chief international economist at Deutsche Bank . Congress had some room
financially and politically to engage in fiscal stimulus during the last recession. But at the end of
2007, the federal debt was 64.4 percent of the economy. Today, it is
estimated at around 100 percent of gross domestic product, a share not seen

since the aftermath of World War II, and there is little chance of lawmakers reaching consensus
on additional stimulus that would increase the debt. There is no approachable precedent, at least in the postwar
era, for what happens when an economy with 9 percent unemployment falls back into recession, said Nigel Gault,
chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. The

one precedent you might

consider is 1937 , when there was also a premature withdrawal of fiscal

stimulus, and the economy fell into another recession more painful than
the first.

A2 Decoupling
The US is key to the global economy no decoupling
Caploe 2009 David Caploe (the CEO of the Singapore-incorporated American
Centre for Applied Liberal Arts and Humanities in Asia) April 2009 Focus Still on
America to Lead Global Recovery Online
While superficially sensible, this view is deeply problematic. To begin with, it ignores the fact that the global
economy has in fact been 'America-centred' for more than 60 years. Countries - China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Korea,
Mexico and so on - either sell to the US or they sell to countries that sell to the US. To put it simply, Mr Obama
doesn't seem to understand that there is no other engine for the world economy - and hasn't been for the last six

If the US does not drive global economic growth, growth is not going to
happen. Thus, US policies to deal with the current crisis are critical not just domestically, but
also to the entire world. This system has generally been advantageous for all concerned. America gained
decades.

certain historically unprecedented benefits, but the system also enabled participating countries - first in Western

this
deep inter-connection between the US and the rest of the world also explains how the
collapse of a relatively small sector of the US economy - 'sub-prime' housing, logarithmically
exponentialised by Wall Street's ingenious chicanery - has cascaded into the worst global economic
crisis since the Great Depression . To put it simply, Mr Obama doesn't seem to understand that there
is no other engine for the world economy - and hasn't been for the last six decades.
Europe and Japan, and later, many in the Third World - to achieve undreamt-of prosperity. At the same time,

If the US does not drive global economic growth, growth is not going to happen. Thus, US policies to deal with the
current crisis are critical not just domestically, but also to the entire world. Consequently, it is a matter of global
concern that the Obama administration seems to be following Japan's 'model' from the 1990s: allowing major banks
to avoid declaring massive losses openly and transparently, and so perpetuating 'zombie' banks - technically alive
but in reality dead. As analysts like Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have pointed out, the
administration's unwillingness to confront US banks is the main reason why they are continuing their increasingly
inexplicable credit freeze, thus ravaging the American and global economies. Team Obama seems reluctant to
acknowledge the extent to which its policies at home are failing not just there but around the world as well. Which

If the US can't or won't or doesn't want to be the global economic engine, which
country will? The obvious answer is China . But that is unrealistic for three reasons.
First, China's economic health is more tied to America's than practically any other
country in the world. Indeed, the reason China has so many dollars to invest
everywhere - whether in US Treasury bonds or in Africa - is precisely that it has structured its own
economy to complement America's. The only way China can serve as the engine of
the global economy is if the US starts pulling it first. Second, the US-centred system began at a
time when its domestic demand far outstripped that of the rest of the world. The fundamental source of
its economic power is its ability to act as the global consumer of last resort. China,
however, is a poor country, with low per capita income, even though it will soon pass Japan as the world's
second largest economy. There are real possibilities for growth in China's domestic
demand. But given its structure as an export-oriented economy, it is doubtful if
even a successful Chinese stimulus plan can pull the rest of the world along unless
and until China can start selling again to the US on a massive scale . Finally, the key
'system' issue for China - or for the European Union - in thinking about becoming the engine of the world
economy - is monetary: What are the implications of having your domestic currency become the global reserve
raises the question:

currency? This is an extremely complex issue that the US has struggled with, not always successfully, from 1959 to
the present. Without going into detail, it can safely be said that though having the US dollar as the world's medium
of exchange has given the US some tremendous advantages, it has also created huge problems, both for America

The Chinese leadership is certainly familiar with this history. It will try
to avoid the yuan becoming an international medium of exchange until it feels much more
and the global economic system.

confident in its ability to handle the manifold currency problems that the US has grappled with for decades. Given

the US will remain the engine of global economic recovery for the foreseeable future,
even though other countries must certainly help. This crisis began in the US - and it
is going to have to be solved there too.
all this,

Econ decline impacts

Economic decline causes multiple scenarios for extinction
Burrows and Harris 2009 Mathew J. Burrows counselor in the National
Intelligence Council and Jennifer Harris a member of the NICs Long Range Analysis
Unit Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis The
Washington Quarterly 32:2
https://csis.org/files/publication/twq09aprilburrowsharris.pdf
Increased Potential for Global Conflict Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed
believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many
possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing

While we continue to believe

that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from
that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic
societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral
institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this
would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that
reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem
to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if
sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever.

change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and

Terrorisms
appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is
nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda.

reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and
scientific knowledge will place some of the worlds most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups
in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groupsinheriting organizational structures,
command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacksand newly
emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of

The most dangerous casualty

of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost
certainly be the Middle East. Although Irans acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries
about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security
arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider
pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship
economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn.

that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a

Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a

nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear
nuclear Iran.

red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals
combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will

The
lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile
flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on
preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises.Types of conflict that
the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge,
particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist
practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future
access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government
produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack.

leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability
and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications.
Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as Chinas
and Indias development of blue water naval capabilities.

If

the

fiscal stimulus focus for these countries

turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military . Buildup
of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions , rivalries, and counterbalancing
indeed

moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water
also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to
be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.

Econ collapse = extinction

Kemp 10 Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon
Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the
president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South
Asian affairs on the National Security Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East
Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010, The
East Moves West: India, China, and Asias Growing Presence in the Middle East, p.
233-4
The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario;
everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The world economic situation
weakens rather than strengthens, and India, China, and Japan suffer a major
reduction in their growth rates, further weakening the global economy. As a result,
energy demand falls and the price of fossil fuels plummets, leading to a financial
crisis for the energy-producing states, which are forced to cut back dramatically on
expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to political unrest: and
nurtures different radical groups, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists.
The internal stability of some countries is challenged, and there are more failed
states. Most serious is the collapse of the democratic government in Pakistan and
its takeover by Muslim extremists, who then take possession of a large number of
nuclear weapons. The danger of war between India and Pakistan increases
significantly. Iran, always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and
weaponizes its nuclear program. That further enhances nuclear proliferation in the
Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and Iran as nuclear
states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases,
and the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack in either the Western world or in the
oil-producing states may lead to a further devastating collapse of the world
economic market, with a tsunami-like impact on stability. In this scenario, major
disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for two-thirds of the planets
population.

Global economic crisis causes nuclear war

Cesare Merlini 11, nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States
and Europe and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Institute for
International Affairs, May 2011, A Post-Secular World?, Survival, Vol. 53, No. 2
Two neatly opposed scenarios for the future of the world order illustrate the range of possibilities, albeit at the risk of oversimplification. The first

One or more of the acute tensions

apparent today evolves into an open and traditional conflict between states, perhaps even
scenario entails the premature crumbling of the post-Westphalian system.

The crisis might be triggered by a collapse of the

global economic and financial system, the vulnerability of which we have just experienced, and the
prospect of a second Great Depression, with consequences for peace and
involving the use of nuclear weapons.

democracy similar to those of the first. Whatever the trigger, the unlimited exercise of
national sovereignty, exclusive self-interest and rejection of outside interference
would self-interest and rejection of outside interference would likely be amplified, emptying, perhaps entirely, the half-full
glass of multilateralism, including the UN and the European Union. Many of the more likely conflicts, such as between Israel and Iran or
India and Pakistan, have potential religious dimensions. Short of war, tensions such as those related to immigration might become unbearable.

amiliar issues of creed and identity could be exacerbated . One way or another, the secular
rational approach would be sidestepped by a return to theocratic absolutes , competing
or converging with secular absolutes such as unbridled nationalism .
F

Protectionism impacts
Protectionism lowers the threshold for all conflict makes
escalation more likely causes a laundry list of impacts *card
says prevents Iran conflict
Stewart Patrick (senior fellow and director of the Program on International
Institutions and Global Governance at the Council on Foreign Relations) March
2009 Protecting Free Trade The National Interest
http://nationalinterest.org/article/protecting-free-trade-3060
President Obama and his foreign counterparts should reflect on the lessons of the
1930s-and the insights of Cordell Hull. The longest-serving secretary of state in
American history (1933-1944), Hull helped guide the United States through the
Depression and World War II. He also understood a fundamental truth: "When goods
move, soldiers don't." In the 1930s, global recession had catastrophic political
consequences-in part because policymakers took exactly the wrong approach.
Starting with America's own Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930, the world's major trading
nations tried to insulate themselves by adopting inward looking protectionist and
discriminatory policies. The result was a vicious, self-defeating cycle of tit-for-tat
retaliation. As states took refuge in prohibitive tariffs, import quotas, export
subsidies and competitive devaluations, international commerce devolved into a
desperate competition for dwindling markets. Between 1929 and 1933, the value of
world trade plummeted from $50 billion to $15 billion. Global economic activity
went into a death spiral, exacerbating the depth and length of the Great
Depression. The economic consequences of protectionism were bad enough. The
political consequences were worse. As Hull recognized, global economic
fragmentation lowered standards of living, drove unemployment higher and
increased poverty-accentuating social upheaval and leaving destitute populations
"easy prey to dictators and desperadoes." The rise of Nazism in Germany, fascism in
Italy and militarism in Japan is impossible to divorce from the economic turmoil,
which allowed demagogic leaders to mobilize support among alienated masses
nursing nationalist grievances. Open economic warfare poisoned the diplomatic
climate and exacerbated great power rivalries, raising, in Hull's view, "constant
temptation to use force, or threat of force, to obtain what could have been got
through normal processes of trade." Assistant Secretary William Clayton agreed:
"Nations which act as enemies in the marketplace cannot long be friends at the
council table." This is what makes growing protectionism and discrimination among
the world's major trading powers today so alarming. In 2008 world trade declined
for the first time since 1982. And despite their pledges, seventeen G-20 members
have adopted significant trade restrictions. "Buy American" provisions in the U.S.
stimulus package have been matched by similar measures elsewhere, with the EU
ambassador to Washington declaring that "Nobody will take this lying down."
Brussels has resumed export subsidies to EU dairy farmers and restricted imports
from the United States and China. Meanwhile, India is threatening new tariffs on
steel imports and cars; Russia has enacted some thirty new tariffs and export
subsidies. In a sign of the global mood, WTO antidumping cases are up 40 percent

since last year. Even less blatant forms of economic nationalism, such as banks
restricting lending to "safer" domestic companies, risk shutting down global capital
flows and exacerbating the current crisis. If unchecked, such economic nationalism
could raise diplomatic tensions among the world's major powers. At particular risk
are U.S. relations with China, Washington's most important bilateral interlocutor in
the twenty-first century. China has called the "Buy American" provisions "poison"not exactly how the Obama administration wants to start off the relationship. U.S.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's ill-timed comments about China's currency
"manipulation" and his promise of an "aggressive" U.S. response were not especially
helpful either, nor is Congress' preoccupation with "unfair" Chinese trade and
currency practices. For its part, Beijing has responded to the global slump by rolling
back some of the liberalizing reforms introduced over the past thirty years. Such
practices, including state subsidies, collide with the spirit and sometimes the law of
open trade. The Obama administration must find common ground with Beijing on a
coordinated response, or risk retaliatory protectionism that could severely damage
both economies and escalate into political confrontation. A trade war is the last
thing the United States needs, given that China holds $1 trillion of our debt and will
be critical to solving flashpoints ranging from Iran to North Korea. In the 1930s,
authoritarian great-power governments responded to the global downturn by
adopting more nationalistic and aggressive policies. Today, the economic crisis may
well fuel rising nationalism and regional assertiveness in emerging countries. Russia
is a case in point. Although some predict that the economic crisis will temper
Moscow's international ambitions, evidence for such geopolitical modesty is slim to
date. Neither the collapse of its stock market nor the decline in oil prices has kept
Russia from flexing its muscles from Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan. While some expect the
economic crisis to challenge Putin's grip on power, there is no guarantee that
Washington will find any successor regime less nationalistic and aggressive. Beyond
generating great power antagonism, misguided protectionism could also exacerbate
political upheaval in the developing world. As Director of National Intelligence
Dennis Blair recently testified, the downturn has already aggravated political
instability in a quarter of the world's nations. In many emerging countries, including
important players like South Africa, Ukraine and Mexico, political stability rests on a
precarious balance. Protectionist policies could well push developing economies and
emerging market exporters over the edge. In Pakistan, a protracted economic crisis
could precipitate the collapse of the regime and fragmentation of the state. No
surprise, then, that President Obama is the first U.S. president to receive a daily
economic intelligence briefing, distilling the security implications of the global crisis.

Protectionism causes war

Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr (senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Sara Fitzgerald is a
trade policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation) February 2003 Trade Brings
Security http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3006
And, according to research by Edward Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania
and Jon Pevehouse of the University of Wisconsin, that's a recipe for trouble.

Mansfield and Pevehouse have demonstrated that trade between nations makes
them less likely to wage war on each other -- and keeps internecine spats from
spiraling out of control. They also found these trends are more pronounced among
democratic countries with a strong tradition of respect for the rule of law. Countries
that trade with each other are far less likely to confront each other on the battlefield
than are countries with no trade relationship. And the size of the economies
involved doesn't affect this relationship, which means small, weak countries can
enhance their defense capabilities simply by increasing trade with the world's
economic giants. Experts, including Mansfield and Pevehouse, say intensive trade
integration, perhaps more than any other factor, has led to an unprecedented five
decades of peace in Western Europe.

Advantage Internet Freedom

L- Mass surveillance harms internet freedom

Failure to reform NSA internet data collection undermines US
interests in promoting internet freedom; and will bleed over
into foreign policy credibility in general.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Mandatory data localization proposals are just one of a number of ways that foreign
governments have reacted to NSA surveillance in a manner that threatens U.S.
foreign policy interests, particularly with regard to Internet Freedom. There has been
a quiet tension between how the U.S. approaches freedom of expression online in
its foreign policy and its domestic laws ever since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
effectively launched the Internet Freedom agenda in January 2010.170 But the NSA
disclosures shined a bright spotlight on the contradiction: the U.S. government
promotes free expression abroad and aims to prevent repressive governments from
monitoring and censoring their citizens while simultaneously supporting domestic
laws that authorize surveillance and bulk data collection. As cybersecurity expert
and Internet governance scholar Ron Deibert wrote a few days after the first
revelations: There are unintended consequences of the NSA scandal that will
undermine U.S. foreign policy interests in particular, the Internet Freedom
agenda espoused by the U.S. State Department and its allies.171 Deibert
accurately predicted that the news would trigger reactions from both policymakers
and ordinary citizens abroad, who would begin to question their dependence on
American technologies and the hidden motivations behind the United States
promotion of Internet Freedom. In some countries, the scandal would be used as an
excuse to revive dormant debates about dropping American companies from official
contracts, score political points at the expense of the United States, and even justify
local monitoring and surveillance. Deiberts speculation has so far proven quite
prescient. As we will describe in this section, the ongoing revelations have done
significant damage to the credibility of the U.S. Internet Freedom agenda and
further jeopardized the United States position in the global Internet governance
debates. Moreover, the repercussions from NSA spying have bled over from the
Internet policy realm to impact broader U.S. foreign policy goals and relationships
with government officials and a range of other important stakeholders abroad. In an
essay entitled, The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks,
international relations scholars Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore argue that a
critical, lasting impact of information provided by leakers like Edward Snowden is
the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually
doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the governments public
rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook
Washingtons covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their
own.172 Toward the end of the essay, Farrell and Finnemore suggest, The U.S.
government, its friends, and its foes can no longer plausibly deny the dark side of

U.S. foreign policy and will have to address it head-on. Indeed, the U.S. is currently
working to repair damaged bilateral and multilateral relations with countries from
Germany and France to Russia and Israel,173 and it is likely that the effects of the
NSA disclosures will be felt for years in fields far beyond Internet policy.174

Current NSA bulk internet data collection policies are

destroying US legitimacy in promoting free, open global
internet.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Although there were questions from the beginning about whether the United States
would hold itself to the same high standards domestically that it holds others to
internationally,178 the American government has successfully built up a policy and
programming agenda in the past few years based on promoting an open
Internet.179 These efforts include raising concerns over Internet repression in
bilateral dialogues with countries such as Vietnam and China,180 supporting
initiatives including the Freedom Online Coalition, and providing over $120 million in
funding for groups working to advance Internet freedom supporting countercensorship and secure communications technology, digital safety training, and
policy and research programs for people facing Internet repression.181 However,
the legitimacy of these efforts has been thrown into question since the NSA
disclosures began. Trust has been the principal casualty in this unfortunate affair,
wrote Ben FitzGerald and Richard Butler in December 2013. The American public,
our nations allies, leading businesses and Internet users around the world are
losing faith in the U.S. governments role as the leading proponent of a free, open
and integrated global Internet.182

U.S. leadership shapes global internet norms our rhetoric

must be paired with concrete policy changes like the plan.
David Gross, 2013 U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and
Information Policy at the State Department from 2001-2009. Walking the Talk: The
Role of U.S. Leadership in the Wake of WCIT, 1-17-13. http://www.bna.com/walkingthe-talk-the-role-of-u-s-leadership-in-the-wake-of-wcit-by-david-a-gross/
During the past month, more has been written about December's World Conference
on International Telecommunications (WCIT), hosted by the United Nation's
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Dubai, than about any previous
international telecoms treaty conference. And for good reason. Despite the fact that
the nominal focus of the conference was to bring up-to-date a 1988
telecommunications treaty regarding traditional international telecoms services,

countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others sought to use the
gathering to establish new international rules through the ITU governing the
internet. Although many believe that WCIT failed because 55 countriesincluding
the United States, virtually all of Europe, and other internet-leading countries such
as Kenya and Indiadid not sign the revised treaty, in reality WCIT was an
important early chapter in the critical global process of determining the internet's
political and policy futureand in turn, its technical and economic future. It is
important to recognize that the internet's political and policy future will be shaped
by American leadershipnot just through traditional U.S. rhetoric about
competition, private sector leadership, and multi-stakeholder decisionmaking, but
by America's ability to walk the talk by showing unequivocally that the ideals we
preach internationally are fully reflected in what we do at home. American
policymakers recognize that what we do domestically is watched and analyzed with
great care by much of the rest of the world. For example, before the WCIT
negotiations began in Dubai, Congress unanimously passed resolutions on internet
governance that stated that the United States should continue to preserve and
advance the multi-stakeholder governance model under which the Internet has
thrived as well as resist the imposition of an International Telecommunication Union
(ITU) mandated international settlement regime on the Internet. Declaring, among
other things, that it is essential that the Internet remain stable, secure, and free
from government control. Congress's Clear Message Was Heard This action was
important not only because of the substance of Congress's statements, but also
because the world understood just how extraordinary it is for our Congress to act
with unanimity, especially in an era when Congress has immense difficulty reaching
consensus on almost anything. At the end of WCIT, I heard from many foreign
officials that they knew that the United States would not sign the revised treaty with
its Internet-related provisions because Congress had sent a clear and unequivocal
message that such an agreement was unacceptable to the American people.
Looking ahead, we must recognize the obviousinternet policy issues affect
virtually everyone in the world, and U.S. leadership depends on the power of its
forward looking arguments, not just the historical fact that the United States gave
the world a transformational technology. Although establishing global internet policy
will be long, complex and challenging, we are fortunate that we have a wellestablished road map to follow. No Room for Hypocrisy We can continue to lead the
world toward greater prosperity and the socially transformational benefits long
associated with the internet. But if we fail to match our words with action; if we
insist that others avoid an approach that imposes regulations and laws that limit the
internet's capacity to advance freedom, openness and creativity, micromanages
markets, or limits competition and investment, but do otherwise at home, then the
world will quickly recognize our hypocrisy.

Failure to reform the NSA is galvanizing opposition to our

Internet Freedom agenda.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Prior to the NSA revelations, the United States was already facing an increasingly
challenging political climate as it promoted the Internet Freedom agenda in global
Internet governance conversations. At the 2012 World Conference on International
Telecommunications (WCIT), the U.S. and diverse group of other countries refused to
sign the updated International Telecommunications Regulations based on concerns
that the document pushed for greater governmental control of the Internet and
would ultimately harm Internet Freedom.183 Many observers noted that the split
hardened the division between two opposing camps in the Internet governance
debate: proponents of a status quo multistakeholder Internet governance model,
like the United States, who argued that the existing system was the best way to
preserve key online freedoms, and those seeking to disrupt or challenge that
multistakeholder model for a variety of political and economic reasons, including
governments like Russia and China pushing for greater national sovereignty over
the Internet.184 Many of the proposals for more governmental control over the
network could be understood as attempts by authoritarian countries to more
effectively monitor and censor their citizens, which allowed the U.S. to reasonably
maintain some moral high ground as its delegates walked out of the treaty
conference.185 Although few stakeholders seemed particularly pleased by the
outcome of the WCIT, reports indicate that by the middle of 2013 the tone had
shifted in a more collaborative and positive direction following the meetings of the
2013 World Telecommunications/ICT Policy Forum (WTPF) and the World Summit on
Information Society + 10 (WSIS+10) review.186 However, the Internet governance
conversation took a dramatic turn after the Snowden disclosures. The annual
meeting of the Freedom Online Coalition occurred in Tunis in June 2013, just a few
weeks after the initial leaks. Unsurprisingly, surveillance dominated the conference
even though the agenda covered a wide range of topics from Internet access and
affordability to cybersecurity.187 Throughout the two-day event, representatives
from civil society used the platform to confront and criticize governments about
their monitoring practices.188 NSA surveillance would continue to be the focus of
international convenings on Internet Freedom and Internet governance for months
to come, making civil society representatives and foreign governments far less
willing to embrace the United States Internet Freedom agenda or to accept its
defense of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance as a anything other
than self-serving. One can come up with all kinds of excuses for why US
surveillance is not hypocrisy. For example, one might argue that US policies are
more benevolent than those of many other regimes And one might recognize that
in several cases, some branches of government dont know what other branches are
doing and therefore US policy is not so much hypocritical as it is inadvertently
contradictory, wrote Eli Dourado, a researcher from the Mercatus Center at George

Mason University in August 2013. But the fact is that the NSA is galvanizing
opposition to Americas internet freedom agenda.189 The scandal revived
proposals from both Russia and Brazil for global management of technical standards
and domain names, whether through the ITU or other avenues. Even developing
countries, many of whom have traditionally aligned with the U.S. and prioritize
access and affordability as top issues, dont want US assistance because they
assume the equipment comes with a backdoor for the NSA. They are walking
straight into the arms of Russia, China, and the ITU.190

NSA mass surveillance programs undermine US credibility and

soft power
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Beyond Internet Freedom, the NSA disclosures have badly undermined U.S.
credibility with many of its allies, Ian Bremmer argued in Foreign Policy in
November 2013.214 Similarly, as Georg Mascolo and Ben Scott point out about the
post-Snowden world, the shift from an open secret to a published secret is a game
changer it exposes the gap between what governments will tolerate from one
another under cover of darkness and what publics will tolerate from other
governments in the light of day.215 From stifled negotiations with close allies like
France and Germany to more tense relations with emerging powers including Brazil
and China, the leaks have undoubtedly weakened the American position in
international relations, opening up the United States to new criticism and political
maneuvering that would have been far less likely a year ago.216 U.S. allies like
France, Israel, and Germany are upset by the NSAs actions, as their reactions to the
disclosures make clear.217 Early reports about close allies threatening to walk out
of negotiations with the United Statessuch as calls by the French government to
delay EU-U.S. trade talks in July 2013 until the U.S. government answered European
questions about the spying allegations218appear to be exaggerated, but there
has certainly been fallout from the disclosures. For months after the first Snowden
leaks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel would not visit the United States until the
two countries signed a no-spy agreementa document essentially requiring the
NSA to respect German law and rights of German citizens in its activities. When
Merkel finally agreed come to Washington, D.C. in May 2014, tensions rose quickly
because the two countries were unable to reach an agreement on intelligence
sharing, despite the outrage provoked by news that the NSA had monitored Merkels
own communications.219 Even as Obama and Merkel attempted to present a
unified front while they threatened additional sanctions against Russia over the
crisis in the Ukraine, it was evident that relations are still strained between the two
countries. While President Obama tried to keep up the appearance of cordial
relations at a joint press conference, Merkel suggested that it was too soon to return

to business as usual when tensions still remain over U.S. spying allegations.220
The Guardian called the visit frosty and awkward.221 The German Parliament
has also begun hearings to investigate the revelations and suggested that it is
weighing further action against the United States.222 Moreover, the disclosures
have weakened the United States relationship with emerging powers like Brazil,
where the fallout from NSA surveillance threatens to do more lasting damage.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has seized on the NSA disclosures as an
opportunity to broaden Brazils influence not only in the Internet governance field,
but also on a broader range of geopolitical issues. Her decision not to attend an
October 2013 meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House was a
direct response to NSA spyingand a serious, high-profile snub. In addition to
cancelling what would have been the first state visit by a Brazilian president to the
White House in nearly 20 years, Rousseffs decision marked the first time a world
leader had turned down a state dinner with the President of the United States.223 In
his statement on the postponement, President Obama was forced to address the
issue of NSA surveillance directly, acknowledging that he understands and regrets
the concerns disclosures of alleged U.S. intelligence activities have generated in
Brazil and made clear that he is committed to working together with President
Rousseff and her government in diplomatic channels to move beyond this issue as a
source of tension in our bilateral relationship.224 Many observers have noted that
the Internet Freedom agenda could be one of the first casualties of the NSA
disclosures. The U.S. government is fighting an uphill battle at the moment to regain
credibility in international Internet governance debates and to defend its moral high
ground as a critic of authoritarian regimes that limit freedom of expression and
violate human rights online. Moreover, the fallout from the NSAs surveillance
activities has spilled over into other areas of U.S. foreign policy and currently
threatens bilateral relations with a number of key allies. Going forward, it is critical
that decisions about U.S. spying are made in consideration of a broader set of
interests so that they do not impedeor, in some cases, completely undermine
U.S. foreign policy goals.

Government surveillance is the greatest threat to Internet

freedom
Emily Taylor 02 Mar 2014, 3-2-2014, "Government control greatest threat to Internet
Governance in 2014," Emily Taylor Research, http://www.emilytaylor.eu/government-control-trustinternet-threat/

The greatest threat facing Internet governance is the way too much power afforded
to governments to control communication on the network . To me, this is mainly
manifested in the increasing actions of online mass surveillance carried out by some
governments and the threats that this poses to privacy; and the ability of some
governments to stop all Internet communication using a kill switch. Weve seen this happen in Egypt
during the 18 days that brought Mubarak down, but its also still happening on a smaller scale in parts
of Egypt (mainly the Sinai), with the government claiming its done in the interest of national
security. Sam Dickinson, writer and and public affairs consultant. www.linguasynaptica.com The

greatest threat to Internet governance is external politics. Its got nothing to do with
the Internet itself. Its developments like the revelations of widespread NSA
surveillance and existing tensions between countries with rival political views.
Resentment towards the USA means that NSA surveillance is being used as a catchall argument in Internet governance discussions . Equally, stakeholders from Western
developed countries often automatically view with suspicion the different perspectives of those from
the Middle East, Russia, and China. The less-than-perfect human rights records of many of these
countries is used as unstated justification that their views on non-human rights related are somehow
less legitimate than those from more enlightened developed countries. Combine these wider political
prejudices held by stakeholders with the looming deadline to reframe the WSIS vision for the next
decade, and you end up with a significantly reduced chance of real progress in Internet governance.
Pam Little, former Senior Director of Compliance at ICANN, Australia Governments. I see governments
as a two-way sword in that trust has been breached or eroded, which in turn could undermine the
success or full potential of the Internet as an enabler and tool for innovation, e-commerce and the free
flow of information. This brings me to a related issue, the U.S. governments influence over ICANN and
control over the domain name system (through the IANA contract). To me, this is no longer appropriate
so to the extent that such legacy influence continues, it would continue to plague ICANN and ICANN
will continue to suffer a legitimacy problem Fiona Alexander Associate Administrator for
International Affairs NTIA, USA We clearly face challenges to maintain a free and open

Internet in the wake of the unauthorized disclosures of U.S. governments

surveillance practices. Some countries are using these disclosures as an excuse for cutting off or
disrupting the free flow of information. This would cause significant economic damages and could
impede technological advancement and innovation, which rely on global cooperation. We cannot let
the surveillance issues jeopardize this. Too much is at stake. So, we must work to discourage the
building of barriers, and we must work to reduce and eliminate the threat to the existing
multistakeholder process of Internet governance.

L China censorship
States are continuing to justify internet repression and
censorship on the basis of our data collection policies. The
dangers are snowballing.
Washington Post, 2014 (Citing a Freedom House report. In the global
struggle for Internet freedom, the Internet is losing, report finds 12-4-14.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/04/in-the-globalstruggle-for-internet-freedom-the-internet-is-losing-report-finds/)
The year 2014 marks the moment that the world turned its attention to writing laws
to govern what happens on the Internet. And that has not been a great thing,
according to an annual report from the U.S.-based pro-democracy think tank
Freedom House.
Traditionally, countries eager to crack down on their online critics largely resorted to
blocking Web sites and filtering Internet content, with the occasional offline
harassment of dissidents. But that has changed, in part because online activists
have gotten better at figuring out ways around those restrictions; Freedom House
points to Greatfire, a service that takes content blocked in mainland China and
hosts it on big, global platforms, like Amazon's servers, that the Chinese
government finds both politically and technologically difficult to block.
In the wake of these tactics, repressive regimes have begun opting for a "technically
uncensored Internet," Freedom House finds, but one that is increasingly controlled
by national laws about what can and can't be done online. In 36 of the 65 countries
surveyed around the world the state of Internet freedom declined in 2014,
according to the report.
Russia, for example, passed a law that allows the country's prosecutor general to
block "extremist" Web sites without any judicial oversight. Kazakstan passed a
similar law. Vietnam passed decrees cracking down on any critiques of the state on
social media sites. Nigeria passed a law requiring that Internet cafes keep logs of
the customers who come into their shops and use their computers.
There's a bigger worry at work, too, Freedom House says: the potential for a
"snowball effect." More and more countries, the thinking goes, will adopt these sorts
of restrictive laws. And the more that such laws are put in place, the more they fall
within the range of acceptable global norms.
Also shifting those norms? According to Freedom House, "Some states are using the
revelations of widespread surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)
as an excuse to augment their own monitoring capabilities, frequently with little or
no oversight, and often aimed at the political opposition and human rights
activists."

Impact ext China soft power solves global

problems
China soft power solves every scenario for extinction
Zhang Weiwei, 9-4-2012, a professor of international relations at Fudan
University and a senior research fellow at the Chunqiu Institute, "The rise of China's
political soft power," No Publication, http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/201209/04/content_26421330.htm jwh
As China plays an increasingly significant role in the world, its soft power must be
attractive both domestically as well as internationally. The world faces many
difficulties, including widespread poverty, international conflict, the clash of
civilizations and environmental protection. Thus far, the Western model has not
been able to decisively address these issues; the China model therefore brings hope
that we can make progress in conquering these dilemmas. Poverty and
development
The Western-dominated global economic order has worsened poverty in developing
countries. Per-capita consumption of resources in developed countries is 32 times as
large as that in developing countries. Almost half of the population in the world still
lives in poverty. Western countries nevertheless still are striving to consolidate their
wealth using any and all necessary means. In contrast, China forged a new path of
development for its citizens in spite of this unfair international order which enabled
it to virtually eliminate extreme poverty at home. This extensive experience would
indeed be helpful in the fight against global poverty. War and peace
In the past few years, the American model of "exporting democracy'" has produced
a more turbulent world, as the increased risk of terrorism threatens global security.
In contrast, China insists that "harmony is most precious". It is more practical, the
Chinese system argues, to strengthen international cooperation while addressing
both the symptoms and root causes of terrorism .
The clash of civilizations Conflict between Western countries and the Islamic world is
intensifying. "In a world, which is diversified and where multiple civilizations coexist,
the obligation of Western countries is to protect their own benefits yet promote
benefits of other nations," wrote Harvard University professor Samuel P. Huntington
in his seminal 1993 essay "The Clash of Civilizations?". China strives for "being
harmonious yet remaining different", which means to respect other nations, and
learn from each other. This philosophy is, in fact, wiser than that of Huntington, and
it's also the reason why few religious conflicts have broken out in China. China's
stance in regards to reconciling cultural conflicts, therefore, is more preferable than
its "self-centered" Western counterargument.
Environmental protection
Poorer countries and their people are the most obvious victims of global warming,
yet they are the least responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases. Although
Europeans and Americans have a strong awareness of environmental protection, it

is still hard to change their extravagant lifestyles. Chinese environmental protection

standards are not yet ideal, but some effective environmental ideas can be
extracted from the China model.
Perfecting the China model
The China model is still being perfected, but its unique influence in dealing with the
above four issues grows as China becomes stronger. China's experiences in
eliminating poverty, prioritizing modernization while maintaining traditional values,
and creating core values for its citizens demonstrate our insight and sense of
human consciousness. Indeed, the success of the China model has not only brought
about China's rise, but also a new trend that can't be explained by Western theory.
In essence, the rise of China is the rise of China's political soft power, which has
significantly helped China deal with challenges, assist developing countries in
reducing poverty, and manage global issues. As the China model improves, it will
continue to surprise the world.

Impact ext China censorship

Censorships net-worse for stability
C. Custer, 2012, Chinese cultural expert with a degree in East Asia Studies,
Tech in Asia, December, 18, 2012, Web of Failure: How Chinas Internet Policies
Have Doomed Chinese Soft Power", http://www.techinasia.com/failure-chinainternet-policies-doomed-chinese-soft-power/
When it comes to the web, China has continually struggled to choose between its
impulse to control things as tightly as possible and its recognition of web platforms
as a powerful way to broadcast its propaganda both at home and abroad. In the
past few years, its apparent strategy has been to attempt to have its cake and eat it
too: to broadcast its own message using all the Western web channels at its
disposal while blocking those channels for domestic web users. Unfortunately for
the government, having your cake and eating it is impossible, and this policy if it
is continued will prove to be an utter failure. Domestic Stability Chinas
censorship of Western web platforms like Facebook and Twitter is predicated on the
idea that those platforms, because they are uncensored, threaten Chinas domestic
stability. In the wake of the 2009 Urumqi riots, numerous Western social media sites
(including the aforementioned Twitter and Facebook) were blamed for facilitating
the organization of protests and the spread of harmful information, and were
subsequently blocked. Blocking websites does increase stability in the short term,
because people with dissenting messages have fewer ways to spread them. In the
long-term , though, this kind of stability is unsustainable . Censorship, after all,
does not eliminate dissent; it merely silences it, or more often pushes it into
different channels. And while Chinas Great Firewall (GFW) makes organizing dissent
more difficult, it also foments dissent by frustrating people who are trying to do
normal internet things but cant because of the blockages. Moreover, it encourages
creative ways to circumvent the blocks both technologically and ideologically
(Chinas net users may be the worlds most creative when it comes to using puns
and homophones to discuss sensitive issues without setting off keyword blocks).
The Great Firewall also effectively moves many dissenters from foreign sites (where
most of the audience cant understand them) onto domestic services like Sina
Weibo. And while Sina Weibo and other Chinese social services are monitored and
censored, theyre often not monitored and censored quickly and efficiently enough
to stop so-called harmful information from spreading. The harder China cracks
down on VPNs and other GFW-circumventing technology, the worse this is going to
get. If Ai Weiwei and his followers (for example) are prevented from using Twitter,
does the government really think theyre just going to stop expressing themselves
and give up? No, they will turn to domestic sites, and while domestic censors will
block their accounts and delete their messages, some of those messages will get
through. And in a country where strident dissent is often illegal, its impact and its
spread are intensified. To put it another way, if the Chinese internet was
uncensored, the dramatic statements of Ai Weiwei and other dissidents probably
wouldnt be considered remarkable. And if everyone had the freedom to express

themselves without fear of censorship and reprisals, Ai Weiweis fearlessness

wouldnt be particularly important. Honestly, if the government really wants to
effectively silence Ai Weiwei, they should dismantle the Great Firewall tomorrow.

Impact ext Territorial conflict escalation

Territorial conflicts will escalate
Burnett 14 Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight, a BBC News
program, Real Clear World, February 12, 2014, "Will Asia Repeat Europe's
Mistakes?",
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2014/02/12/will_asia_repeat_europes_mistak
es_110290.html
Yet tension in East Asia is rising - especially between China and Japan. Unlike
relations between Germany and Britain a hundred years ago, the present-day
tension between China and Japan has its roots in past conflicts between the two
countries.
Many Chinese do not think the Japanese leadership has fully accepted the country's
responsibility for the invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s. Chinese students
learn about the widespread atrocities committed by Japanese forces in gory detail,
while Japanese nationalists play down the details and China says many Japanese
textbooks whitewash the invasion - all of which means there's been no real
reconciliation. China and Japan also have a long-running territorial dispute over
control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea arising out of the first
Sino-Japanese war of the modern era in the 1890s. The islands were annexed by
Japan after that war in 1895, but 50 years later, after the Second World War, unlike
other territories conquered by the Japanese, they were not returned to China, but
instead occupied by the Americans. By the time the United States decided it didn't
need the islands in the early 1970s, China was ruled by the Communist Party and
Japan was a US ally, so Washington returned the islands to Japanese control.
Growing more powerful in recent years, China has increased pressure on Japan to
acknowledge there is a dispute over the islands. China now regularly sends ships
and planes to patrol near the islands, the Japanese respond with patrols of their
own, and the likelihood of an accidental clash is increasing.
So even if comparisons with 1914 are off the mark, conflict between China and
Japan could still be a possibility.
Abe is a seen as a nationalist who would like Japan to move on from the pacifism
imposed on it by the United States after 1945. He may not go as far as changing the
pacifist elements of the constitution, but he wants to change Japan's defense
posture, so the armed forces take a more assertive role - up to now, Japan has relied
heavily on the United States to defend the areas around it - and he justifies this by
pointing at China's growing military capabilities and doubts over Beijing's intentions.
In Beijing, Xi is focused on reforming the economy and cleaning up the corruption
that's undermining the Communist Party's legitimacy, which would suggest he does
not want a war. But for his reforms to succeed, maintaining tension with Tokyo and a
sense of threat from abroad is useful as it encourages loyalty to the center. Xi will

also need support of the military and security apparatus for his reforms as he takes
on vested interests in the party leadership, provincial governments and large state
enterprises, and this makes compromise with Japan more difficult. Chinese public
opinion is also hostile to Japan, evident in opinion polls, social media and the ease
with which anti-Japanese boycotts occur.
So, domestic politics as well as geopolitics are driving both China and Japan to be
more assertive, and this worries Washington. When Abe visited the controversial
Yasukuni shrine for Japanese war dead at the end of December, it not only stoked
tension with China and South Korea which issued strong protests, the United States
publicly stated it was "disappointed."
In his comments at Davos, Abe, presumably thinking of the strong trade links
between his country and China, said the economic links between Germany and
Britain did not prevent war in 1914. Some listening to the Japanese prime minister
came away with the impression he thinks pecuniary interests may not be strong
enough to deter a military clash.
If a conflict between Beijing and Tokyo were to break out, the US could not bank on
its other ally in the region, Seoul, given the tense relations between South Korea
and Japan which have their own territorial and historical disputes. So Washington
would choose between honoring its defense treaty with Japan and avoiding direct
conflict with China. As Washington would stand to lose the trust of many allies in the
region and is not noted for eating humble pie, the odds would suggest support for
Japan. So if there is any parallel with 1914, it could turn out to be in how cascading
alliance commitments can cause a wider war.

Territorial conflicts will escalate and cause extinction

Rehman2013(Iskander,StantonNuclearSecurityFellow+associateintheNuclearPolicyProgram
@theCarnegieEndowmentforInternationalPaceandaStantonNuclearSecurityFellow.Hisresearch
focusesonsecurityandcrisisstabilityinAsia,specificallythegeopoliticalramificationsofnaval
nuclearizationintheIndianOcean,3/9/13,DragoninaBathtub:ChineseNuclearSubmarinesandthe
SouthChinaSea,http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/03/09/dragoninbathtubchinesenuclear
submarinesandsouthchinasea/fpjl)
DespiteAmericasbesteffortstoconstructstrongertieswithChina,relationsinbetweenbothcountrieshavebeenrepeatedly

buffetedbyaseriesoftensionsandmisunderstandings .Manyofthesefrictionsappeartohaveresultedfromamore
assertiveChinesepostureintheSouthChinaSea.Almosteveryweek,Asianheadlinesseemtobedominatedbyreportsof
jingoisticstatementsoverdisputedislets,orofarenewedboutofaggressivemaneuveringbyboatsfromoneofBeijingsnumerousmaritime
agencies.WhenattemptingtoexplainthisupsurgeinChinesepugnacity,analystshavepointedtotherisingpower'sselectiveinterpretationofthe
lawoftheseaandgrowingunwillingnesstocompromiseoverwhatitcallsitsbluenationalsoil,particularlywhenconfrontedwithan
increasinglyintransigentdomesticpopulace.Othershavepointedtothemoreimmediatelytangiblebenefitstobederivedfromthepresenceof
numerousoffshoreoilandgasdepositswithincontestedwaters.Strangelyenough,however,oneoftheprincipalexplanationsforChinas
increasedpricklinesstowardsforeignmilitarypresencewithinitsmaritimebackyardhasyettobeclearlyarticulated.Indeed, notonlyisthe

SouthChinaSeaoneoftheworldsbusiesttradethoroughfares,italsohappenstobetheroamingpenof
Chinasemergingballisticmissilesubmarinefleet ,whichisstationedatSanya,onthetropicalIslandofHainan.The
UnitedStates,withitsarrayofadvancedantisubmarinewarfareassetsandhydrographicresearchvesselsdeployedthroughouttheregion,

givesBeijingtheunwelcomeimpressionthatUncleSamcantstoppeeringintoitsnuclearnursery .When
Chinesenavalstrategistsdiscusstheirmaritimeenvirons,thesentimenttheyconveyisoneofperpetualembattlement.PointingtotheUSs
extendednetworkofalliesintheIndoPacificregion,andtotheirownrelativeisolation,ChinesestrategistsfearthatBeijings

growingnavycouldbeensnaredwithinthefirstislandchainaregionwhichtheydescribeasstretchingfromJapan
allthewaytotheIndonesianarchipelago .Applyingthismaritimesiegementalitytonavalplanning;theyfretthattheUS
Navycouldlocateandneutralizetheirfledglingunderseadeterrentintheveryfirstphasesofconflict,beforeitevenmanagestoslipthroughthe
chinksoffirstislandchain.ThisconcernhelpsexplainChina'sgrowingintolerancetoforeignmilitaryactivitiesintheSouthChinaSea.
Tellingly,someofthemostnervewrackingstandoffsinvolvingUSandChineseforceshaveunfoldedincloseproximitytoHainan.The
infamousEp3crisis,duringwhichaUSspyplaneenteredintocollisionwithaChinesefighterjet,occurredwhiletheplanescrewwas
attemptingtocollectintelligenceonnavalinfrastructuredevelopment.Similarly,theUSNSImpeccableincident,duringwhichaUS
hydrographicvesselwasdangerouslyharassedbyfiveChineseships,tookplaceapproximatelyseventymilestothesouthofHainan.Duringthe
confrontation,ChinesesailorsreportedlyattemptedtounhooktheImpeccablestowedacousticarraysonars.Inpublic,China'sprotestsover
foreignmilitaryactivitiesarecouchedinterritorialterms.Inprivate,however,Chinesepolicymakersreadilyacknowledgethecentralityofthe
nucleardimension.ThusinthecourseofadiscussionwithaformerChineseofficial,Iwastoldthateventhoughterritorialissuesareof
importance,ourmajorconcernisthesanctityofourfutureseabaseddeterrent.Hethenwentontodescribe,withaflickerofamusement,how
fishermenoffthecoastofHainanregularlysnagUSsonarsintheirnets,andareencouragedtosellthembacktothelocalauthoritiesinexchange
forfinancialcompensation.Ofcourse,suchcatandmousegamesarenothingnewandareperfectlylegalprovidedtheyoccurwithin
internationalwatersorairspace.DuringtheColdWar,AmericanandSovietshipswouldfrequentlyconductforwardintelligencegathering
missions,sometimesinverycloseproximitytoeachothersshores.Atthetime,Americanthinkerscautionedthatsuch

riskybehavior

couldpotentiallyleadtomisinterpretationandnucleardisaster .UnliketheSoviets,however,whocouldconfinethe
movementsoftheirboomerstothefrigid,lonelywatersoftheBarentsandOkhotskseas,theChinesehavechosentoerecttheir

nuclearsubmarinebasesmackbanginthemiddleofoneoftheworldsbusiestmaritimehighways .
Needlesstosay,thislocationishardlyideal.Whenitcomestopickingstrategicrealestateintheirnearseas,theChinesehavebuta
limitedrosterofoptions.Afterall,theirmaritimebackyardisgirdedbyasturdypalisadeofstateswhich
increasinglyviewChinasmeteoricrise,andattendanttruculenceatsea,withamixtureofalarmand
dismay.Likeadragoncaughtflounderinginabathtub,Chinasnavalambitionsaresimplytoobroadandgrandioseforitsconstrictedmaritime
geography.ThisperceivedlackofstrategicdepthprovidesapartialexplanationtoBeijingsincreasedobduracyoverterritorialdisputesinthe
SouthChinaSea.Inordertobetterprotectitsvaluablesubsurfaceassets,Chinaaimstoestablisharingofmaritimewatchtowersorbastions
aroundHainan.AbsolutecontrolovertheremoteSpratlyislands,inadditiontothemoreproximateParacels,wouldgreatlyfacilitatethis
concentricdefensiveconfiguration.Untilnotlongago,Chinasstrategicsubmarineforcewasntreallytakenseriously.Theirlone092Xiaclass
boatwasdeemedtooantiquatedandnoisytobeanythingmorethanasymbolofBeijingsdesireforgreatpowerstatus.Someobservershad
venturedthatChinawouldbecontenttorelyalmostexclusivelyonitsrapidlymodernizinglandbasedmissilesystemforitsdeterrent.Recent
developments,however,suggestthatthismaybeabouttochange.InitslatestreporttoCongress,theUSChinaEconomicandSecurityReview
CommissionstatedthatChinacouldsoonequipitsnewclassofJinsubmarineswiththeJL2ballisticmissile,whichhasarangeof
approximately4600miles.ThiswouldenableBeijing,thereportadds,toestablishanearcontinuousatseastrategicdeterrent.Inall
likelihoodthisforcewillbeberthedatHainan.ThesecondObamaAdministrationwillthereforehavetheunenviabletaskof

dealingwithtensionsinaregionwhichisnotonlyriddledwithterritorialdivisions,butisalso rapidly
morphingintooneoftheworldsmostsensitivenuclearhotspots

Internet freedom key to econ

Open internets key to economic growth and cloud
computing
COMMISSIONER ROBERT M. MCDOWELL FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS
COMMISSION, 5-31-2012, "Comm'r. McDowell's Congressional Testimony 5-312012," http://www.fcc.gov/document/commr-mcdowells-congressional-testimony-531-2012
Second, it is important to define the challenge before us.

The threats are real and not imagined, although they

scores of countries led by China, Russia, Iran,

Saudi Arabia, and many others, have pushed for, as then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said almost a year
ago, international control of the Interne t through the ITU.1 I have tried to find a more concise way to express
admittedly sound like works of fiction at times. For many years now,

this issue, but I cant seem to improve upon now-President Putins crystallization of the effort that has been afoot for quite some time. More importantly, I
think we should take President Putin very seriously. 1 Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Working Day, GOVT OF THE RUSSIAN
FEDN, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/15601/ (June 15, 2011) (last visited May 14, 2012). Six months separate us from the renegotiation of the

What proponents of Internet

freedom do or dont do between now and then will determine the fate of the Net ,
1988 treaty that led to insulating the Internet from economic and technical regulation.

affect global economic growth and determine whether political liberty can
proliferate During the treaty negotiations, the most lethal threat to Internet freedom may not come from a full frontal assault, but through
insidious and seemingly innocuous expansions of intergovernmental powers. This subterranean effort is already under way. While influential ITU Member
States have put forth proposals calling for overt legal expansions of United Nations or ITU authority over the Net, ITU officials have publicly declared that
the ITU does not intend to regulate Internet governance while also saying that any regulations should be of the light-touch variety.2 But which is it? It is
not possible to insulate the Internet from new rules while also establishing a new light touch regulatory regime. Either a new legal paradigm will emerge
in December or it wont. The choice is binary. Additionally, as a threshold matter, it is curious that ITU officials have been opining on the outcome of the
treaty negotiation. The ITUs Member States determine the fate of any new rules, not ITU leadership and staff. I remain hopeful that the diplomatic process
will not be subverted in this regard. As a matter of process and substance, patient and persistent incrementalism is the Nets most dangerous enemy and
it is the hallmark of many countries that are pushing the pro- regulation agenda. Specifically, some ITU officials and Member States have been discussing
an alleged worldwide phone numbering crisis. It seems that the world may be running out of phone numbers, over which the ITU does have some
jurisdiction. 2 Speech by ITU Secretary-General Tour, The Challenges of Extending the Benefits of Mobile (May 1,
2012),http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/index.aspx?lang=en (last visited May 29, 2012). 2 Today, many phone numbers are used for voice
over Internet protocol services such as Skype or Google Voice. To function properly, the software supporting these services translate traditional phone
numbers into IP addresses. The Russian Federation has proposed that the ITU be given jurisdiction over IP addresses to remedy the phone number
shortage.3 What is left unsaid, however, is that potential ITU jurisdiction over IP addresses would enable it to regulate Internet services and devices with
abandon. IP addresses are a fundamental and essential component to the inner workings of the Net. Taking their administration away from the bottom- up,
non-governmental, multi-stakeholder model and placing it into the hands of international bureaucrats would be a grave mistake. Other efforts to expand
the ITUs reach into the Internet are seemingly small but are tectonic in scope. Take for example the Arab States submission from February that would
change the rules definition of telecommunications to include processing or computer functions.4 This change would essentially swallow the Internets
functions with only a tiny edit to existing rules.5 When ITU leadership claims that no Member States have proposed absorbing Internet governance into the
ITU or other intergovernmental entities, the Arab States submission demonstrates that nothing could be further from the truth. An infinite number of
avenues exist to 3 Further Directions for Revision of the ITRs, Russian Federation, CWG-WCIT12 Contribution 40, at 3 (2011), http://www.itu.int/md/T09CWG.WCIT12-C-0040/en (last visited May 29, 2012) (To oblige ITU to allocate/distribute some part of IPv6 addresses (as same way/principle as for
telephone numbering, simultaneously existing of many operators/numbers distributors inside unified numbers space for both fixed and mobile phone
services) and determination of necessary requirements.). 4 Proposed Revisions, Arab States, CWG-WCIT12 Contribution 67, at 3 (2012),
http://www.itu.int/md/T09- CWG.WCIT12-C-0067/en (last visited May 29, 2012). 5 And Iran argues that the current definition already includes the Internet.
Contribution from Iran, The Islamic Republic of Iran, CWG-WCIT12 Contribution 48, Attachment 2 (2011), http://www.itu.int/md/T09-CWG.WCIT12- C0048/en (last visited May 29, 2012). 3 accomplish the same goal and it is camouflaged subterfuge that proponents of Internet freedom should watch for
most vigilantly. Other examples come from China. China would like to see the creation of a system whereby Internet users are registered using their IP
addresses. In fact, last year, China teamed up with Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to propose to the UN General Assembly that it create an
International Code of Conduct for Information Security to mandate international norms and rules standardizing the behavior of countries concerning
information and cyberspace.6 Does anyone here today believe that these countries proposals would encourage the continued proliferation of an open
and freedom-enhancing Internet? Or would such constructs make it easier for authoritarian regimes to identify and silence political dissidents? These
proposals may not technically be part of the WCIT negotiations, but they give a sense of where some of the ITUs Member States would like to go. Still
other proposals that have been made personally to me by foreign government officials include the creation of an international universal service fund of
sorts whereby foreign usually state-owned telecom companies would use international mandates to charge certain Web destinations on a per-click
basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe. Google, iTunes, Facebook and Netflix are mentioned most often as prime sources

the U.S. and like-minded proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity across the globe should resist efforts
to expand the powers of intergovernmental bodies over the Internet 6 Letter dated 12 September
of funding. In short,

2011 from the Permanent Representatives of China, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to the United Nations addressed to the SecretaryGeneral, Item 93 of the provisional agenda - Developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security, 66th
Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Annex (Sep. 14, 2011),
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1800/sources/2012_UN_Russia_and_China_Code_o_Conduct.pdf (last visited May 29, 2012). 4 5 even in the smallest
of ways. As my supplemental statement and analysis explains in more detail below,

such a scenario would be

devastating to global economic activity , but it would hurt the developing world

the most.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today and I look forward to your questions. * * * FCC Commissioner Robert M.
McDowell Supplemental Statement and Analysis May 31, 2012 Thank you, Chairman Walden and Ranking Member Eshoo, for holding this hearing. Its topic
is among the most important public policy issues affecting global commerce and political freedom: namely, whether the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU), or any other intergovernmental body, should be allowed to expand its jurisdiction into the operational and economic affairs of the Internet. As
we head toward the treaty negotiations at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in December, I urge governments
around the world to avoid the temptation to tamper with the Internet. Since its privatization in the early 1990s, the Internet has flourished across the world
under the current deregulatory framework. In fact, the long-standing international consensus has been to keep governments from regulating core
functions of the Internets ecosystem. Yet, some nations, such as China, Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been pushing to reverse this course by
giving the ITU or the United Nations itself, regulatory jurisdiction over Internet governance. The ITU is a treaty-based organization under the auspices of
the United Nations.1 Dont take my word for it, however. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said almost one year ago, the goal of this well-organized
and energetic effort is to establish international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the [ITU]. 2 Motivations of
some ITU Member states vary. Some of the arguments in support of such actions may stem from frustrations with the operations of Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Any concerns regarding ICANN, however, should not be used as a pretext to end the multi-stakeholder model
that has served all nations especially the developing world so well. Any reforms to ICANN should take place through the bottom-up multi-stakeholder
process and should not arise through the WCITs examination of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR)s. Constructive reform of the ITRs
may be needed. If so, the scope of any review should be limited to traditional telecommunications services and not expanded to include information
services or any form of Internet services. Modification of the current multi- stakeholder Internet governance model may be necessary as well, but we
should all work together to ensure no intergovernmental regulatory overlays are placed into this sphere. Not only would nations surrender some of their
national sovereignty in such a pursuit, but they would suffocate their own economies as well, while politically paralyzing engineering and business
decisions within a global regulatory body. 1 History, ITU, http://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/history.aspx (last visited May 14, 2012). 2 Vladimir Putin, Prime
Minister of the Russian Federation, Working Day, GOVT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDN, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/15601/ (June 15, 2011) (last visited
May 14, 2012). Every day headlines tell us about industrialized and developing nations alike that are awash in debt, facing flat growth curves, or worse,

Not only must governments, including our own, tighten their fiscal belts, but they
must also spur economic expansion. An unfettered Internet offers the brightest ray
of hope for growth during this dark time of economic uncertainty, not more
regulation. Indeed, we are at a crossroads for the Internets future. One path holds
great promise, while the other path is fraught with peril. The promise , of course, lies with
keeping what works, namely maintaining a freedom-enhancing and open Internet
while insulating it from legacy regulations . The peril lies with changes that would ultimately sweep up Internet services
shrinking GDPs.

into decades-old ITU paradigms. If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the regulatory dungeon of the past.

The

future of global growth and political freedom lies with an unfettered

Internet . Shortly after the Internet was privatized in 1995, a mere 16 million people were online worldwide.3 As of early 2012, approximately
2.3 billion people were using the Net.4 Internet connectivity quickly evolved from being a novelty in industrialized countries to becoming an essential tool
for commerce and sometimes even basic survival in all nations, but especially in the developing world. Such explosive growth was helped, not
hindered, by a deregulatory construct. Developing nations stand to gain the most from the rapid pace of deployment and adoption of Internet technologies
brought forth by an Internet free from intergovernmental regulation. By way of illustration, a McKinsey report re leased in January examined the Nets
effect on the developing world, or aspiring countries.5 In 30 specific aspiring countries studied, including Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Turkey and
Vietnam,6 Internet penetration has grown 25 percent per year for the past five years, compared to only five percent per year in developed nations.7
Obviously, broadband penetration is lower in aspiring countries than in the developed world, but that is quickly changing thanks to mobile Internet access
technologies. Mobile subscriptions in developing countries have risen from 53 percent of the global market in 2005 to 73 percent in 2010.8 3 Internet
Growth Statistics, INTERNET WORLD STATS, http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm (last visited Feb. 21, 2012). 4 Id. 5 See McKinsey High Tech
Practice, Online and upcoming: The Internets impact on aspiring countries , MCK INSEY & CO. (Jan. 2012) (McKinsey Aspiring Countries Report ),
http://www.mckinsey.com/Client_Service/High_Tech/Latest_thinking/Impact_of_the_internet_on_aspiring _countries (last visited May 24, 2012). 6 Id. at 22
(categorizing the following as aspiring countries: Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran,
Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Taiwan,
Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Vietnam). 7 Id. at 1, 3-4, 23. 8 Id. at 1. 2 In fact, Cisco estimates that the number of mobile-connected devices
will exceed the worlds population sometime this year.9 Increasingly, Internet users in these countries use only mobile devices for their Internet access. 10
This trend has resulted in developing countries growing their global share of Internet users from 33 percent in 2005, to 52 percent in 2010, with a
projected 61 percent share by 2015.11 The 30 aspiring countries discussed earlier are home to one billion Internet users, half of al global Internet us 12 l
ers.

The effect that rapidly growing Internet connectivity is having on aspiring

countries economies is tremendous. The Net is an economic growth

accelerator . It contributed an average 1.9 percent of GDP growth in aspiring countries for an estimated total of $366 billion in 2010. 13 In
some developing economies, Internet connectivity has contributed up to 13 percent of GDP growth over the past five years.14 In six aspiring countries
alone, 1.9 million jobs were associated with the Internet.15 And in other countries, the Internet creates 2.6 new jobs for each job it disrupts.16 I expect
that we would all agree that these positive trends must continue. The best path forward is the one that has served the global economy so well, that of a
multi-stakeholder governed Internet. One potential outcome that could develop if pro-regulation nations are successful in granting the ITU authority over
Internet governance would be a partitioned Internet. In particular, fault lines could be drawn between countries that will choose to continue to live under

A
balkanized Internet would not promote global free trade or increase living
standards. At a minimum, it would create extreme uncertainty and raise costs for all users
across the globe by rendering an engineering, operational and financial morass. For
the current successful model and those Member States who decide to opt out to place themselves under an intergovernmental regulatory regime.

instance, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced placing many of their courses online for free for anyone to

uncertainty

with a newly politicized

use. The
and economic and engineering chaos associated
9 Cisco Visual Networking
Index: Global M obile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-201 6 , CISCO, at 3 (Feb. 14, 2012),
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11- 520862.pdf (last visited May 24, 2012). 10 McKinsey

Aspiring Countries Report at 1. 11 Id. at 3-4, 23. 12 Id. at iv, 4, 23. And 73 percent of Internet users do not speak English as a first language. Id. at iv. 13 Id.
at 2, 8-9, 26-27. 14 Id. at 2. 15 Id. at v. 16 McKinsey Global Institute, Internet Matters: The Nets Sweeping Impact on Growth, Jobs, and Prosperity , MCK
INSEY & CO., at 3, 21 (May 2011), http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Internet_matters (last visited May 24,

intergovernmental legal regime would inevitably drive up costs as cross border

traffic and cloud computing become more complicated and vulnerable to regulatory
arbitrage. Such costs are always passed on to the end user consumers and may very well
negate the ability of content and application providers such as Harvard and MIT to
offer first-rate educational content for free. Nations that value freedom and
prosperity should draw a line in the sand against new regulations while welcoming reform that could
include a non-regulatory role for the ITU. Venturing into the uncertainty of a new regulatory quagmire
will only undermine developing nations the most.
2012). 3

US leadership key to prevent global internet fragmentation

kills the economy
Mark Weinstein, Mark has served as a Steering Committee Member of National
Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), Huffington Post, November 12,
2014, Obama Heroically Wages Internet War, But Misses World Wide Web Target,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weinstein/obama-heroically-wagesin_b_6137324.html

I have a greater fear -- a rudderless World Wide Web and captain-less

ICANN. That's why eight months ago I preached for Net Neutrality and for the United
States to push such an agenda through as stewards of ICANN. I was overjoyed on
Monday to see Obama support half of my wish list when he released an emphatic
video statement throwing his administration's full support behind Net Neutrality and
asking the FCC to implement strict rules to give weight to such an agenda. Way to
go, Mr. President!
Yet there's more to do here. What's interesting about Monday's statement is for
all its good, it turns the discussion away from a global perspective to a domestic
one. Obama's speech focuses on a free and open Internet within our borders that
doesn't speed up or slow down content delivery based on the whims of broadband
companies. Take that Netflix with your big ideas of Internet favoritism. At the same
time, is this a first step of a philosophy or a final one? I hope the former but fear the
latter.
Imagine for a second if every country had its own Internet. The World
Wide Web would become anything but, leading to an economic and
individual rights disaster that would complicate commerce and freedom
around the world.
In 1997, Bill Clinton helped create ICANN within his Green Paper proposal for
privatizing the domain name system (DNS). In that regard, our impartiality and
creation of checks and balances built into the system have led to a rather

impressive run , one that has averted partisan politics and lobbyists and helped
keep the Internet as a free platform.
I think that our losing such a leadership role is a mistake for the U nited
S tates and the principles of Net Neutrality. Yet in the spirit of compromise, I
commend Obama for taking a stand within our borders. Now he needs to take
the next step.
The hope I have is that whatever new governance structure emerges for
ICANN in 2015 turns into a United Nations of Internet protection where the entire
world has access to a free Internet. However, if the new structure cannot guarantee
Net Neutrality, then I believe the U.S. government should revoke its decision to
relinquish leadership. The risk is too great and the ramifications too
frightening to idly stand by and allow any other conclusion.

Internet freedom key to democracy

US support for internet freedom is essential to our continued
ability to promote democracy
Richard Fontaine and Will Rogers Center for a New American Security
Internet Freedom A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age June, 2011 http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_InternetFreedom_FontaineR
ogers_0.pdf
The United States has a long history of providing diplomatic and financial support
for the promotion of human rights abroad, including the right to free expression.
While each presidential administration emphasizes human rights to differing
degrees, during recent decades they have all consistently held that human rights
are a key U.S. interest. Promoting freedom of the Internet expands human rights
support into cyberspace, an environment in which an ever-greater proportion of
human activity takes place. The United States advocates for freedom of the Internet
because it accords not only with American values, but also with rights America
believes are intrinsic to all humanity. For years, the U.S. government has
programmatically and rhetorically supported democracy promotion abroad. The
State Department routinely disburses millions of dollars in funding for democracybuilding programs around the world, many of which are aimed explicitly at
expanding free expression. Presidential and other speeches regularly refer to the
American belief in the universality of this right; to cite but one example, a March
2011 White House statement on Syria noted that, The United States stands for a
set of universal rights, including the freedom of expression and peaceful
assembly.8 The Obama administrations 2010 National Security Strategy
specifically called for marshaling the Internet and other information technologies to
support freedom of expression abroad,9 and the Bush administration adopted a
policy of maximizing access to information and ideas over the Internet.10 Americas
interest in promoting freedom via the Internet comes from the same fundamental
belief in democratic values and human rights. Despite inevitable inconsistencies
and difficult tradeoffs, the United States continues to support democracy. The Bush
administrations 2006 National Security Strategy committed to support democratic
institutions abroad through transformational diplomacy.11 President Obama, after
entering office with an evident desire to move away from the sweeping tone of his
predecessors freedom agenda, nevertheless told the U.N. General Assembly in
2009 that there are basic principles that are universal; there are certain truths
which are self-evident and the United States of America will never waver in our
efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own
destiny.12 To the extent that supporting Internet freedom advances Americas
democracy-promotion agenda, the rationale for promoting online freedom is clear.
However, cause and effect are not perfectly clear and the United States must
choose its policies under conditions of uncertainty. Both the Bush and Obama
administrations have wagered that by promoting global Internet freedom the United
States will not only operate according to universal values but will promote tools that
may, on balance, benefit societies over the autocrats that oppress them. Secretary

of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged countries to join us in the bet we have made,
a bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries.13
Given the evidence we discuss throughout this report, this bet is one worth making.

2AC

A2 Terror DA
NSA bulk internet data collection techniques impeded our
ability to fight the war on terror 4 key reasons.
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
Given the amount of information the NSA is collecting, it is not surprising that the
agency would also take aggressive steps to improve its ability to read that
information. According to the black budget released by The Washington Post in
August 2013, 21 percent of the intelligence budget (roughly $11 billion) goes toward
the Consolidated Cryptologic Program, with a staff of 35,000 in the NSA and the
armed forces surveillance and code breaking units.237 The resources devoted to
signals intercepts are extraordinary, wrote Barton Gellman and Greg Miller.238
However, the agency has employed a variety of methods to achieve this goal far
beyond simple code-breakingmethods that directly undermine U.S. cybersecurity,
not just against the NSA, but also against foreign governments, organized crime,
and other malicious actors. In this section, we consider four different ways that the
NSA has damaged cybersecurity in pursuit of its signals intelligence goals: (1) by
deliberately engineering weaknesses into widely-used encryption standards; (2) by
inserting surveillance backdoors in widely-used software and hardware products; (3)
by stockpiling information about security vulnerabilities for its own use rather than
disclosing those vulnerabilities so that they can be remedied; and (4) by engaging
in a wide variety of offensive hacking techniques to compromise the integrity of
computer systems and networks around the world, including impersonating the web
sites of major American companies like Facebook and LinkedIn.

NSA bulk internet data collection doesnt help find real

terrorists they use other less obvious mechanisms to transfer
information
GEOFFREY INGERSOLL Jun. 25, 2013, 5:44 PM The NSA's PRISM Surveillance
Program Only Gathers Info On Stupid Terrorists Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nsa-prism-is-aimed-at-terrorisms-idiots-20136#ixzz3efOp11ct
It doesn't really matter if the NSA gathers all the information from the big tech
giants, because real terrorists, smart terrorists, the guys in management, they don't
use those platforms. Only terrorism's idiots do. Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg
writes: The infrastructure set up by the National Security Agency, however, may
only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists.
The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of Americas
largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail

and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use.
A few weeks ago, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked
documents diagramming the existence of a program called PRISM. Supposedly this
program enabled the NSA to tap into the content of communications from the major
tech giants but only specific information and only if they had a court order, NSA
officials later claimed. Later, when Congress pressed for information and
justification for such a program, NSA director Keith Alexander claimed they had
stopped 50 terrorist acts, 10 of which were aimed at the U.S. Former vice president
Dick Cheney raised the stakes, asserting PRISM could have stopped 9/11. Dubious
claims at best. There are multiple platforms and methods to avoid the higher, more
visible side of the Internet. Even Bin Laden was smart enough to use a courier and
hand written notes to give orders. The real terrorist planners prefer to "remain in
the undernet," writes Bershidsky. From Bloomberg: In 2012, a French court found
nuclear physicist Adlene Hicheur guilty of, among other things, conspiring to
commit an act of terror for distributing and using software called Asrar alMujahideen, or Mujahideen Secrets. The program employed various cutting-edge
encryption methods, including variable stealth ciphers and RSA 2,048-bit keys. A
mathmetician found out when he hacked into Google last year that they were only
using 512 bit keys for their email communications. Likely they've upgraded, but the
anecdote goes to show just how sophisticated terrorist planners can get. Earlier this
year we covered an element of the undernet called "Tor." Certainly the paranoid
upper echelons of Al Qaeda would use this side-road rather than the general
Internet super highway. Those aren't the only options either when it comes to
avoding PRISM. "At best," writes Bershidsky, "the recent revelations concerning
Prism and telephone surveillance might deter potential recruits to terrorist causes
from using the most visible parts of the Internet."

Claims that NSA bulk data surveillance, including Section 702

surveillance, prevents terrorism are hyped and misleading a
very low percentage of terrorism cases even have anything to
do with it.
Bailey Cahall, et.al. (David Sterman, Emily Schneider Peter Bergen) POLICY
PAPER | JANUARY 13, 2014 https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/donsas-bulk-surveillance-programs-stop-terrorists/
However, our review of the governments claims about the role that NSA bulk
surveillance of phone and email communications records has had in keeping the
United States safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and even
misleading. An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by al-Qaeda or a likeminded group or inspired by al-Qaedas ideology, and charged in the United States
with an act of terrorism since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative
methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted
intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority
of cases, while the contribution of NSAs bulk surveillance programs to these cases
was minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American telephone

metadata, which includes the telephone numbers that originate and receive calls,
as well as the time and date of those calls but not their content, under Section 215
of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in initiating, at
most, 1.8 percent of these cases. NSA programs involving the surveillance of nonU.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA
Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined,
and NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority played a role in 1.3 percent of
the cases we examined.

NSA exaggerates the role of its programs in protecting us from

terrorism. We dont need more information, the problem is we
dont understand or share the information we possess.
Bailey Cahall, et.al. (David Sterman, Emily Schneider Peter Bergen) POLICY
PAPER | JANUARY 13, 2014 https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/donsas-bulk-surveillance-programs-stop-terrorists/
Additionally, a careful review of three of the key terrorism cases the government
has cited to defend NSA bulk surveillance programs reveals that government
officials have exaggerated the role of the NSA in the cases against David Coleman
Headley and Najibullah Zazi, and the significance of the threat posed by a notional
plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. In 28 percent of the cases we reviewed,
court records and public reporting do not identify which specific methods initiated
the investigation. These cases, involving 62 individuals, may have been initiated by
an undercover informant, an undercover officer, a family member tip, other
traditional law enforcement methods, CIA- or FBI-generated intelligence, NSA
surveillance of some kind, or any number of other methods. In 23 of these 62 cases
(37 percent), an informant was used. However, we were unable to determine
whether the informant initiated the investigation or was used after the investigation
was initiated as a result of the use of some other investigative means. Some of
these cases may also be too recent to have developed a public record large enough
to identify which investigative tools were used. We have also identified three
additional plots that the government has not publicly claimed as NSA successes, but
in which court records and public reporting suggest the NSA had a role. However, it
is not clear whether any of those three cases involved bulk surveillance programs.
Finally, the overall problem for U.S. counterterrorism officials is not that they need
vaster amounts of information from the bulk surveillance programs, but that they
dont sufficiently understand or widely share the information they already possess
that was derived from conventional law enforcement and intelligence techniques.
This was true for two of the 9/11 hijackers who were known to be in the United
States before the attacks on New York and Washington, as well as with the case of
Chicago resident David Coleman Headley, who helped plan the 2008 terrorist
attacks in Mumbai, and it is the unfortunate pattern we have also seen in several
other significant terrorism cases.

Minimization requirements are key to making data collecting

effective enough to stop terror attacks
Baker, 13 (Stewart Baker, Foreign Policy, June 2013, Why the NSA Needs Your
Phone Calls...,
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/06/why_the_nsa_needs_your_phone_calls)
why, you ask, would the government collect all these records , even subject to
minimization, especially when Wyden was kicking up such a fuss about it? And, really, what's the
justification for turning the data over to the government, no matter how strong the post-collection rules are? To
understand why that might seem necessary, consider this entirely hypothetical example. Imagine that
the United States is intercepting al Qaeda communications in Yemen. Its leader there
calls his weapons expert and says, "Our agent in the U.S. needs technical assistance
constructing a weapon for an imminent operation . I've told him to use a throwaway
cell phone to call you tomorrow at 11 a.m. on your throwaway phone. When you answer, he'll
give you nothing other than the number of a second phone . You will buy another phone in the
bazaar and call him back on the second number at 2 p.m." Now, this is pretty good improvised tradecraft,
and it would leave the government with no idea where or who the U.S.-based
operative was or what phone numbers to monitor . It doesn't have probable cause to investigate
But

any particular American. But it surely does have probable cause to investigate any American who makes a call to
Yemen at 11 a.m., Sanaa time, hangs up after a few seconds, and then gets a call from a different Yemeni number

Finding that person, however, wouldn't be easy, because the government

could only identify the suspect by his calling patterns, not by name . So how would
the NSA go about finding the one person in the U nited States whose calling pattern
matched the terrorists' plan? Well, it could ask every carrier to develop the capability to store all calls and
three hours later.

search them for patterns like this one. But that would be very expensive, and its effectiveness would really only be
as good as the weakest, least cooperative carrier. And even then

it wouldn't work without massive,

real-time information sharing -- any reasonably intelligent U.S.-based terrorist would just
The only way to
make the system work, and the only way to identify and monitor the one American
who was plotting with al Qaeda's operatives in Yemen, would be to pool all the carriers'
data on U.S. calls to and from Yemen and to search it all together -- and for the costs to be borne by all of us,
buy his first throwaway phone from one carrier and his second phone from a different carrier.

not by the carriers. In short, the government would have to do it. To repeat, this really is hypothetical; while I've had
clearances both as the NSA's top lawyer and in the top policy job at the Department of Homeland Security, I have

it's not
that hard to imagine circumstances in which the government needs to obtain
massive amounts of information about Americans yet also needs to remain bound
by the general rule that it may only monitors those whom it legitimately suspects of
being terrorists or spies. The technique that squares that circle is minimization . As
not been briefed on this program. (If I had, I wouldn't be writing about it.) But the example shows that

long as the minimization rules require that all searches of the

collected data must be justified in advance by probable cause, Americans are
protected

from arbitrary searches. In the standard law enforcement model that we're all familiar with, privacy is
protected because the government doesn't get access to the information until it presents evidence to the court
sufficient to identify the suspects. In the alternative model, the government gets possession of the data but is
prohibited by the court and the minimization rules from searching it until it has enough evidence to identify terror

Plenty of people will say that

they don't trust the government with such a large amount of dat a -- that there's too much
suspects based on their patterns of behavior. That's a real difference.

risk that it will break the rules -- even rules enforced by a two-party, three-branch system of checks and balances.
When I first read the order, even I had a moment of chagrin and disbelief at its sweep. But for those who don't like

the real question is "compared to what"? Those who want to push

the government back into the standard law enforcement approach of identifying terrorists only
by name and not by conduct will have to explain how it will allow us to catch
terrorists who use halfway decent tradecraft -- or why sticking with that model is so fundamentally
the alternative model,

important that we should do so even if it means more acts of terrorism at home.

Best study proves

Lennard 14 [Natasha assistant news editor at Salon, Study: NSA data hoarding
doesnt stop terror attacks, 1/13/14,
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/study_nsa_data_hoarding_doesnt_stop_terror_attacks/
\\NL]

Aligning with the findings of a review committee appointed by the White House, a
report published Monday from the New America Foundation found that the NSAs
bulk collection of phone data has not prevented terror attacks.
NAF carried out an in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by al-Qaida or a
like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaedas ideology, and charged in the United
States with an act of terrorism since 9/11. The study found that traditional
investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities,
and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations
in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSAs bulk surveillance programs
to these cases was minimal.
The think tanks conclusions are strong, challenging government claims that
metadata collections of U.S. telephonic communications is necessary to national
security:
Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on
preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing
terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group. Furthermore, our
examination of the role of the database of U.S. citizens telephone metadata in the
single plot the government uses to justify the importance of the program that of
Basaaly Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver who in 2007 and 2008 provided $8,500 to alShabaab, al-Qaedas affiliate in Somalia calls into question the necessity of the
Section 215 bulk collection program.
The findings of the NAF and the White Houses NSA advisory committee not only call
into question NSA practices brought to light by Edward Snowden. They highlight the
ease with which the administration has been willing to deceive the American public
about the necessity of surveillance dragnets. NSA officials had claimed that phone
data collections had been necessary in thwarting as many as 54 terror plots. NSA
director Keith Alexander was forced to admit that the figure was fabricated during a
congressional hearing. At best, one case can be used in support of the efficacy of
phone data hoarding for preventing terror plots.

No actual evidence support the claim that bulk data collection

under Sec 702/PRISM is relevant for terror cases
Danielle Kehl, et.al (with Kevin Bankston, Robyn Greene & Robert Morgus) New
Americas Open Technology Institute July 2014 Policy Paper Surveillance Costs: The
NSAs Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity
https://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Surveilance_Costs_Final.pdf
So far, the purported benefits of the programs remain unsubstantiated. While
intelligence officials and representatives of the Obama Administration have
defended the merits of the NSA programs,18 they have offered little hard evidence
to prove their value. To the contrary, initial analyses of the NSAs bulk records
collection program suggest that its benefits are dubious at best, particularly
compared to the programs vast breadth. A January 2014 study from the New
America Foundations International Security Program, for example, concluded that
the governments claims about the role that NSA bulk surveillance of phone and
email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from
terrorism are overblown and even misleading.19 Similarly, in its review of the
telephone records collection program under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act,
the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) could not identify a single
instance in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the
outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.20 The Presidents Review Group
concurred, emphasizing that there is always a possibility that acquisition of more
informationwhether in the US or abroadmight ultimately prove helpful. But that
abstract possibility does not, by itself, provide a sufficient justification for acquiring
more information.21 Although the PCLOB did find in a separate report that the
information the [Section 702] program collects has been valuable and effective in
protecting the nations security and producing useful foreign intelligence,22 it
provided no details and did not weigh those purported benefits against the various
costs of the surveillance. Furthermore, its conclusions were undermined just days
later when The Washington Post revealed that nine out of ten of the Internet users
swept up in the NSAs Section 702 surveillance are not legally targeted
foreigners.23

NSA PRISM data collection techniques are actively preventing

the successful acquisition of useful information to fight
terrorism, and claims that NSA surveillance has stopped terror
attack are false and misleading.
Robert Taylor 6-18-13 PRISM Probably Never Stopped and Never Will Stop a
Terrorist Attack
http://mic.com/articles/49449/prism-probably-never-stopped-and-never-will-stop-aterrorist-attack

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. 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 centrally-planned 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? But if surveillance programs
are largely ineffective, why do they exist? Like virtually all government restrictions
on liberty, especially ones as sweeping as the PATRIOT Act and PRISM, the desire for
more intrusive control lies at the heart of any state's power. Dissent against the
welfare-warfare state is growing, and any ideological threat to this institutionalized
plunder is met with far more attention than, say, prosecuting rape in the military.
Cynical? Perhaps. But what does it say when the likes of Senator Dianne Feinstein,
House Speaker John Boehner and former Vice President Dick Cheney all call Edward
Snowden a "traitor" for leaking information about the NSA spy program to the
public? Treason is defined in the Constitution as giving "aid and comfort" to the
enemy. According to this Washington "bipartisan consensus" of accepted political
thought, "the enemy" Snowden aided are Americans and anyone around the world
sympathetic to civil liberties, privacy and the rule of law. If Snowden is a traitor,
then I don't want to see what a patriot looks like. They know that the more truth
comes out about the national security state that permeates American society like a
cancer, the more Americans will likely be outraged and demand answers they don't
have. This is why the Obama administration is waging such a ruthless war on
whistleblowers. This is nothing new, however, in even America's short history. The
first whistleblower against the domestic police state was illegally detained and
deported, Wilson and FDR tightened the screws, and the 1947 National Security Act
in which President Truman wanted "to scare the hell out of the American people"
entrenched the national security state. The "war on terror" has built and
expanded upon these previous encroachments of liberty and is now used to
predictably smear the messenger and fear-monger to justify this level of secrecy
and surveillance. As a result, we have sacrificed so much liberty in the name of
professed security, and have neither. Given that you are eight times more likely to
killed by the state than by a terrorist a threat that is compounded by such a
reckless, lawless and militaristic foreign policy a government that has

institutionalized broad powers to assassinate, wage aggressive war, suspend

habeus corpus and monitor virtually our every move, justified in the name of
"security," seems like the real threat to peace and liberty. Benjamin Franklin's oftencited axiom about balancing security and liberty, however, need not be a sacrifice
of one or the other. Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order and security.
This is why the Bill of Rights exists; to restrict government power so that it protects
rights, not tramples on them. But even in the realm of security, we find that liberty
and the market do a far better job of striking this balance between our natural
desires for safety and freedom. As David Greenwald argues in "Martial Law vs.
Market Law: Reflections on Boston," entrusting our security to a highly centralized
monopoly imposing a top-down, uniform model on 300 million plus Americans leads
to predictable abuse while. In a free society, "it is the citizens who would tell the
police which types of conduct would be tolerated." Unfortunately, the NSA
surveillance program is just the beginning as governments around the world think
that the program doesn't go far enough. As the surveillance state, rooted in
unchecked state power unleashed by an interventionist foreign policy, grows the
task of defending civil liberties and working to expose and dismantle this beast
becomes even more vital. Both our liberty and security depend upon it.

PRISM not effective at fighting terrorism Boston bombing

incident proves, no evidence exists to back up the flawed
examples the government has given of its effectiveness.
Steven Ahle is the Editor of Red Statements and a regular contributor to The D.C.
Clothesline. Prism Fights Terrorism? Dont You Believe It Posted on June 17, 2013
Ever since PRISM has been revealed, the administration and many members of
congress have fallen over themselves, making the claim that PRISM has stopped
dozens of terrorist attacks. But how true is that? About as true as anything else
the Obama Mafiaosa touches. General Keith Alexander told congress that PRISM is a
tool against terrorism: Its dozens of terrorist events that these have helped
prevent. Both here and abroad, in disruption or contributing to the disruption of
terrorist attacks, Alexander told a U.S. Senate committee. His comments backed up
the testimony of James Clapper, head of National Intelligence. But I still find it
impossible to believe and tend to believe the program was more like the IRS scandal
than it is about fighting a war on terror, when we all know the war on terror ended
early on in Obamas first term, when he eliminated the term war on terror. Ben
Smith at Buzzfeed makes the case that the government lied. In the case of the
attempted bombing of the New York subways, the government claimed that the
email program stopped that attack. Documents in the public domain say otherwise.
These documents show that Najibullah Zazi went to Pakistan to train with Al Qaeda.
In 2009, he was charged with leading two other men into a plot to bomb the
subways in New York. Now the question becomes, did PRISM stop the attack or was
it good old fashioned police work? Zazis capture actually was the result of British
Intelligence arresting several suspected terrorists. In 2010 a special court allowed
British officials to search their computers and they found Zazis email address in

there. The open case is founded upon a series of emails exchanged between a
Pakistani registered email account sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com and an email
account admittedly used by Naseer humaonion@yahoo.com between 30 November
2008 and 3 April 2009. The Security Services assessment is that the user of the
sana_pakhtana account was an Al Qaeda associate Therefore, this information
was obtained even before Zazi was a suspect in any kind of terror plot. PRISM was
not responsible. But as we have seen in the past, this administration will keep on
trotting out lie after lie in an effort to keep anyone from knowing what they were
really up to. Now, let me tell you why I firmly believe PRISM was not about catching
terrorists, although they may have used it as such at one time or another. Heres my
scenario. A young Muslim travels from the US to Russia, where he is radicalized. The
Russians contact the US and the FBI investigates the young man. If PRISM were truly
a tool to catch terrorists, would they not have gone into their massive collection of
data and listened to his phone calls and read his emails. And armed with that
monitor the mosque he attended. Perhaps even listened to his rant in favor of Jihad.
Had any of this had been done, he would not have been able to, with the help of his
brother, bomb the Boston Marathon. This was the textbook case for PRISM as a tool
to fight terrorism. Yet, it was never used. maybe they were too busy visiting Ted
Nugent?

NSA PRISM efforts have actually not solved any terrorist

attack, despite government claims they can offer evidence or
examples
ROBERT ZUBRIN June 21, 2013 4:00 AM president of Pioneer Energy and the
author of Energy Victory. Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351622/prism-costs-lives-robert-zubrin
The answer is no. In a recent article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education,
authors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart provide an analysis of the only two
concrete examples that had been offered at that point by the Obama administration
of how PRISM supposedly impaired a terrorist plot. One was the arrest of an
American accomplice to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, which arrest, however,
did nothing to stop the attack. The other was the arrest of three Pakistani-trained
Afghan-Americans who were plotting to bomb the New York subway system.
However, those arrests were actually enabled by a tip from British intelligence,
which got wind of the plot using standard surveillance techniques. The tip was then
reinforced by the plotters foolish use of stolen credit cards to buy large quantities
of explosive supplies. In short, American security agencies did not succeed in foiling
the first plot, and the gathering of metadata on the American public had nothing to
do with stopping the second one. The NSAs director, General Keith Alexander, told
a House committee this week that PRISM and other NSA programs have helped stop
50 plots worldwide, including ten in the U.S., but he named no arrests and did not
specify, in his public testimony, how much was learned through metadata collection
and how much through conventional surveillance programs. Deputy FBI Director
Sean Joyce did tell the same House committee of four cases in which PRISM data

helped foil a plot or expose a conspirator but one of the ones he listed was the
subway plot. Nor has any other evidence been advanced by anyone to show that
metadata gathering was critical in stopping any plots. But what is known is that
thousands of Americans died to bankroll this questionable surveillance.

NSA programs, including PRISM, have no discernible impact on

preventing terror attacks, evidence exists that refutes all
examples of this given by the federal government.
MEGHAN NEAL January 13, 2014 // 09:50 AM EST You'll Never Guess How Many
Terrorist Plots the NSA's Domestic Spy Program Has Foiled
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/youll-never-guess-how-many-terrorist-plots-thensas-domestic-spy-program-has-foiled
At the end of this week President Obama is expected to finally answer the mounting
calls to curtail the NSA's bloated power to invade its citizens' privacy by spying on
millions of Americans' communications. But the president is going to have a hard
time falling back on the old standby explanation that massive data collection is a
necessary evil to protect the country from terrorism. A new analysis of terrorism
charges in the US found that the NSA's dragnet domestic surveillance "had no
discernible impact" on preventing terrorist acts. Instead, the majority of threats over
the last decade were detected by regular old intelligence and law enforcement
methodstips, informants, CIA and FBI ops, routine law enforcement. The nonprofit
think tank New America Foundation published a report today after investigating the
227 Al Qaeda-affiliated people or groups that have been charged for committing an
act of terrorism in the US since 9/11. It found just 17 of the cases were credited to
NSA surveillance, and just one conviction came out of the government's extracontroversial practice of spying on its own citizens. And that charge, against San
Diego cab driver Basaaly Moalin, was for sending money to a terrorist group in
Somalia. There was no threat of an actual attack. This is hardly the first time
experts have searched for a link between bulk metadata collection and foiled
terrorist plots and come up empty-handed. So far, the only real value in collecting
and monitoring billions of US phone records has been to provide extra support in
investigations already underway by the FBI or another agency, or to verify that a
rumored threat isn't real (the "peace of mind" metric), the report found. But that
hasn't stopped NSA officials and the Obama administration from drumming up a
connection between terrorist attacks and surveillance to defend the agency's
snooping. Shortly after Edward Snowden blew the lid off the classified PRISM
program and the backlash heated up, officials claimed the mass surveillance tactics
had thwarted 54 terrorist plots. NSA Director Keith Alexander trotted out this
number in his testimony before Congress and the president echoed the line to the
press. Eventually that claim was found to be grossly exaggerated and Alexander
walked back the statement, admitting the cases weren't actually terrorist plots per
se. He traded in the words "plots" and "attacks" for "events" and "activities." But
the 50+ number was already pretty well-circulated through the press. Of course,
government talking points on the issue also strategically tie the unpopular spy ops
to the attack on 9/11. Officials were told to use lines like, "NSA and its partners must

make sure we connect the dots so that the nation is never attacked again like it was
on 9/11," and "I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs than
explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent," Al Jazeera
revealed. But even though the attack on the World Trade Center was used as
justification for expanding the intelligence community's powers in the first place,
the new report suggests that the 9/11 hijackers didn't succeed by totally blindsiding
the US, but because the government bungled the early warnings. "The overall
problem for US counterterrorism officials is not that they need the information from
the bulk collection of phone data, but that they dont sufficiently understand or
widely share the information they already possess that is derived from conventional
law enforcement and intelligence techniques," wrote New American Foundation
National Security Director Peter Bergen. Now it's over a decade later and the US
government has backdoor access into basically the entire digiverse, with no
evidence to prove the dubious data collection is doing anything at all useful. Last
month, Obama's advisory panel determined the agencys spy operations are "not
essential to preventing attacks," and handed him 46 recommendations for
reforming the programs. Unfortunately, sources say the president has embraced the
terrorism justification and isnt expected to make any major moves to narrow the
scope of domestic surveillance, just call for minor changes to reassure Americans
that their civil liberties aren't being trampled.

Plan reforms to Section 702 will protect privacy without

damaging national security
Jake Laperruque July 2014 https://cdt.org/blog/why-average-internet-users-should-demandsignificant-section-702-reform/

There are sensible reforms that can significant limit the collateral damage to privacy
caused by Section 702 without impeding national security. Limiting the purposes for
which Section 702 can be conducted will narrow the degree to which
communications are monitored between individuals not suspected of wrongdoing or
connected to national security threats. Closing retention loopholes present in the
Minimization Guidelines governing that surveillance will ensure that when
Americans communications are incidentally collected, they are not kept absent
national security needs. And closing the backdoor search loophole would ensure
that when Americans communications are retained because they communicated
with a target of Section 702 surveillance, they couldnt be searched unless the
standards for domestic surveillance of the American are met.

Current NSA data collection strategy focuses on vulnerability

mitigation rather than threat mitigation which is an inferior
method for resolving terror concerns privacy and relations
are necessary to effectively implement a threat mitigation
strategy.
Shawn Henry, 2-13-13 PRESIDENT, CROWDSTRIKE SERVICES
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg81461/html/CHRG-113hhrg81461.htm
Vulnerability mitigation is the current cybersecurity approach in the private sector,
and has been for the past 20 years. We continuously focus on hardening our
networks by ``Defense-in-Depth'', using firewalls, anti-virus software, patching
vulnerabilities, and employing intrusion prevention systems. This approach
generally stops those actors who do not care who their specific targets are, but are
simply like burglars who are willing to rob anybody's house and take anybody's
jewelry. Our mistake, however, is that we are using the same approach against
Advanced Persistent Threat actors who actually have specific targets in mind, and
are not going to stop until they have reached their goals. These modern-day cyber
burglars are targeting the equivalent of the Hope Diamond, quite specifically, not
fungible engagement rings. For our most advanced and well-funded adversaries,
there are no substitutes for their targets, regardless of how many, and they will
continue their onslaught until they achieve success. Ironically, our own defensive
efforts have actually made the problem worse, by encouraging our adversaries to
outperform us, while we outspend them. Although many are not prepared to
consider this possibility, the result of our failure to distinguish between the novice
and the professional adversary has been a proliferation of more capable malware,
created by nation-state adversaries and organized crime groups, and an escalation
of their activities in order to defeat our defenses.
what does this mean?
Employing a threat mitigation strategy requires an increased ability to detect and
identify our adversaries, and to penalize them. This is the identical strategy we
employ in the physical world every single day to thwart criminals, spies, and
terrorists. Achieving these goals in the cyber environment, however, will require
unprecedented coordination between private industry--which as a whole has the
ownership and ability to achieve these goals, and governments, which are primarily
authorized to investigate and penalize them. Inevitably we must bring the private
sector and the Government together to achieve the goal of threat deterrence. The
vast majority of the intelligence that will lead to identification of the adversaries
resides on private-sector networks; they are, in essence, ``crime scenes'', and the
evidence and artifacts of the breach are resident on those networks. That threat
intelligence, too, can't be shared periodically via e-mail at human speed; it needs to
be shared among all victims, in real-time, at network speed. The private sector,
then, can fill tactical gaps that the Government is blind to. This can be done while
respecting privacy, a critical and absolutely necessary element of intelligence
sharing.

PRISM only making the haystack bigger when it comes to

finding terrorists
Shaun Waterman 6/20/13, reporter for The Washington Times and senior editor for United
Press International, NSA Data gathering gave little help in four terrorism investigations,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/20/nsa-data-gathering-gave-little-help-in-4terrorism/?page=all

The Obama administrations efforts to justify the National Security

Agencys vast data-gathering about Americans phone and online
communications hit a snag this week, as doubts surfaced about newly
declassified details on terrorism investigations that U.S. intelligence
officials released to reassure the public. Lawmakers with access to
classified information and lawyers who have followed the four cases
made public said the NSAs domestic data gathering had not played the
crucial role that officials assert. We have yet to see any evidence that
the bulk phone records collection program has provided any otherwise
unobtainable intelligence, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon
Udall of Colorado said in a joint statement.

and Mark

It is highly doubtful that these [NSA

collection] programs played the kind of central role in these cases that
officials have said, said Michael German, a lawyer and former undercover FBI agent who now works for
the American Civil Liberties Union. Since contract computer technician and self-proclaimed whistleblower Edward
Snowden revealed the existence of two huge top-secret NSA data-gathering programs this month, officials have
struggled to justify them to the public without worsening the damage they say the revelations have caused to
national security. This week, intelligence officials at a rare public hearing told the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence that more than 50 terrorist plots, 10 to 12 of which involved a target in the U.S., had
been foiled using intelligence from at least one of the NSA programs. One of them, which uses a computer system
called Prism to get real-time access to electronic communications carried by U.S. Internet and technology
companies, is authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amendments of 2008.
Prism, which allows the NSA to eavesdrop on email and text messages, as well as Internet telephone and video chat
services such as Skype, is used only against targets reasonably believed to be foreigners outside the U.S., officials
say. They acknowledge that some Americans communications are collected inadvertently because they are in
touch with targeted suspects. But there has been more concern about the second program exposed by Mr.
Snowden, which is authorized under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, a large suite of anti-terrorism laws passed
hurriedly in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Under this program, the NSA collects so-called
metadata time, duration and destination number about every telephone call made in the U.S. Officials told the
House intelligence committee that the data helped them identify contacts between terrorists abroad and their
associates in the U.S. But even FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III acknowledged Wednesday that this huge NSA
database of domestic phone calls was only a contributing factor; one dot amongst a number of dots, in many of
the 10 to 12 cases involving a planned attack in the U.S. The one case that he said wholly relied on the program
was a 2003 probe that began after a tipoff about a San Diego-based supporter of al-Shabab, a Somali terrorist
group with links to al Qaeda. We closed the investigation down, said Mr. Mueller, explaining that agents were
unable to find evidence of a terrorist connection. In 2007, the NSA gave the FBI a phone number in San Diego that
they said had been in contact with a phone in East Africa they were monitoring. They could not tell what calls were
made to that telephone line in East Africa, said Mr. Mueller. And consequently, they took that number, ran it
against the database and came up with this telephone number in San Diego. Officials then had to go through the
additional legal process to get the name of the phone subscriber, ensure that there was predication, meaning
sufficient grounds to open a full federal investigation, and obtain a warrant for a wiretap. On the basis of that

surveillance, four men were convicted this year of fundraising for al-Shabab. That is one case where you have
[Section] 215 [data-gathering authority] standing by itself, Mr. Mueller told Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat. But Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall, the two Democrats who have seen classified
information about the cases, said Mr. Mueller and other officials were giving credit to Section 215 domestic
collection for foiling plots that actually were thwarted using foreign intelligence programs such as Section 702.

Saying that these programs have disrupted dozens of potential

terrorist plots is misleading if the bulk [domestic] phone records
collection program is actually providing little or no unique value, they
said in their statement. In fact, the ACLUs Mr. German said, the huge
proliferation of electronic surveillance data was overwhelming the FBI
and just making the haystack bigger. He noted as an example of
missing a needle that the FBIs Webster Commission Report into the
bureaus failure to identify

accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan as a jihadist called the case

a stark example of the impact of the data explosion. The exponential growth in the amount of electronically
stored information is a critical challenge to the FBI, the commission concluded. Also Thursday, the FBI
acknowledged that Deputy Director Sean Joyce misspoke this week in describing to lawmakers details about
another of those four cases, involving a Kansas City man called Khalid Ouazzini. Mr. Ouazzini was placed under
court-ordered surveillance by the FBI after the NSA discovered he had been in email contact with a terrorist suspect
in Yemen, Mr. Joyce said. He added that the surveillance uncovered a nascent plot to bomb the New York Stock
Exchange. Was the plot serious? he was asked. I think the jury considered it serious, since they were all
convicted, he replied. But an FBI official acknowledged Thursday that Mr. Ouazzini and two associates in New York
had merely pleaded guilty to lesser charges of money laundering or providing support to terrorist groups.
Nevertheless, the official defended that case as an example of the programs success regardless of the specific
convictions ultimately achieved. We stand behind the example that was provided, he said. Nonetheless, doubts
continued to surface about the other two cases as well. In the case of David Headley, the Pakistani-American
charged with aiding the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, the ACLUs Mr. German said the FBI had received no fewer
than five separate tipoffs that he was visiting terror training camps two of them from his ex-wives. Authorities
said Headley was planning an attack on the Danish newspaper that printed multiple satirical cartoons of Islams
Prophet Muhammad when the NSA program enabled officials to catch up to him. The most serious attack officials
say was thwarted was Najibullah Zazis attempt to bomb the New York subway. Zazi was caught because his al
Qaeda handler in Pakistan was emailing him from the same Yahoo account that he had used to communicate with a
British-based terrorist cell broken up the previous year, official said.

PRISM has been the least successful of all NSA programs

Jason Ditz 6/11/13, News editor and writer for The Huffington Post, Surveillance:
The God that Failed, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-ditz/surveillance-thegod-that_b_3420900.html
Over a few short days, we have learned the Obama Administration and the NSA are
engaged in worldwide surveillance on a scale unprecedented in human history. The
president and other officials have dismissed the privacy concerns therein, insisting
that the security benefits outweigh basic human dignity. Yet even if this had been
the case , it is plain that PRISM and the rest of the surveillance schemes
are such colossal failures that they are impossible to defend on any
grounds. They must be immediately stopped. PRISM is the most important
aspect of this surveillance system, and gives the NSA and other affiliated

officials with direct access to private data of hundreds of millions of

Americans, and billions of users worldwide, through nine major Internet
companies , including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple. This is just part of
the overall system, however, and a leaked report from the NSA's analysis tool
named Boundless Informant showed 97 billion pieces of "intelligence"culled over a
30-day span centering around March. As officials have sought to defend the
program, they have been unable to provide many examples of this
"intelligence" amounting to anything. Several years of this level of
information awareness amounted to one arrest over a speculative plot by
Najibullah Zazi . In 2009 Zazi was arrested for plotting to bomb the New York
subways. His plot consisted of him buying hydrogen peroxide and nail-polish
remover from a beauty salon, and his ability to go from those items to a "weapon of
mass destruction" was dubious, at best. Still, a plot is a plot, and officials are
clinging to it apparently for lack of anything else. Some critics have noted that
97 billion pieces of intelligence per month did nothing to stop the Boston
Marathon bombings , which again is a fair point. Yet when the surveillance
system has jumped outside of the realm of "terror suspects" and is now watching all
of us, all of the time, it is clear that focusing merely on this one segment misses the
broader point. Murders, kidnappings -- in fact , all the violent and non-violent
crimes in the United States are being committed by people who, if they
are on the Internet, were under surveillance. Yet PRISM failed to detect
any of these other plots ahead of time. Think about that: every school shooter
was under intensive scrutiny for years before their attack. Every premeditated
murder was planned by someone whose communications were being
carefully scrutinized. PRISM caught nary a one of these people. That's a
string of failures impossible to ignore. We can even extend it beyond matters
of crime. Every person who attempted suicide was facing the same surveillance.
Every Google search they did, every desperate email they sent that could've served
as a warning went through PRISM The NSA collected all of this, and did nothing
about it. If we, as individuals, are to be expected to sacrifice the sum total of all of
our privacy to a surveillance leviathan watching us at all times, nominally for our
own protection, this dramatic incompetence is an insurmountable problem. We
can put aside all of the debating about sacrificing our liberty for security,
because the plain truth is that we aren't getting the security dividends at
any rate.

Biggest success story for PRISM has been disproven as

effective
ABBY OHLHEISER 6/11/13, Author for The Wire and The Atlantic, The NSAs
best defense of prism didnt even last a week,
http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/06/nsas-only-terrorist-defense-prism-didnteven-last-week/66143/
Looks like surveillance defenders just lost their main talking point in defense of the NSA's (formerly) secret phone
and data tracking programs: Najibullah Zazi, the would-be New York City subway bomber, could have easily been
caught without PRISM. That's according to a devastating rebuttal from theAssociated Press out Tuesday, which
further explains that those employing the Zazi defense didn't even get the details right on the attempted plot in the
first place. In case you missed the Zazi subplot in the massive NSA story that's been dominating headlines for the
past week, a quick primer: Last Thursday, Representative Mike Rogers referred to an unspecified terrorist attack
that was thwarted by the blanket surveillance programs revealed by the Guardian and the Washington Post. That
planned attack, it turned out, was Zazi's al-Qaeda backed pan to bomb the NYC Subway system. Defenders of the
NSA programs, like Rogers, have been pushing that story ever since. For example, here's Sen. Dianne Feinstein on
ABC's "This Week," talking about Zazi as a phone tracking success story: "The second is a man who lived in
colorado, who made the decision that he was going to blow up a new york subway, who went to a beauty wholesale
supply place, bought enough hydrogen peroxide to make bombs, was surveilled by the FBI for six months, traveled
to go to new york to meet with a number of other people who were going to carry out this attack with him." As the
AP points out, it looks like Feinstein misspoke there. It's PRISM, not the phone tracking program, that officials are
saying led to Zazi's capture, according to declassified documents addressing the investigation that were released in
the wake of the NSA news last week.

And it gets worse for Team NSA: even before

Feinstein et al. took to the Sunday talk shows, many hadalready raised
credible doubts about the necessity of PRISM in the Zazi investigation,
including Adam Goldman, who co-bylined today's AP story: Which brings
us to the Associated Press takedown.

Zazi, as Goldman and Matt Apuzzo explain, was foiled

when officials intercepted an email to a Yahoo email address in September of 2009.

It looks like they

did use PRISM to capture the incriminating missive, but here's the thing:
they didn't have to. Although 2007 and 2008 laws gave the FBI the goahead to monitor email accounts linked to known terrorists without a
warrant, investigators would have easily gotten a warrant to monitor the
account in question anyway : "To get a warrant, the law requires that the government show that the
target is a suspected member of a terrorist group or foreign government, something that had been well established
at that point in the Zazi case."

In other words, the Zazi plot does little to justify

blanket surveillance of millions of phone and email accounts without a

warrant, because authorities found the email address they needed
without PRISM, and could have monitored that account without it, too.
But, hey, NSA defenders are going to get at least one more big chance to
mount a defense of the agency's massive data tracking programs

: the ACLU

filed suit against the NSA on Tuesday, claiming that the programs violate the First and Fourth amendments, along
with Section 215 of the Patriot Act itself. Or, they could mount their new defense in response to one of the other

pending lawsuits against them for PRISM-like programs, like the two pending lawsuits filed by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation before last week's news even broke.

A2 Politics
NSA surveillance unpopular with republicans 2 to 1 margin
Lee 13 (Timothy B. Lee, senior editor at Vox, former writer for Washington Post,
Ars Technica, and Forbes, Poll: Republicans hate NSA spying. Democrats are
ambivalent., The Washington Post, June 12, 2013,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/poll-republicanshate-nsa-spying-democrats-are-ambivalent/) Wang
A majority of Americans, 53 percent, disapprove of two National Security Agency
surveillance programs whose existence was reported last week. A Gallup poll found that just 37
percent approved of the NSA's efforts to "compile telephone call logs and Internet communications."
Interestingly,

the most intense opposition to the programs comes from the

political right. Republicans disapprove of the program by almost a 2 to 1

margin . Independents disapprove, 56 to 34 percent.
approve of the program, compared with 40 percent who disapprove. Gallup says

But 49 percent of Democrats

the partisan breakdown

on the issue has changed over time.

When the polling organization asked a similar question in 2006,

the NSA's program had more support from Republicans than Democrats. Gallup believes the shift "reflects the party
of the president under whose watch the programs were carried out at those two points in time." Of course, the
programs in question were begun during the Bush administration. Americans were evenly split, 44 percent to 42
percent, on whether it was right for Edward Snowden to leak classified documents to the press. A recent CBS poll

58 percent of respondents disapproving of the government

collection of information about "ordinary Americans." That poll found the same partisan split,
found similar results, with

with Democrats more likely to approve. In contrast, a Pew/Washington Post survey found that a majority of voters
approved of surveillance when told that the programs were supervised by the courts and intended to "investigate
terrorism."

Surveillance reform overwhelmingly bipartisan over 70% of

both parties oppose spying programs
Clement 13 (Scott Clement, survey research analyst for Capital Insight, chair
for the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)s Jourbakust
Education team, Concern over NSA privacy violations unites Democrats and
Republicans, poll finds, August 16, 2013,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/16/concern-over-nsaprivacy-violations-unites-democrats-and-republicans-poll-finds/) Wang
National Security Agency broke privacy rules threatens to fuel Americans fastgrowing concerns about civil liberties. But the surprising partisan consensus that programs trample on
Fresh disclosures that the

privacy marks a key feature of public assessments, representing a break from similar debates during George W.
Bush's presidency. A July Washington Post-ABC News poll before the latest disclosures reported by The Post
found

fully 70 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans said the

NSA's phone and Internet surveillance program intrudes on some Americans' privacy
rights. What's more, Democrats and Republicans who did see intrusions were about equally
likely to say they were "not justified:" 51 and 52 percent respectively. Nearly six in 10
political independents who saw intrusions said they are unjustified . There was less
partisan agreement in 2006, when news about the George W. Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping

program broke. That January, a Post-ABC poll found 73 percent of Democrats but only 50 percent of Republicans
said federal agencies were intruding on some Americans' privacy rights.

Broad support for bulk data surveillance reform

CSM, 6-3-2015, "For privacy advocates, USA Freedom doesn't end push for
surveillance reform," http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2015/0603/Forprivacy-advocates-USA-Freedom-doesn-t-end-push-for-surveillance-reform
Supporters of surveillance reform took a brief moment on Tuesday to savor the Senates 67-32
passage of the USA Freedom Act before immediately locking their sights on the next targets for change.
The bill that was quickly signed into law by President Obama puts an end to the
National Security Agencys bulk collection of phone call metadata and imposes
conditions and limits on how US spy agencies can use and access phone data. It also amends key
portions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1976 and the USA Patriot Act
of 2005 with language that introduces greater transparency and oversight of government surveillance practices
and the decisions of the FISA court. Recommended: How well do you know the world of spying? Take our CIA and

USA Freedom is the most significant national surveillance reform in the last
30 years, said Harley Geiger, advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and
Technology. It demonstrates that the era of rubber stamping mass surveillance is over. Several other
groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Internet Infrastructure
Coalition, and the Open Technology Institute expressed similar sentiments. Were
celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could
never happen a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by
Congress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote. But most reform groups also noted that the
Freedom Act leaves unchanged many other controversial surveillance practices. For
instance, the Freedom Act does not change a FISA provision referred to as Section
702, which the government has used as its authority to conduct extensive
surveillance on online communications. The government has cited Section 702 as its authority for
NSA quiz.

programs like PRISM for collecting huge quantities of data directly from servers and networks belonging to several
Internet giants including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Bipartisan support for additional bulk data restrictions

Alex Marthews, 5-29-2014, "We Need Real Surveillance Reform, Not The
House's "USA Freedom Act", https://www.restorethe4th.com/blog/we-need-realsurveillance-reform-not-the-houses-usa-freedom-act/
We urge the Senate, and especially the Judiciary Committee, to fight hard for the
Fourth Amendment in the next few months by advancing as strong a bill as possible
much stronger than this one. The USA Freedom Act, in its original form, was
popular enough in the House to have passed unamended, had it been allowed to
come to the floor. In the Senate, the same may well be true, and our next steps on
Capitol Hill will be to work to make that happen. When we look back in a generation
at the era of our out-of-control surveillance state, we will wonder why we didn't take
the Fourth Amendment as seriously as our Founders took it. We will feel shame that
we were willing to sell our Bill of Rights in an attempt to thwart the same terrorists
said to be attacking it. The sooner we replace this act with actual reform, the sooner
our out-of-control surveillance state will finally be a thing to look back on.

Momentum toward surveillance reform in Congress now

Spencer Ackerman, 6-2-2015, "Rand Paul allies plan new surveillance reforms
to follow USA Freedom Act," Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2015/jun/02/rand-paul-house-allies-surveillance-usa-freedom-act
Several of Rand Pauls allies in the US House of Representatives are seeking to
capitalize on the momentum of surveillance reform as the USA Freedom Act
continues through the Senate by attempting to stop the N ational Security Agency from
undermining encryption and banning other law enforcement agencies from
collecting US data in bulk. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded Kentucky Republican, has authored
an amendment to a forthcoming appropriations bill that blocks any funding for the
National Institute of Science and Technology to coordinate or consult with the NSA
or the Central Intelligence Agency for the purpose of establishing cryptographic or
computer standards that permit the warrantless electronic surveillance by the spy
agencies. He is joined in the effort by Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California. Massie and Lofgren will place the
amendment on the bill funding the Justice Department as early as Tuesday. Their move is part of the first wave of
follow-up measures by privacy advocates to supplement the USA Freedom Act, a bill already passed by the House
which, although it would limit some NSA powers, many civil libertarians consider insufficient. The

USA
Freedom Act is definitely not the last word. Whenever a program expires or whenever funding is
required, those are must-pass pieces of legislation that present opportunities for
refinement, Massie told the Guardian on Tuesday. Lofgren and another civil libertarian, Republican Ted
Poe of Texas, will propose an amendment to the same appropriations bill that would
block the Federal Bureau of Investigation from inserting vulnerabilities into
encryption on mobile devices. The FBI director, James Comey, is currently campaigning against tech
companies that are expanding encryption for their commercial products. Privacy is a constitutional
right, whether the FBI likes it or not, Poe told the Guardian on Tuesday. Another congressional privacy advocate,
Democrat Jared Polis of Colorado, will push a further amendment to the appropriations bill
that would in effect block the Drug Enforcement Agency from collecting Americans
phone data in bulk a recently exposed surveillance program that preceded the
NSAs now-shuttered bulk collection. The Guardian has acquired the text of all these
amendments. Polis told the Guardian he wanted to rein in the DEAs unwarranted and unconstitutional
program, calling the Freedom Act the beginning of a reform process, not the conclusion
of one.

Tech lobbies support privacy reform; and they are

Washingtons biggest lobbyists
Astra Taylor Become A Fan, 6-4- 2014 , "How the Internet Is Transforming from a
Tool of Liberation to One of Oppression," Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/astra-taylor/internet-oppressionliberation_b_5449838.html
There are various reasons pessimism is on the rise besides surveillance, though that's a big one.

Google has been investigated by government officials for promoting its own
products in search results above competitors' and has been revealed as one of
Washington's biggest lobbyists. Subpar labor conditions and worker suicides at Apple's factories
have made headlines. Amazon has been getting bad press lately for the abominable conditions in its
warehouses and for bullying publishers to get more favorable terms, making it impossible or difficult

for customers to purchase certain titles. The list goes on. Meanwhile, these companies keep
expanding, buying up competition and staking their claim on new technological frontiers, from mobile
messaging and virtual reality to home appliances and transportation. As an independent documentary
filmmaker and activist, I'm dependent on new technologies and aware of their potential; in many ways,
I'm a prime candidate for championing the digital revolution. But like a growing number of my fellow
citizens, I'm worried that we've taking the wrong turn on the road to the future, which is

Look
around and it's clear that we are not seeing a revolution but a rearrangement, with
why I wrote my book The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.

architectural, economic, and social hierarchies warping the web and many of the problems of the old
model--centralization, consolidation, and commercialization--perpetuated and even intensified online.
It turns out the old dinosaurs are adapting to digital life just fine. Legacy media companies like Disney,
Time Warner, and CBS are doing great; their share prices rising. At the same time, a new crop of
behemoths has emerged: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are now some of the biggest
companies on earth. Google, Facebook, and many other major social platforms, are dependent on the
advertising dollar. Only they are far more ubiquitous and invasive. They monitor our private

thoughts and track our every move, sucking up our personal data in order to better
serve marketers, who are the real paying customers. "Surveillance is the business
model of the Internet," as technologist Bruce Schneier has said, and the NSA and
other state agencies piggyback on these private sector practices. To put things in
perspective, Disney didn't read your diary and your mail or follow you around the mall. For too long
we've been talking about what the Internet might hypothetically do. But the fact is that

technologies do not emerge in a vacuum; economic forces in particular shape the evolution of
our tools. In an age of increasing inequality and diminishing democracy, this is a
major cause for concern. Our communications system is at a crossroads -- one path
leading to an increasingly corporatized and commercialized world where we are
treated as targeted consumers, the other to a true cultural commons where we are
nurtured as citizens and creators. A more open and egalitarian media system is
possible, but technology alone will not bring it about.

Tech companies are a powerful lobbying force in Congress

TONY ROMM 1/21/15 6:49 PM EDT senior technology reporter for POLITICO Pro. Tech giants get deeper into
D.C. influence game
114468.html)

Politico (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/tech-lobby-apple-amazon-facebook-google-

Apple, Amazon and Facebook shelled out record amounts to influence Washington; Google posted one of its biggest
lobbying years ever; and a slew of new tech companies dipped their toes into politics for the first time in 2014 a
sign of the industrys deepening effort to shape policymaking in D.C. The sharp uptick in

reflects the tech sectors evolution

spending

from an industry that once shunned Washington

into a

powerful interest thats willing to lobby extensively to advance the

debates that matter most to companies bottom lines from clamping down on patent
lawsuits to restricting NSA surveillance to obtaining more high-skilled immigration visas and green cards.

There is increasingly a sense from companies that they need to engage

earlier and smarter,

said Ryan Triplette, a Republican lobbyist for Franklin Square Group, which

represents companies like Apple and Google. They began opening up their view as their businesses have grown
and not just looking at traditional technology issues. Apple, which mostly avoided D.C. under the watch of late CEO

Steve Jobs, grew its lobbying balance sheet to just over $4.1 million last year from $3.3 million in 2013, according to

iPhone giant recently

has shown a greater willingness to engage Washington under CEO Tim Cook: It even
dispatched executives to Capitol Hill in September to talk about its new smart watch
and health tracking tools hoping to assuage lawmakers fears about the new
technologys data-tracking abilities. Amazons lobbying expenses more than $4.7 million, up
an analysis of lobbying reports, the latest of which were filed midnight Tuesday. The

from around $3.5 million in 2013 correspond with the companys own Washington makeover. The e-commerce

last year jumped into new lines of business, expanding its pursuit of
government contracts while eyeing a new drone delivery service, prompting it to
hire a slew of new lobbyists and move to a bigger downtown D.C. office. Amazon is also fighting the
giant

Federal Trade Commission over how it handled app purchases made by kids. Apple, Amazon and Google declined to
comment on the record. Facebook did not reply to a request for comment. For all their efforts,

these tech

giants failed to advance their political priorities in the last Congress

but the fights are sure to return in 2015
leaders in both chambers

have already

under the Republican-majority Congress. GOP

promised to revive the debate over

patent litigation reform a critical issue for tech companies like Google
that want to curb lawsuits from so-called patent trolls. Theres also talk of boosting the number of foreign highskilled workers, something industry titans have coveted as part of broader immigration reform. The looming
expiration of key Patriot Act surveillance authorities means Congress must also wade back into the fight over what
data the NSA can collect a major issue for tech companies stung by Edward Snowdens leaks about the agencys
spying via popular Internet services. And lawmakers are plugging into new issues like drones and wearable
technology that are important to Silicon Valley. No doubt, Internet and tech companies are a bigger and more
important part of the economy period. Its natural theyre going to be more involved in the political process, said
Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members
include Amazon, Facebook and Google.

Theres been a growing realization that

tech companies have to be in there [in D.C.],

to make a fair pitch,

not only do

they have to

be more actively involved because they have to fight off hostile efforts.
Google is the leader of the tech pack when it comes to lobbying: The company, which until October owned Motorola
Mobility, spent more than $17 million in 2014 its second-most expensive year after 2012, when it battled back a
federal antitrust investigation. The search giants D.C. operation, led by former GOP Rep. Susan Molinari, relocated
last year to a new, sprawling 54,000-square-foot office steps from the Capitol. Facebook, for its part, spent more
than $9.3 million in 2014, up from $6.4 million in 2013. The companys most recent lobbying report points to its
work on privacy and security issues along with Internet access and trade, as Facebook aims to expand its service
worldwide and avoid foreign rules that might restrict where it stores user data.
a major player in the emerging sector of connected home devices,
photo messages,

Companies like Belkin ,

and Snapchat , an app for disappearing

each registered their first-ever lobbyists last year

. Snapchat hired its

new consultants from the firm Heather Podesta + Partners after a major data breach registered on Washingtons
radar. Other prominent tech companies retained new help, as well. Netflix grew its lobbying roster amid the fight at
the FCC over net neutrality. And Uber added D.C. lobbyists to win new allies for its ride-hailing app, which has
triggered fights with state and local regulators and cab operators nationwide. And a coalition of tech titans like
Apple, Google and Microsoft banded together to invest in an anti-NSA snooping coalition, Reform Government
Surveillance, which spent $230,000 in 2014.

Many of those companies executives

regularly traveled to Washington to press President Barack Obama on

surveillance reforms, and the group ran frequent advertisements
highlighting the need for more NSA transparency.

Tech giants have a huge lobbying interest behind them

Yuval Rosenberg October 27, 2014 executive editor of The Fiscal Times
Google spends more than any other tech giant to influence Congress The Week
(http://theweek.com/articles/442720/google-spends-more-than-other-tech-giantinfluence-congress)
Silicon Valley keeps playing the D.C. game.

Tech and telecom giants including Google and

Facebook spent millions on political lobbying

September, according to data released last week.

in the three-month period from July to

Google spent nearly $4 million

on its efforts

to win favor with lawmakers , up 17 percent over the same period last year (but
down from roughly $5.3 million last quarter). Among major tech-related companies only
Comcast spent more last quarter . The cable giant, of course, is trying to win
approval for its $45 billion
2014, though

mega merger with Time Warner Cable. Over the first nine months of

, Google has spent $13 million on lobbying, more than any other tech

company. Comcast, by comparison, has spent about $11.8 million, AT&T has doled
out roughly $11 million, and Facebook has spent $7.35 million. Google's ramped up
spending over the last quarter relative to the same period in 2013 makes it a bit of an outlier in the tech sector.
Nine of the 15 tech companies monitored by Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group, dialed back their lobbying
spending last quarter compared to the third quarter of 2013. Facebook was among the
that

six

Companies ]

increased their lobbying efforts , upping third-quarter spending 70 percent, from $1.44

million last year to $2.45 million this year. Amazon's lobbying bill, at $1.18 million, reached seven figures in a
quarter for just the second time, as the retailer upped third-quarter lobbying by 51 percent over 2013. What are the
tech giants buying with that money? "

Businesses don't spend big bucks unless they

think that they're going to get something for it ," says John M. Simpson of Consumer
Watchdog. "Sometimes it's as much about what isn't being passed as what is being passed." Google's most recent
filing indicates it has lobbied politicians on a host of issues, from cybersecurity and privacy issues to intellectual
property enforcement and patent law. It has also lobbied lawmakers on trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, international tax reform, immigration policies, wind power, health IT and data policies, and "unmanned
aerial vehicle technology," or drones.