Pro In the following round, we offer the following observation.

The primary responsibility of a state is to protect the lives of its citizens. Without security, a state cannot ensure the civil liberties of its people. Therefore we affirm this months resolution. Contention 1: The domestic surveillance program is effective. The domestic surveillance of the NSA is essential in stopping terrorism. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the NSA, states that domestic surveillance could be valuable in identifying previously unknown terrorists inside the United States. The Heritage foundation reports that 54 terrorist attacks were thwarted by the NSA since 9/11. Some of these attacks include the foiling of Najibullah Zazi, also known as the Times Square bomber. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, domestic terrorism has declined by 460%.
Contention 2: THE NSA DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM COULD HAVE STOPPED THE 9/11 ATTACKS IF IT HAD BEEN IN PLACE IN 2001. A number of senators made it clear at the hearing that they supported the domestic data gathering. Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, baldly stated that the metadata program would have thwarted the Sept. 11 plot because at least one of the 19 hijackers was in telephone contact with a known terrorist facility in the Middle East. The program is designed so that U.S. calls to or from foreign numbers associated with terrorist suspects can be found after the fact and their contacts with other U.S. telephone numbers before and since can be logged. "I am here to tell the American people," the senator declaimed, that if the metadata program had been in place, "the 19 hijackers who were here in the country, most of them in illegal status, talking to people abroad, we would have known what they were up to. The roots of today's programs began as an almost-immediate response to those attacks. Three days after 9/11, then-NSA director Hayden determined with other agency officials that there was a need for the authority to target U.S. telephone numbers linked to foreign terrorists or their countries of origin. Intelligence officials later pieced together and have remembered ever since that 9/11 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar resided in California in early 2000 and that while some of his conversations with an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen were picked up, the NSA did not have that U.S. phone number or any indication that he was located in San Diego. Had the current program existed then, they might have had a chance to disrupt the 9/11 plot.

Contention 3: THE AMERICAN PUBLIC HAS ALREADY CONCLUDED THAT THE BENEFITS OF NSA DOMESTIC
SURVEILLANCE OUTWEIGH THE HARMS. ABC news reports that the public by 58-39 percent supports the NSA collecting extensive records of phone calls, as well as internet data related to specific investigations, to try to identify possible terrorist threats. Support for theprogram is far higher among Democrats and liberals than among Republicans and strong conservatives, reversing Bush-era political divisions on issues of privacy vs. security. A Pew Research survey released June 10 found that 62 percent of respondents agree that it is more important to investigate terrorist threats than it is to protect privacy. That finding is consistent with results from Pew polls that asked that same question in 2010 and 2006. Dealing with the specifics of recent revelations, 56 percent of respondents to the June 10 survey said it is acceptable for the NSA to get secret court orders to track phone calls of millions of Americans in order to investigate terrorism. Forty-one percent said this is not acceptable.