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NEG
Contents
Case Construction ......................................................................................................................................... 2
4 Facets of Privacy ........................................................................................................................... 4
When privacy is dismantled ............................................................................................................. 5
The term security is used to eliminate the threats they have created............................................ 6
The term terror is a rhetorical tool .................................................................................................. 7
Terror is a word manipulated to benefit the oppressors actions .................................................... 8
(Rebuttal) Defeats purpose of why this country was founded .................................................................... 9
Infringes on Autonomy .................................................................................................................. 10
Loss of privacy creates and perpetuates power disparities. ......................................................... 11
Terrorism is not severe enough to justify NSA surveillance .......................................................... 12
NSA Surveillance is Inefficient........................................................................................................ 14
NSA surveillance lends itself to use in unethical persuasion ......................................................... 15
Unauthorized collection frequently occurs ................................................................................... 16
The right to privacy is eroding ....................................................................................................... 17
Collecting phone records inefficient .............................................................................................. 18
The NSA fails to differentiate between foreign and American content ........................................ 19
The NSA is only held nominally accountable to Congress ............................................................. 20
Twelve Examples of NSA Abuse ..................................................................................................... 21
NSA Surveillance Encourages Underground Activity ..................................................................... 22
National security is not an indiscriminate pretense ...................................................................... 23
Success of NSA Surveillance Greatly Exaggerated ......................................................................... 24
The FISA Court refuses to keep the NSA in check .......................................................................... 25

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Case Construction
Facets of National Security
Wright University, FBI's foreign counterintelligence mission,
http://www.wright.edu/rsp/Security/T1threat/Nstl.htm
The FBI's foreign counterintelligence mission is set out in a strategy known as the National Security
Threat List (NSTL). The NSTL combines two elements:
First is the Issues Threat List -- a list of eight categories of activity that are a national security
concern regardless of what foreign power or entity engages in them.
Second is the Country Threat List -- a classified list of foreign powers that pose a strategic
intelligence threat to U.S. security interests. The activities of these countries are so hostile, or of
such concern, that counterintelligence or counterterrorism investigations are warranted to
precisely describe the nature and scope of the activities as well as to counter specific identified
activities.
1. Terrorism
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated activities that:
Involve violent acts, dangerous to human life, that are a violation of the criminal laws of the
United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the
jurisdiction of the United States or any state;
Appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a
government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by
assassination or kidnapping; and
Occur totally outside the United States or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means
by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to coerce or intimidate, or
the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.
2. Espionage
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity directed
at the U.S. Government or U.S. corporations, establishments, or persons, which involves the
identification, targeting and collection of U.S. national defense information.
3. Proliferation
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity directed
at the U.S. Government or U.S. corporations, establishments or persons, which involves:
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to include chemical, biological, or nuclear
weapons, and delivery systems of those weapons of mass destruction; or
The proliferation of advanced conventional weapons.
4. Economic Espionage
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity directed
at the U.S. Government or U.S. corporations, establishments, or persons, which involves:
The unlawful or clandestine targeting or acquisition of sensitive financial, trade or economic
policy information, proprietary economic information, or critical technologies; or
The unlawful or clandestine targeting or influencing of sensitive economic policy decisions.

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5. Targeting the National Information Infrastructure

This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity directed
at the U.S. Government or U.S. corporations, establishments, or persons, which involves the targeting of
facilities, personnel, information, or computer, cable, satellite, or telecommunications systems which
are associated with the National Information Infrastructure. Proscribed intelligence activities include:
Denial or disruption of computer, cable, satellite or telecommunications services;
Unauthorized monitoring of computer, cable, satellite or telecommunications systems;
Unauthorized disclosure of proprietary or classified information stored within or communicated
through computer, cable, satellite or telecommunications systems;
Unauthorized modification or destruction of computer programming codes, computer network
databases, stored information or computer capabilities; or
Manipulation of computer, cable, satellite or telecommunications services resulting in fraud,
financial loss or other federal criminal violations.
6. Targeting the U.S. Government
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity directed
at the U.S. Government or U.S. corporations, establishments, or persons, which involves the targeting of
government programs, information, or facilities or the targeting or personnel of the:
U.S. intelligence community;
U.S. foreign affairs, or economic affairs community; or
U.S. defense establishment and related activities of national preparedness.
7. Perception Management
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity directed
at the U.S. Government or U.S. corporations, establishments, or persons, which involves manipulating
information, communicating false information, or propagating deceptive information and
communications designed to distort the perception of the public (domestically or internationally) or of
U.S. Government officials regarding U.S. policies, ranging from foreign policy to economic strategies.
8. Foreign Intelligence Activities
This issue concerns foreign power-sponsored or foreign power-coordinated intelligence activity
conducted in the U.S. or directed against the United States Government, or U.S. corporations,
establishments, or persons, that is not described by or included in the other issue threats.

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4 Facets of Privacy
David Banisar And Simon Davies, Deputy Director Of Privacy International (PI) And Director
General Of Privacy International And A Visiting Fellow At The London School Of Economics, Fall, 1999 in
"Global Trends In Privacy Protection: An International Survey of Privacy, Data Protection, And
Surveillance Laws And Developments," The John Marshall Journal Of Computer & Information Law, 18 J.
Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 1

Definitions of privacy vary widely according to context and environment. In many countries, the concept
has been fused with data protection, which interprets privacy in terms of managing personal
information. Outside this rather strict context, privacy protection is frequently seen as a way of drawing
the line at how far society can intrude into a person's affairs. It can be divided into the following facets:
Information privacy , involving the establishment of rules governing the collection and handling of
personal data such as credit information and medical records; Bodily privacy , concerning the
protection of people's physical beings against invasive procedures such as drug testing and cavity
searches; Privacy of communications, covering the security and privacy of mail, telephones, email and
other forms of communication; and Territorial privacy , concerning the setting of limits on intrusion
into the domestic and other environments such as the workplace or public space. The lack of a single
definition should not imply that the issue lacks importance. As one writer observed,

"In one

sense, all human rights are aspects of the right to privacy."

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When privacy is dismantled

Evgeny Morozov on October 22, 2013 Sprios Smitis, 1985
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/
He also recognized that privacy is not an end in itself. Its a means of achieving a certain ideal of
democratic politics, where citizens are trusted to be more than just self-contented suppliers of
information to all-seeing and all-optimizing technocrats. Where privacy is dismantled, warned
Simitis, both the chance for personal assessment of the political process and the opportunity to
develop and maintain a particular style of life fade.

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The term security is used to eliminate the threats they have created
Lipschutz 95 (Ronnie D, a Professor of Politics and Codirector of the Center for Global, International,
and Regional Studies at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz , On Security, p. 9-10)
Operationally, however, this means: In naming a certain development a security problem, the state
can claim a special right, one that will, in the final instance, always be defined by the state and its elites.
Trying to press the kind of unwanted fundamental political chance on a ruling elite is similar to playing a
game in which ones opponent can change the rules at any time s/he likes. Power holders can always try
to use the instrument of securitization of an issue to gain control over it. By definition, something is a
security problem when the elites declare it to be so: and because the End of this Institution [the
Leviathan, the Sovereign], is the Peace and Defense of them all; and whosoever has the right to the End,
has right to the Means; it belongeth of Right, to whatsoever Man, or Assembly that hath the
Soveraignty, to be Judge both of the meanes of Peace and Defense; and also of the hindrances, and
disturbances of the same; and to do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done, both before hand,
for the preserving of Peace and Security, by prevention of Discord at home and thus, that those who
administer this order can easily use it for specific, self-serving purposes is something that cannot be
easily avoided. What then is security? With the help of language theory, we can regard security as a
speech act. In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to somethingmore rea; the
utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promis, naming a ship).
By uttering security, a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and
thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it. The clearest illustration
of this phenomenon- on which I will elaborate below- occurred in Central and Eastern Europe during the
Cold War, where order was clearly, systematically, and institutionally linked to the survival of the
system and its elites. Thinking about chainge in the East-West relations and/or in Eastern Europe
throughout this period meant, therefore, trying to bring about change without generating a
securitization response by elites, which would have provided the pretext for acting against those who
had overstepped the boundaries of the permitted. Consequentially, to ensure that this mechanism
would not be triggered, actors had to keep their challenges below a certain thershold and/or through
the political process-wheter national or international- have the threshold negotiated upward. As Egbert
Jahn put it, the task was to turn threats into challenges; to move developments from the sphere of
existential fear to one where they could be handled by ordinary means, as politics, economy, culture,
and so on. As part of this exercise, a crucial political and theoretical issue became the definition of
intervention or interference in domestic affairs, whereby change-oriented agents tried, through
international law, diplomacy, and various kinds of politics, to raise the threshold and make more
interaction possible.

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The term terror is a rhetorical tool

Greenwald 8/15/12 (Glenn, Glenn Greenwald is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the
Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald
was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the
winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning. The sham terrorism expert industry,
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/the_sham_terrorism_expert_industry/)

The very concept of Terrorism is inherently empty, illegitimate, and meaningless. Terrorism itself is
not an objective term or legitimate object of study, but was conceived of as a highly politicized
instrument and has been used that way ever since. The best scholarship on this issue, in my view,
comes from Remi Brulin, who teaches at NYU and wrote his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris on
the discourse of Terrorism. When I interviewed him in 2010, he described the history of the term it
was pushed by Israel in the 1960s and early 1970s as a means of universalizing its conflicts (this isnt our
fight against our enemies over land; its the Entire Worlds Fight against The Terrorists!). The term was
then picked up by the neocons in the Reagan administration to justify their covert wars in Central
America (in a test run for what they did after 9/11, they continuously exclaimed: were fighting against
The Terrorists in Central America, even as they themselves armed and funded classic Terror groups in El
Salvador and Nicaragua). From the start, the central challenge was how to define the term so as to
include the violence used by the enemies of the U.S. and Israel, while excluding the violence the U.S.,
Israel and their allies used, both historically and presently.

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Terror is a word manipulated to benefit the oppressors actions

Greenwald 8/15/12

(Glenn, Glenn Greenwald is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's

executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential
political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest
and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning. The sham terrorism expert industry, http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/the_sham_terrorism_expert_industry/)

The exaggerations of the threat presented by terrorism and then on the distortions of perspective these
exaggerations have inspired distortions that have in turn inspired a determined and expensive quest
to ferret out, and even to create, the nearly nonexistent. Richard Jackson is a Professor at the The
National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand. He has written volumes on the fraud of terrorism expertise and the
propagandistic purpose of this field of discipline. He has documented that most self-proclaimed terrorism experts simply ignore the primary cause of the violence they claim to study:

most terrorism scholars, politicians and the media dont seem to know that terrorism is most often
caused by military intervention overseas, and not religion, radicalization, insanity, ideology, poverty or
such like

even though the Pentagon has known it for years. In one article entitled 10 Things More Likely to Kill You Than Terrorism, he notes that The chances of you dying in a terrorist attack are in the range of 1 in 80,000, or about the same chance of being killed by a meteor, and that bathtubs, vending machines, and lightning all pose a greater risk of death. In a book critiquing the terrorism expert field, Jackson argued that most of what is accepted as well-founded knowledge in terrorism studies is, in fact, highly

debatable and unstable. He therefore scorns almost four decades of so-called Terrorism scholarship as based on a series of virulent myths, half-truths and contested claims that are plainly biased towards Western state priorities. To Jackson, terrorism is a social fact rather than a brute fact and does not exist outside of the definitions and practices which seek to enclose it, including those of the terrorism studies field. In sum, it means whatever the wielder of the term wants it to mean: something that cannot be the subject of legitimate expertise. * * * * *

There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than

Terrorism. It shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the

minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have to get information from the Terrorists); due-processfree-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists); and rampant secrecy
(the Government cant disclose what its doing or have courts rule on its legality because the
Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of
Terrorism). It is a telling paradox indeed that this central, all-justifying word is simultaneously the most meaningless
and therefore the most manipulated.

It is, as I have noted before,

a word that simultaneously means nothing yet

justifies everything . Indeed, thats the point: it is such a useful concept precisely because its so malleable,
because it means whatever those with power to shape discourse want it to mean . And no faction has helped this process
along as much as the group of self-proclaimed terrorism experts that has attached itself to think tanks, academia, and media outlets. They

enable pure political propaganda to

masquerade as objective fact, shining brightly with the veneer of scholarly rigor. The industry itself is
a fraud, as are those who profit from and within it.

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Defeats purpose of why this country was founded

Shane R. Heskin, legal scholar, 1999, Albany Law Review, High Court Studies: Floridas State
Constitutional Adjudication: A Significant Shift As Three New Members Take Seats On The States
Highest Court, pp. 1573-74
Running through all of these decisions, however, is the courts' deeply imbedded belief, rooted in our
constitutional traditions, that an individual has a fundamental right to be left alone so that he is free
to lead his private life according to his own beliefs free from unreasonable governmental
interference. Surely nothing, in the last analysis, is more private or more sacred than one's religion or
view of life, and here the courts, quite properly, have given great deference to the individual's right to
make decisions vitally affecting his private life according to his own conscience. It is difficult to overstate
this right because it is, without exaggeration, the very bedrock on which this country was founded.

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10

Infringes on Autonomy
Deborah G. Johnson, Computer Ethics, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall (1985): 65.
The analysis of Rachels and Fried suggests a deeper and more fundamental issue: personal freedom. As
Deborah Johnson has observed, "To recognize an individual as an autonomous being, an end in himself,
entails letting that individual live his life as he chooses. Of course, there are limits to this, but one of the
critical ways that an individual controls his life is by choosing with whom he will have relationships and
what kind of relationships these will be.... Information mediates relationships. Thus when one cannot
control who has information about one, one loses considerable autonomy."6

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11

Loss of privacy creates and perpetuates power disparities.

Katrin Schatz Byford, attorney and legal scholar, 1998, Rutgers Computer and Technology
Law Journal, Privacy in Cyberspace: Constructing a Model of Privacy for the Electronic
Communications Environment, pp. 23-24
Once we regard privacy as implicated in the construction and transformation of all social relations, its
value transcends that of a mere personal right to be left alone. Instead, privacy becomes an integral
element of the sociopolitical process. Knowledge is power, and in any social interaction, an imbalance in
the amount and nature of personal information possessed by each party creates and perpetuates power
disparities. In a society where surveillance and the collection of personal information have become
institutionalized, those who control the data collection process have potentially immense social
power at their disposal. But their activities are likely to engender distrust and resentment and, insofar
as surveillance in public settings is perceived as unavoidable, may cause others to withdraw from public
participation altogether. Rather than eliminate the dividing line that separates public from private,
information gathering may cause its entrenchment by driving those subject to observation into a strictly
private sphere. As a consequence, access to political power is likely to be left in the hands of those able
to control the collection and distribution of information.

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12

Terrorism is not severe enough to justify NSA surveillance

Friedersdorf, Connor. The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terrorism The
Atlantic. June 10, 2013.
Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism. But consider some
hard facts. In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack -- by far the
biggest in its history -- roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S.
Let's put that in context. That same year in the United States:
71,372 died of diabetes.
29,573 were killed by guns.
13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.
That's what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let's take a longer view.
We'll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.
Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval, roughly 150,000
were killed in drunk-driving accidents, roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC
gives is 364,483 -- in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total
terrorism deaths).
Measured in lives lost, during an interval that includes the biggest terrorist attack in American
history, guns posed a threat to American lives that was more than 100 times greater than the threat
of terrorism. Over the same interval, drunk driving threatened our safety 50 times more than
terrorism.
Those aren't the only threats many times more deadly than terrorism, either.
The CDC estimates that food poisoning kills roughly 3,000 Americans every year. Every year, food-borne
illness takes as many lives in the U.S. as were lost during the high outlier of terrorism deaths. It's a killer
more deadly than terrorism. Should we cede a significant amount of liberty to fight it?
Government officials, much of the media, and most American citizens talk about terrorism as if they're
totally oblivious to this context -- as if it is different than all other threats we face, in both kind and
degree. Since The Guardian and other news outlets started revealing the scope of the surveillance state
last week, numerous commentators and government officials, including President Obama himself, have
talked about the need to properly "balance" liberty and security.

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13

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14

NSA Surveillance is Inefficient

Bialik, Carl. Ethics Aside, Is NSAs spy Tool Efficient Wall Street Journal. June 14, 2013.
A Ph.D. candidate in computational ecology wrote on his blog last week that even a very accurate
algorithm for identifying terrorist communications could produce about 10,000 false positives for
every real "hit," creating a haystack of false leads to chase in order to find every needle. Several
media reports repeated the figure, and some experts agreed. "The false positives will kill you in this kind
of system," said Bruce Schneier, a security technologist at U.K. telecommunications company BT Group
PLC.
The value of these monitoring tools also depends on another question, though, that can be addressed:
whether sifting for terrorism could be similar to screening for a rare disease. Corey Chivers, the fourthyear graduate student at McGill University in Montreal who wrote the blog post noted above, based his
calculation on assuming the two kinds of screening are identical mathematically. The thinking goes like
this: If you apply a test for something very rare to a population, even if it can be relied on to identify
people who possess certain traits, there are so many more who don't that the false positives will vastly
outnumber the correct hits.
Mr. Chivers said he never intended his proposed ratio to be very precise. Still, he said, his point stands:
"Even if those numbers were vastly different, you're still going to have a large false-positive rate."
Several statisticians agreed with his basic point . Even if the NSA's algorithm "is terribly clever and has
a very high sensitivity and specificity, it cannot avoid having an immense false-positive rate," said
Peter F. Thall, a biostatistician at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. In his arena,
false positives mean patients may get tests or treatment they don't need. For the NSA, false positives
could mean innocent people are monitored, detained, find themselves on no-fly lists or are otherwise
inconvenienced, and that the agency spends resources inefficiently.

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15

NSA surveillance lends itself to use in unethical persuasion

Richards, Neil. "The Dangers of Surveillance." Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): n. pag. Web. 02 Oct.
2013
Governments also use the power of surveillance to control behavior. For example, one of the
justifications for massive CCTV networks in modern urban areas is that they allow police greater
ability to watch and influence what happens on city streets. Certainly, the presence of cameras or police
can persuade citizens to obey the law, but they can have other effects as well. The surveillance studies
literature has documented the use of government CCTV assemblages to direct public behavior
towards commerce and away from other activities ranging from crime to protest. In Britain, where
the science of surveillance-based control is at its most advanced, CCTV operates in connection with
court-ordered injunctions, known as Anti-Social Behavior Orders or ASBOs, to move groups of nonpurchasing teens out of the commercial cores of cities, using surveillance and the power of the state to
ensure that commerce continues efficiently.
The bottom line about surveillance and persuasion is this: Surveillance gives the watcher information
about the watched. That information gives the watcher increased power over the watched that can be
used to persuade, influence, or otherwise control them, even if they do not know they are being
watched. Sometimes this power is undeniably a good thing, for example when police are engaged in riot
control. But we should not forget that surveillance represents a persuasive power shift whether the
watcher is a government agent or a corporate marketer. We have legal doctrines dealing with power
imbalances between both consumers and businesses, such as the doctrine of unconscionability and
consumer protection law. We also have legal doctrines protecting citizens from state coercion, such as
the unconstitutional conditions doctrine and the First Amendments protections of freedom of thought
and conscience. In an age of surveillance, when technological change gives the watcher enhanced
powers of persuasion, it may well be time to think about updating those doctrines to bring them into
the digital age.
This evidence shows how surveillance unjustly concentrates power into the hands of a few. While this
alone doesnt prove anything, it will be useful with the issue of accountability, showing how this new
threat to civil liberties is gaining more power and virtually unchecked by the rest of the government.

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16

Unauthorized collection frequently occurs

Phillip, Abby D. "Obama vs. Washington Post: Whos Right on NSA Surveillance? ABC News Network,
13 Aug. 2013.
Press reports that the National Security Agency broke privacy rules thousands of times per year and
reportedly sought to shield required disclosure of privacy violations are extremely disturbing, said
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., noting that instances of non-compliance are required by
law to be reported to Congress.
Well let you be the judge:
Obama:
Well, the fact that I said that the programs are operating in a way that prevents abuse, that continues to
be true, without the reforms.
The NSA audit obtained by The [Washington] Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the
preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally
protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or
violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a
court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders .
This card is extremely impactful. Not only does it present a serious statistic about the unintentional
stealing of legally protected information, but it also shows that the claims being made by the
government about the legitimacy of the surveillance programs are significantly different than what the
numbers show. Additionally, this card can be used to illustrate the fact that the NSA is not giving its due
respect to Congress by disclosing instances of non-compliance with the law. Surveillance is illegally
violating right, being lied about to the public, and undermining the checks and balances of the state.

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17

The right to privacy is eroding

Risen, James, and Laura Poitras. "N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens." New
York TImes, 28 Sept. 2013.
The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt
for information about the nations adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its
most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an
individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by
listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.
Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify peoples friends and associates, detect
where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive
information like regular calls to a psychiatrists office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or
exchanges with a fellow plotter.
Metadata can be very revealing, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington
University. Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the persons
cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. Its the digital
equivalent of tailing a suspect.
While a "digitial equivalent of tailing a suspect" sounds promising in terms of law enforcement, if this
argument is expanded, the impact of this card is that nearly every individual is being digitally followed by
the NSA at all times due to metadata collection.

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18

Collecting phone records inefficient

Tom Cohen and Bill Mears, CNN. August 1, 2013. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/31/politics/nsasurveillance/index.html.
There is little evidence the U.S. government's sweeping collection of phone records, as revealed by
admitted intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, has helped prevent terror attacks as national security
officials have claimed, a top senator said on Wednesday.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy [stated] "If this program is not effective, it has to
end," the Vermont Democrat said of the phone record collection program under Section 215 of the
Patriot Act. He noted that classified details provided by the NSA on how the initiative had been used do
NOT "reflect dozens or even several terrorist plots" that it helped prevent "let alone 54 as some have
suggested."
At Wednesday's hearing, Justice Department and security officials conceded the lack of direct causal
links between the Section 215 phone record collection and thwarted attacks.

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19

The NSA fails to differentiate between foreign and American content

Granick, Jennifer. "NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our
Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 14 Aug. 2013. Web. 05 Oct.
2013.
Published by the Guardian, they show that NSA analysts are presented with dropdown lists of
preapproved factors the NSA accepts as sufficient proof that a person is a foreigner, including being in
direct contact with (a) target overseas or the use of storage media (like a server located abroad) seized
outside the U.S. So any U.S. person who talks to a foreigner that the NSA has identified as a target, or
who stores data on a server outside the U.S. (as someone might well do if emailing from a foreign hotel
room) may be presumed to be a foreigner. And thats not even the worst of it. Leaked NSA documents
also suggest that the agency will presume that a person is a foreigner whenever there is no
information suggesting otherwise. That sort of willful blindness gives the NSA a lot of leeway to
target Americans.

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20

The NSA is only held nominally accountable to Congress

Bendix, William and Paul J. Quirk. Institutional Failure in Surveillance Policymaking: Deliberating the
Patriot Act. Brookings Institution. July 2013. Web.
As often occurs in national-security policy, Congress had difficulty exerting influence on issues that
demanded secrecy. If all 535 members routinely participated in classified discussions, damaging leaks
might be almost constant. Instead, Congress normally settles for limited briefings, typically including
only members of the Intelligence committees. On especially sensitive matters, briefings have been
limited to eight congressional leaders. This system has preserved secrecy but often at the expense of
genuine congressional participation. With only four members from each party privy to critical
information, legislators will rarely resist the administration position on a major issue.
As recent reports on the metadata program show, Congress has struggled to conduct effective
oversight of domestic spying. Although Congress received briefings, many lawmakers only learned of
the program when The Guardian ran its stories. Members on the Intelligence committees received the
bulk of the briefings, and provided opportunities for their colleagues in the House and Senate to view
top-secret files. But many skipped the sessions because classified briefings were seen as pointless.
Lawmakers could not take notes, consult experts, or discuss technical matters with staff, thus limiting
their ability to assess classified information.
These restrictions did not apply to members on the Intelligence committees, who were uniquely able to
follow the metadata program. But the Intelligence panels lacked a hands-on familiarity with the legal
issues concerning both records seizures and the FISA Court procedures, because the Judiciary
committees had done most of the work on the Patriot Act. But even if the Intelligence panels had
sufficient legal understanding, they were confined to discuss policy in a classified setting and
therefore were in no position to mobilize Congress against a presidential program that few members
knew about or understood.

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Twelve Examples of NSA Abuse

Andrew Ellis. 12 Cases of NSA Surveillance Technology Abuse Revealed. Digital Journal.
http://digitaljournal.com/article/359243
The Guardian reported that a letter from the NSA's Inspector General to Iowa representative Senator
Chuck Grassley revealed 12 cases where the agency's surveillance technology was abused by its
employees.
In one case, according to Politico, a foreign woman employed by the United States suspected a person
she was in a relationship with, who was an NSA employee, was overhearing her phone conversations. An
investigation by the NSA later revealed that the person used the surveillance system to pull up the
woman's phone calls from 1998 to 2003.
CNN reported that there was another case in 2004 where a women employee spied on a phone number
from her husband's cell phone she didn't recognize because she thought it meant he was having an
affair.
In another case that didn't involve an employee's personal life, Politico reported that an employee
"improperly" used the surveillance to gain more information on the relative of a foreign intelligence
target.
Another case involved a member of the US military who used the system to spy on the email
addresses of six of his former girlfriends on the first day he was given access, according to The
Guardian.
The Guardian also reported that a quarter of the abuse cases were only discovered after the employees
responsible confessed. In seven of the cases, the ones responsible either resigned or retired before any
kind of disciplinary action could be taken.
The letter, written by Dr. George Ellard, only listed the cases that were investigated and then
"substantiated," or validated, by his office, according to The Guardian.
CNN reported that six of the cases were brought to the Department of Justice, but no charges appear to
have been brought on.
When disciplinary action was taken, according to The Guardian, sometimes all it involved was a written
warning. Politico reported that other punishments included reduced pay, revocation of classified access,
demotion, and suspension.

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NSA Surveillance Encourages Underground Activity

Ian Duncan and Justin Fenton. Silk Road Arrrest Exposes a Hidden Internet. Tribune Business News.
October 6, 2013. Web. October 7, 2013.
The events of the past week have drawn renewed attention to the underground of the Internet, where
users hide their identities, bounce information around the world to obscure its origin, access hidden
sites with extensions like ".onion" and spend digital currency known as Bitcoins.
But experts say the technology that allows drug dealers and child pornographers to flourish is also a
legitimate protector of Internet privacy and a crucial check on government power. So-called Deep Web
applications have helped activists drive forward the Arab Spring and get around China's Great Firewall.
Some of the tools used by Silk Road and its patrons were developed by the U.S. government, and
observers say they could become increasingly popular here as the populace reckons with revelations of
vast Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency.
"Why wouldn't you be interested in anonymity, with all the recent releases of information that the NSA
has been pervasively tracking almost everything we do online?" asked Michael Taylor, a computer
science professor at the University of California, San Diego. "It gets back to the fundamental freedoms
that Americans tend to believe they have."
This source explains one of the fundamental issues with NSA surveillanceit encourages criminals to go
even further beyond detection. This phenomenon has fueled the Silk Road, an underground online
market for drug dealers and other criminal transactions.

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National security is not an indiscriminate pretense

Walt, Stephen. Sullivan, the NSA, and the Terrorism Threat. Foreign Policy. 6 June 2013. Web.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/06/sullivan_the_nsa_and_the_terrorism_threat
This claim depends on the belief that jihadism really does pose some sort of horrific threat to American
society. This belief is unwarranted, however, provided that dedicated and suicidal jihadists never gain
access to nuclear weapons. Conventional terrorism -- even of the sort suffered on 9/11 -- is not a serious
threat to the U.S. economy, the American way of life, or even the personal security of the overwhelming
majority of Americans, because al Qaeda and its cousins are neither powerful nor skillful enough to
do as much damage as they might like. And this would be the case even if the NSA weren't secretly
collecting a lot of data about domestic phone traffic. Indeed, as political scientist John Mueller and
civil engineer Mark Stewart have shown, post-9/11 terrorist plots have been mostly lame and inept, and
Americans are at far greater risk from car accidents, bathtub mishaps, and a host of other undramatic
dangers than they are from "jihadi terrorism." The Boston bombing in April merely underscores this
point: It was a tragedy for the victims but less lethal than the factory explosion that occurred that
same week down in Texas. But Americans don't have a secret NSA program to protect them from
slipping in the bathtub, and Texans don't seem to be crying out for a "Patriot Act" to impose better
industrial safety. Life is back to normal here in Boston (Go Sox!), except for the relatively small number
of people whose lives were forever touched by an evil act.
Terrorism often succeeds when its targets overreact, thereby confirming the extremists' narrative
and helping tilt opinion toward their cause. Thus, a key lesson in dealing with these (modest) dangers
is not to exaggerate them or attribute to enemies advantages that they do not possess.

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Success of NSA Surveillance Greatly Exaggerated

Peter Grier. Is NSA Exaggerating Its Surveillance Successes? CS Monitor. June 18, 2013.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0618/Is-NSA-exaggerating-its-surveillancesuccesses
As to the New York subway plot, it was discovered not by analysis of vast amounts of Internet data
of foreign users, but rather by old-fashioned police work, according to The Guardian, the British
newspaper that first published a secret NSA document showing the agency collected phone
metadata from Verizon Business Services.
A British intelligence investigation into a suspected terrorist cell in Englands northwest first turned up a
crucial e-mail address of a Pakistani extremist, write The Guardians Ed Pilkington and Nicholas Watt.
They passed this address to the US.
Surveillance of this one address led the US to Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American living in Colorado who
had asked the Pakistani extremist for explosives recipes. FBI agents followed Mr. Zazi as he traveled to
New York. Search warrants turned up bomb components, and in 2010 Zazi confessed to a plot to bomb
the citys subway system with backpacks.
NSA Surveillance is rarely crucial to uncovering terrorist information. This example demonstrates
how tracing an email address-an act that takes very little surveillance informationwas the only
aspect depending on the NSA.

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The FISA Court refuses to keep the NSA in check

Sprigman, Christopher and Jennifer Granick. FISA Court Rolls Over, Plays Dead. Center for Internet
and Society. Stanford Law School. 28 August 2013. Web.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/fisa-court-rolls-over-plays-dead
So what did the court do when it found out it had been lied to, that purely domestic communications
were fair game, that untold numbers of innocent people were being illegally spied on, and that all the
safeguards in place needed to be rethought?
Nothing, really. The court suggested the NSA should train its analysts to notice when their queries
turned up an MCT i.e., an Internet transaction containing multiple messages and then to look
carefully at all the by-catch. If existing procedures allowed them to use anything in those purely
domestic messages that they were never supposed to have collected in the first place, great!
Otherwise, only after collection and review, should the information be deleted. The NSA adopted this
approach, and continues to blithely collect Internet transactions containing wholly domestic
communications between innocent Americans to this day.
So in the face of illegal, unconstitutional and potentially criminal conduct conduct about which the
NSA repeatedly lied to the FISA court the FISA court corrected the problem by requiring banner
warnings that something might be an MCT, and an extra round of review by NSA analysts. The real
problem that the NSA regularly collects Americans most private communications that the law does
not permit it to collect and lies about it to the FISA court was simply waved away.
In other words, the NSA intentionally collects purely domestic American communications which it
assured the American people were off-limits. But the FISA court allows the government to use these
communications to criminally investigate us, and for foreign intelligence purposes.
The harms to civil liberties are already a well-established and often-tread point in discussing NSA
surveillance. This behavior shows a more worrying precedent: supposedly regulatory government bodies
are ostensibly being held subservient to the goals of a single powerful agency. Even if we were to
accept that the NSAs national security work is worthwhile, the pretense under which this work is
done is unacceptable in any governmental structure that wishes to remain accountable to both itself
and its people.

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