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Privacy

Mass Surveillance Doesn’t Hurt Privacy

NSA surveillance strikes the appropriate balance between protecting civil liberties and maintaining national security.


Epstein, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, ’13 [Richard, “In Defense of the NSA”, The Hoover Institution, 6-18-13, http://www.hoover.org/research/defense-nsa, RSR]

Finally, the NSA surveillance program signals a strong categorical shift in the balance to the government side. In these cases, the government has collected information that might be useful in tracking down future terrorists. So far, critics of the program have been far too glib, as in Jim Harper’s recent post on Cato@Liberty. Harper suggests that the very act of data collection brings back the sordid British practice of issuing a “general warrant,” which is the very abuse that the Fourth Amendment was intended to curb. But such a statement is simply not accurate: What sparked the Fourth Amendment was the 1765 case of Entick v. Carrington, in which Lord Halifax, a Secretary of State, ordered his agents, one of whom was Carrington, to ransack John Entick’s premises, which they did for four hours collecting charts and pamphlets, and causing damage of some £2,000, which Entick was eventually allowed to collect. All the evidence suggests that nothing remotely like this outrage has taken place. In the NSA case, the key point is that it takes a search warrant to examine the contents of the phone calls collected. Yet, there is no evidence of any breach of the line between collection and use. A recent Reuters story says the government estimates that about 300 phone calls were probed. Why should we presume that this claim is false? Does anyone think that NSA agents are petty voyeurs, that they could even use their equipment for unauthorized use, or that the NSA is institutionally insensitive to privacy breaches? Besides, there are credible stories that tracking actually works in some cases, such as when the FBI uses cell phone transmissions from speeding escape cars to crack burglaries. I don’t always agree with Alan Dershowitz, nor does he always agree with me, but I think that he is right on the money when he laments at The Daily Beast that, with the outcry against the NSA program, we are witnessing a return to a form of paranoia that has too often marred American politics. Dershowitz here is not arguing whether we do or do not need a government program; he is describing the level of trust that we put in government. In making that observation it is imperative to distinguish between cases. Nothing whatsoever should insulate the NSA from political scrutiny and legislative and judicial intervention. But nothing should allow us to equate the so-called NSA standard with the inexcusable IRS scandal that is rife with partisan politics and worse, precisely because of the utter absence of any institutional protections against partisan abuse. But different cases deserve different treatments. Without a sense of proportion, this nation cannot survive. There is no escaping the fact that national security is an area where government may be appropriately feared, but is still desperately needed. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty. The solution is to work hard to maintain a proper balance, which cannot be done if the NSA collection and retention of data is regarded as an intolerable invasion of individual privacy rights, when at the present it is anything but that.

Mass surveillance doesn’t violate privacy – concerns are overblown.


Zegart and Erwin, ’14 [Amy (Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and a member of the Hoover task forces focusing on national security and law, Arctic security, military history, and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University) and Marshall (research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy), “Bringing the NSA in from the Cold”, Hoover Digest, 2014, No. 2, RSR]

General Keith Alexander, then-director of the NSA, argued in a speech in September that surveillance programs had been sensationalized by the media: “And so what’s hyped up in a lot of the reporting is that we’re listening to your phone calls. We’re reading your e-mails. That’s just not true.” He’s right. But if you read between the lines, what Alexander and other intelligence officials are saying is that their biggest problem is misperception: if only the public knew more, they would approve of what the NSA is doing. This is why the Obama administration’s response to the leaks by Edward Snowden has focused so much on transparency. Increased transparency, the logic goes, will correct misperceptions and win support. Our results suggest this approach is misguided. To know the NSA is not to love the NSA. The NSA needs to win this debate on the merits. What we need to know is whether the agency’s telephone and Internet surveillance programs are wise and effective. For months, we have been obsessing over the legality of the surveillance programs. But recent administration disclosures have provided a remarkable amount of information about the legal rationale and oversight regime governing the programs. Though legal scholars will continue to debate just what “relevance” or “targeting” means, the message from these disclosures for the public is this: there is no evidence that the NSA is engaged in any illegal domestic snooping operations. For national security, the more important question now is whether these programs are good counterterrorism policy. We have lost sight of that. Our poll shows that Americans are willing to give their government significant leeway if they think counterterrorism tools are effective. Support for assassinating known terrorists, for example, has hovered at around 65 percent for years. However, we have yet to hear a compelling case for why the NSA’s programs are valuable. This is how the administration can win an NSA debate: by demonstrating with clear examples that these programs have been critical, and by convincing the public that the privacy trade-offs involved are worth it.


No Fourth Amendment Violation

NSA surveillance doesn’t violate the 4th amendment – massive amount of legal precedent defends electronic surveillance for national security.


Yoo, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law School, ’14 [John, “THE LEGALITY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY’S BULK DATA SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS”, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2014, RSR]

Even if constitutional privacy interests were thought to extend to telephone metadata or to foreign e-mails, the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement still would not apply because the NSA searches seek to prevent military attacks, not garden-variety criminal activity.84 As observed earlier, every lower court to examine the question has found that when the government conducts a search of a foreign power or its agents, it need not meet the requirements that apply to criminal law enforcement. Though, admittedly, the Supreme Court has never ruled on the question, it has suggested in dicta that roadblocks and dragnets to stop a terrorist bombing in an American city would not need to meet the warrant requirement’s demand for individualized suspicion.85 This approach is fully consistent with the Supreme Court’s recent Fourth Amendment cases. Not all searches require a warrant. Rather, as the Court found in a 1995 case upholding random drug testing of high school athletes, “[a]s the text of the Fourth Amendment indicates, the ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a governmental search is ‘reasonableness.’”86 When a passenger enters an airport, government employees search his belongings and subject him to an x-ray— undoubtedly a search—without a warrant. When travelers enter the country, customs and immigration officials can search their baggage and sometimes their persons without a warrant.87 Of course, when law enforcement undertakes a search to discover evidence of criminal wrongdoing, reasonableness generally requires a judicial warrant. But when the government’s conduct is not focused on law enforcement, a warrant is unnecessary. A warrantless search can be constitutional, the Court has said, “’when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.’”88 A search must be “reasonable” under the circumstances. What does “reasonable” mean? The Court has upheld warrantless searches to reduce deaths on the nation’s highways, to maintain safety among railway workers, and to ensure that government officials were not using drugs.89 In these cases, the “‘importance of the governmental interests’” outweighed the “‘nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests.’”90 It is hard to imagine that any of these situations are more important than protecting the nation from a direct foreign attack in wartime. “It is obvious and unarguable,” the Supreme Court has observed several times, “that no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the Nation.”91 It is the duty of the President to respond to attacks on the territory and people of the United States, and Congress confirmed the President’s authority to use force after September 11. The extraordinary circumstances of war require that the government seek specific information relevant to possible attacks on Americans, sometimes in situations where obtaining a warrant is not practical.92 Before the September 11 attacks, the Supreme Court observed that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement would probably not apply to the special circumstances created by a potential terrorist attack. “[T]he Fourth Amendment would almost certainly permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route.”93 To be sure, this case, City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, challenged the constitutionality of a highway checkpoint program that searched cars for illegal drugs rather than for terrorists. And in Edmond, the Court found that the checkpoints vio- lated the Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure because the police were searching for drugs for the purpose of “crime control” and “the ordinary enterprise of investigating crimes.” 94 But the Court still observed that some warrantless searches were acceptable in the emergency situation of a possible terrorist attack, in which the “need for such measures to ensure public safety can be particularly acute.”95 If the Supreme Court has found that searches for border and airport control present special needs that do not call for a warrant, a court would be hard pressed to deny that searches to find foreign terrorists bent on attacking the United States fall within the same category. If national security searches do not require a warrant, it might be asked why FISA is even necessary. FISA offers the executive branch a deal. If a President complies with the process of obtaining a FISA warrant, courts will likely agree that the search was reasonable and will admit its fruits as evidence in a criminal case. FISA does not create the power to authorize national security searches. Rather, it describes a safe harbor that deems searches obtained with a warrant reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. If a President proceeds with a search under his own authority rather than under FISA or under ordinary criminal procedure, he takes his chances. A court might refuse to admit evidence in any future proceeding that had been obtained without a warrant, or even allow the target to sue the government for damages.96 Then again, it might not. FISA ultimately cannot limit the President’s powers to protect national security through surveillance if those powers stem from his unique Article II responsibilities. Intercepting enemy communications has long been part of waging war; indeed, it is critical to the successful use of force.97 The U.S. military cannot at- tack or defend to good effect unless it knows where to aim. America has a long history of conducting intelligence operations to obtain information on the enemy. General Washington used spies extensively during the Revolutionary War and as President established a secret fund for spying that existed until the creation of the CIA.98 President Lincoln personally hired spies during the Civil War, a practice the Supreme Court upheld.99 In both World Wars I and II, Presidents ordered the interception of electronic communications leaving the United States. 100 Some of America’s greatest wartime intelligence successes have involved signals intelligence (SIGINT), most notably the breaking of Japanese diplomatic and naval codes during World War II, which allowed the U.S. Navy to anticipate the attack on Midway Island.101 SIGINT is even more important in this war than in those of the last century. Al Qaeda has launched a variety of efforts to attack the United States, and it intends to continue them.102 The primary way to stop those attacks is to find and stop al Qaeda operatives who have infiltrated the United States. The best way to find them is to intercept their electronic communications entering or leaving the country. The need for executive authority over electronic intelligence gathering becomes apparent when we consider the facts of the war against al Qaeda. In the hours and days after September 11, members of the government thought that al Qaeda would try to crash other airliners or use a weapon of mass destruction in a major east coast city, probably Washington, D.C. Combat air patrols began flying above New York and Washington. Suppose a plane was hijacked and would not respond to air traffic controllers. It would be reasonable for U.S. antiterrorism personnel to intercept any radio or cell phone calls to or from the airliner, to discover the hijackers’ intentions, what was happening on the plane, and ultimately whether it would be necessary for the fighters to shoot down the plane. Under the civil libertarian approach to privacy, the government could not monitor the suspected hijackers’ phone or radio calls unless they received a judicial warrant first—the calls, after all, are electronic communications within the United States. A warrant would be hard to obtain because it is unlikely that the government would then know the identities of all the hijackers, who might be U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens. But because the United States is in a state of war, the military can intercept the communications of the plane to see if it poses a threat, and target the enemy if necessary, without a judicial warrant because the purpose is not arrest and trial, but to prevent an attack. This comports far better with the principle of reasonableness that guides the Fourth Amendment. As Commander-in-Chief, the President has the constitutional power and the responsibility to wage war in response to a direct attack against the United States.103 In the Civil War, President Lincoln undertook several actions—raising an army, withdrawing money from the treasury, launching a blockade—on his own authority in response to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, moves that Congress and the Supreme Court later approved.104 During World War II, the Supreme Court similarly recognized that once war began, the President’s authority as Commanderin-Chief and Chief Executive gave him the tools necessary to wage war effectively.105 In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Congress agreed that “the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States,” which recognizes the President’s authority to use force to respond to al Qaeda, and any powers necessary and proper to that end.106 Even legal scholars who argue against this historical practice concede that once the United States has been attacked, the President can respond immediately with force. The ability to collect intelligence is intrinsic to the use of military force. It is inconceivable that the Constitution would vest in the President the powers of Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive and give him the responsibility to protect the nation from attack, but then disable him from gathering intelligence on how to use the military most effectively to defeat the enemy. Every evidence of the Framers’ understanding of the Constitution is that the government would have every ability to meet a foreign danger. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist, “[s]ecurity against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society.”107 Therefore, the “powers requisite for attaining it must be effectually confided to the federal councils.”108 After World War II, the Supreme Court declared that a “grant of war power includes all that is necessary and proper for carrying these powers into execution.”109 Covert operations and electronic surveillance are clearly part of this authority. During the writing of the Constitution, some Framers believed that the President alone should manage intelligence because only he could keep secrets.110 Several Supreme Court cases have recognized that the President’s role as Commander-inChief and the primary organ of the nation in its foreign relations must include the power to collect intelligence.111 These authorities agree that responsibility for intelligence gathering rests with the President because the structure of the office allows for unified, secret, and speedy action. Presidents have long ordered electronic surveillance without any judicial or congressional participation. More than a year before the Pearl Harbor attacks, but with war clearly looming with the Axis powers, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the FBI to intercept any communications, whether wholly inside the country or abroad, of persons “suspected of subversive activities against the Government of the United States, including suspected spies.”112 FDR was concerned that “fifth columns” could wreak havoc with the war effort. “It is too late to do anything about it after sabotage, assassinations and ‘fifth column’ activities are completed,” FDR wrote in his order.113 FDR ordered the surveillance even though a federal law at the time prohibited electronic surveillance without a warrant.114 Presidents continued to monitor the communications of national security threats on their own authority, even in peacetime.115 If Presidents in times of peace could order surveillance of spies and terrorists, executive authority is only the greater now, as hostilities continue against al Qaeda. This is not a view that Justice Departments have held only under Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama. The Clinton Justice Department held a similar view of the executive branch’s authority to conduct surveillance outside the FISA framework.116 Courts have never opposed a President’s authority to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance to protect national securi- ty. When the Supreme Court first considered this question in 1972, it held that the Fourth Amendment required a judicial warrant if a President wanted to conduct surveillance of a purely domestic group, but it refused to address surveillance of foreign threats to national security.117 In the years since, every federal appeals court to address the question, including the FISA Appeals Court, has “held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.”118 The FISA Appeals Court did not even feel that it was worth much discussion. It took the President’s power to do so “for granted,” and observed that “FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”119 Congress also implicitly authorized the President to carry out electronic surveillance to prevent further attacks on the United States. Congress’s September 18, 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force is sweeping; it has no limitation on time or place—its only limitation is that the President is to pursue al Qaeda.120 Although the President did not need, as a constitutional matter, Congress’s permission to pursue and attack al Qaeda after the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, its passage shows that the President and Congress fully agreed that military action would be appropriate. Congress’s approval of the killing and capture of al Qaeda members obviously must include the tools to locate them in the first place. A choice between FISA or his constitutional authority gives the President the discretion to use the best method to protect the United States, whether through the military or by relying on law enforcement. It also means warrantless surveillance will not be introduced into the criminal justice system; the judiciary is only needed to enforce this legal distinction. Presidents could alleviate concern about the NSA programs by publicly declaring that no evidence generated by them will be used in a criminal case. Although FISA cannot supersede the President’s constitutional authority, it can provide a more stable system for the domestic collection of foreign intelligence, such as the NSA’s collection of phone call metadata and foreign e-mails.

Security from Surveillance Better than Privacy

Mass surveillance is comparatively better – loss of privacy is trivial compared to the damage of terrorist attacks.


Pilon and Epstein, ’13 [Roger (vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute) and Richard (law professor at New York University Law School, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago), “NSA surveillance in perspective”, 6-12-13, The Chicago Tribune, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-06-12/opinion/ct-perspec-0612-nsa-20130612_1_nsa-national-security-agency-privacy, RSR]

President Barack Obama is under harsh attack for stating the obvious: No amount of government ingenuity will guarantee the American people 100 percent security, 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. He was answering a burst of more heated responses from left and right alike to the "news" that for years the National Security Agency has been collecting metadata about Americans' phone calls and certain foreign Internet communications. Legally, the president is on secure footing under the Patriot Act, which Congress passed shortly after 9/11 and has since reauthorized by large bipartisan majorities. As he stressed, the program has enjoyed the continued support of all three branches of the federal government. It has been free of political abuse since its inception. And as he rightly added, this nation has real problems if its people, at least here, can't trust the combined actions of the executive branch and the Congress, backstopped by federal judges sworn to protect our individual liberties secured by the Bill of Rights. In asking for our trust, Obama would be on stronger ground, of course, if the NSA controversy had not followed hard on the heels of the ongoing Benghazi, IRS and AP/Fox News scandals — to say nothing of Attorney General Eric Holder's problems. But give Obama due credit: We can recall no other instance in which he announced publicly that the responsibilities of his office have changed his mind. And for the better — here's why. In domestic and foreign affairs, the basic function of government is to protect our liberty, without unnecessarily violating that liberty in the process. The text of the Fourth Amendment grasps that essential trade-off by allowing searches, but not "unreasonable" ones. That instructive, albeit vague, accommodation has led courts to craft legal rules that, first, define what a search is and, second, indicate the circumstances under which one is justified. In the realm of foreign intelligence gathering, recognizing the need for secrecy and their own limitations, judges have shown an acute awareness of the strength of the public interest in national security. They have rightly deferred to Congress and the executive branch, allowing executive agencies to engage in the limited surveillance that lies at the opposite pole from ransacking a single person's sensitive papers for political purposes. That deference is especially appropriate now that Congress, through the Patriot Act, has set a delicate balance that enables the executive branch to carry out its basic duty to protect us from another 9/11 while respecting our privacy as much as possible. Obviously, reasonable people can have reasonable differences over how that balance is struck. But on this question, political deliberation has done its job, because everyone on both sides of the aisle is seeking the right constitutional balance. In 1979, in Smith v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed that balance when it held that using a pen register to track telephone numbers did not count as an invasion of privacy, even in ordinary criminal cases. That's just what the government is doing here on a grand scale. The metadata it examines in its effort to uncover suspicious patterns enables it to learn the numbers called, the locations of the parties, and the lengths of the calls. The government does not know — as some have charged — whether you've called your psychiatrist, lawyer or lover. The names linked to the phone numbers are not available to the government before a court grants a warrant on proof of probable cause, just as the Fourth Amendment requires. Indeed, once that warrant is granted to examine content, the content can be used only for national security issues, not even ordinary police work. As the president said, the process involves some necessary loss of privacy. But it's trivial, certainly in comparison to the losses that would have arisen if the government had failed to discern the pattern that let it thwart the 2009 New York subway bombing plot by Colorado airport shuttle driver Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American, who was prosecuted and ultimately pleaded guilty. The critics miss the forest for the trees. Yes, government officials might conceivably misuse some of the trillions of bits of metadata they examine using sophisticated algorithms. But one abuse is no pattern of abuses. And even one abuse is not likely to happen given the safeguards in place. The cumulative weight of the evidence attests to the soundness of the program. The critics would be more credible if they could identify a pattern of government abuses. But after 12 years of continuous practice, they can't cite even a single case. We should be thankful that here, at least, government has done its job and done it well.

Failing to engage in mass surveillance is a greater threat to our liberties.


Cleave, former head of US counterintelligence under President George W. Bush, ’13 [Michelle, “What It Takes: In Defense of the NSA”, World Affairs Journal, November/December 2013, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/what-it-takes-defense-nsa, RSR]

The United States has built a global intelligence apparatus because it has global interests and global responsibilities. We have taken seriously the duties of leader of the free world, as two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and freedom fighters in many parts of the world can attest. None of these duties in the last sixty years could have been met without the exceptional resources of NSA. Successive presidents and Congresses, entrusted with preserving and defending our freedom, have judged these investments to be vital to our nation’s security. They have protected the core secrets that enable collection programs to succeed, as have those in US business and industry who have been integral to their success. The unquestioned qualitative edge of US intelligence has been as essential to defending this country and preserving our freedom as have the forces we have built to arm and equip our military. But time has not stood still. China is attacking computer systems throughout the world, stealing information and implanting features to enable future control. China’s prominence in IT commercial markets means that they are in the supply chain, and their market share is growing as part of a purposeful, state-run program for strategic position. A long roll call of spies from Russia, China, Cuba, and other nations have targeted the essential secrets of US intelligence capabilities in order to be able to defeat them. And now they have the Snowdens and the WikiLeakers of the world helping them out. Interconnected global networks of digital data have become the single most important source of intelligence warning of threats, enabling our defense at home and the advancement of freedom abroad. To say “hands off,” as some shortsighted privacy advocates have been doing, will not preserve our liberties, it will endanger them. It should be possible for an enlightened citizenry to empower government action in that sphere without forfeiting the very rights that our government exists to secure. That challenge is, at the very least, a part of the continuing experiment that is our democracy.

Security Impacts Probable

Security studies deflates threats versus overinflating them – default neg.


Schweller 04 (Randall L. Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical RealistTheory of Underbalancing,” International Security 29.2 (2004) 159-201, Muse)

Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject. Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been made with equal veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of domestic politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have with some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival. There may be some cognitive or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people are, in some way, "out to get you" or are planning to do oneharm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the opposite psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet, we do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that describes this pathology (hubris and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I have described). That noted, international relations theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states' underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is deliberately used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public. A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on underreactions to threats, however, is the tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy relevant theories that may help resolve or manage urgent security problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the dangers of underreacting to or underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear revolution was not about overkill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation, accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to threats than underresponding to them. At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war thatnobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now that the Cold War is over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial underand overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided society. The arguments presented here also suggest that elite fragmentation and disagreement within a competitive political process, which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist policies, are more likely to produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent states.96 This is because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any, compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic environment is always somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This dynamic captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.

Extinction risks are underestimated in the SQUO.


Bostrum 12 (Nick, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and winner of the Gannon Award, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6, “We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction”, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.¶ Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.¶ Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why? ¶ Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.

Their fears of epistemological bias are unfounded and exaggerated – even if our claims aren’t perfect, they are likely accurate and wholesale rejection is the worst approach*


Martin, Professor of Geography at Cambridge, ‘1 [Ron, “Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda”, Progress in Human Geography, 25: 2, 2001 http://geography.fullerton.edu/550/public%20policy.pdf, RSR]

A second source of the prejudice against policy study, however, is the charge that it all too readily becomes hijacked or subverted by the organizations, research grant bodies and government departments that commission and fund it. The complaint is that through their funding, and their selection and assessment procedures, these institutions set the agenda, define the issues, control access to data and even influence the nature of policy research. After all, critics argue, no government or other policy-making body is likely to commission or welcome research which it believes could be strongly critical of its policy programmes. In this sense, it is claimed, government-funded policy research is likely to be compromised in its scope and orientation from the very start. At the same time, attempts by government and research funding agencies to define what are ‘socially relevant’ (or even worse, ‘socially useful’) fields of research are seen as prone to bias or even blatant instrumentalism (see Johnston, 1997, on a related point). To compound matters, the complaint goes, research that is critical of government policy or runs counter to what the government wants to hear, is either ignored or may even be used to attack the academics who produced it. For many, therefore, policy studies threaten the very independence of interest, thought and method that is the hallmark of academic research. As Harvey (1974) and Leach (1974) bemoaned, in the earlier debate on geography and policy referred to above, the fear is that public policy and other social-problem orientated research simply becomes subservient to the state, and thereby serves to preserve and strengthen the status quo. Few would deny the reality of these problems, but they can also be exaggerated and too easily used as an excuse not to engage in policy research at all. Public policy research does not mean the surrender of intellectual independence and integrity. It does not mean that research becomes subservient to the particular political interests of the state. What it does mean, however, is that to be persuasive, research has to be relevant and practical and, above all, backed up by persuasive empirical investigation and clear and logical argument. Policy-makers are less able to ignore or reject policy research – even if it is highly critical of policies – if that research is well founded methodologically and empirically. And it is also easier to shift policy-makers’ views if criticism is constructive, that is accompanied with positive suggestions for improving or changing policy. Taking issue with, and winning over, policy-makers is not easy, but is precisely part of the reason why this sort of academic activity needs to be undertaken. To engage in this activity, however, geographers need to expunge the ‘purity’ versus ‘policy’ mentality that permeates the discipline. They need to elevate the academic quality, and hence the status, of policy-relevant research. And they also need to identify where they stand with respect to the key issues in terms of which public policies should be judged (social equity and inclusion, social justice, citizenship, democracy, and so on), and how ‘geography’ and ‘place’ matter for the conduct and content of policy discourse.

Util Comes First

Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equality


Cummiskey 90 – Professor of Philosophy, Bates (David, Kantian Consequentialism, Ethics 100.3, p 601-2, p 606, jstor)

We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive "overall social good." Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has."30 Why, however, is this not equally true of all those that we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, one fails to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? We have a duty to promote the conditions necessary for the existence of rational beings, but both choosing to act and choosing not to act will cost the life of a rational being. Since the basis of Kant's principle is "rational nature exists as an end-in-itself' (GMM, p. 429), the reasonable solution to such a dilemma involves promoting, insofar as one can, the conditions necessary for rational beings. If I sacrifice some for the sake of other rational beings, I do not use them arbitrarily and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, an unconditional and incomparable value" that transcends any market value (GMM, p. 436), but, as rational beings, persons also have a fundamental equality which dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The formula of the end-in-itself thus does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration dictates that one sacrifice some to save many. [continues] According to Kant, the objective end of moral action is the existence of rational beings. Respect for rational beings requires that, in deciding what to do, one give appropriate practical consideration to the unconditional value of rational beings and to the conditional value of happiness. Since agent-centered constraints require a non-value-based rationale, the most natural interpretation of the demand that one give equal respect to all rational beings lead to a consequentialist normative theory. We have seen that there is no sound Kantian reason for abandoning this natural consequentialist interpretation. In particular, a consequentialist interpretation does not require sacrifices which a Kantian ought to consider unreasonable, and it does not involve doing evil so that good may come of it. It simply requires an uncompromising commitment to the equal value and equal claims of all rational beings and a recognition that, in the moral consideration of conduct, one's own subjective concerns do not have overriding importance.

Ethical obligations are tautological – the only coherent rubric is to maximize lives


Greene 10 – Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul”, www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Developmental/Greene-KantSoul.pdf)

What turn-of-the-millennium science is telling us is that human moral judgment is not a pristine rational enterprise, that our moral judgments are driven by a hodgepodge of emotional dispositions, which themselves were shaped by a hodgepodge of evolutionary forces, both biological and cultural. Because of this, it is exceedingly unlikely that there is any rationally coherent normative moral theory that can accommodate our moral intuitions. Moreover, anyone who claims to have such a theory, or even part of one, almost certainly doesn't. Instead, what that person probably has is a moral rationalization. It seems then, that we have somehow crossed the infamous "is"-"ought" divide. How did this happen? Didn't Hume (Hume, 1978) and Moore (Moore, 1966) warn us against trying to derive an "ought" from and "is?" How did we go from descriptive scientific theories concerning moral psychology to skepticism about a whole class of normative moral theories? The answer is that we did not, as Hume and Moore anticipated, attempt to derive an "ought" from and "is." That is, our method has been inductive rather than deductive. We have inferred on the basis of the available evidence that the phenomenon of rationalist deontological philosophy is best explained as a rationalization of evolved emotional intuition (Harman, 1977). Missing the Deontological Point I suspect that rationalist deontologists will remain unmoved by the arguments presented here. Instead, I suspect, they will insist that I have simply misunderstood whatKant and like-minded deontologists are all about. Deontology, they will say, isn't about this intuition or that intuition. It's not defined by its normative differences with consequentialism. Rather, deontology is about taking humanity seriously. Above all else, it's about respect for persons. It's about treating others as fellow rational creatures rather than as mere objects, about acting for reasons rational beings can share. And so on (Korsgaard, 1996a; Korsgaard, 1996b).This is, no doubt, how many deontologists see deontology. But this insider's view, as I've suggested, may be misleading. The problem, more specifically, is that it defines deontology in terms of values that are not distinctively deontological, though they may appear to be from the inside. Consider the following analogy with religion. When one asks a religious person to explain the essence of his religion, one often gets an answer like this: "It's about love, really. It's about looking out for other people, looking beyond oneself. It's about community, being part of something larger than oneself." This sort of answer accurately captures the phenomenology of many people's religion, but it's nevertheless inadequate for distinguishing religion from other things. This is because many, if not most, non-religious people aspire to love deeply, look out for other people, avoid self-absorption, have a sense of a community, and be connected to things larger than themselves. In other words, secular humanists and atheists can assent to most of what many religious people think religion is all about. From a secular humanist's point of view, in contrast, what's distinctive about religion is its commitment to the existence of supernatural entities as well as formal religious institutions and doctrines. And they're right. These things really do distinguish religious from non-religious practices, though they may appear to be secondary to many people operating from within a religious point of view. In the same way, I believe that most of the standard deontological/Kantian self-characterizatons fail to distinguish deontology from other approaches to ethics. (See also Kagan (Kagan, 1997, pp. 70-78.) on the difficulty of defining deontology.) It seems to me that consequentialists, as much as anyone else, have respect for persons, are against treating people as mere objects, wish to act for reasons that rational creatures can share, etc. A consequentialist respects other persons, and refrains from treating them as mere objects, by counting every person's well-being in the decision-making process. Likewise, a consequentialist attempts to act according to reasons that rational creatures can share by acting according to principles that give equal weight to everyone's interests, i.e. that are impartial. This is not to say that consequentialists and deontologists don't differ. They do. It's just that the real differences may not be what deontologists often take them to be. What, then, distinguishes deontology from other kinds of moral thought? A good strategy for answering this question is to start with concrete disagreements between deontologists and others (such as consequentialists) and then work backward in search of deeper principles. This is what I've attempted to do with the trolley and footbridge cases, and other instances in which deontologists and consequentialists disagree. If you ask a deontologically-minded person why it's wrong to push someone in front of speeding trolley in order to save five others, you will getcharacteristically deontological answers. Some will be tautological: "Because it's murder!"Others will be more sophisticated: "The ends don't justify the means." "You have to respect people's rights." But, as we know, these answers don't really explain anything, because if you give the same people (on different occasions) the trolley case or the loop case (See above), they'll make the opposite judgment, even though their initial explanation concerning the footbridge case applies equally well to one or both of these cases. Talk about rights, respect for persons, and reasons we can share are natural attempts to explain, in "cognitive" terms, what we feel when we find ourselves having emotionally driven intuitions that are odds with the cold calculus of consequentialism. Although these explanations are inevitably incomplete, there seems to be "something deeply right" about them because they give voice to powerful moral emotions. But, as with many religious people's accounts of what's essential to religion, they don't really explain what's distinctive about the philosophy in question.

Death is the worst impact – default neg.


Paterson 3 – Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island (Craig, “A Life Not Worth Living?”, Studies in Christian Ethics, http://sce.sagepub.com)

Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that is really the objective evil for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than the alter- native of non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has ceased to exist, for no person actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject — it is the ultimate in metaphysical lightening strikes.80 The evil of death is truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives. Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything, whether caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unintentional) that drastically interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is an objective evil for the person. What is crucially at stake here, and is dialectically supportive of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that death is a radical interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we are. In consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a ‘primitive evil’ for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods of life.81 In conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable to state that any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to irrationally destroy the person, the very source and condition of all human possibility.82


AT: Uncertain Probability

Magnitude first---normal statistical estimates of probability break down for catastrophic risks because we can’t afford to be wrong even once---arguments about uncertain probability just prove that a precautionary approach is key


Mark Jablonowski 10, Lecturer in Economics at the University of Hartford, “Implications of Fuzziness for the Practical Management of High-Stakes Risks,” International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, Vol.3, No. 1 (April, 2010), 1-7,

“Danger” is an inherently fuzzy concept. Considerable knowledge imperfections surround both the probability of high-stakes exposures, and the assessment of their acceptability. This is due to the complex and dynamic nature of risk in the modern world. Fuzzy thresholds for danger are most effectively established based on natural risk standards. This means that risk levels are acceptable only to the degree they blend with natural background levels. This concept reflects an evolutionary process that has supported life on this planet for thousands of years. By adhering to these levels, we can help assure ourselves of thousands more. While the level of such risks is yet to be determined, observation suggest that the degree of human-made risk we routinely subject ourselves to is several orders of magnitude higher. Due to the fuzzy nature of risk, we can not rely on statistical techniques. The fundamental problem with catastrophe remains, in the long run, there may be no long run. That is, we can not rely on results “averaging out” over time. With such risks, only precautionary avoidance (based on the minimax’ing of the largest possible loss) makes sense. Combined with reasonable natural thresholds, this view allows a very workable approach to achieving safe progress.




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