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Links—Mass Surveillance

Mass surveillance has thwarted many attacks – more transparency of the programs makes attacks very likely


Nakashima 13 [Ellen Nakashima, national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties. “Officials: Surveillance programs foiled more than 50 terrorist plots”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/officials-surveillance-programs-foiled-more-than-50-terrorist-plots/2013/06/18/d657cb56-d83e-11e2-9df4-895344c13c30_story.html, June 18th, 2013//Rahul]

The U.S. government’s sweeping surveillance programs have disrupted more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and abroad, including a plan to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, senior government officials testified Tuesday. The officials, appearing before a largely friendly House committee, defended the collection of telephone and Internet data by the National Security Agency as central to protecting the United States and its allies against terrorist attacks. And they said that recent disclosures about the surveillance operations have caused serious damage. “We are now faced with a situation that, because this information has been made public, we run the risk of losing these collection capabilities,” said Robert S. Litt, general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “We’re not going to know for many months whether these leaks in fact have caused us to lose these capabilities, but if they do have that effect, there is no doubt that they will cause our national security to be affected.” The hearing before the House Intelligence Committee was the third congressional session examining the leaks of classified material about two top-secret surveillance programs by Edward Snowden, 29, a former NSA contractor and onetime CIA employee. Articles based on the material in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper have raised concerns about intrusions on civil liberties and forced the Obama administration to mount an aggressive defense of the effectiveness and privacy protections of the operations. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the NSA, told the committee that the programs had helped prevent “potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11.” He said at least 10 of the disrupted plots involved terrorism suspects or targets in the United States. Alexander said officials do not plan to release additional information publicly, to avoid revealing sources and methods of operation, but he said the House and Senate intelligence committees will receive classified details of the thwarted plots. Newly revealed plots In testimony last week, Alexander said the surveillance programs had helped prevent an attack on the subway system in New York City and the bombing of a Danish newspaper. Sean Joyce, deputy director of the FBI, described two additional plots Tuesday that he said were stopped through the surveillance — a plan by a Kansas City, Mo., man to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and efforts by a San Diego man to send money to terrorists in Somalia. The officials said repeatedly that the operations were authorized by Congress and subject to oversight through internal mechanisms and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose proceedings are secret. Alexander said that more than 90 percent of the information on the foiled plots came from a program targeting the communications of foreigners, known as PRISM. The program was authorized under Section 702 of a 2008 law that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The law authorizes the NSA to collect e-mails and other Internet communications to and from foreign targets overseas who are thought to be involved in terrorism or nuclear proliferation or who might provide critical foreign intelligence. No American in the country or abroad can be targeted without a warrant, and no person inside the United States can be targeted without a warrant. A second program collects all call records from U.S. phone companies. It is authorized under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. The records do not include the content of calls, location data, or a subscriber’s name or address. That law, passed in 2001 and renewed twice since then, also amended FISA. Snowden, a high school dropout who worked at an NSA operations center in Hawaii for 15 months as a contractor, released highly classified information on both programs, claiming they represent government overreach. He has been in hiding since publicly acknowledging on June 9 that he leaked the material. Several lawmakers pressed for answers on how Snowden, a low-level systems administrator, could have had access to highly classified material such as a court order for phone records. “We need to seal this crack in the system,” said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel. Alexander said he is working with intelligence officials to come up with a “two-person” rule to ensure that the agency can block unauthorized people from removing information from the system. But Alexander and the other witnesses focused more heavily on justifying the programs and arguing that they operate under legal guidelines. “As Americans, we value our privacy and our civil liberties,” Alexander said. “As Americans, we also value our security and our safety. In the 12 years since the attacks on September 11th, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation. That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur on 9/11.”





Links—Perception

Terrorists’ perception of surveillance effectively deters terrorist communication – the plan makes effective regrouping more successful


Rascoff 14 (Samuel J. Rascoff, Associate Professor of Law, Faculty Director, Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law, “COUNTERTERRORISM AND NEW DETERRENCE,” http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-89-3-Rascoff_0.pdf2014)

An open question - an answer to which requires more empirical data - is whether the government's prosecution of relatively amateur would-be terrorists based on stings is likely to be effective in deterring better-trained terrorists. n109 But it bears remembering that the viability [*855] of the deterrence-based account of stings does not depend on who is prosecuted. The mere fact of prosecution can alter terrorists' perceptions of future success by implying a pervasive surveillance network n110 facilitated by technology. n111 As Alex Wilner observed of Canadian counterterrorism, the fact that the country's "intelligence community clearly has the means and the tools to uncover plots expeditiously" creates an "overwhelming perception ... that terrorists are unlikely to evade Canada's watchful eye." n112 In sum, the meaning of a sting operation and subsequent trial must include the strategic benefits of revealing the fact of undercover surveillance as well as the normative costs implied by widespread surveillance. n113 This in turn illustrates the [*856] complicated relationship between transparency and secrecy entailed by new deterrence. C. Psychology and Strikes New deterrence also enriches understanding of the role of fear and emotion in counterterrorism. Terrorism aims at communicating vulnerability and sowing distrust; violent attacks are, in a sense, means to bring about these more intangible objectives. n114 (Thus, building sufficient social resiliency to withstand terrorist attacks, as new deterrence counsels, deprives terrorists of an important goal, even when an attack succeeds. n115) But fear n116 and distrust are also part of the counterterrorism repertoire. n117 Inevitably this fact raises serious [*857] normative issues. First is the foundational question of what it means for the state to manage terrorist risk through the potentially widespread, deliberate employment of fear. n118 Rich sociological and historical literature attest to the emotional costs of aggressive national security tactics. n119 Second is a concern about the distribution of fear and whether the government considers race and religion when employing it. n120 My central point here, however, is not normative so much as conceptual: Whereas policymakers, lawyers, and the general public often define counterterrorism as the sum of so many violent interventions, new deterrence reminds us that counterterrorism also operates in a psychological register. Unlike traditional deterrence, which conveys its message through fear of being caught and punished, new deterrence relies on a wider and subtler range of official modalities that go to the likelihood of terrorist success. For example, the government may aim to demoralize an adversary by telegraphing the state's overwhelming might. The state might do so by "spreading false or exaggerated rumors of the [*858] existence of sting operations," n121 sowing a sense of distrust within a cell by implying that one among them is on an official payroll, or even conveying an image of officials as irrational and prone to unmeasured violence. n122




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