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NC/1NR Uniqueness—Surveillance Now
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- Widespread Surveillance Programs are Keeping Terror Plots in Check—Massive Attacks Would Have Taken Place Without It
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2NC/1NR Uniqueness—Surveillance NowUS surveillance is increasing to deal with new terrorist threatsBennett 5/18/15 (Brian, washington based reporter for the LA Times, "White House Steps Up Warning About Terrorism on US Soil") Alarmed about the growing threat from Islamic State, the Obama administration has dramatically stepped up warnings of potential terrorist attacks on American soil after several years of relative calm.¶ Behind the scenes, U.S. authorities have raised defenses at U.S. military bases, put local police forces on alert and increased surveillance at the nation's airports, railroads, shopping malls, energy plants and other potential targets.¶ Driving the unease are FBI arrests of at least 30 Americans on terrorism-related charges this year in an array of "lone wolf" plots, none successful, but nearly all purportedly inspired by Islamic State propaganda or appeals.¶ The group's leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi, drove home the danger in a 34-minute audio recording released online Thursday. He urged Muslims everywhere to "migrate to the Islamic State or fight in his land, wherever that may be."¶ It is pretty easy for [Islamic State] to reach out to a very large number of people using a very robust social media presence. I suspect we should see more plots going forward.¶ - J.M. Berger, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution¶ The audio was released with translations in English, French, German, Russian and Turkish, signaling the militants' increasingly ambitious attempts to draw new recruits — and to spark violence — around the world.¶ U.S. officials estimate the Sunni Muslim group has drawn 22,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, including about 3,700 from Western nations. About 180 Americans have gone, or tried to go.¶ U.S. counter-terrorism officials initially viewed Islamic State as primarily a regional security threat, focused on expanding and protecting its self-proclaimed Islamist caliphate in Syria and Iraq, rather than launching attacks abroad.¶ But the analysis has shifted sharply as gunmen inspired by the group, but not controlled or assisted by them, opened fire at the Parliament in Ottawa; at a cafe in Sydney, Australia; at a kosher grocery in Paris; and, on May 3, in Garland, Texas.¶ In the Texas case, two would-be terrorists apparently prompted by Islamic State social media messages tried to shoot their way into a provocative contest for caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Both gunmen were shot to death, and no one else was killed. Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the assault, the first time it has done so for an attack on U.S. soil.¶ James B. Comey, the FBI director, warned this month that "hundreds, maybe thousands" of Americans are seeing recruitment pitches from Islamic State on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, as well as messages sent to smartphones of "disturbed people" who could be pushed to attack U.S. targets.¶ "It's like the devil sitting on their shoulders saying, 'Kill, kill, kill,'" Comey told reporters.¶ The United States has entered a "new phase, in my view, in the global terrorist threat," Jeh Johnson, director of Homeland Security, said Friday on MSNBC.¶ "We have to be concerned about the independent actor, and the independent actor who is here in the homeland who may strike with little or no warning," he said. "The nature of the global terrorist threat has evolved."¶ That poses a special challenge for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which spent years desperately trying to penetrate and understand Al Qaeda's rigid hierarchy and top-down approach to terrorism.¶ Now they are struggling to detect and prevent lethal attacks by individuals — such as the April 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon by two Russian-born brothers — with little or no outside communication or support.¶ The administration has sought to stiffen homeland defenses, and intelligence gathering, in response. 2NC/1NR Extensions – Uniqueness (general) Widespread Surveillance Programs are Keeping Terror Plots in Check—Massive Attacks Would Have Taken Place Without ItBoot ’13 Max Boot is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2004, he was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy." In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. Boot holds a bachelor's degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree in history from Yale University. Boot has served as an adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the published author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. From the article: “Stay calm and let the NSA carry on” - LA Times – June 9th - http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/09/opinion/la-oe-boot-nsa-surveillance-20130609 After 9/11, there was a widespread expectation of many more terrorist attacks on the United States. So far that hasn't happened. We haven't escaped entirely unscathed (see Boston Marathon, bombing of), but on the whole we have been a lot safer than most security experts, including me, expected. In light of the current controversy over the National Security Agency's monitoring of telephone calls and emails, it is worthwhile to ask: Why is that? It is certainly not due to any change of heart among our enemies. Radical Islamists still want to kill American infidels. But the vast majority of the time, they fail. The Heritage Foundation estimated last year that 50 terrorist attacks on the American homeland had been foiled since 2001. Some, admittedly, failed through sheer incompetence on the part of the would-be terrorists. For instance, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American jihadist, planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010 that started smoking before exploding, thereby alerting two New Yorkers who in turn called police, who were able to defuse it. But it would be naive to adduce all of our security success to pure serendipity. Surely more attacks would have succeeded absent the ramped-up counter-terrorism efforts undertaken by the U.S. intelligence community, the military and law enforcement. And a large element of the intelligence community's success lies in its use of special intelligence — that is, communications intercepts. The CIA is notoriously deficient in human intelligence — infiltrating spies into terrorist organizations is hard to do, especially when we have so few spooks who speak Urdu, Arabic, Persian and other relevant languages. But the NSA is the best in the world at intercepting communications. That is the most important technical advantage we have in the battle against fanatical foes who will not hesitate to sacrifice their lives to take ours. Which brings us to the current kerfuffle over two NSA monitoring programs that have been exposed by the Guardian and the Washington Post. One program apparently collects metadata on all telephone calls made in the United States. Another program provides access to all the emails, videos and other data found on the servers of major Internet firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. At first blush these intelligence-gathering activities raise the specter of Big Brother snooping on ordinary American citizens who might be cheating on their spouses or bad-mouthing the president. In fact, there are considerable safeguards built into both programs to ensure that doesn't happen. The phone-monitoring program does not allow the NSA to listen in on conversations without a court order. All that it can do is to collect information on the time, date and destination of phone calls. It should go without saying that it would be pretty useful to know if someone in the U.S. is calling a number in Pakistan or Yemen that is used by a terrorist organizer. As for the Internet-monitoring program, reportedly known as PRISM, it is apparently limited to "non-U.S. persons" who are abroad and thereby enjoy no constitutional protections. These are hardly rogue operations. Both programs were initiated by President George W. Bush and continued by President Obama with the full knowledge and support of Congress and continuing oversight from the federal judiciary. That's why the leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees, Republicans and Democrats alike, have come to the defense of these activities. It's possible that, like all government programs, these could be abused — see, for example, the IRS making life tough on tea partiers. But there is no evidence of abuse so far and plenty of evidence — in the lack of successful terrorist attacks — that these programs have been effective in disrupting terrorist plots. Granted there is something inherently creepy about Uncle Sam scooping up so much information about us. But Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Citibank and other companies know at least as much about us, because they use very similar data-mining programs to track our online movements. They gather that information in order to sell us products, and no one seems to be overly alarmed. The NSA is gathering that information to keep us safe from terrorist attackers. Yet somehow its actions have become a "scandal," to use a term now loosely being tossed around. The real scandal here is that the Guardian and Washington Post are compromising our national security by telling our enemies about our intelligence-gathering capabilities. Their news stories reveal, for example, that only nine Internet companies share information with the NSA. This is a virtual invitation to terrorists to use other Internet outlets for searches, email, apps and all the rest. No intelligence effort can ever keep us 100% safe, but to stop or scale back the NSA's special intelligence efforts would amount to unilateral disarmament in a war against terrorism that is far from over. It’s not about “winning or losing” in absolute terms. The US is doing well – and far better than if softer intel approaches like plan – were used. Zenko ‘15 (Micah Zenko is the Douglas Dillon fellow in the Center for Preventive Action (CPA) at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The author is internally quoting Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan – “CIA Director: We’re Winning the War on Terror, But It Will Never End” Politics, Power and Preventive Action – a blog coordinated by the Council of Foreign Relations April 8, 2015 http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2015/04/08/cia directorwerewinningthewaronterrorbutitwillneverend/) Last night, Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan participated in a questionandanswer session at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. The first thirtyseven minutes consisted of an unusually probing exchange between Brennan and Harvard professor Graham Allison (full disclosure: Graham is a former boss of mine). Most notably, between 19:07 and 29:25 in the video, Allison pressed Brennan repeatedly about whether the United States is winning the war on terrorism and why the number of alQaedaaffiliated groups has only increased since 9/11: “There seem to be more of them than when we started...How are we doing?” Brennan replied: If I look across the board in terms of since 9/11 at terrorist organizations, and if the United States in all of its various forms. In intelligence, military, homeland security, law enforcement, diplomacy. If we were not as engaged against the terrorists, I think we would be facing a horrendous, horrendous environment. Because they would have taken full advantage of the opportunities that they have had across the region... We have worked collectively as a government but also with our international partners very hard to try and root many of them out. Might some of these actions be stimulants to others joining their ranks? Sure, that’s a possibility. I think, though it has taken off of the battlefield a lot more terrorists, than it has put on. This statement is impossible to evaluate or measure because the U.S. government has consistently refused to state publicly which terrorist organizations are deemed combatants, and can therefore be “taken out on the battlefield.” However, relying upon the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism,the estimated strength of all alQaedaaffiliated groups has grown or stayed the same since President Obama came into office. Of course, nonalQaedaaffiliated groups have arisen since 9/11, including the selfproclaimed Islamic State, which the Central Intelligence Agency estimated last September to contain up to 31,500 fighters, and Boko Haram, which has perhaps 10,000 committed members. However, the most interesting question posed to Brennan came at the very end from a Harvard freshman who identified himself as Julian: “We’ve been fighting the war on terror since 2001. Is there an end in sight, or should we get used to this new state of existence? Brennan replied: It’s a long war, unfortunately. But it’s been a war that has been in existence for millennia, at the same time—the use of violence for political purposes against noncombatants by either a state actor or a subnational group. Terrorism has taken many forms over the years. What is more challenging now is, again, the technology that is available to terrorists, the great devastation that can be created by even a handful of folks, and also mass communication that just proliferates all of this activity and incitement and encouragement. So you have an environment now that’s very conducive to that type of propaganda and recruitment efforts, as well as the ability to get materials that are going to kill people. And so this is going to be something, I think, that we’re always going to have to be vigilant about. There is evil in the world and some people just want to kill for the sake of killing...This is something that, whether it’s from this group right now or another group, I think the ability to cause damage and violence and kill will be with us for many years to come. We just have to not kill our way out of this because that’s not going to address it. We need to stop those attacks that are in train but we also have to address some of those underlying factors and conditions. I’m not saying that poverty causes somebody to become a terrorist, or a lack of governance, but they certainly do allow these terrorist organizations to grow and they take full advantage of those opportunities. To summarize, the war on terrorism is working, compared to inaction or other policies. But, the American people should expect it to continue for millennia, or as long as lethal technologies and mass communication remain available to evil people. 2NC/1NR Extension: Impact (Nuclear Terrorism)Surveillance prevents war and terrorist attacks Armstrong 13 (Stuart Armstrong for Aeon “The Strange Benefits of a Total Surveillance State” Online http://aeon.co/magazine/society/the-strange-benefits-of-a-total-surveillance-state/) The military is another arm of state power that is ripe for a surveillance-inspired shrinking. If cross-border surveillance becomes ubiquitous and effective, we could see a reduction in the $1.7 trillion that the world spends on the military each year. Previous attempts to reduce armaments have ultimately been stymied by a lack of reliable verification. Countries can never trust that their enemies aren’t cheating, and that encourages them to cheat themselves. Arms races are also made worse by a psychological phenomenon, whereby each side interprets the actions of the other as a dangerous provocation, while interpreting its own as purely defensive or reactive. With cross-border mass surveillance, countries could check that others are abiding by the rules, and that they weren’t covertly preparing for an attack. If intelligence agencies were to use all the new data to become more sophisticated observers, countries might develop a better understanding of each other. Not in the hand-holding, peace-and-love sense, but in knowing what is a genuine threat and what is bluster or posturing. Freed from fear of surprising new weapons, and surprise attacks, countries could safely shrink their militaries. And with reduced armies, we should be able to expect reduced warfare, continuing the historical trend in conflict reduction since the end of the Second World War. […]Likewise, mass surveillance could prevent the terrorist use of nukes, dirty bombs, or other futuristic weapons. Instead of blanket bans in dangerous research areas, we could allow research to proceed and use surveillance to catch bad actors and bad practices. We might even see an increase in academic freedom. Counterterrorism is vital terrorists will go nuclear if we let our guard down. Brill & Luongo 2012 (Kenneth Brill and Kenneth Luongo. March 15. “Nuclear Terrorism: A Clear Danger.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/opinion/nuclearterrorismacleardanger.html?_r=0) Terrorists exploit gaps in security. The current global regime for protecting the nuclear materials that terrorists desire for their ultimate weapon is far from seamless. It is based largely on unaccountable, voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders. Its weak links make it dangerous and inadequate to prevent nuclear terrorism.Later this month in Seoul, the more than 50 world leaders who will gather for the second Nuclear Security Summit need to seize the opportunity to start developing an accountable regime to prevent nuclear terrorism.There is a consensus among international leaders that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, not a Hollywood confection. President Obama, the leaders of 46 other nations, the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, and numerous experts have called nuclear terrorism one of the most serious threats to global security and stability. It is also preventable with more aggressive action. At least four terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have demonstrated interest in using a nuclear device. These groups operate in or near states with histories of questionable nuclear security practices. Terrorists do not need to steal a nuclear weapon. It is quite possible to make an improvised nuclear device from highly enriched uranium or plutonium being used for civilian purposes. And there is a black market in such material. There have been 18 confirmed thefts or loss of weaponsusable nuclear material. In 2011, the Moldovan police broke up part of a smuggling ring attempting to sell highly enriched uranium; one member is thought to remain at large with a kilogram of this material. A terrorist nuclear explosion could kill hundreds of thousands, create billions of dollars in damages and undermine the global economy. Former Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations said that an act of nuclear terrorism “would thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty” and create “a second death toll throughout the developing world. Surely after such an event, global leaders would produce a strong global system to ensure nuclear security. There is no reason to wait for a catastrophe to build such a system.The conventional wisdom is that domestic regulations, U.N. Security Council resolutions, G8 initiatives, I.A.E.A. activities and other voluntary efforts will prevent nuclear terrorism. But existing global arrangements for nuclear security lack uniformity and coherence.There are no globally agreed standards for effectively securing nuclear material. There is no obligation to follow the voluntary standards that do exist and no institution, not even the I.A.E.A., with a mandate to evaluate nuclear security performance.This patchwork approach provides the appearance of dealing with nuclear security; the reality is there are gaps through which a determined terrorist group could drive one or more nuclear devices.Obama’s initiative in launching the nuclear security summit process in Washington in 2010 helped focus highlevel attention on nuclear security issues. Unfortunately, the actions produced by the 2010 Washington Summit and that are planned for the upcoming Seoul Summit are voluntary actions that are useful, but not sufficient to create an effective global nuclear security regime.The world cannot afford to wait for the patchwork of nuclear security arrangements to fail before they are strengthened. Instead, we need a system based on a global framework convention on nuclear security that would fill the gaps in existing voluntary arrangements. This framework convention would commit states to an effective standard of nuclear security practices, incorporate relevant existing international agreements, and give the I.A.E.A. the mandate to support nuclear security by evaluating whether states are meeting their nuclear security obligations and providing assistance to those states that need help in doing so.Nuclear terrorism is a real and present danger for all states, not just a few. Preventing it is an achievable goal. The current focus on nuclear security through voluntary actions, however, is not commensurate with either the risk or consequences of nuclear terrorism. This must be rectified. If the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit makes this a priority, there can be an effective global nuclear security regime in place before this decade ends. 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