Aff—Arab American Turn mass surveillance kills law enforcement coop with US-Arab Americans – that’s key to check terror.
Risen ‘14
(Internally quoting Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Tom Risen is a reporter for U.S. News & World Report. “Racial Profiling Reported in NSA, FBI Surveillance” - U.S. News & World Report - July 9, 2014 - http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/07/09/racial-profiling-reported-in-nsa-fbi-surveillance)
The National Security Agency and the FBI have reportedly been overzealous trying to prevent terrorist attacks to the point that anti-Islamic racism in those agencies led to the surveillance of prominent Muslim-Americans, revealing a culture of racial profiling and broad latitude for spying on U.S. citizens. An NSA document leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to reporter Glenn Greenwald shows 202 Americans targeted among the approximately 7,485 email addresses monitored between 2002 and 2008, Greenwald’s news service The Intercept reports. To monitor Americans, government agencies must first make the case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause that the targets are terrorist agents, foreign spies or “are or may be” abetting sabotage, espionage or terrorism. Despite this filter The Intercept identified five Muslim-Americans with high public profile including civil rights leaders, academics, lawyers and a political candidate. Racial profiling of Muslims by security officers has been a controversy since the terrorist attacks of 2001 spiked fears about al-Qaida trainees preparing more attacks. The New York Police Department has disbanded its unit that mapped New York’s Muslim communities that designated surveillance of mosques as “terrorism enterprise investigations” after pressure from the Justice Department about aggressive monitoring by police. A 2005 FBI memo about surveillance procedures featured in The Intercept story uses a fake name “Mohammed Raghead” for the agency staff exercise. This latest report about email surveillance of successful Muslim-Americans is akin to “McCarthyism” that fed paranoia about communist spies during the Cold War, says Reza Aslan, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. “The notion that these five upstanding American citizens, all of them prominent public individuals, represent a threat to the U.S. for no other reason than their religion is an embarrassment to the FBI and an affront to the constitution,” Aslan says. There is a risk of radicalization among citizens Americans, evidenced by some who have gone to fight jihads in Syria and Somalia, but mass shootings carried out by U.S. citizens of various racial backgrounds occurs much more often, says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Since 1982, there have been at least 70 mass shootings across the U.S. “We have seen very little domestic terrorism in the U.S.,” Felbab-Brown says. This lack of terrorism is due in part to the willingness of the Islamic community to cooperate with law enforcement to identify possible radical threats, out of gratitude that the U.S. is a stable, secure country compared with the Middle East, she says. “That could go sour if law enforcement becomes too aggressive, too extreme,” she says.
Aff—Surveillance Fails/No Link Current surveillance techniques are unsuccessful – ISIS is beginning to evade them
Dale 14 (Helle Dale, a senior fellow in public diplomacy focusing on US outreach to foreign countries, published on the Daily Signal, “ISIS Is Getting Smarter About Avoiding U.S. Surveillance,” http://dailysignal.com/2014/11/21/isis-getting-smarter-avoiding-u-s-surveillance/, November 21st, 2014) aj
Social media can be a double-edged sword for terrorists groups such as ISIS, a fact that its leadership appears to be aware of. According to recent reports, the group’s top cadre has curtailed electronic communications, hoping to shrink its footprint and exposure to western intelligence agencies. A terrorist group of the 21st century, ISIS is adept at the use of social media, producing “cruelly effective” propaganda, as retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen has put it. Yet, that same propaganda also has provided a wealth of information for the U.S. and other governments. As reported by The Daily Beast’s Shane Harris, who cited U.S. intelligence sources, ISIS is changing its “communications strategy.” It is encrypting its electronic communications, limiting its online presence and using services that delete messages as soon as they are sent. Its top cadre uses couriers rather than electronic devices to deliver orders, making them elusive in the U.S.-led surveillance campaign. As human intelligence is hardly available on the ground, especially in Syria, and the number of unmanned drones is limited, cyber surveillance has been a key tool in the fight against ISIS. Yet, although ISIS leadership may be wise to its cyber vulnerabilities, its followers are not as easy to control in the electronic sphere. The group disseminates its grisly propaganda on social media, and its thousands of followers and recruits continue to post pictures and information on their social media accounts. According to reports by communications expert James Farwell published by the London-based Institute for International Strategic Studies, “advances in technology may eventually leave the group vulnerable to cyber attacks, similar to those reportedly urged by U.S. intelligence sources to intercept and seize funds controlled by Mexican drug cartels.” Communications strategy must be a critical component in combatting this latest form of violent Islamism, which itself uses propaganda so effectively to magnify its own image of invulnerability. Most effectively, writes Farwell, would be a message that shows the opposite, that the United States and its allies are powerful and determined to win. (Though unfortunately that has hardly been forthcoming yet.) Communications strategy is currently in the hands of Rick Stengel, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Stengel recently attended a meeting with Arab nations in Kuwait to discuss precisely this issue and encourage their participation in the communications battle. It is clear though, as Farwell writes, that information warfare should be seamless with military tactics, allowing Gen. Allen to coordinate the resources of the whole of the U.S. government. Strategic communication is as important today as at any time during the Iraq and Afghan wars.
No link – targeted warrants, which plan allows, solve the terror disad just as well.
Wyden ‘14
(et al; This amicus brief issued by three US Senators - Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich. Wyden and Udall sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had access to the meta-data program. “BRIEF FOR AMICI CURIAE SENATOR RON WYDEN, SENATOR MARK UDALL, AND SENATOR MARTIN HEINRICH IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF-APPELLANT, URGING REVERSAL OF THE DISTRICT COURT” – Amicus Brief for Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - Appeal from the United States District Court District of Idaho The Honorable B. Lynn Winmill, Chief District Judge, Presiding Case No. 2:13-cv-00257-BLW – Sept 9th, 2014 – This Amicus Brief was prepared by CHARLES S. SIMS from the law firm PROSKAUER ROSE LLP. Amici” means “friend of the court” and – in this context - is legal reference to Wyden, Udall, etc. This pdf can be obtained at: https://www.eff.org/document/wyden-udall-heinrich-smith-amicus)
As members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, amici Senators Wyden and Udall have for years participated in the oversight of government surveillance conducted under the Patriot Act that they knew would astonish most Americans. They sought to warn the public about those activities as best they could without disclosing classified information. They also co-sponsored an amendment to the Patriot Act’s reauthorization that sought to address the problem of government officials “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes” and “describ[ing] the execution of these laws in a way that misinforms or misleads the public.” See 157 Cong. Rec. S3360 (daily ed. May 25, 2011) (introducing SA 384 to S. 990, 112th Cong. § 3 (2011)); see also 157 Cong. Rec. S3386 (daily ed. May 26, 2011) (statement of Sen. Wyden) (“The fact is anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act. Yet many Members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch.”); 157 Cong. Rec. S3258 (daily ed. May 24, 2011) (statement of Sen. Udall) (“Congress is granting powers to the executive branch that lead to abuse, and, frankly, shield the executive branch from accountability”). Now that the government’s bulk call-records program has been documented and exposed, the executive branch has retreated from frequently repeated claims about its necessity and expressed an intent to end government bulk collection under section 215. Press Release, FACT SHEET: The Administration’s Proposal for Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program (Mar. 27, 2014), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/27/fact-sheet-administration-s-proposal-ending-section-215-bulk-telephony-m (“White House Press Release”). While Senators Udall, Heinrich and Wyden broadly support a policy aimed at ending the government’s indiscriminate collection of telephony metadata, they share a concern that there is no plan to suspend the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records in the absence of new legislation, which is not necessarily imminent. Meanwhile, the government continues to defend its bulk call-record collection program vigorously against statutory and constitutional challenges in the courts. Amici submit this brief to respond to the government’s argument that its collection of bulk call records is necessary to defend the nation against terrorist attacks. Amici make one central point: as members of the committee charged with overseeing the National Security Agency’s surveillance, amici have reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans. The government has at its disposal a number of authorities that allow it to obtain the call records of suspected terrorists and those in contact with suspected terrorists. It appears to amici that these more targeted authorities could have been used to obtain the information that the government has publicly claimed was crucial in a few important counterterrorism cases.
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