Democracy Promotion/Soft Power—Affirmative Tentative 1AC
Surveillance Hurts the Democratic Model
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- The US cannot lead by example now because of domestic surveillance
- Massive government surveillance is the antithesis of democracy
- Surveillance undermines the US democratic model
Surveillance Hurts the Democratic ModelDomestic NSA surveillance destroys the perception of the viability of democracy and American soft power—hypocrisy only helps PutinShevtsova 13 Lilia Shevtsova, Kremlinology expert and currently serves as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Tinker, tailor, Snowden, spy?” 2013-07-29, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2013/07/197_140121.html The real espionage, however, lies not in Snowden's decision to release NSA secrets, but in the surveillance programs that he exposed. The leaked information highlighted the West's long-ignored failure to strike an informed balance between security and liberty. Current political and economic uncertainty has exacerbated the situation, driving policymakers to settle on simplistic solutions that, as Snowden made starkly apparent, can undermine the values that the West espouses. This is not true only in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, which happen to be entangled in the Snowden scandal. The reluctant responses by Germany and France to evidence that the NSA has been conducting unprecedented surveillance of their officials indicate that Europe's governments may also be involved. Indeed, it now appears that America has shared its intelligence trove with Germany's spy services when needed. So far, Obama's handling of the Snowden affair shows that he places more stock in the logic of security than in adherence to principle. Coming from a president who won global sympathy - and a Nobel Peace Prize - for his moral stance, the claim that the NSA's activities are justified because 'that's how intelligence services operate' is particularly disappointing. A state that emphasizes security over civil rights and liberties is easily hijacked by security agencies. While America's 'war on terror' demands a stronger emphasis on security, the NSA's activities expose an alarming willingness to violate the privacy of millions of individuals - including in allied countries, whose constitutions and sovereignty have also been breached. Western leaders must now ask themselves whether the ends justify the means. With the all-powerful U.S. training its sights on a young former analyst, the answer appears to be no. The current scandal's impact on Obama's image increasingly resembles the impact of the Watergate scandal on President Richard Nixon's standing in the 1970s - only now the events are playing themselves out on a global stage. But Obama is not really the problem; at the heart of the issue is a model of liberal democracy that fails to respond to challenges that contradict the values it is supposed to uphold. In fact, Snowden's warning that 'any NSA analyst, at any time, can target anyone, from a federal judge to the president' suggests that NSA head Keith Alexander - dubbed 'Emperor Alexander' - could already be more powerful than Obama. Monitoring individuals' private lives is not limited to the state and its security services. Major global telecommunication companies - such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Skype - have assembled secret stockpiles of personal information about their users, which they share with the NSA. Beyond the obvious violation of individuals' privacy implied by such activities lies the danger that these firms will later make a deal with authoritarian regimes in Russia or China, where little, if any, effort is made to preserve even the illusion of privacy. Google already has some experience in turning over information to China's security services. Against this background, it is impossible to know whether these companies are already spying on Western leaders, together with the NSA. Snowden's presence in Russia, even in the airport's international transit zone, has given the U.S. a pretext to declare that he is not a whistleblower, but a traitor. The fact that Snowden has now applied for temporary asylum in Russia has reinforced that interpretation. Ironically, by turning the affair into a spy thriller, Putin has helped the U.S. to salvage its reputation - or at least to deflect some of the attention from the NSA's surveillance programs. The discussion about security, privacy, and freedom that the Snowden drama has sparked is long overdue. But the scandal has begotten many losers. Snowden has effectively given up his future. The U.S. and Obama have lost their claim to the moral high ground. And liberal democracies' apparent inability to protect their citizens from infringement of their individual rights has undermined their standing at home and abroad. Russian society will also pay a price, with the NSA's surveillance programs giving the Kremlin ammunition to defend the expansion of state control over the Internet and other aspects of citizens' personal lives. Similarly, the scandal will likely inspire China to strengthen its Great Firewall further. The ordeal's only victor is Putin, who now has grounds to dismiss U.S. criticism of his authoritarian rule. Indeed, at the slightest provocation, Putin will be able to point to America's hypocrisy for spying on, say, European Union facilities as part of expanded surveillance programs supposedly within the scope of the war on terror, and for hunting Snowden after accusing Russia of unfairly prosecuting the whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Snowden did not create the security-privacy dilemma, but he did illuminate a deeply rooted problem that Western leaders have long tried to obscure. One can only hope that his actions, and the resulting scandal, will compel Western leaders to reassess their approach to national security - and not simply lead them to try to conceal it better. The US cannot lead by example now because of domestic surveillanceWong 15 - Cynthia Wong is senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. (“Reclaiming Privacy in the Golden Age of Surveillance,” http://fpif.org/reclaiming-privacy-golden-age-surveillance/ 1/12/2015) STRYKER As a global community, we have not even begun to grapple with the costs of mass surveillance to privacy and other rights. A joint Human Rights Watch and American Civil Liberties Union report in July documented the insidious effects of large-scale surveillance on journalism and law in the United States. Interviews with dozens of leading journalists showed that increased surveillance is stifling reporting, especially when government tightens controls to prevent sources from leaking government information or even talking to journalists about unclassified topics. This damages the role of the fourth estate, particularly on matters of public concern related to national security. Perhaps one of the biggest casualties of the Snowden revelations has been the U.S. and UK’s moral authority to criticize the surveillance abuses of other governments and lead by example. A March Human Rights Watch report documented how the Ethiopian government uses surveillance to monitor opposition groups and journalists and silence dissenters. With unfettered access to mobile networks, security agencies intercept calls and access phone records, using them to intimidate detainees during abusive interrogations. Ethiopia is not the United States or the UK, but the actions of those governments set a troubling precedent that undermine their credibility on rights and that many other governments will cite. Massive government surveillance is the antithesis of democracyRowley 15 - Coleen Rowley is a former FBI Special Agent (“Real Democracy Promotion: Lord Acton and Tom Clancy vs John Yoo,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/real-democracy-promotion_b_7473824.html 5/29/2015) STRYKER Lord Acton is famous for his insights on how power corrupts but he also figured out that "everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice." The creators of democratic forms of government throughout the ages, including America's Founding Fathers knew these things too so they tried to ensure governmental transparency, in part through constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press. Sadly however, we've allowed our excessively secret government to take away almost all the privacy of ordinary citizens. As I wrote here a couple months ago, "when a powerful government like 'Top Secret America' enjoys maximum 'privacy' while private individuals are subjected to full transparency, it might be time to turn that boat around!" It will be telling if Congress can start the turn-around by allowing Section 215 of the Patriot Act to sunset, especially after a 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously told them that the Bush and Obama Administrations' secret interpretation of this provision was and is completely illegal. Until it gets righted, the topsy turvy situation that now exists is the antithesis of democracy. As Tom Clancy put it: "The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people." Here just one example: it's supposed to be illegal to classify information evidencing illegality yet ironically, whistleblowers who disclose government illegality are the ones who are threatened with imprisonment and they don't even get a chance to explain any of this or their righteous motivation to a jury. Maybe poor Richard Nixon, with his theory of being above the law, just missed his time?! This currently anti-democratic system can likely be traced to a couple of weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a top secret memo was written by Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Attorney John Yoo, (who would also write the "torture memo" a year later). The OLC memo stated, among other things: "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. 'When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.'" This OLC opinion--see full article by retired Army Major Todd Pierce--claimed authority of the President as the Commander in Chief to use the military both inside and outside of the U.S., and was probably the authority for the National Security Agency's (NSA's) military operation within the U.S., spying on Americans. In the years that followed, we learned, due to the courage of whistleblowers, culminating with the numerous documentary disclosures of Edward Snowden, that the NSA and other US intelligence agencies secretly implemented various massive data collection projects, vacuuming up trillions of pieces of info on people all over the world, in a counter-productive effort to achieve a kind of "Total Information Awareness." With its omnipresent surveillance, the US Government also began aggressively targeting and prosecuting whistleblowers and other sources, putting renowned journalists and publishers worldwide, even mainstream media like Associated Press, directly or incidentally in their surveillance crosshairs. Surveillance undermines the US democratic modelGoh 15 - Benjamin Goh wrote this as his thesis for an International Relations PhD at New York University. (“Prosperity and Security: A Political Economy Model of Internet Surveillance,” http://www.politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/5628/Goh.pdf 4/3/2015) STRYKER Edward Snowden’s leak of classified NSA documents revealed to a large extent the invasiveness of the NSA in surveilling U.S. citizens. This revelation fuelled an outcry within the United States, when citizens found out that the NSA was forcing Internet Service Providers to provide information about its users, infringing upon the right to privacy (Greenwald and MacAskill 2013). While the secret legislative process that was employed to surveil Americans sparked uproar about the democratic process, the debate on surveillance was largely centered on the diminishing sovereign power of the citizens that has been ceded to the authorities (Cassidy 2013). However, while Big Brother seems more intrusive than ever before, the public is still ambivalent about Edward Snowden’s revelations. Some celebrate him as a hero who gave up his life to fight for privacy, while others believe that this battle for privacy comes at the expense of increasing their vulnerability to aggressors (Scarborough 2014; Drury 2014). Are privacy and security two sides of the same coin? Proponents of this tradeoff argue that monitoring the Internet indeed plays an important role in breaking down belligerent organizations, such as terrorist groups—Osama bin Laden, for example, had to have his communications delivered manually through flash drives rather than through emails (Schneier 2011). On the other hand, privacy activists, while cognizant of the possibility of threats to national security, argue that society incurs a similarly large social cost when empowering the government to have the—to borrow a Foucauldian term—“panoptic gaze” into the lives of the individual. This is because surveillance, even if it is “just metadata”, imposes a categorical suspicion on everyone plugged into the net, assessing guilt by Google keyword searches (van Dijck 2014; Webb 2007; Marx 1988). However, the “right to privacy”, although explicitly expressed in the UDHR and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is barely a commonly agreed upon principle across nations. While it can be commonly agreed upon that terrorism is costly, in doing cross-national studies on surveillance it is worth reminding that the rhetoric of privacy is a concept too narrow, overly grounded on the assumption of human rights (Bennett 2011). There is also no universally accepted definition of privacy (Viseu et al. 2004); privacy, in turn, has to be understood in terms of culture, a construction based partly on history, but for the most part a function of political institutions. In recognizing the importance of ideological differences, this paper thus proposes a model that explicitly acknowledges the divergence in cultural attitudes towards internet surveillance in understanding the extent to which countries surveil its people. Within a country, the driving forces behind the desire to surveil stems not only from the possible backlash by citizens but also from a combination of factors such as the level of terror paranoia, prevalence of terror attacks, and the overall perceived ability of the leader. I posit that these variables are the key factors in attempting to explain what determines the equilibrium level of surveillance. I also go further to explore the comparative statics across countries and determine the conditions under which some governments may choose to increase or decrease level of surveillance employed. The motivating question is this: what causes the United States and the United Kingdom, long seen as beacons of democracy, to employ surveillance levels similar or worse than Venezuela, Malaysia and Kazakhstan (The Web Index 2014)? Is democratic dragnet surveillance the norm, or are these countries an anomaly? This model will be, to my knowledge, the first paper to systematically study surveillance policies across countries, and aims to broaden the discussion on how to influence public decision making on employing surveillance. 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