India

2AC – India – OVIndo-Pak war is the only extinction impact – smoke and yield studies prove even a limited exchange causes extinction – try or die for the Aff

2AC – India – A2: Domestic Not KeyUS reform is reverse causal – creates private-sector pressure on India to reform and international precedent on DOMESTIC spying – Wong and Sinha

Our impact IS to domestic spying – it’s Indian spying domestically on financial markets that cause collapse

2AC – India – A2: Deterrence SolvesDeterrence doesn’t solve miscalc, accidental launch and terrorist acquisition – domestic backlash, lack of command and control – lead time is an aff warrant creates use it or lose it pressue - robust studies are aff – that’s Busch

Humint

2AC – Humint – A2: Link Turn – GeneralBroad surveillance unsuccessful in CT – only humint solves – false positives and data overload – empirical data is aff – that’s Tufecki and Margolis

2AC – Terrorism – HUMINT Turns DAInfo-overload outweighs their turnsSchwartz, 15

(Mattathias Schwartz, a staff writer, began contributing to the magazine in 2011. “A Massacre in Jamaica,” his investigation into the extradition of Christopher Coke, won the 2011 Livingston Award for international reporting. He has reported for the magazine from the Mosquito Coast, Tripoli, and Zuccotti Park. Between 2002 and 2005, he edited and published the twenty-one-issue run of the Philadelphia Independent, a broadsheet newspaper, “The Whole Haystack”, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/whole-haystack, January 26, 2015, ak.)

It’s possible that Moalin would have been caught without Section 215. His phone number was “a common link among pending F.B.I. investigations,” according to a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent agency created in 2004 at the suggestion of the 9/11 Commission, which Obama had tasked with assessing Section 215. Later, in

a congressional budget request, the Department of Justice said that the Moalin case was part of a broader investigation into Shabaab funding. Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, who, like Leahy, has pressured the N.S.A. to justify bulk

surveillance, said, “To suggest that the government needed to spy on millions of law-abiding people in order to catch this individual is simply not true.” He continued, “I still haven’t seen any evidence that the dragnet surveillance of Americans’ personal information has done a single thing to improve U.S. national security.”

Representative James Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in the House, agreed. “The intelligence community has never made a compelling case that bulk collection stops terrorism,” he told me. Khalid al-Mihdhar’s phone calls to Yemen months before he helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, on 9/11,

led Obama, Alexander, Feinstein, and others to suggest that Section 215 could have prevented the attacks. “We know that we didn’t stop 9/11,” Alexander told me last spring. “People were trying, but they didn’t have the tools. This tool, we believed, would help

them.” But the PCLOB found that “it was not necessary to collect the entire nation’s calling records” to find Mihdhar. I asked William Gore, who was running the F.B.I.’s San Diego office at the time, if the Patriot Act would have made a difference.

“Could we have prevented 9/11? I don’t know,” he said. “You can’t find somebody if you’re not looking for them.” Last year, as evidence of the fifty-four disrupted plots came apart, many people in Washington shifted their rhetoric on Section 215 away from specific cases and toward hypotheticals and analogies. “I have a fire-insurance policy on my house,” Robert Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said. “I don’t determine whether I want to keep that fire-insurance policy by the number of times it’s paid off.”

James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, has called this “the peace-of-mind metric.” Michael Leiter, who led the National Counterterrorism Center under George W. Bush and Obama, told me that Section 215 was useful but not indispensable: “Could we live without Section 215? Yes. It’s not the most essential piece. But it would increase risk and make

some things harder.” In addition to phone metadata, the N.S.A. has used Section 215 to collect records from hotels, car-rental agencies, state D.M.V.s, landlords, credit-card companies, “and the like,” according to Justice Department

reports. Once the N.S.A. has the phone metadata, it can circulate them through a shared database called “the corporate store.” To some, this sounds less like fire insurance and more like a live-in fire marshal, authorized to root through the sock drawer in search of flammable material . “The open abuse is how they use that data,” Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent and lobbyist for the A.C.L.U., who is now a fellow at the

Brennan Center, said. “It’s no longer about investigating a particular suspect.” In 2013, Le Monde published documents from

Edward Snowden’s archive showing that the N.S.A. obtained seventy million French phone-metadata records in one month. It is unknown whether any of these calls could be retrospectively associated with the Paris attacks. “The interesting thing to know would be whether these brothers made phone calls to Yemen in a way that would have been collected by a program like Section 215 or another signals intelligence program,” Leiter told me last week. “I don’t know the answer to that question.” Philip Mudd, a former C.I.A. and senior F.B.I. official, told me that tallying up individual cases did not capture the full value of Section 215. “Try to imagine a quicker way to understand a human being in 2015,” he said. “Take this woman in Paris. Who is she? How are you going to figure that out? You need historical data on everything she ever touched, to accelerate the investigation. Now, do we want to do that in America? That’s a different question, a political

question.” Documents released by Snowden and published by the Washington Post show that the N.S.A. accounted for $10.5 billion of the $52.6 billion “black budget,” the top-secret budget for U.S. intelligence spending, in

2013. About seventeen billion dollars of the black budget goes to counterterrorism each year, plus billions more through the unclassified budgets of the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies, plus a special five-billion-dollar fund proposed by Obama last year to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The maximalist approach to intelligence is not limited to the N.S.A. or to Section 215. A central terrorist watch list is called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE. According to a classified report released by the Web site the Intercept,

TIDE, which is kept by the National Counterterrorism Center, lists more than a million people. The C.I.A., the N.S.A., and the F.B.I. can all “nominate” new individuals. In the weeks before the 2013 Chicago Marathon, analysts performed “due diligence” on “all of the records in TIDE of people who held a drivers license in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.” This was “based on the lessons learned from the Boston Marathon.” In retrospect, every terrorist attack leaves a data trail that appears to be dotted with missed opportunities. In the case of 9/11, there was Mihdhar’s landlord, the airport clerk who sold Mihdhar his one-way ticket for cash, and the state trooper who pulled over another hijacker on

September 9th. In August, 2001, F.B.I. headquarters failed to issue a search warrant for one of the conspirators’ laptops, despite a warning from the Minneapolis field office that he was “engaged in preparing to seize a Boeing 747-400 in commission of a terrorist act.” There was plenty of material in the haystack. The government had adequate tools to collect even more. The problem was the tendency of intelligence agencies to hoard information, as well as the cognitive difficulty of anticipating a spectacular and unprecedented attack. The 9/11 Commission called this a “failure of the imagination.” Finding needles, the commission wrote in its report, is easy when you’re

looking backward, deceptively so. They quoted the historian Roberta Wohlstetter writing about Pearl Harbor: It is much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.

Before the event, every bit of hay is potentially relevant. “The most dangerous adversaries will be the ones who most successfully disguise their individual transactions to appear normal, reasonable, and legitimate,” Ted Senator, a data scientist who worked on an early post-9/11 program called Total Information Awareness, said, in 2002. Since then, intelligence officials have often referred to “lone-wolf terrorists,” “cells,” and, as Alexander has put it, the “terrorist who walks among us,” as though Al Qaeda were a fifth column, capable of camouflaging itself

within civil society. Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. case officer who works with the Soufan Group, a security company, told me that this image is wrong. “We knew about these networks,” he said, speaking of the Charlie Hebdo

attacks. Mass surveillance, he continued, “gives a false sense of security . It sounds great when you say you’re monitoring every phone call in the United States. You can put that in a PowerPoint. But, actually, you have no idea what’s going on .” By flooding the system with false positives , big-data approaches to counterterrorism might actually make it harder to id entify real terrorists before they act . Two years before the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers alleged to have committed the attack, was assessed by the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. They determined that he was not a threat. This was one of about a thousand assessments that the Boston J.T.T.F. conducted that year, a number that had nearly doubled in the previous two years, according to the Boston F.B.I. As of 2013, the Justice Department has trained nearly three hundred thousand law-enforcement officers in how to file “suspicious-activity reports.” In

2010, a central database held about three thousand of these reports; by 2012 it had grown to almost twenty-eight thousand. “The bigger haystack makes it harder to find the needle ,” Sensenbrenner told me. Thomas

Drake, a former N.S.A. executive and whistle-blower who has become one of the agency’s most vocal critics, told me, “If you target everything, there’s no targe t .” Drake favors what he calls “a traditional law-enforcement ”

approach to terrorism, gathering more intelligence on a smaller set of targets. Decisions about which targets matter, he said, should be driven by human expertise , not by a database . One alternative to data-driven

counterterrorism is already being used by the F.B.I. and other agencies. Known as “ countering v iolent extremism,” this approach bears some resemblance to the community-policing programs of the nineteen-nineties, in which law enforcement builds a listening relationship with local leaders. “The kinds of people you want to look for, someone in the community might have seen them first,” Mudd said. After the Moalin arrests, the U.S. Attorney’s office in

San Diego began hosting a bimonthly “Somali roundtable” with representatives from the F.B.I., the Department of

Homeland Security, the sheriff’s office, local police, and many Somali organizations. “They’ve done a lot of work to reach out and explain what they’re about,” Abdi Mohamoud, the Somali nonprofit director, who has attended the meetings, said. Does the Moalin case

justify putting the phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens into the hands of the federal government? “Stopping the money is a big deal,” Joel Brenner, the N.S.A.’s former inspector general, told me. Alexander called Moalin’s actions “the seed of a future terrorist attack or set

of attacks.” But Senator Leahy contends that stopping a few thousand dollars, in one instance, over thirteen years, is a weak track record. The program “invades Americans’ privacy” and “has not been proven to be effective,” he said last week. The Moalin case, he continued, “was not a ‘plot’ but, rather, a material-support prosecution for sending a few thousand dollars to Somalia.” On June 1st, Section 215 and the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act will expire. Sensenbrenner told me

that he doesn’t expect Congress to renew either unless Section 215 is revised. “If Congress knew in 2001 how the FISA court was going to interpret it, I don’t think the Patriot Act would have passed,” he told me.

2AC – Terrorism – U – Data FailsMass surveillance doesn’t prevent terrorism. Schneier 15 — Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer for Counterpane Internet Security, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Program Fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, Board Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, interviewed by Felix Macherez, 2015 (“This Security Expert Reckons Mass Surveillance Doesn't Stop Terror Attacks,” Vice, June 26th, Available Online at https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/bruce-schneier-mass-surveillance-wont-stop-terror-876, Accessed 07-12-2015)

Is there any proof that the omnipresent surveillance that exists in the US – on the internet, with phone conversations –

has actually helped to stop terrorist attacks in the past? No. It's now a clear fact that the mass surveillance performed in the US has never stopped a single attack . On several occasions, the government was asked to justify its surveillance methods , and they have failed to ever do so . Sometimes, they provide scenarios and vague plans, but the data never withstands any test . Are there better ways of stopping

terrorist attacks then in your opinion? What works and has proven efficient several times in the US, is to use "conventional" detective techniques – just following the clues . However there's an important caveat here: no method of surveillance or inquiry will ever stop a lone gunman. There are simply never enough hints to stop the aggressor before he acts in such cases. Individuals such as the Fort Hood shooter, or Anders Behring Breivik , or the Charlie Hebdo attackers in France, will always be a problem. Early intervention aimed at identifying and helping troubled individuals before they become murderers is the only real solution here.

2AC – Humint – A2: Big Data/NSA Solves – GeneralNSA doesn’t solve – bulk data collection failure inevitable – only humint breaks up bioterrorism threats – that’s Johnson

2AC – Humint – A2: Big Data/NSA Solves – Accumulo TechAccumulo fails – Boston Marathon proves Konkel ‘13Frank Konkel is the editorial events editor for Government Executive Media Group and a technology journalist for its publications. He writes about emerging technologies, privacy, cybersecurity, policy and other issues at the intersection of government and technology. He began writing about technology at Federal Computer Week. Frank is a graduate of Michigan State University. “NSA shows how big 'big data' can be” - FCW - Federal Computer Week is a magazine covering technology - Jun 13, 2013 - http://fcw.com/articles/2013/06/13/nsa-big-data.aspx?m=1

As reported by Information Week, the NSA relies heavily on Accumulo , "a highly distributed, massively parallel processing key/value store

capable of analyzing structured and unstructured data" to process much of its data. NSA's modified version of Accumulo, based on Google's BigTable data

model, reportedly makes it possible for the agency to analyze data for patterns while protecting personally identifiable information – names, Social Security numbers and the like. Before news of Prism broke, NSA officials revealed a graph search it operates on top of Accumulo at a Carnegie Melon tech conference. The graph is based on 4.4 trillion data points, which could represent phone numbers, IP addresses, locations, or calls made and to whom; connecting those points creates a graph with more than 70 trillion edges. For a human being, that kind of visualization is impossible, but for a vast, high-end computer system with the right big data tools and mathematical algorithms, some signals can be pulled out. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, publicly stated that the government's collection of phone records thwarted a terrorist plot inside the United States "within the last few years," and other

media reports have cited anonymous intelligence insiders claiming several plots have been foiled. Needles in endless haystacks of data are not easy to find , and the NSA's current big data analytics methodology is far from a flawless system, as evidenced by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and injured more than 200. The bombings were carried out by Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the latter of whom was previously interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the Russian Federal Security Service notified the agency in 2011 that he was a

follower of radical Islam. The brothers had made threats on Twitter prior to their attack as well, meaning several data points of suspicious behavior existed, yet no one detected a pattern in time to prevent them from setting off bombs in a public place filled with people. "We're still in the genesis of big data, we haven't even scratched the surface yet," said big data expert Ari Zoldan, CEO of New-

York-based Quantum Networks. "In many ways, the tech nology hasn't evolved yet, it's still a new industry."

Bigotry

2AC – Bigotry – OVRacialized violence from surveillance collection endemic in the status quo – over-enforcment on religious minorities and immigrants is mass stereotyping that should be rejected – privileged enforcement of laws ought to constrain your decision

2AC – Bigotry – A2: UtilUtil doesn’t answer our arg – we don’t think you should ignore the DA but it’s a question of probability – 100% risk of racialized violence in the squo only the plan solves vs. theoretical internal link chains of the DA should be preference

--- --- --- --- ---

Tunnel-visioned util is worse for ethicsHolt ‘95 (Jim Holt is an American philosopher, author and essayist. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Slate. He hosted a weekly radio spot on BBC for ten years and he writes frequently about politics and philosophy. New York Times, “Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic,” August 5, p. Lexis)

Can the deliberate massacre of innocent people ever be condoned? The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 to 250,000 Japanese by incineration and radiation poisoning. Although a small fraction of the victims were soldiers, the great majority were noncombatants -- women, children, the aged. Among the justifications that have been put forward for President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb, only one is worth taking seriously -- that it saved lives. The alternative, the reasoning goes, was to launch an invasion. Truman claimed in his memoirs that this would have cost another half a million American lives. Winston Churchill put the figure at a million. Revisionist historians have cast doubt on such numbers. Wartime documents suggest that military planners expected around 50,000 American combat deaths in an invasion. Still, when Japanese casualties, military and civilian, are taken into account, the overall invasion death toll on both sides would surely have ended up surpassing that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars will continue to argue over whether there were other, less catastrophic ways to force Tokyo to surrender. But given the fierce obstinacy of the Japanese militarists, Truman and his advisers had some grounds for believing that nothing short of a full-scale invasion or the annihilation of a big city with an apocalyptic new weapon would have succeeded. Suppose they were right. Would this prospect have justified the

intentional mass killing of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the debate over the question, participants on both sides have been playi ng the numbers game. Estimate the hypothetical number of lives saved by the bombings, then add up the actual lives lost. If the first number exceeds the second, then Truman did the right thing; if the reverse, it was wrong to have dropped the bombs. That is one approach to the matter -- the utilitarian approach. According to

utilitarianism, a form of moral reasoning that arose in the 19th century, the goodness or evil of an action is determined solely by its consequences. If somehow you can save 10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead and boil that baby . There is, however, an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes a quite different view. The gist of it is expressed by St. Paul’s

condemnation of those who say, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” Some actions, this tradition holds, can never be justified by their consequences; they are absolutely forbidden . It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby. Applying this absolutist morality to war can be tricky. When enemy soldiers are trying to enslave or kill us, the principle of self-defense permits us to kill them (though not to slaughter them once they are taken prisoner). But what of those who back them? During World War II, propagandists made much of the “indivisibility” of modern warfare: the idea was that since the enemy nation’s entire economic and social strength was deployed behind its military forces, the whole population was a legitimate target for obliteration. “There are no civilians in Japan,” declared an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force shortly before the Hiroshima bombing, a time when the Japanese were popularly depicted as vermin worthy of extermination. The boundary between combatant and noncombatant can be fuzzy, but the distinction is not meaningless, as the case of small children makes clear. Yet is wartime killing of those who are not trying to harm us always tantamount to murder? When naval dockyards, munitions factories and supply lines are bombed, civilian carnage is inevitable. The absolutist moral tradition acknowledges this by a principle known as double effect: although it is always wrong to kill innocents deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some noncombatants will die as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is lying ill. It does not, however, apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Transformed into hostages by the technology of aerial bombardment, the people of those cities were intentionally executed en masse to send a message of terror to the rulers of Japan. The practice of ordering the massacre of civilians to bring the enemy to heel scarcely began with Truman. Nor did the bomb result in casualties of a new order of magnitude. The earlier bombing of Tokyo by incendiary weapons killed

some 100,000 people. What Hiroshima and Nagasaki did mark, by the unprecedented need for rationalization they presented, was the triumph of utilitarian thinking in the conduct

of war. The conventional code of noncombatant immunity -- a product of several centuries of ethical progress among nations, which had been formalized by an international commission in the

1920’s in the Hague -- was swept away. A simpler axiom took its place: since war is hell, any means necessary may be used to end, in Churchill’s words, “the vast indefinite butchery.” It is a moral calculus that, for all its logical consistency, offends our deep-seated intuitions about the sanctity of life -- our conviction that a person is always to be treated as an end, never as a means. Left up to the warmakers , moreover, utilitarian calculations are susceptible to bad-faith reasoning: tinker with the numbers enough and virtually any atrocity can be excused in the national interest. In January, the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where mass slaughter was committed as an end in itself -- the ultimate evil. The moral nature of Hiroshima is ambiguous by contrast. Yet in the postwar era, when governments do not hesitate to treat the massacre of civilians as just

another strategic option, the bomb’s sinister legacy is plain: it has inured us to the idea of reducing innocents to instruments and morality to arithmetic.

Solvency

2AC – A2: SQ Solves – GeneralSquo doesn’t go far enough- watered down, weak terms, section 215, data retention and legal standards all key – that’s NYT and Greene

Doesn’t solve signal – too watered downToomey ‘15(et al; Patrick C. Toomey is a staff attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project, where he works on issues related to electronic surveillance, national security prosecutions, whistle-blowing, and racial profiling. Mr. Toomey is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. After graduating from law school, he served as a law clerk to the Hon. Nancy Gertner, United States District Judge for the District of Massachusetts, and to the Hon. Barrington D. Parker, United States circuit judge for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. “Flip the Patriot Act’s Kill Switch” – Slate – May 5th - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/patriot_act_s_section_215_should_expire_why_we_should_let_the_law_s_worst.html?wpsrc=sh_all_tab_tw_bot)

The more compelling argument against allowing Section 215 to sunset comes from those who believe that Congress should leverage the opportunity presented by the scheduled sunset to enact a broad reform package. But while the proposed bill—the USA Freedom Act—includes worthwhile elements, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. (The American Civil Liberties Union neither supports nor

opposes it.) It would allow the government to continue stor ing innocent people’s records in vast intelligence databases. It would require the government to be more transparent about its use of some surveillance authorities, but it would allow the FBI to keep secret some

of the information the public needs most. And while it would end the bulk collection of call records under Section 215, it would leave the government with the authority to engage in the broad collection of other kinds of sensitive records. We appreciate the work of the legislators who are championing the bill—Sens. Patrick Leahy and Ron Wyden and

Reps. John Conyers and Jim Sensenbrenner, in particular, deserve credit for their tireless work in the service of surveillance reform—but they have had to make deep concessions to the intelligence community in order to win its support. We can’t help but worry that the vague language in the bill’s key provisions will provide a new lease on life to surveillance programs that haven’t yet been—and may never be

—disclosed to the public. We can’t afford to squander the opportunity that the scheduled sunset of Section 215 affords. Thanks to Snowden, Americans now know that the government’s surveillance activities are far more extensive than is defensible in a free society. The current debate in Congress reflects a

growing bipartisan consensus that reform is urgently needed. Unless Congress can coalesce around much broader reforms than are on the table right now , the best way to begin the reform effort is by letting Section 215 expire. Letting the provision die wouldn’t itself accomplish all

of the changes that are necessary—not even close. But it would be a first step toward the kind of systemic reform we desperately need, and it would send an important and overdue message that the era of unchecked government surveillance —the era of the Patriot Act

—is at long last coming to an end.

2AC - India – A2: SQ SolvesSquo doesn’t solve IndiaRies ‘14(Internally quoting Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program. Also internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular focus on international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of Law. Also internally quoting Center for Democracy and Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger – Brian Ries is Mashable’s Real-Time News Editor. Prior to working at Mashable, Brian was Social Media Editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, responsible for using Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr to cover revolutions, disasters, and presidential elections. During his time at The Daily Beast, he contributed to a team that won two Webby Awards for “Best News Site”. “Critics Slam 'Watered-Down' Surveillance Bill That Congress Just Passed” - Mashable - May 22, 2014 – http://mashable.com/2014/05/22/congress-nsa-surveillance-bill/)

As a result, many of its initial supporters pulled their support. “We supported the original USA Freedom act , even though it didn’t do much for non-US persons,” Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International's Security & Human Rights Program told Mashable after Thursday's vote. He described the original version as “a good step to end bulk collection .////

” However, in its current version, it's not even clear that this bill does that at all, Johnson said. He added that

Congress left a lot of "wiggle room" in the bill — something he said is a real problem. "Where there is vagueness in a

law, you can count on the administration to exploit it," Johnson said. However, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, took a more positive view of the bill. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," she said in a statement. "While we share the concerns of many — including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough — without it we would be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of

Americans’ communications into law." The Electronic Frontier Foundation simply called it "a weak attempt at NSA reform." “The ban on bulk collection was deliberately watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable, ” said Center for Democracy and

Technology Senior Counsel Harley Geiger. “We withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed in to a codification of large-scale, untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrori sm.” And Cynthia Wong , senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “This so-called reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the US and around the world. Until Congress passes real reform, U.S. credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to fade.”

2AC CP

2AC – Fund HUMINT CP

( ) Perm – do both

No solvency — focus on metadata inevitable — they’ll use metadata before Humint data – diverts attention, creates false positives and data overload – that’s Tufecki

***CP clearly links to politics – funding causes GOP backlash – their Hattem proves ANY surveillance reform links(don’t read)

Hattem, 15 (Julian Hattem, staff writer for The Hill, 4-30-2015, "Expansive surveillance reform takes backseat to House politics", The Hill, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/240641-expansive-spying-reforms-take-backseat-to-house-politics, DA: 5-23-2015)

Congress is waving the white flag about moving forward with more expansive intelligence reform. As

lawmakers stare down the barrel of a deadline to renew or reform the Patriot Act, they have all but assured that more expansive reforms to U.S. intelligence powers won’t be included . It’s not because of the substance of the reforms — which practically all members of the House Judiciary Committee said they support on Thursday — but because they would derail a carefully calibrated deal and are opposed by GOP leaders in the House and Senate. The House Judiciary Committee killed an amendment to expand the scope of the USA Freedom Act — which would reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and some

other provisions — by a vote of 9-24. “If there ever was a perfect being the enemy of the good amendment, then this is it,” said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a supporter of the idea behind the amendment who ultimately voted against it. “What adoption of this amendment will do is take away all leverage that this committee has relative to

reforming the Patriot Act. ... If this amendment is adopted, you can kiss this bill goodbye ,” he added. The amendment from Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) would block the spy agency from using powers under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to collect Americans’ Internet communications without a warrant. The NSA has relied on the powers of Section 702 to conduct its “PRISM” and “Upstream” collection programs, which gather data from major Web companies such as Facebook and Google, as well as to tap into the networks that make up the backbone of the Internet. The amendment would have also prevented the government from forcing tech companies to include “backdoors” into their devices, so that the government could access people’s information. “Unless we specifically limit searches of this data on American citizens, our intelligence agencies will continue to use it for this purpose and they will continue to do it without a warrant,” Poe said.

“A warrantless search of American citizens' communication must not occur.” The discussion during Thursday’s markup offered a fascinating glimpse into the political calculations and sacrifices lawmakers make in order to advance legislation . While every committee member who spoke up was in support of the amendment, it ultimately failed because of fear that it would kill the overall bill. “We have been assured if this amendment is attached to this bill,

this bill is going nowhere ,” Judiciary Committee Chair man Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said. “This amendment is objected to by many in positions who affect the future of this legislation .” In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch

McConnell (R-Ky.) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) have introduced legislation to renew the Patriot Act without changes. If the USA Freedom Act were to be scuttled because of the new amendment, backers said, that Senate effort would become the default path forward. The move to drop the fix was all the more frustrating, supporters of the amendment said, because Congress overwhelmingly voted 293-123 to add similar language to a defense spending bill last year. “How can it be when the House of Representatives has expressed its will on this very question, by a vote of 293-123, that that is illegitimate?” asked Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who supported the amendment. While lawmakers blocked Thursday’s amendment, many suggested that it would be brought

up as an amendment to various appropriations bills in coming months. The 702 powers are also set to sunset in 2017, which should force a debate on them then. Goodlatte also pledged to hold a hearing on the matter “soon.” But that

provided little reassurance to critics of the NSA’s powers. “We’re talking about postponing the Fourth Amendment and allowing it to apply to American citizens for at least two years,” said Poe.

Funding alone is not enough — divisional focus must be diverted for Humint. Gallington 06 — Daniel Gallington, Adjunct Professor of National Security Law at the University of Illinois, senior policy and program adviser at the George C. Marshall Institute, LL.M. from the University of Michigan Law School, J.D. from the University of Illinois, 2006 (“What hope for HUMINT?,” Washington Times, May 8th, accessible online at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/may/8/20060508-091537-5575r/?page=all, accessed on 6-30-15)

Assuming Mike Hayden is confirmed as the new director, basic CIA “housecleaning” should continue — happening at the same

time will be significant budgetary shifts from high-tech “remote-sensing” intelligence operations, to human-

intelligence collection, the traditional CIA mission. Because the entrenched CIA senior bureaucracy remains resistant to change , it’s also fair to ask if the CIA can improve its hum an- int elligence collection even if we spend a lot more money on it. The answer in the shorter term — three to 10 years — is probably “no,” and whether we can do it for the longer term is not at all clear yet. Why such a negative assessment? Looking at how we have done in the past with human intelligence provides at least an indicator of our probable success: Our archenemy for 50 years, the Soviet Union, proved very hard to collect against using human sources. And, for most of the Cold War we seemed oblivious to this: Many sources we used were double agents and “played us like an

organ,” as the expression goes. A primary way to get human intelligence — pay for it — can too often become the only way , because it is simply easier. And, we have probably paid a lot of money over the years for bad info rmatio n — much of it planted with us by double agents. Traditionally, we have been unable to develop long-term, well-placed sources in other countries. The reason is that the time required — sometimes 20 years —

seems beyond our comprehension and the ability of our government to fund and keep secret for sustained periods. Too often, our idea of “cover” for our agents was something your mother — let alone the KGB — could have figured out in about 30 seconds. We have the wrong kind of people doing the work: Despite being the most culturally diverse free nation in the world, we seem to send blond-haired, blue-eyed people to do intelligence field work. They simply can’t do the mission in today’s world — however, they seem to rise to leadership positions without difficulty. What should we do? (1) We have to take a very critical look at ourselves. This cannot be done objectively by the CIA and the other agencies because their primary focus is on the very short term — getting more money to spend. The president — consulting with the Intelligence Committees in Congress — should call together a group of experts, including counterintelligence experts, and chart out a long-term HUMINT collection strategy. We should get their guidance, Congress should fund it and the president carry it out. (2) It isn’t written in stone that the traditional HUMINT roles, missions and collection authorities of the various intelligence agencies should stay the same. In fact, everything should be on the table and no agency should expect its traditional HUMINT mission will remain intact. On paper at least, the new director of national intelligence (DNI) would seem empowered to direct this kind of reallocation of mission. (3) Too often, our intelligence collections overseas are based on second- and third-hand reports, and often obtained from host or other nations’ intelligence services. As these reports are analyzed and similarities are seen and written about, it’s easy to see how we can be misled by “group speak” reporting, mostly controlled by sources we have no way of assessing. Spying is spying: We should do more of it on our own throughout the world and get our own, firsthand information. (4) Most HUMINT collections should be controlled centrally: Local authorities overseas — including the U.S. ambassador in the country concerned and the regional military commander — should not, ordinarily, be “in the loop” for such activities. (5) There has been way too much emphasis on “open source” reporting, and it’s become a crutch for a number of agencies. Many so-called “open sources” are manipulated by those opposed to us, whether we consider them our “friends” or not. And, way too often, “open source” reporting just means someone reading a foreign newspaper — then writing an “intelligence” report on it. Will these recommendations work? We don’t

have any choice: We are simply not getting the critical information we need to be responsive to the ever- broadening spectrum of threats from terrorism . And, unless we can penetrate terrorist organizations, including their planning and financing, we’ll simply be unable to prevent more terrorist attacks against us around the world and at home. Nevertheless, even if we do all these things — and do them right — we may be 15 or 20 years away from developing a true “world class” HUMINT collection capability: as good, for example as some of our key adversaries have had against us for

years. But let’s make sure we stay on task and do it right — not just fling our money in a different direction for a few years.

Conditionality is a voter – creates time and strategy skews, not reciprocal and undermines argumentative responsibility – dispo solves

--- --- --- --- ---

No neg fiat --- no “should not” in the resolution, potential CPs are infinite

A shift in intelligence gathering priority is key — commanders still prioritize drones post-counterplan. BI 14 — Business Insider, major US business journal — Byline: Robert Caruso, 2014 (“Here's How the US Can Build the Intelligence Capabilities Needed to Defeat ISIS,” Business Insider, September 8th, accessible online at http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-needs-better-humint-to-beat-isis-2014-9, accessed on 6-29-15)

The U.S. government has a large number of officers trained by the CIA that can be deployed globally . Their efforts should focus on high-quality targets for human source intelligence that can provide information on strategic intent . Sources that only provide tactical and capability-based intelligence are insufficient.

Human source intelligence collection is as much a psychological and emotional construct as it is a political, military, or national security one. Intelligence collection is not an academic exercise that can be understood by rote formula or analyzed by a linear thinking process.

Typical defense intelligence priorities must undergo a conceptual shift . The practice of providing tactical intelligence to support military commanders is extremely important. But only understanding our adversaries’ capabilities without knowing their intentions means the U.S. is only winning half the battle.

There's a legal dimension to the problem that today's enemy combatants pose as well. In order to expand the fight against groups like ISIS, a congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force may be necessary. But that brings up questions of its own: Authorization for what? And, more poignantly, against whom? The language could become rapidly outdated as the nature of the enemy and the scope of the fight changes.

Today's enemy is embedded in local populations. Drones have no way of distinguishing between enemy combatants and noncombatants without actionable intelligence. Deep knowledge of today's enemies is vital to understanding them — and defeating them.

Humnit must consistently be our focus to solve. Webster 08 — William Webster, Chairman of the National Security Council, Former director of both the CIA and FBI, J.D. from Washington University, St. Louis, 2008 (“How can the U.S. improve its human intelligence,” Washinton Times, July 6th, accessible online at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/06/how-can-the-us-improve-its-human-intelligence/?page=all, accessed on 6-29-15)

Expansion of human intelligence (Humint).

These on-the-ground sources are the most reliable means of ascertaining the intentions and capabilities of our adversaries . Whenever the threat seems lessened these sources are the first to go and not be replaced. These sources are vital to our security, they cannot be put on ice and immediately called up and put in place to meet each new threat, whether officially assigned or as nonofficial cover agents (NOCs). This takes time, and the time to do it is now. Complete the FBI’s reorganization of its data gathering and data mining electronic capability. Past efforts have failed to transform this extremely valuable resource into a system that can supply needed intelligence to CIA and other key agencies. “Need to share” is just as important as “need to know.” The cost is high, but well worth it. Pre-emptive and preventive intelligence. The intelligence gathered by modern digital technology on a rapid basis should be made available to all personnel charged with spotting suspected terrorists at various points of entry as will those on the watch lists seeking to fly on commercial aircraft. Any useful intelligence gathered abroad must be promptly conveyed to security officers looking for suspected individuals and cargo so that the prompt and preventive policy can be more effective. Improve National Estimates. The longer-view estimates have often been neglected by consumers at the White House and elsewhere in favor of the “current intelligence” that seems to be more readily actionable. The NIEs have real, though less apparent value, in spotting trends and conditions that could result in hostile action against the United States and should be elevated in quality and presentation. Retention of objectivity. We may expect in a troubled world during this century that our leaders may want to cherry-pick the intelligence to support a previously determined program for action. Intelligence officers must not only be seen to be objective; they must protect the work product from distortion by the consumers that can only undermine its credibility. This can be a tough assignment, but it must be done. Our satellites project important imagery and signals intelligence that expand our understanding of potentially hostile activities and should be enhanced wherever possible. They do not, however, replace the need for on-the-ground intelligence about the intentions and capabilities of our adversaries. A well-placed human source can be of critical importance in explicating the purpose of such activities detected by our electronic “eyes and ears.” Similarly, human intelligence can also be an important factor in helping our electronic tools focus upon unusual plans or activities on the ground. Each is important in early detection and analysis. Together, they can make an important contribution to the safety of our nation by avoiding surprise and miscalculation of the intentions and capabilities of our adversaries and are thus indispensable to our policy-makers in reaching sound decisions in the best interest of our country. Public source information must also be factored in. But if we want to avoid surprises like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 we must have access to closely guarded secrets. Humint cannot be an afterthought.

2AC – Cuba Politics

Won’t Pass---2ACCuba won’t pass – assumes PC – McConnell statements, congressional opposition, election fears with Cuban Americans, and public fear of human rights violations/communism Cowan 7/12 {Richard, syndicated politics columnist, “Mitch McConnell Thinks Congress Will Block Obama's Efforts to Engage with Cuba,” Reuters via the Huffington Post – Politics, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/12/obama-cuba-relations_n_7780432.html#THUR}

The top U.S. Senate Republican said on Sunday that Congress is likely to block any nominee that President Barack

Obama names as ambassador to Cuba and retain broad economic sanctions , even as Obama moves to establish diplomatic and economic ties with the Communist-run island . Senate Majority Leader Mitch

McConnell, interviewed on the "Fox News Sunday" television program, said the Senate is unlikely to confirm any U.S. ambassador to Havana nominated by Obama . McConnell added, "There are sanctions that were imposed by Congress.

I think the administration will have a hard time getting those removed. This is a policy that there is substantial opposition to in Congress." Last December, Obama announced he would use his executive powers to move toward more normal relations with Cuba after a five-decade standoff. Those steps have included establishing diplomatic relations, an expansion of some travel from the United States to

Cuba, increasing the limit on remittances to Cuban nationals from those living in the United States and expanding some trade in goods and services. But it would be up to Congress to allow normal travel and full trade . Republicans control both the Senate and House of

Representatives. Many Republican oppose Obama's moves toward better relations with Cuba, claiming they only bolster Cuba's communist leaders. Republicans also fear alienating Cuban Americans in Florida who

have fled the island nation and are supporters of the Republican Party. Obama charted a new U.S. path toward Cuba with the support of some Republicans, including freshman Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. Obama said in March his moves were already paying dividends, saying that since December the

Cuban government had begun discussing ways to reorganize its economy. McConnell has been a consistent critic of Obama on a range of foreign policy fronts, including Cuba and U.S. participation in multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. "This president has been involved in ... talking to a lot of countries: talk, talk, talk. And Cuba is a good example. He thinks that simply by engaging with them we get a positive result," McConnell said, adding, "I don't see

any indication that Cubans are going to change their behavior." Human rights advocates have admonished Cuba for abuses ,

including arbitrary imprisonment of political opponents, and Cuba's tight control of its economy also has been a lightning

rod for criticism .

Iran---2ACIran thumps the DA – Obama pushing hard, it costs mad capital, and it’s top of the docketKevin Liptak, 7/14/15, Kevin Liptak is the CNN White House Producer, “Now that he has a deal with Iran, Obama must face Congress,” http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/14/politics/iran-nuclear-deal-congress-obama-block/

Washington (CNN)With a historic deal meant to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions in place, President Barack Obama has ticked off another legacy-making item on his checklist -- as long as Congress doesn't get in his way . ¶ Early Tuesday,

Obama launched a sales pitch to lawmakers who remain deeply skeptical of the nuclear deal. But while Congress retains the ability to nullify Obama's accord with Tehran, the high bar for action on Capitol Hill -- including building veto-proof majorities in just over two months -- will make it difficult for opponents to block the President.¶ In its most simplistic form, the deal means that in exchange for limits on its nuclear activities, Iran would get relief from sanctions while being allowed to continue its atomic program for peaceful

purposes. Many of the more technical points of the deal weren't available Tuesday morning, and specifics

could prove to be red flags for skeptical members of Congress , many of whom said they were still

reviewing the specifics of the plan.¶ Congress has 60 days to review the deal, and if it opposes it can pass a resolution of disapproval to block its implementation. The administration now has five days to certify the agreement and formally present the deal to Capitol Hill. The clock on that 60 day period will not start until the official

document is delivered to Capitol Hill.¶ The Republican controlled House has the votes to pass a resolution, but in the Senate Republicans would need to attract support from a half a dozen Democrats.¶ Because President Obama has already pledged to veto any bill to block the deal GOP leaders would need to convince enough Democrats to join with them to override his veto -- a heavy lift. How the public views the deal will be critical,

as Members of Congress will be back home for several weeks this summer before any vote. ¶ While Obama on Tuesday said he welcomed a " robust" debate over the deal's merits, he issued a warning to lawmakers considering blocking the agreement, bluntly th reatening to veto any measure that would prevent the deal from going into effect.¶ "Precisely because the stakes are so high, this is not the time for politics," he said in an address from the White House.

"Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems. Hard nosed diplomacy, leadership that has united the world's major powers, offers a more effective way of verifying Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon."¶ Like the completion earlier this month of a diplomatic renewal with Cuba, the deal with Iran provides Obama a tentative foreign policy achievement in the final year-and-a-half of his presidency. Both are built on the premise of engaging traditional U.S. foes, a vow Obama made at the very beginning of his presidency when he declared to hostile nations the United States would "extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."¶ The deal -- which was finalized after almost two years of talks -- provides vindication for an administration that's sought to emphasize diplomacy over military force.¶ Burns: "If we get a deal, we'll have to contain Iranian power"¶ Burns: "If we get a deal, we'll have to contain Iranian power" 02:44¶ PLAY VIDEO¶ "This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change," Obama said Tuesday, adding later that the deal "offers an opportunity to move in a new direction."¶ But even Obama himself has admitted there are risks inherent in striking an accord with a sworn U.S. enemy. Lawmakers, many deeply wary of those risks, now have 60 days to digest the provisions included in the deal with Iran, a two-month review period Congress insisted upon as the negotiations

unfolded.¶ Obama was initially resistant to any congressional review of the Iran pact. But faced with overwhelming support among lawmakers for some kind of evaluation period, the White House ultimately conceded that Congress could be able to review the final deal before it takes full effect .¶ It won't be easy for Congress to inflict

damage on the agreement. They must act quickly -- and the two-month period in which they can scuttle the plan includes a month-long August recess, and only a handful of working days.¶ Foreign Relations Committee Chairman

Bob Corker told reporters Monday he expect s to start hearings sometime shortly after the 60-day clock begins -- which will come sometime in the next five days , after the Director of National Intelligence completes a number of certifications to Congress about the deal, including that it meets U.S. non-proliferation objectives and does not jeopardize U.S. national security.¶ Corker said he wants first to

ensure senators have ample time to read the agreement and its classified annexes so they are "well versed" before hearing from the administration and any outside experts he plans to call to testify.¶ Corker said he would like to complete hearings before the August recess -- which begins Aug. 7 -- so lawmakers have the recess to consider their positions. Under this scenario, up or down votes on the deal itself would not happen until mid-

September, he said.¶ In the House, a similar process and timeframe is also expected.¶ Within the 60-day span, opponents of the

measure must rally votes to either enact new sanctions against Iran, or to disallow Obama from easing sanctions as part of the deal, measures the President would veto .¶ Overriding the veto in Congress would require a two-thirds majority -- meaning in the Senate, Obama must only secure a minimum of 34 votes in order for his deal to take effect. Additional time beyond the 60-day review period is included for Obama to veto any legislation, and for Congress to muster support for an override.¶ If lawmakers fail to pass any new restrictions during the review period -- which ends in mid-September -- the deal will go into place, and sanctions will be lifted in Iran.¶ Obama: Iran's path to nuclear weapons will be cut off¶ Obama: Iran's path to nuclear weapons will be cut off 04:21¶ PLAY VIDEO¶ But among deeply skeptical senators, who worry about Iran's support for terror groups and incarceration of Americans, even 34 Democratic votes in support of Obama aren't necessarily assured.¶ "

TPP---2ACTPP thumpsKehoe, 6/14 -- John, Journalist and US Correspondent at Australian Financial Review, AFR Weekend, http://www.afr.com/news/world/north-america/obama-applies-pressure-to-democrats-ahead-of-new-vote-on-stalled-bill-20150614-ghnfrq

Obama applies pressure to Dem ocrat s ahead of new vote on stalled bill A former senior adviser to US President Barack Obama has warned that the no vote by the US Congress that blocked a proposed Pacific rim free trade deal is a "near-death experience" for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Matthew Goodman, who was an international economic adviser to President Obama, told The Australian Financial Review the vote was a serious setback. "But it's still in play and the broad consensus in Washington is that this will still move forward and get done," said Mr Goodman, now a senior Asia adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mr Obama, who has been criticised for failing to persuade Democrats of the benefits of international trade, spent the weekend lobbying his own party to overturn their opposition. The President's lack of clout with colleagues suggests his power is fading late in his second term. The mooted free trade pact encompassing Australia and 11 other Pacific rim countries hit a roadblock, after Mr Obama copped an embarrassing rejection from his own Democratic Party on legislation considered vital to finalising the TPP. Democrats in Congress, under pressure from trade unions worried about the loss of manufacturing jobs from free trade, on Friday turned against the President at the eleventh hour on a trade bill intended to pave the way for the US to finalise the TPP with negotiating countries. Unless the Congress grants Mr Obama so-called "trade promotion authority" (TPA), countries like Australia and Japan are unlikely to sign the TPP, a pact that would cover more than 40 per cent of the world's economy and set sweeping new rules for trade, investment, intellectual property, labour and the environment. "Trying to ratify the TPP in US Congress without TPA will kill the agreement," said Shiro Armstrong, a co-director of the Australia-Japan Reserach Centre at Australian National University. "The Japanese side has rightly made it clear it will not conclude the bilateral negotiation or show all its cards until the President has TPA." The House will hold another crucial vote on Tuesday in an attempt to

win support for the trade legislation. Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Robb admitted Friday's outcome was a setback, but remained optimistic a deal could be struck.

"There is always a lot of cut and thrust in these things and politics being played ," Mr Robb said. "There is another opportunity to get the ducks lined up but second guessing the US is always difficult." "I remain hopeful the relevant legislation will ultimately pass which would provide the necessary momentum to conclude the

negotiations." Major TPP countries like Japan and Canada are highly unlikely to sign the TPP and drop agriculture tariffs and import restrictions, unless they have confidence Mr Obama can push the TPP through Congress. At the heart of the US domestic political debate is a fight between pro-free trade Republicans and sceptical Democrats worried about international trade sending blue collar jobs to cheaper labour countries like Vietnam. In an unusual alliance, Mr Obama has teamed up with Republican rivals like Paul Ryan, a former US vice president candidate and chair of the House ways and means committee. Unless Mr Obama is granted TPA, also known as fast track, trade experts say the TPP won't be concluded by the negotiating countries. TPA allows Mr Obama to finalise a trade pact with other countries, and prevents Congress changing the details of a deal, only giving lawmakers a yes or no vote on the TPP. The House on Friday tried to pass two pieces of trade legislation, after the Senate approved the bill this month. The package fell apart after Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues reneged on approving the proposal. Democrats, largely for political tactical reasons, rejected a trade adjustment package of about $US1 billion intended to compensate workers disrupted by trade. The final vote tally was 126-302. "Its defeat, sad to say, is the only way that we would be able to slow down the fast track," Ms Pelosi said. The rebuff shocked the White House, because the measure was proposed by Democrats to offset the ostensible negative impacts on local jobs in return for granting Mr Obama TPA. While the TPA part of the bill subsequently won a narrow majority of support in the

House by a margin of 219-211, including 28 Democrats, the vote was in effect irrelevant. TPA and trade adjustment authority for worker-aid both need to both be passed together, to match identical legislation approved by the Senate. Mr Obama on the weekend urged lawmakers to reverse their opposition . "These kinds of agreements make sure that the global economy's rules aren't written by countries like China; they're written by the United States of America," Mr Obama said. If the US fails to secure the TPP with the 11 other countries,

it would be a major blow to President Obama's "rebalance" to Asia and help tip the balance in favour of emerging rival China for influence in the region. The 12 TPP countries are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Virtually every US president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s had been granted the power to set trade deals, including most recently George W Bush and Bill Clinton.

Obama Good --- 2ACDisads not intrinsic – a logical policy maker can do the plan and pass Cuba

Turn – bipart momentum for curtailing surveillanceWeisman, 13 (Jonathan Weisman, political writer for NYT, 7-28-2013, "Momentum Builds against N.S.A. Surveillance", New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/momentum-builds-against-nsa-surveillance.html, DA: 5-30-2015)

WASHINGTON — The movement to crack down on government surveillance started with an odd couple from Michigan, Representatives Justin Amash, a young libertarian Republican known even to his friends as “chief wing nut,” and John Conyers Jr., an elder of

the liberal left in his 25th House term. But what began on the political fringes only a week ago has built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable , drawing support from Republican and Democrat ic leader s , attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the House. The rapidly shifting politics were reflected clearly in the House on Wednesday, when a plan to defund the National Security Agency’s telephone data collection program fell just seven votes short of passage. Now, after initially signaling that they were comfortable with the scope of the N.S.A.’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet activities, but not their content, revealed last month by Edward J. Snowden,

lawmakers are showing an increasing willingness to use legislation to curb those actions. Representatives Jim

Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, have begun work on legislation in the

House Judiciary Committee to significantly rein in N.S.A. telephone surveillance. Mr. Sensenbrenner said on Friday that he would have a bill ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict phone surveillance to only those named as targets of a federal terrorism investigation, make significant changes to the secret court that oversees such programs and give businesses like Microsoft and

Google permission to reveal their dealings before that court. “There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here,” Ms. Lofgren said. The sudden reconsideration of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policy has taken much of Washington by surprise. As the revelations by Mr. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, were gaining attention in the news media, the White House and leaders in both parties stood united behind the programs he had unmasked. They were focused mostly on bringing the leaker to justice. Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control over the extent of any revisions. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee met on Wednesday as the House deliberated to try to find accommodations to growing public misgivings about the programs, said the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat and longtime critic of the N.S.A. surveillance programs, said he had taken part in serious meetings to discuss changes. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the panel, said, “We’re talking through it right now.” He added, “There are a lot of ideas on the table, and it’s pretty obvious that we’ve got some uneasy folks.” Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has assured House colleagues that an intelligence policy bill he plans to draft in mid-September will include new privacy safeguards. Aides familiar with his efforts said the House Intelligence Committee was focusing on more transparency for the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees data gathering, including possibly declassifying that court’s orders, and changes to the way the surveillance data is stored. The legislation may order such data to be held by the telecommunications

companies that produce them or by an independent entity, not the government. Lawmakers say their votes to restrain the N.S.A. reflect a gut-level concern among voters about personal privacy. “I represent a very reasonable district in suburban

Philadelphia, and my constituents are expressing a growing concern on the sweeping amounts of data that the government is compiling,” said Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican who represents one of the few true swing districts left in the House and who voted on Wednesday to limit N.S.A. surveillance. Votes from the likes of Mr. Fitzpatrick were not initially anticipated when Republican leaders chided reporters for their interest in legislation that they said would go nowhere. As the House slowly worked its way on Wednesday toward an evening vote to curb government surveillance, even proponents of the legislation jokingly predicted that only the “wing nuts” — the libertarians of the right, the most ardent liberals on the left — would support the measure. Then Mr. Sensenbrenner, a Republican veteran and one of the primary authors of the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act, stepped to a microphone on the House floor. Never, he said, did he intend to allow the wholesale vacuuming up of domestic phone records, nor did his legislation envision that data dragnets would go beyond specific targets of terrorism investigations. “The time has come to stop it, and the way we stop it is to approve this amendment,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said. He had not intended to speak, and when he did, he did not say much, just seven brief sentences. “I was able to say what needed to be said in a minute,” he said Friday. Lawmakers from both parties said the brief speech was a pivotal moment. When the tally was final, the effort to end the N.S.A.’s programs had fallen short, 205 to 217. Supporters included Republican leaders like Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Democratic leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. Republican moderates like Mr. Fitzpatrick and Blue Dog Democrats like Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon joined with respected voices on national security matters like Mr. Sensenbrenner and Ms. Lofgren. Besides Ms. McMorris Rodgers, Representative Lynn Jenkins of Kansas, another member of the Republican leadership, voted yes. On the Democratic side, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Representative Xavier Becerra of California, and his vice chairman, Representative Joseph Crowley of New York, broke with the top two Democrats, Representatives Nancy Pelosi

of California and Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who pressed hard for no votes. On Friday, Ms. Pelosi, the House minority leader and a veteran

of the Intelligence Committee, and Mr. Hoyer dashed off a letter to the president warning that even those Democrats who had stayed with him on the issue on Wednesday would be seeking changes. That letter included the signature of Mr.

Conyers, who is rallying an increasingly unified Democratic caucus to his side , as well as 61 House Democrats who voted no on Wednesday but are now publicly signaling their discontent. “Although some of us voted for and others against the amendment, we all agree that there are lingering questions and concerns about the current” data collection program, the letter stated. Representative Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, a Republican who voted for the curbs and predicted that changes to the N.S.A. surveillance programs were now unstoppable, said: “This was in many respects a vote intended to send a message. The vote was just too strong.” Ms. Lofgren said the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders had not come to grips with what she called “a grave sense of betrayal” that greeted Mr. Snowden’s revelations. Since the Bush administration, lawmakers had been repeatedly assured that such indiscriminate collection of data did not exist, and that when targeting was unspecific, it was aimed at people abroad. The movement against the N.S.A. began with the fringes of each party. Mr. Amash of Michigan began pressing for an amendment on the annual military spending bill aimed at the N.S.A. Leaders of the Intelligence Committee argued strenuously that such an amendment was not relevant to military spending and should be ruled out of order. But Mr. Amash, an acolyte of Ron Paul, a libertarian former congressman, persisted and rallied support. Mr. Sensenbrenner and Ms. Lofgren said they were willing to work with the House and Senate intelligence panels to overhaul the surveillance programs, but indicated that they did not believe those panels were ready to go far enough. “I would just hope the Intelligence Committees will not stick their heads in the sand on this,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

Political capital doesn’t exist and isn’t key to their DA- more likely winners win – that’s THEIR Milbank cardMichael Hirsch, chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He was also Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207

On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt reduction. In response,

the pundits will do what they always do this time of year: They will talk about how unrealistic most of the proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of how much

“pol itical cap ital ” Obama possesses to push his program through. Most of this talk will have no bearing on what actually happens over the next four years. Consider this: Three months ago, just before the November election, if someone had talked seriously about Obama

having enough political capital to oversee passage of both immigration reform and gun-control legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after winning the election by 4 percentage points and

5 million votes (the actual final tally)—this person would have been called crazy and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.) In his first term, in a starkly polarized

country, the president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for at least two years. Obama didn’t dare to even bring up gun control, a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health care law. And yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “pol itical cap ital ”—chances are fair that both will now happen . What changed? In the case of gun control, of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the 20 first-graders who were slaughtered

in Newtown, Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.” As a result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun laws. But one thing is clear: The political

tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit of compromise on

immigration reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence—his political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do with just two numbers: 71 and 27.

That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in

Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of the Republican Party’s recent

introspection, and the realization by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first

time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some

momentum on your side.” The real problem is that the idea of pol itical cap ita l—or mandates, or momentum—is so poorly defined that presidents and pundits often get it wrong . “Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political capital—some sense of an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It almost never happens. In

1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political capital is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It conveys the idea that we know more than we really do about the ever-elusive concept of political power, and it discounts the way unforeseen events can suddenly change everything .

Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to invest, just as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history.

Naturally, any president has practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at present. And unless a surge in the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any concessions that make him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just don’t know what you can do until

you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “Winning wins.” In theory, and in practice, depending on Obama’s handling of any particular issue, even in a polarized time, he could still deliver on a lot of his second-term goals, depending on his skill and the breaks. Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can

dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge disparity in the Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass legislation and run successful presidencies say that pol itical cap ital is , at best, an empty concept , and that almost nothing in the academic literature successfully quantifies or even defines it. “It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far

more complex than the term suggests. Winning on one issue often changes the calculation for the next issue; there is never any known amount of cap ital . “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he wants, and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors”

Ornstein says. “If they think he’s going to win, they may change positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon effect.” ¶ ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ¶ Sometimes, a clever practitioner of power can get more done just because he’s aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress well. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of the

1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main reasons for that mandate (in addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to that election, and his ability to get far more done than anyone thought possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his exhaustive study of LBJ, The Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late 1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize Southern lawmakers’ support for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table [said that] the presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of course, was what political capital was called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson didn’t worry about coinage, and he got the Civil Rights Act enacted, along with much else: Medicare, a tax cut, antipoverty programs. He appeared to understand not just the ways of Congress but also the way to maximize the momentum he possessed in the lingering mood of national grief and determination by picking the right issues, as Caro records. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” LBJ said. “It is a controllable fact of political life.” Johnson had the skill and wherewithal to realize that, at that moment of history, he could have unlimited coinage if he handled the politics right. He did. (At least until Vietnam, that is.) And then there are the presidents who get the politics, and the issues, wrong. It was the last president before Obama who was just starting a second term, George W. Bush, who really revived the claim of political capital, which he was very fond of wielding. Then Bush promptly demonstrated that he didn’t fully understand the concept either. At his first news conference after his 2004 victory, a confident-sounding Bush declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. That’s my style.” The 43rd president threw all of his political capital at an overriding passion: the partial privatization of Social Security. He mounted a full-bore public-relations campaign that included town-hall meetings across the country. Bush failed utterly, of course. But the problem was not that he didn’t have enough political capital. Yes, he may have overestimated his standing. Bush’s margin over John Kerry was thin—helped along by a bumbling Kerry campaign that was almost the mirror image of Romney’s gaffe-filled failure this time—but that was not the real mistake. The problem was that whatever credibility or stature Bush thought he had earned as a newly reelected president did nothing to make Social Security privatization a better idea in most people’s eyes. Voters didn’t trust the plan, and four years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the stock-market collapse bore out the public’s skepticism. Privatization just didn’t have any momentum behind it, no matter who was pushing it or how much capital Bush spent to sell it. The mistake that Bush made with Social Security, says John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-followed political blogger, “was that just because he won an election, he thought he had a green light. But there was no sense of any kind of public urgency on Social Security reform. It’s like he went into the garage where various Republican policy ideas were hanging up and picked one. I don’t think Obama’s going to make that mistake.… Bush decided he wanted to push a rock up a hill. He didn’t understand how steep the hill was. I think Obama has more momentum on his side because of the Republican Party’s concerns about the Latino vote and the shooting at Newtown.”

Obama may also get his way on the debt ceiling, not because of his reelection, Sides says, “but because Republicans are beginning to doubt whether taking a hard line on fiscal policy is a good idea ,” as the party suffers in the polls.¶ THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER¶ Presidents are limited in what they can

do by time and attention span, of course, just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate. But this, too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital passing the health care law in his first term. But the real problem was that the plan was unpopular, the economy was bad, and the president didn’t realize that the national mood (yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party revolt about to burst on the scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout, aghast at the amount of federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage was simply an intervention too far. So was the idea of another economic stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic fights over the debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with the country’s mood. Unlike Bush, Obama did ultimately get his idea passed. But the bigger political problem with health care reform was that it distracted the government’s attention from other issues that people cared about more urgently, such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional staffers told me at the time that their bosses didn’t really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation with loopholes. Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the aides said. Weighing the imponderables of momentum, the often-mystical calculations about when the historic moment is ripe for an issue, will never be a science. It is mainly intuition, and its best practitioners have a long history in American politics. This is a tale told well in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln attempts a lot of behind-the-scenes vote-buying to win passage of the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, along with eloquent attempts to move people’s hearts and minds. He appears to be using the political capital of his reelection and the turning of the tide in the Civil War. But it’s clear that a surge of conscience, a sense of the changing times, has as much to do with the final vote as all the backroom horse-trading. “The reason I think the idea of political capital is kind of distorting is that it implies you have chits you can give out to people. It really oversimplifies why you elect politicians, or why they can do what Lincoln did,” says Tommy Bruce, a former political consultant in Washington. Consider, as another example, the storied political career of President Franklin Roosevelt. Because the mood was ripe for dramatic change in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was able to push an astonishing array of New Deal programs through a largely compliant Congress, assuming what some described as near-dictatorial powers. But in his second term, full of confidence because of a landslide victory in 1936 that brought in unprecedented Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt overreached with his infamous Court-packing proposal. All of a sudden, the political capital that experts thought was limitless disappeared. FDR’s plan to expand the Supreme Court by putting in his judicial allies abruptly created an unanticipated wall of opposition from newly reunited Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. FDR thus inadvertently handed back to Congress, especially to the Senate, the power and influence he had seized in his first term. Sure, Roosevelt had loads of popularity and momentum in 1937. He seemed to have a bank vault full of political capital. But, once again, a president simply chose to take on the wrong issue at the wrong time; this time, instead of most of the political interests in the country aligning his way, they opposed him. Roosevelt didn’t fully recover until World War II, despite two more election victories.

In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But if he picks issues that the country’s mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control—there is no reason to think he can’t win far more victories

than any of the careful calculators of pol itical cap ital now believe is possible, including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction. Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt,

a new, more mature Obama seems to be emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly. If he can get some early wins —as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-

income tax increase—that will create momentum , and one win may well lead to others. “Winning wins.” Obama himself learned some hard lessons over the past four years about the falsity of the political-capital concept. Despite his decisive victory over John McCain in 2008, he fumbled the selling of his $787 billion stimulus plan by portraying himself naively as a “post-partisan” president who somehow had been given the electoral mandate to be all things to all people. So Obama tried to sell his stimulus as a long-term restructuring plan that would “lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.” The president thus fed GOP suspicions that he was just another big-government liberal. Had he understood better that the country was digging in against yet more government intervention and had sold the stimulus as what it mainly was—a giant shot of adrenalin to an economy with a stopped heart, a pure emergency measure—he might well have escaped the worst of the backlash. But by laying on ambitious programs, and following up quickly with his health care plan, he only sealed his reputation on the right as a closet socialist. After that, Obama’s public posturing provoked automatic opposition from the GOP, no matter what he said. If the president put his personal imprimatur on any plan—from deficit reduction, to health care, to immigration reform—Republicans were virtually guaranteed to come out against it. But this year, when he sought to exploit the chastened GOP’s newfound willingness to compromise on immigration, his approach was different. He seemed to understand that the Republicans needed to reclaim immigration reform as their own issue, and he was willing to let them have some credit. When he mounted his bully pulpit in Nevada, he delivered another new message as well: You Republicans don’t have to listen to what I say anymore. And don’t worry about who’s got the political capital. Just take a hard look at where I’m saying this: in a state you were supposed to have won but lost because of the rising Hispanic vote. Obama was cleverly pointing the GOP toward conclusions that he knows it is already reaching on its own: If you, the Republicans, want to have any kind of a future in a vastly changed electoral map, you have no choice but to move. It’s your choice.

Fiat solves the link

Hotspots Impact D --- 2ACNo impact to hotspots – we’ve survived periods of low readinessNSN, 8 (National Security Network 8 (May 13, http://www.nsnetwork.org/node/850)

Our military is second to none, but eight years of negligence, lack of accountability, and a reckless war in Iraq have left our ground forces facing shortfalls in both recruitment and readiness . Every service is out of balance and ill-prepared . We need a new strategy to give the military the tools it needs for the challenges we face today. And we need leadership that meets our obligations to the men and women who put their lives on the line. Overview The U.S. military is a fighting force second to none. It didn’t get that way by accident – it took decades of careful stewardship by civilian as well as military leaders in the Pentagon, the White House, and on Capitol Hill. But eight years of Administration recklessness, and a lack of oversight from conservatives

on Capitol Hill, have put the military under enormous strain. Active-duty generals at the highest levels have said that “the current demand for our forces is not sustainable… We can’t sustain the all-volunteer force at the pace that we are going on right now”

(Army Chief of Staff George Casey, April 2008); that in terms of readiness, many brigades being sent back to Afghanistan and Iraq were “not where they need to be” (Army Vice-Chief of Staff Richard Cody, SASC subcommittee

hearing, April 14, 2008); and that “we cannot now meet extra force requirements in places like Afghanistan” (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen on National Public Radio, April 2008). Readiness and Response: Two-thirds of the Army – virtually all of the brigades not currently deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq – are rated “not combat ready.” The dramatic equipment shortages

of a few years ago have been improved but not completely remedied. Recruitment and Retention: These conditions of service, and the strains they place on military family members, have hindered Army efforts (and to a lesser extent

those of the Marine Corps) to recruit and retain the requisite number and quantity of service members. The Army has been forced to lower its educational and moral standards and allow an increasing number of felons into its ranks. It is also struggling to keep junior officers, the brains of the force, who represent the height of the military’s investment in its people – and whose willingness to stay on represents a crucial judgment on Administration policies. The Marine Corps, America’s emergency 911 force, is under similar strain. The Commandant of the Marine Corps said in February 2008 that the Marines will not be able to maintain a long term presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The National Guard and Reserve are already suffering from severe shortages of equipment and available combat personnel. In many states, the Army National Guard would struggle to respond to a natural or man-made disaster – just as the Kansas National Guard struggled to respond to the severe tornados last year. How, and whether, we rebuild

our military in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq will likely shape it for the next generation. Too much of our military posture is left over from the Cold War . Our forces are being ground down by low-tech insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the most immediate threat confronting the U.S. is a terrorist network that possesses no tanks or aircraft. We must learn the lessons of Iraq and dramatically transform our military into a 21st century fighting force ready to confront the threats of today and tomorrow.

Aff turns hotspots – Indian meltdown causes escalation and US draw-in

Impact empirically denied – 70 years of Cuban embargo and Gowell is from when you were 8 years old

Normalization Not Key --- 2ACSquo solves normalization Embassies already approved, ambassador not key and future Senates can approve DeLaurentis

Crabtree 7/2 {Susan, syndicated politics correspondent for The Hill/Congressional Quarterly/Roll Call, B.S. in broadcast journalism (University of Southern California), “Obama ready to fight over U.S. ambassador to Cuba,” The Washington Examiner, 2015, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-ready-to-fight-over-u.s.-ambassador-to-cuba/article/2567500#THUR}

Juan Carlos Hidalgo, a policy analyst on the Western Hemisphere at the Cato Institute, said the budget for the U.S. mission

in Havana, known as the U.S. Interests Section, has already been approved through 2017 so opening an official embassy there is as simple as changing the signage on the building. Likewise, he said , the current head of the mission,

Jeffrey DeLaurentis, a 24-year veteran of the Foreign Service, has been in Havana since August 2014 and could simply remain in an acting position with no impact on his role there . " I don't think we will have an official ambassador to Cuba anytime soon," he said, but that doesn't really hurt the embassy 's ability to function. DeLaurentis will have all the capabilities of an acting ambassador even if he has to wait for the title until Republicans lose the majority in the Senate, Hidalgo said.

2AC – Terrorism

2AC – No LinkNo link – targeted warrants solveWyden ‘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 intel ligence 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.

2AC – Bigotry Turns DABigotry turns – stops intel coopRisen ’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 S ecurity 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.

2AC – India – Democracy Add-OnIndian surveillance reform key to democracyKaul ‘14Mahima Kaul, heads the Cyber and Media Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi and is also the editor of its monthly Cyber Monitor. The Initiative provides a vibrant platform for all stakeholders to discuss internet-related issues in India. It also runs India's biggest internet policy platform: Cyfy: The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance, which brings governments, business, academia and civil society participation from over 12 countries to New Delhi, every October. She is Member, India Project Advisory Committee Member for Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and the European Union's project "Advancing Internet Freedoms" which looks at internet freedom in India, Pakistan and Malaysia. The author holds an M.A. Communication Policy, University of Westminster, and a B. A. Political Science & History, McGill University. “Ensuring Privacy in a Regime of Surveillance” - From the publication: Cyfy - March 30, 2014 http://cyfy.org/ensuring-privacy-in-a-regime-of-surveillance/

This paper examines the legality of surveillance structures in India today (including mass surveillance programmes), and an expanding e-government project, and juxtaposes them against the missing privacy legal framework that is needed in a liberal democracy such as India . It concludes that accountability mechanisms and laws

are needed to safeguard a society that is increasingly adapting to mass surveillance and the lack of privacy. In India, as is the case globally, there is no doubt that a necessary argument must and will be made for being able to use the same technologies for policing and security as are used to perpetrate crimes and acts of terror. With increasing Internet penetration in the country, India released its first Cyber Security Policy in 2013, flagging the biggest areas of concerns for the country, including protecting critical information infrastructure and training more cyber security personnel. There is also growing concern in the country about the security of mobile networks given the increasing number of cheap and unverified products entering the market. With the increasing frequency of terror attacks on Indian soil there is a necessity for law enforcement officials to be able to investigate suspects with speed. At the same time, there is also a need and desire to use digital technologies to make governance more effective and efficient for the citizenry. Therefore, there are two broad aspects that need to be examined. The first relates to the surveillance mechanisms that exist via previous legislation, and new mass surveillance schemes that are being built by leveraging current technology. The second concerns the mass (and secure) collection of citizen data to build governance tools for smoother delivery of public services. A recent NATO publication

flagged the problems with the first issue well: ‘State-sponsored surveillance tends to be discounted as a “passive” or invisible

intrusion, but when conducted on a pervasive scale, it is an activity that can severely harm rights in several dimensions. First, the invasion of privacy occurs at the point of intrusion and capture of material, not only at the point of access or use of information. The inability to direct one’s communications to only those who are intended recipients is a serious loss of control over one’s identity and autonomy; everyone has experienced the sensation of literally “being a different person” when in public, as opposed to among intimates. The uncertainty over which communications will be accessed when, and by whom, can also chill the exercise of many rights: freedom of expression, access to information, association with others, religious belief and practice, and assembly, for example.’1 India has a number of laws that offer a basis for the kinds of surveillance that exists in the country. Some of these are listed below: The Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 was drafted to cover the use of telegraphy, phones, communication, radio, telex and fax in India. Section 5 of the act allows for legal wiretapping, and the guidelines state that only the home secretary, either of the Government of India or of a state government, can give an order for lawful interception. The order for the wiretapping is valid for a period of two months and should not exceed six. The Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1993 does not permit anyone to own wireless transmission apparatus without a license, and in Section 7 gives power to any officer specially empowered by the central government to search any building, vessel or place if there is reason to believe that there is any wireless telegraphy apparatus which has been used to commit an offence. The Indian Post Office Act of 1898, Section 26, confers powers of interception of postal articles for the ‘public good’. Section 91 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, grants other powers to the police; it states that: ‘Whenever any court or any officer in charge of a police station considers that the production of any document or other thing is necessary or desirable for the purposes of any investigation, inquiry, trial or other proceeding under this code by or before such court or officer, such court may issue a summons, or such officer a written order, to the person in whose possession or power such document or thing is believed to be, requiring him to attend and produce it, or to produce it, at the time and place stated in the summons or order.’ The most recent and currently controversial legislation is the Information Technology Act of 2000, amended in 2008 after the horrific Mumbai terror attack. Currently, the act contains some sections that require persons to reveal personal information without much room for recourse. Section 44 lays out punishment and fines in case of failure to furnish any document, return or report to the controller or the certifying authority. Section 66a lists out punishment upto three years with a fine for sending any communication through electronic means which could be considered grossly offensive, menacing, false information for annoyance, inconvenience, hatred, ill-will and so on. Section 80 gives police and senior government officials the power to enter any public place and search and arrest without warrant any person found therein who is reasonably suspected or having committed or of committing or about to commit an offence under this act. However,

in 2013, information about a mass surveillance scheme being rolled out by the Government of India came to light. The Central Monitoring System ( CMS ) was launched in 2009, but became public knowledge four years later. According to reports and interviews,

the CMS will automate already existing data from other interception and monitoring programmes, and will have a non-erasable

command log of all provisioning activities. Simply put, ‘CMS targets private information of individuals since it will enable real-time tracking of online activities, phone calls, text messages and even social media conversations.’2 Further, CMS will not need permission from nodal officers of the Telecommunication Service Providers (TSPs), and will provision requests from all law and enforcement agencies. It isn’t quite clear what the legal basis of CMS is, but it has been suggested that it will operate under Section 52 (2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, which as we know allows for interception of (telegraphic) messages for various reasons including ‘public emergency’ and ‘public safety’. It has not been created by, or answers to, Parliament. According to available information, the CMS can tap information from various other monitoring and interception schemes across India. These include the Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems (CCTNS), Lawful Intercept and Monitoring Program (LIM), Telephone Call Interception System (TCIS) and the Internet Monitoring System (IMS). The various department/agencies that will have access to all this gathered data, through CMS, include the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), Department of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), Enforcement Directorate, Intelligence Bureau, Narcotics Control Bureau, National Intelligence Agency, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Ministry of Home Affairs, the Military Agencies of Assam and Jammu &

Kashmir, and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). As reported in The Hindu, ‘The CMS will have unfettered access to the existing Lawful Interception Systems (LIS) currently installed in the network of every fixed and mobile operator, ISP, and International Long Distance service provider. Mobile and long distance operators, who were required to ensure interception only after they were in receipt of the “authorization”, will no longer be in the picture. With CMS, all authorizations remain secret within government departments. This means that government agencies can access in real time any mobile and fixed line phone conversation, SMS, fax, website visit, social media usage, Internet search and email, including partially written emails in draft folders, of “targeted numbers”. This is because, contrary to the impression that the CMS was replacing the existing surveillance equipment deployed by mobile operators and ISPs, it would actually combine the strength of two, expanding the CMS’s forensic capabilities multiple times.’3 At the same time, limited resources to store citizen data are becoming a thing of the past. New technologies like cloud computing have allowed space for storage to increase exponentially. Therefore, as the capacity of the state to accumulate data increases, for example with MeghRaj, a National Cloud launched by the Government of India in February 2014, it will be able to expand its e-government services. Therefore, the common refrain among privacy experts and other stakeholders is that the crux of the matter lies in India passing an all-inclusive privacy law. This, they believe, would take into account not just protection for the individual viz-a-viz civil and criminal laws in India, but ensure there are privacy safeguards in the ambitious projects that the government of India is undertaking with regards to citizens private data. These would include the massive rollout of e-governance projects under the National e-Government Programme, which includes 31 mission mode projects that seek to, in the first phase, digitize all available citizen data (such as land records and health records) for respective ministries, and then, in the second phase, build responsive and efficient government service delivery platforms. In some states this means accessing healthcare through smartcards, while in others citizens can access and pay their electricity bills online. For example, Bhoomi, an e-government project in Karnataka under the revenue department has already computerized over 20 million land records of over 6.7 million farmers. These digitized ministries will soon not function as islands. The NATGRID – the National Intelligence Grid – is a system that will connect several government departments and data-bases to collect ‘comprehensive patterns of intelligence that can be readily accessed by intelligence agencies.’ While this means a single point to access citizen data from a variety of sources, it also allows a single window to steal this personal information. Then there is the controversial UID – Universal ID card – that the Government of India plans on issuing to every resident of India, after collecting his or her biometric data. Simply put, the UID will become a citizen identifier. This means that the government will now be able to confirm that it is indeed citizen ‘x’ who is making phone calls or sending emails of some interest to the authorities, by immediately identifying the person through biometric data available with the state. Conversely, this also means that the state now has not just biometric data on its people, but it will be linked to all their communication data in an easy-to-find manner. All this is happening without a comprehensive privacy law passed by the Indian Parliament. Article 21 of the Indian Constitution declares that no citizen can be denied his life and liberty except by law, and the right to privacy has been interpreted to be part of that. Further, Article 43A of the IT Act directs corporate bodies who ‘possess, deal or handle’ any ‘sensitive personal data’ to implement and maintain ‘reasonable’ security practices, failing which they would be liable to compensate those affected by any negligence attributable to this failure. This must necessarily extend to the government as well. It is instructive to refer to the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy, chaired by Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court.4 The report suggested a conceptual framework for privacy regulation in India, touching upon five salient points. Technological neutrality and interoperability with international standards: the privacy act should not refer to any specific technologies and should be generic enough to adapt to changes in society, helping build trust of global clients and users. Multi-dimensional privacy: the privacy act must include concerns related to a number of platforms including audio, video, personal identifiers, DNA, physical privacy and so on. Horizontal applicability: any legislation must extend to the government and private sector. Conformity with privacy principles: this means that the data controller should be accountable for the collection, processing and use of the data, therefore, guaranteeing privacy. Co-regulatory enforcement regime: establishing the office of a privacy officer is also recommended as the primary authority for the enforcement of provisions in the act. However, it is also suggested that industry specific self-regulation organizations also be established. The document also refers to court judgments from Indian courts that have helped shape some form of privacy safeguards into the system. For example, in the 1997 case, PUCL vs Union of India, the court observed: ‘Telephone-tapping is a serious invasion of an individual’s privacy. It is no doubt correct that every government, howsoever democratic, exercises some degree of sub rosaoperation as a part of its intelligence outfit, but at the same time citizen’s right to privacy has to be protected from being abused by the authorities of the day.’ The court then placed restrictions on the class of bureaucrats who could authorize such surveillance and also ordered the creation of a review committee, which would look at all surveillance measures authorized under the act. The Shah Report lays out a road map of acts passed by the Indian Parliament that would need to be reviewed for balance between individual privacy and national security. For example, when reviewing the UID scheme, the report points out that citizens should be informed if their data is breached. They should also be informed about where and how their data will be used, and notified of any changes in UID’s privacy policy. These and other

suggestions are then placed in a broader regulatory framework that imagines a privacy commissioner for India. At the same time it is pertinent to remember that while

there is no privacy law to safeguard citizens, the government itself does not have a legal framework for the kind of mass surveillance India is moving towards. As pointed out by privacy experts: ‘The two laws covering interception are the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 and the Information Technology Act of 2000, as amended in 2008, and they restrict lawful interception to time-limited and targeted interception. The targeted interception both these laws allow ordinarily requires case-by-case authorization by either the home secretary or the secretary of the department of information technology.’5 Where do these competing interests end up? There is no privacy law to shield citizens from upgraded mass surveillance technology and systems, which themselves constantly need updated legal grounding. Ironically, just before the Snowden revelations, in his April 2013 report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue noted that he was ‘deeply concerned by actions taken by states against individuals communicating via the Internet, frequently justified broadly as being necessary to protect national security or to combat terrorism. While such ends can be legitimate under international human rights law, surveillance often takes place for political, rather than security reasons in an arbitrary and covert manner.’6 The report also highlights the fact that national legal standards that impose little or no judicial oversight, or allow warrantless surveillance powers in the name of national security without any particular demonstration of a genuine need or threat and that ‘every individual should also be able to ascertain which public authorities or private individuals or bodies control or may control their files.’ Today, the concept of privacy is also undergoing a sea change due to the increasing ease with which citizens and customers are handing over data to governments and businesses. This has been seen with information shared on social media – 93 million Indians are on Facebook – and was seen in the almost unquestioned way in which e-governance projects were welcomed in the early days without any flags being raised about any data security or privacy safeguards in the design. In his essay, ‘The Real Privacy Problem’,7 writer Evgeny Morozov wrestles with the evolving concept of ‘privacy’. He writes of a privacy scholar named Spiros Simitis who grappled with data protection in the 1980s, and the three ideas he grappled with. The first was that with virtually every employee, taxpayer, patient, bank customer, welfare recipient, or car driver handing over their personal data to private companies (and of course, government) privacy was now everyone’s problem. The second was that CCTV and other recording technologies like smart cards were normalizing surveillance, weaving it into our everyday life. The third was that by allowing everyday activities to be recorded, citizens were actually allowing ‘long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mould and adjust individual conduct.’ Ultimately, while technology itself is always faulted for being the cause of privacy failures, the truth is that these gaps enter the system through poor

legislation. As discussed, when projects are created without thinking of who could have unwarranted access to information, or how the information could be used and abused outside the scope of what it is collected for, is when the problems truly begin. Privacy safeguards,

transparency about the intent and extent of a project (even when it was intended for surveillance) injects accountability into a system that remains static,

despite the dynamic leaps in technology. This is the best way forward should India want to retain its spirit and label of being a liberal democracy.

Indian liberal model key to global democracyGupta ‘13Deepankar Gupta is an Indian sociologist. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Shiv Nadar University and director, Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory. He was formerly Professor in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For a brief period from 1993–1994, he was also associated with the Delhi School of Economics as Professor in the Department of Sociology. “The importance of being Indian: Despite its warts, India’s democracy has fired global imagination for over six decades” – The Times of India - Mar 30, 2013 - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/edit-page/The-importance-of-being-Indian-Despite-its-warts-Indias-democracy-has-fired-global-imagination-for-over-six-decades/articleshow/19281689.cms?

When India dared to birth democracy, many thought it was premature and that it would soon be history. Sixty-six

action-filled years later, India's democracy is now a little too old to die young. What is more, the world watches every move we make ; in fact, cannot have enough of us . This is not because India is efficient and affluent - far from it. Rather, it is the way India goes wrong that fires global imagination. In any other country of comparative vintage and want,

ethnicity, once introduced, would have run wild. Indian politici-ans too have repeatedly played this dirty trick, but our democracy has limited its appeal. The ultra corrupt may be ultra rich but because of India's judiciary and the press they often wake up in jail to swill bad tea. Even army officers might face court martial if they mess with the rules. Political bosses, and their cronies, are forever

bending and twisting the law, but for all their power and pelf, they can never quite ignore it. Indian politicians err time and again, but their overbites serve as object lessons because procedures hold. This not only pulls us out of periodic crises with a just-back-from-the-

dentist feel, but also tells the world, the advanced West included, how easily democracy can be lost. If India had been another underperforming tin-pot dictatorship, it would not have been the thought experiment it is today. Take a look at the following: Corruption, assaults and poli-tical conspiracies happen worldwide, but when they strike India they excite the mind like nothing else. For example, South Africa is a serious centre of gang rapes, or "jack rolling" in the local lingo, but that does not cause an international stir. Yet the news of the December rape and murder in Delhi ricocheted within minutes across the world. This was not because the protests were passionate, or because the police should have gone to a finishing school. What was being observed was whether our Cons-titution would hold. Eventually it did; false cases were withdrawn and, boorish cops notwithstanding, no bullets were fired. Ethnic intolerance again is an international affliction. When Putin tells Russian minorities to put up or shut up he gets a standing ovation at home and hardly any press abroad. In Burma, Rohingya Muslims foxhole themselves in fear, but that does not make big news. With India it is different. If the western world was horrified with the 2002 Gujarat killings, it was because our free press and civil society, also gifts of democracy, brought things out in the open. Corruption in China is monumental. It periodically fells bridges and schools, killing hundreds. Brazil has a homicide rate three times higher than India's

and political violence in Russia is just too bad to be true. The world may condemn all of this, and it does. However, it is only when India goes wrong that tongues wag the mind just about everywhere. That India can make this happen again and again is what makes us special. Had we been too perfect, we would be Scandinavia, and nothing unique. On the other hand, had we been too violent, we would have been just another Honduras, or maybe Zimbabwe. But because our stubborn demo-cracy has held to its frame, our leadership blunders light up the sky. This is our real USP! India's imperfections make for its significance. In terms of economic underdevelopment and dodgy politicians, we have a fair amount in common with many troubled nations, some of whom are our neighbours. But even in the darkest of times, we hardly expect military coups and mass arrests, as they do. To their credit, millions of Chinese bloggers also noticed that Delhi's anti-rape agitations did not turn Vijay Chowk into a

Tiananmen Square. Advanced democracies too owe us a debt of gratitude. For years India has acted as a not-for- profit laboratory so that they might remember the fundamentals of citizenship that made them rich and kept them that way. It is

now payback time and they should tell us how exactly they set up universal health and education that served their citizens so well. When democracies reach out to each other this way, the world becomes a better place and friendships stay secure. This is something that neither G-20 nor Brics meets can do as it is in the nature of the economic beast to cross wires and compete. For starters, South Africa is as unhappy with Brazilian chickens flying in as it is with China's promiscuity with other African countries. The distant hope of a Brics Development Bank or of currency swaps will not blow these fears out of the water.

ExtinctionDiamond ‘95 (Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Coeditor of The Journal of Democracy , “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s”, December, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm)

This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common

cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear , chemical, and bio logical weapons continue to proliferate . The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly

democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another . They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one

another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for

investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the

destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights,

and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.

2AC – A2: Roll BackNo rollback – fiat is durable – it’s a should not would debate – key to aff ground and education

2AC – ThumperSquo USA Freedom Act triggers the linkShear 6/4 (Michael Shear – White House correspondent, NYTimes, “In Pushing for Revised Surveillance Program, Obama Strikes His Own Balance” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/winning-surveillance-limits-obama-makes-program-own.html?ref=topics&_r=0) // CW

Mr. Obama entered the Oval Office with what he called “a healthy skepticism” about the system of surveillance at his command. But Ms. Monaco said that, in part because of his often grim daily intelligence briefing, the president was also “very, very focused on the threats” to

Americans. “He weighs the balance every day,” she said. The compromise on collections of telephone records may end up being too restrictive fo r the president’s c ounter t errorism professionals , as some Republicans predict. Or, as others vehemently insisted in congressional debate during the past week, it may leave in place too much surveillance that can intrude on the lives of innocent Americans. Either way, Mr. Obama’s signature on the law late Tuesday night ensures that he will deliver to the next president a method of hunting for terrorist threats despite widespread privacy concerns that emerged after Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, revealed the existence of the telephone program. “He owned it in 2009,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former N.S.A. director under President George W. Bush, who oversaw the surveillance programs for years. “He just didn’t want anyone to know he owned it.” Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the USA Freedom Act “a step forward in some respects,” but “a very small step forward.”

He said his organization would continue to demand that the president and Congress scale back other government surveillance programs. “Obama has been presented with this choice: Are you going to defend these programs or are you going to change them?” Mr. Jaffer said. “Thus far, we haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the president is willing to spend political capital

changing those programs.” In the case of the telephone program, Mr. Obama’s preferred compromise was originally the brainchild of his

N.S.A. officials, who embraced it as a way to satisfy the public’s privacy concerns without losing the agency’s ability to

conduct surveillance more broadly. In the lead-up to last week’s congressional showdown, Mr. Obama and his national security team insisted that broad surveillance powers were vital to tracking terrorist threats , while admitting that the new approach to data collection would not harm that effort.