Terror da set Up



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Terror DA Set Up

Background


Below is the 1NC shell for the terror DA. Below that is a 2AC frontline to the terror DA. You will have 5 minutes to extend the terrorism DA, making sure you answer every 2AC argument. Assume the 1AC was the Freedom Act packet aff. Advantage one is internet freedom with an economy impact. Advantage two is the India advantage with the cyber impact scenario.

1NC Shell



Uniqueness – Domestic surveillance successfully checks terror incidents now. Prefer longitudinal studies.


Boot ‘13

Max Boot is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2004, he was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy." In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. Boot holds a bachelor's degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree in history from Yale University. Boot has served as an adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the published author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. From the article: “Stay calm and let the NSA carry on” - LA Times – June 9th - http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/09/opinion/la-oe-boot-nsa-surveillance-20130609



After 9/11, there was a widespread expectation of many more terrorist attacks on the United States. So far that hasn't happened. We haven't escaped entirely unscathed (see Boston Marathon, bombing of), but on the whole we have been a lot safer than most security experts, including me, expected. In light of the current controversy over the National Security Agency's monitoring of telephone calls and emails, it is worthwhile to ask: Why is that? It is certainly not due to any change of heart among our enemies. Radical Islamists still want to kill American infidels. But the vast majority of the time, they fail. The Heritage Foundation estimated last year that 50 terrorist attacks on the American homeland had been foiled since 2001. Some, admittedly, failed through sheer incompetence on the part of the would-be terrorists. For instance, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American jihadist, planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010 that started smoking before exploding, thereby alerting two New Yorkers who in turn called police, who were able to defuse it. But it would be naive to adduce all of our security success to pure serendipity. Surely more attacks would have succeeded absent the ramped-up counter-terrorism efforts undertaken by the U.S. intelligence community, the military and law enforcement. And a large element of the intelligence community's success lies in its use of special intelligence — that is, communications intercepts. The CIA is notoriously deficient in human intelligence — infiltrating spies into terrorist organizations is hard to do, especially when we have so few spooks who speak Urdu, Arabic, Persian and other relevant languages. But the NSA is the best in the world at intercepting communications. That is the most important technical advantage we have in the battle against fanatical foes who will not hesitate to sacrifice their lives to take ours. Which brings us to the current kerfuffle over two NSA monitoring programs that have been exposed by the Guardian and the Washington Post. One program apparently collects metadata on all telephone calls made in the United States. Another program provides access to all the emails, videos and other data found on the servers of major Internet firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. At first blush these intelligence-gathering activities raise the specter of Big Brother snooping on ordinary American citizens who might be cheating on their spouses or bad-mouthing the president. In fact, there are considerable safeguards built into both programs to ensure that doesn't happen. The phone-monitoring program does not allow the NSA to listen in on conversations without a court order. All that it can do is to collect information on the time, date and destination of phone calls. It should go without saying that it would be pretty useful to know if someone in the U.S. is calling a number in Pakistan or Yemen that is used by a terrorist organizer. As for the Internet-monitoring program, reportedly known as PRISM, it is apparently limited to "non-U.S. persons" who are abroad and thereby enjoy no constitutional protections. These are hardly rogue operations. Both programs were initiated by President George W. Bush and continued by President Obama with the full knowledge and support of Congress and continuing oversight from the federal judiciary. That's why the leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees, Republicans and Democrats alike, have come to the defense of these activities. It's possible that, like all government programs, these could be abused — see, for example, the IRS making life tough on tea partiers. But there is no evidence of abuse so far and plenty of evidence — in the lack of successful terrorist attacks — that these programs have been effective in disrupting terrorist plots. Granted there is something inherently creepy about Uncle Sam scooping up so much information about us. But Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Citibank and other companies know at least as much about us, because they use very similar data-mining programs to track our online movements. They gather that information in order to sell us products, and no one seems to be overly alarmed. The NSA is gathering that information to keep us safe from terrorist attackers. Yet somehow its actions have become a "scandal," to use a term now loosely being tossed around. The real scandal here is that the Guardian and Washington Post are compromising our national security by telling our enemies about our intelligence-gathering capabilities. Their news stories reveal, for example, that only nine Internet companies share information with the NSA. This is a virtual invitation to terrorists to use other Internet outlets for searches, email, apps and all the rest. No intelligence effort can ever keep us 100% safe, but to stop or scale back the NSA's special intelligence efforts would amount to unilateral disarmament in a war against terrorism that is far from over.

(Note to students: a “longitudinal study” is research carried out over an extended period of time. In this case, several years.)


Link – curtailing surveillance boosts terror risks. That risk’s serious and underestimated.


Lewis ‘14

James Andrew Lewis is a senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., where he writes on technology, security, and the international economy. Before joining CSIS, he worked at the US Departments of State and Commerce as a Foreign Service officer and as a member of the Senior Executive Service. His diplomatic experience included negotiations on military basing in Asia, the Cambodia peace process, and the five-power talks on arms transfer restraint. Lewis received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES - STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAM – December - http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate



Americans are reluctant to accept terrorism is part of their daily lives, but attacks have been planned or attempted against American targets (usually airliners or urban areas) almost every year since 9/11. Europe faces even greater risk, given the thousands of European Union citizens who will return hardened and radicalized from fighting in Syria and Iraq. The threat of attack is easy to exaggerate, but that does not mean it is nonexistent. Australia’s then-attorney general said in August 2013 that communications surveillance had stopped four “mass casualty events” since 2008. The constant planning and preparation for attack by terrorist groups is not apparent to the public. The dilemma in assessing risk is that it is discontinuous. There can be long periods with no noticeable activity, only to have the apparent calm explode. The debate over how to reform communications surveillance has discounted this risk. Communications surveillance is an essential law enforcement and intelligence tool. There is no replacement for it. Some suggestions for alternative approaches to surveillance, such as the idea that the National Security Agency (NSA) only track known or suspected terrorists, reflect wishful thinking, as it is the unknown terrorist who will inflict the greatest harm.

Vigilance link - Strong intel gathering’s key to discourages initiation of BW attacks.


Pittenger ‘14

US Rep. Robert Pittenger, chair of Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, “Bipartisan bill on NSA data collection protects both privacy and national security” - Washington Examiner, 6/9/14, http://washingtonexaminer.com/rep.-robert-pittenger-bipartisan-bill-on-nsa-data-collection-protects-both-privacy-and-national-security/article/2549456?custom_click=rss&utm_campaign=Weekly+Standard+Story+Box&utm_source=weeklystandard.com&utm_medium=referral



This February, I took that question to a meeting of European Ambassadors at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. During the conference, I asked three questions: 1. What is the current worldwide terrorist threat? 2. What is America’s role in addressing and mitigating this threat? 3. What role does intelligence data collection play in this process, given the multiple platforms for attack including physical assets, cyber, chemical, biological, nuclear and the electric grid? Each ambassador acknowledged the threat was greater today than before 9/11, with al Qaeda and other extreme Islamist terrorists stronger, more sophisticated, and having a dozen or more training camps throughout the Middle East and Africa. As to the role of the United States, they felt our efforts were primary and essential for peace and security around the world. Regarding the intelligence-gathering, their consensus was, “We want privacy, but we must have your intelligence.” As a European foreign minister stated to me, “Without U.S. intelligence, we are blind.” We cannot yield to those loud but misguided voices who view the world as void of the deadly and destructive intentions of unrelenting terrorists. The number of terrorism-related deaths worldwide doubled between 2012 and 2013, jumping from 10,000 to 20,000 in just one year. Now is not the time to stand down. Those who embrace an altruistic worldview should remember that vigilance and strength have deterred our enemies in the past. That same commitment is required today to defeat those who seek to destroy us and our way of life. We must make careful, prudent use of all available technology to counter their sophisticated operations if we are to maintain our freedom and liberties.

Bioterror attacks cause extinction


Mhyrvold ‘13

Nathan, Began college at age 14, BS and Masters from UCLA, Masters and PhD, Princeton “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action,” Working Draft, The Lawfare Research Paper Series Research paper NO . 2 – 2013



As horrible as this would be, such a pandemic is by no means the worst attack one can imagine, for several reasons. First, most of the classic bioweapons are based on 1960s and 1970s technology because the 1972 treaty halted bioweapons development efforts in the United States and most other Western countries. Second, the Russians, although solidly committed to biological weapons long after the treaty deadline, were never on the cutting edge of biological research. Third and most important, the science and technology of molecular biology have made enormous advances, utterly transforming the field in the last few decades. High school biology students routinely perform molecular-biology manipulations that would have been impossible even for the best superpower-funded program back in the heyday of biological-weapons research. The biowarfare methods of the 1960s and 1970s are now as antiquated as the lumbering mainframe computers of that era. Tomorrow’s terrorists will have vastly more deadly bugs to choose from. Consider this sobering development: in 2001, Australian researchers working on mousepox, a nonlethal virus that infects mice (as chickenpox does in humans), accidentally discovered that a simple genetic modification transformed the virus.10, 11 Instead of producing mild symptoms, the new virus killed 60% of even those mice already immune to the naturally occurring strains of mousepox. The new virus, moreover, was unaffected by any existing vaccine or antiviral drug. A team of researchers at Saint Louis University led by Mark Buller picked up on that work and, by late 2003, found a way to improve on it: Buller’s variation on mousepox was 100% lethal, although his team of investigators also devised combination vaccine and antiviral therapies that were partially effective in protecting animals from the engineered strain.12, 13 Another saving grace is that the genetically altered virus is no longer contagious. Of course, it is quite possible that future tinkering with the virus will change that property, too. Strong reasons exist to believe that the genetic modifications Buller made to mousepox would work for other poxviruses and possibly for other classes of viruses as well. Might the same techniques allow chickenpox or another poxvirus that infects humans to be turned into a 100% lethal bioweapon, perhaps one that is resistant to any known antiviral therapy? I’ve asked this question of experts many times, and no one has yet replied that such a manipulation couldn’t be done. This case is just one example. Many more are pouring out of scientific journals and conferences every year. Just last year, the journal Nature published a controversial study done at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in which virologists enumerated the changes one would need to make to a highly lethal strain of bird flu to make it easily transmitted from one mammal to another.14 Biotechnology is advancing so rapidly that it is hard to keep track of all the new potential threats. Nor is it clear that anyone is even trying. In addition to lethality and drug resistance, many other parameters can be played with, given that the infectious power of an epidemic depends on many properties, including the length of the latency period during which a person is contagious but asymptomatic. Delaying the onset of serious symptoms allows each new case to spread to more people and thus makes the virus harder to stop. This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated by HIV , which is very difficult to transmit compared with smallpox and many other viruses. Intimate contact is needed, and even then, the infection rate is low. The balancing factor is that HIV can take years to progress to AIDS , which can then take many more years to kill the victim. What makes HIV so dangerous is that infected people have lots of opportunities to infect others. This property has allowed HIV to claim more than 30 million lives so far, and approximately 34 million people are now living with this virus and facing a highly uncertain future.15 A virus genetically engineered to infect its host quickly, to generate symptoms slowly—say, only after weeks or months—and to spread easily through the air or by casual contact would be vastly more devastating than HIV . It could silently penetrate the population to unleash its deadly effects suddenly. This type of epidemic would be almost impossible to combat because most of the infections would occur before the epidemic became obvious. A technologically sophisticated terrorist group could develop such a virus and kill a large part of humanity with it. Indeed, terrorists may not have to develop it themselves: some scientist may do so first and publish the details. Given the rate at which biologists are making discoveries about viruses and the immune system, at some point in the near future, someone may create artificial pathogens that could drive the human race to extinction. Indeed, a detailed species-elimination plan of this nature was openly proposed in a scientific journal. The ostensible purpose of that particular research was to suggest a way to extirpate the malaria mosquito, but similar techniques could be directed toward humans.16 When I’ve talked to molecular biologists about this method, they are quick to point out that it is slow and easily detectable and could be fought with biotech remedies. If you challenge them to come up with improvements to the suggested attack plan, however, they have plenty of ideas. Modern biotechnology will soon be capable, if it is not already, of bringing about the demise of the human race— or at least of killing a sufficient number of people to end high-tech civilization and set humanity back 1,000 years or more. That terrorist groups could achieve this level of technological sophistication may seem far-fetched, but keep in mind that it takes only a handful of individuals to accomplish these tasks. Never has lethal power of this potency been accessible to so few, so easily. Even more dramatically than nuclear proliferation, modern biological science has frighteningly undermined the correlation between the lethality of a weapon and its cost, a fundamentally stabilizing mechanism throughout history. Access to extremely lethal agents—lethal enough to exterminate Homo sapiens—will be available to anybody with a solid background in biology, terrorists included.

The Disad turns the case via rollback and new civil liberty violations. Status Quo detection is key.


Clarke ‘13

(et al; This is the Final Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. President Obama ordered a blue-ribbon task force to review domestic surveillance. This report releases the findings of that group. The report was headed by five experts – including Richard Alan Clarke, who is the former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism for the United States. Other expert contributors include Michael Joseph Morell, who was the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and served as acting director twice in 2011 and from 2012 to 2013 and Cass Robert Sunstein, who was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration and is currently a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “LIBERTY AND SECURITY IN A CHANGING WORLD” – December 12th, 2013 – Easily obtained via a google search. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=https%3A%2F2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fdocs%2F2013-12 12_rg_final_report.pdf&ei=Db0yVdDjKIKdNtTXgZgE&usg=AFQjCNH0S_Fo9dckL9bRarVpi4M6pq6MQ&bvm=bv.91071109,d.eXY)



The September 11 attacks were a vivid demonstration of the need for detailed information about the activities of potential terrorists. This was so for several reasons. First, some information, which could have been useful, was not collected and other information, which could have helped to prevent the attacks, was not shared among departments. Second, the scale of damage that 21st-century terrorists can inflict is far greater than anything that their predecessors could have imagined. We are no longer dealing with threats from firearms and conventional explosives, but with the possibility of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices and biological and chemical agents. The damage that such attacks could inflict on the nation, measured in terms of loss of life, economic and social disruption, and the consequent sacrifice of civil liberties, is extraordinary. The events of September 11 brought this home with crystal clarity. Third, 21st-century terrorists operate within a global communications network that enables them both to hide their existence from outsiders and to communicate with one another across continents at the speed of light. Effective safeguards against terrorist attacks require the technological capacity to ferret out such communications in an international communications grid. Fourth, many of the international terrorists that the United States and other nations confront today cannot realistically be deterred by the fear of punishment. The conventional means of preventing criminal conduct—the fear of capture and subsequent punishment—has relatively little role to play in combating some contemporary terrorists. Unlike the situation during the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union was deterred from launching a nuclear strike against the United States in part by its fear of a retaliatory counterattack, the terrorist enemy in the 21st-century is not a nation state against which the United States and its allies can retaliate with the same effectiveness. In such circumstances, detection in advance is essential in any effort to “provide for the common defence.” Fifth, the threat of massive terrorist attacks involving nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons can generate a chilling and destructive environment of fear and anxiety among our nation’s citizens. If Americans came to believe that we are infiltrated by enemies we cannot identify and who have the power to bring death, destruction, and chaos to our lives on a massive scale, and that preventing such attacks is beyond the capacity of our government, the quality of national life would be greatly imperiled. Indeed, if a similar or even more devastating attack were to occur in the future, there would almost surely be an impulse to increase the use of surveillance technology to prevent further strikes, despite the potentially corrosive effects on individual freedom and self-governance.

2AC frontline for practice speeches



( ) Empirically false – 215 program once temporarily ENDED. That didn’t cause the disad – neither will the Aff.


Globe and Mail ‘15

Globe editorial – “The end of US ‘bulk telephony collection,’ and the lessons for Canada” - The Globe and Mail - Jun. 14, 2015 - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/the-end-of-us-bulk-telephony-collection-and-the-lessons-for-canada/article24948261/



For a few days, there was a happily yawning gap in the U.S. National Security Agency’s ability to surveil American citizens. Congress could not agree on how – or whether – to renew the section of the foolishly named Patriot Act that had allowed the government to scoop up and hold all the metadata (identifying both callers and addressees) of all cellphone calls in the U.S. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would then grant or, at least sometimes, not grant, access to the actual contents of the conversations – in other words, a search warrant. The upshot – under the new U.S.A. Freedom Act (officially, the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015”) – is that phone companies, not the NSA and the FBI, will record and store all the metadata for all phone calls. Those agencies will no longer be able to get at that kind of data at will, indiscriminately. The security agencies will have to apply to the FISC court for metadata, too. That’s progress, though FISC may be a bit of a rubber stamp. There is, by the way, no sign that terrorists attacked the United States in the unsurveilled interval between the Patriot Act section and the Freedom Act.

( ) US losing the war on terror


Miller ‘15

Internally quoting Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. - Greg Miller - Intelligence reporter for the Washington Post; former national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and co-author of The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War against al Qaeda - “In campaign against terrorism, U.S. enters period of pessimism and gloom” – Washington Post - March 7 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-campaign-against-terrorism-us-enters-period-of-pessimism-and-gloom/2015/03/07/ca980380-c1bc-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html



In congressional testimony recently, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. went beyond the usual litany of threats to say that terrorism trend lines were worse “than at any other point in history.” Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata, commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East, told participants on a counter­terrorism strategy call that he regarded the Islamic State as a greater menace than al-Qaeda ever was. Speaking at a New York police terrorism conference, Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, said he had come to doubt that he would live to see the end of al-Qaeda and its spawn. “This is long term,” he said. “My children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation will still be fighting this fight.” The assessments reflect a pessimism that has descended on the U.S. counterterrorism community over the past year amid a series of discouraging developments. Among them are the growth of the Islamic State, the ongoing influx of foreign fighters into Syria, the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Yemen and the downward spiral of Libya’s security situation. The latest complication came Saturday, when the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria carried out a series of suicide bombings and reportedly declared its allegiance to the Islamic State. Unlike the waves of anxiety that accompanied the emergence of new terrorist plots over the past decade, the latest shift in mood seems more deep-seated. U.S. officials depict a bewildering landscape in which al-Qaeda and the brand of Islamist militancy it inspired have not only survived 14 years of intense counterterrorism operations but have also spread. Officials emphasize that their campaign has accomplished critical goals. In particular, most officials and experts now see the risk of a Sept. 11-scale attack as infinitesimal, beyond the reach of al-Qaeda and its scattered affiliates. Still, the adjusted outlook contrasts sharply with the surge of optimism that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and the dawn of the Arab Spring, which was initially seen as a political awakening across the Middle East that might render al-Qaeda and its archaic ideology irrelevant. Within months of bin Laden’s death, then-Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was convinced “that we’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” President Obama echoed that view in subsequent years by saying that al-Qaeda was on “a path to defeat” and, more recently, that the then-nascent Islamic State was analogous to a junior varsity sports team. Such upbeat characterizations have all but evaporated.

( ) Turn – Arab-American coop:

    • mass surveillance kills law enforcement coop with US-Arab Americans – that’s key to check terror.


Risen ‘14

(Internally quoting Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Tom Risen is a reporter for U.S. News & World Report. “Racial Profiling Reported in NSA, FBI Surveillance” - U.S. News & World Report - July 9, 2014 - http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/07/09/racial-profiling-reported-in-nsa-fbi-surveillance)



The National Security Agency and the FBI have reportedly been overzealous trying to prevent terrorist attacks to the point that anti-Islamic racism in those agencies led to the surveillance of prominent Muslim-Americans, revealing a culture of racial profiling and broad latitude for spying on U.S. citizens. An NSA document leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to reporter Glenn Greenwald shows 202 Americans targeted among the approximately 7,485 email addresses monitored between 2002 and 2008, Greenwald’s news service The Intercept reports. To monitor Americans, government agencies must first make the case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause that the targets are terrorist agents, foreign spies or “are or may be” abetting sabotage, espionage or terrorism. Despite this filter The Intercept identified five Muslim-Americans with high public profile including civil rights leaders, academics, lawyers and a political candidate. Racial profiling of Muslims by security officers has been a controversy since the terrorist attacks of 2001 spiked fears about al-Qaida trainees preparing more attacks. The New York Police Department has disbanded its unit that mapped New York’s Muslim communities that designated surveillance of mosques as “terrorism enterprise investigations” after pressure from the Justice Department about aggressive monitoring by police. A 2005 FBI memo about surveillance procedures featured in The Intercept story uses a fake name “Mohammed Raghead” for the agency staff exercise. This latest report about email surveillance of successful Muslim-Americans is akin to “McCarthyism” that fed paranoia about communist spies during the Cold War, says Reza Aslan, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. “The notion that these five upstanding American citizens, all of them prominent public individuals, represent a threat to the U.S. for no other reason than their religion is an embarrassment to the FBI and an affront to the constitution,” Aslan says. There is a risk of radicalization among citizens Americans, evidenced by some who have gone to fight jihads in Syria and Somalia, but mass shootings carried out by U.S. citizens of various racial backgrounds occurs much more often, says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Since 1982, there have been at least 70 mass shootings across the U.S. “We have seen very little domestic terrorism in the U.S.,” Felbab-Brown says. This lack of terrorism is due in part to the willingness of the Islamic community to cooperate with law enforcement to identify possible radical threats, out of gratitude that the U.S. is a stable, secure country compared with the Middle East, she says. “That could go sour if law enforcement becomes too aggressive, too extreme,” she says.

    • The turn’s unique – relations are low now. We also control the vital internal link:


Ramirez ‘4

(et al; Deborah A. Ramirez, Professor of Law at Northeastern University. She holds a JD from Harvard University, "Developing partnerships between law enforcement and American Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities: a promising practices guide" (2004). Partnering for Prevention & Community Safety Initiative Publications. Paper 4. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20004127)

For all these reasons, in a post-September 11th world, it is critical for law enforcement and the Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities in this country to strengthen their relationships. Historically, these relationships have not existed in any significant way. Prior to September 11th, law enforcement primarily focused their community policing efforts on other communities of color – Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, etc. Similarly, hate crime enforcement efforts mostly focused on crimes against the gay community, Jews, Latinos, Asians and African-Americans. Consequently few state, local or federal law enforcement agencies had any significant contact with the Arab, Muslim, or Sikh communities prior to September of 2001. It is the premise of the Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative that Americans will only truly be safe from terrorist attacks when law enforcement agencies adopts a strategy focused on building trust and strengthening relationships with the Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities. This paradigm is not only more consistent with our constitutional ideals, it also represents our best hope for securing our homeland.

( ) No link – targeted warrants, which plan allows, solve the terror disad just as well.


Wyden ‘14

(et al; This amicus brief issued by three US Senators - Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich. Wyden and Udall sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had access to the meta-data program. “BRIEF FOR AMICI CURIAE SENATOR RON WYDEN, SENATOR MARK UDALL, AND SENATOR MARTIN HEINRICH IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF-APPELLANT, URGING REVERSAL OF THE DISTRICT COURT” – Amicus Brief for Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - Appeal from the United States District Court District of Idaho The Honorable B. Lynn Winmill, Chief District Judge, Presiding Case No. 2:13-cv-00257-BLW – Sept 9th, 2014 – This Amicus Brief was prepared by CHARLES S. SIMS from the law firm PROSKAUER ROSE LLP. Amici” means “friend of the court” and – in this context - is legal reference to Wyden, Udall, etc. This pdf can be obtained at: https://www.eff.org/document/wyden-udall-heinrich-smith-amicus)



As members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, amici Senators Wyden and Udall have for years participated in the oversight of government surveillance conducted under the Patriot Act that they knew would astonish most Americans. They sought to warn the public about those activities as best they could without disclosing classified information. They also co-sponsored an amendment to the Patriot Act’s reauthorization that sought to address the problem of government officials “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes” and “describ[ing] the execution of these laws in a way that misinforms or misleads the public.” See 157 Cong. Rec. S3360 (daily ed. May 25, 2011) (introducing SA 384 to S. 990, 112th Cong. § 3 (2011)); see also 157 Cong. Rec. S3386 (daily ed. May 26, 2011) (statement of Sen. Wyden) (“The fact is anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act. Yet many Members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch.”); 157 Cong. Rec. S3258 (daily ed. May 24, 2011) (statement of Sen. Udall) (“Congress is granting powers to the executive branch that lead to abuse, and, frankly, shield the executive branch from accountability”). Now that the government’s bulk call-records program has been documented and exposed, the executive branch has retreated from frequently repeated claims about its necessity and expressed an intent to end government bulk collection under section 215. Press Release, FACT SHEET: The Administration’s Proposal for Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program (Mar. 27, 2014), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/27/fact-sheet-administration-s-proposal-ending-section-215-bulk-telephony-m (“White House Press Release”). While Senators Udall, Heinrich and Wyden broadly support a policy aimed at ending the government’s indiscriminate collection of telephony metadata, they share a concern that there is no plan to suspend the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records in the absence of new legislation, which is not necessarily imminent. Meanwhile, the government continues to defend its bulk call-record collection program vigorously against statutory and constitutional challenges in the courts. Amici submit this brief to respond to the government’s argument that its collection of bulk call records is necessary to defend the nation against terrorist attacks. Amici make one central point: as members of the committee charged with overseeing the National Security Agency’s surveillance, amici have reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans. The government has at its disposal a number of authorities that allow it to obtain the call records of suspected terrorists and those in contact with suspected terrorists. It appears to amici that these more targeted authorities could have been used to obtain the information that the government has publicly claimed was crucial in a few important counterterrorism cases.

( ) Bioterror risk is low and wouldn’t kill many people anyway.


Keller 13

(Rebecca, 7 March 2013, Analyst at Stratfor, “Bioterrorism and the Pandemic Potential,” Stratfor, http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/bioterrorism-and-pandemic-potential)



The risk of an accidental release of H5N1 is similar to that of other infectious pathogens currently being studied. Proper safety standards are key, of course, and experts in the field have had a year to determine the best way to proceed, balancing safety and research benefits. Previous work with the virus was conducted at biosafety level three out of four, which requires researchers wearing respirators and disposable gowns to work in pairs in a negative pressure environment. While many of these labs are part of universities, access is controlled either through keyed entry or even palm scanners. There are roughly 40 labs that submitted to the voluntary ban. Those wishing to resume work after the ban was lifted must comply with guidelines requiring strict national oversight and close communication and collaboration with national authorities. The risk of release either through accident or theft cannot be completely eliminated, but given the established parameters the risk is minimal. The use of the pathogen as a biological weapon requires an assessment of whether a non-state actor would have the capabilities to isolate the virulent strain, then weaponize and distribute it. Stratfor has long held the position that while terrorist organizations may have rudimentary capabilities regarding biological weapons, the likelihood of a successful attack is very low. Given that the laboratory version of H5N1 -- or any influenza virus, for that matter -- is a contagious pathogen, there would be two possible modes that a non-state actor would have to instigate an attack. The virus could be refined and then aerosolized and released into a populated area, or an individual could be infected with the virus and sent to freely circulate within a population. There are severe constraints that make success using either of these methods unlikely. The technology needed to refine and aerosolize a pathogen for a biological attack is beyond the capability of most non-state actors. Even if they were able to develop a weapon, other factors such as wind patterns and humidity can render an attack ineffective. Using a human carrier is a less expensive method, but it requires that the biological agent be a contagion. Additionally, in order to infect the large number of people necessary to start an outbreak, the infected carrier must be mobile while contagious, something that is doubtful with a serious disease like small pox. The carrier also cannot be visibly ill because that would limit the necessary human contact.

( ) Terrorist can’t obtain and correctly deploy bioweapons


Ouagrham-Gormley 14

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley is Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University. She worked for a decade at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. She was for two years research director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies office in Kazakhstan and was founding editor of the International Export Control Observer, Cornell University Press, November 2014, “Barriers to Bioweapons”, http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100857780



In both the popular imagination and among lawmakers and national security experts, there exists the belief that with sufficient motivation and material resources, states or terrorist groups can produce bioweapons easily, cheaply, and successfully. In Barriers to Bioweapons, Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley challenges this perception by showing that bioweapons development is a difficult, protracted, and expensive endeavor, rarely achieving the expected results whatever the magnitude of investment. Her findings are based on extensive interviews she conducted with former U.S. and Soviet-era bioweapons scientists and on careful analysis of archival data and other historical documents related to various state and terrorist bioweapons programs. Bioweapons development relies on living organisms that are sensitive to their environment and handling conditions, and therefore behave unpredictably. These features place a greater premium on specialized knowledge. Ben Ouagrham-Gormley posits that lack of access to such intellectual capital constitutes the greatest barrier to the making of bioweapons. She integrates theories drawn from economics, the sociology of science, organization, and management with her empirical research. The resulting theoretical framework rests on the idea that the pace and success of a bioweapons development program can be measured by its ability to ensure the creation and transfer of scientific and technical knowledge. The specific organizational, managerial, social, political, and economic conditions necessary for success are difficult to achieve, particularly in covert programs where the need to prevent detection imposes managerial and organizational conditions that conflict with knowledge production.

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