CFFP Update 3

T – Oversight Don’t forget the other cards in previous files on this topic…….

2AC Oversight = Topical

Counter-Interpretation – surveillance curtailment falls into one of two categories – disclosure and legalism – prefer our interpretation – it’s the most legally and historically precise

Schlanger 15(Margo, Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, University of Michigan, Harvard National Security Journal, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency's Civil Liberties Gap,” pg lexis//um-ef)The June 2013 Guardian piece, which explained the NSA's program of wholesale collection of information about domestic phone calls (though not the contents of the phone conversations themselves) had an

analogue in Seymour Hersh's front-page 1974 New York Times exposure of massive domestic surveillance by the CIA, in violation of rules limiting the agency to

foreign spying. n17 As in recent months, Hersh's first leak-supported exposé was followed by additional reporting and many official disclosures. n18 The lead role in the following " year of intelligence ," n19 1975, was played by a special Senate Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church , n20 whose seven [*121] volumes of reports and recommendations underlay much of the subsequent reform --including the formation of the still-operative congressional intelligence oversight committees, the passage of FISA, and the drafting of executive orders governing the intelligence enterprise.

n21 Reform took two basic approaches : disclosure and legalism . By disclosure I do not mean the kind of leaks and declassifications we have seen since 2013. The Church Committee , for example, did not chiefly urge a system of

direct public accountability. Rather, it recommended that agencies running secret operations or intelligence surveillance make a long list of disclosures both to Congressional oversight committees and within

the executive branch to the President and his staff, n22 and, as will be seen, to the Attorney General. n23 The idea was to defeat "plausible denials n24

and the prior understanding with respect to both the Congress and the President that "[i]t's better for gentlemen not to know what's going on. n25 This would ease the path of accountability to higher-up appointees, who might have better judgment than those more deeply involved in surveillance, and

to elected officials if not to their constituencies. Legalism was a second reform priority : reformers' answer to the starkly apparent disinterest of federal intelligence officials in legal constraints on their activities. n26 Again looking to the Church Committee, the [*122] Committee in its report highlighted testimony of "the man who for ten years headed FBI's Intelligence Division" that "never once did

I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: 'Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral.' We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatic." n27 Less dramatic, but perhaps even more telling, was the almost uncomprehending testimony of NSA deputy director Benson Buffham, facing questioning by Senator Walter Mondale, about a controversial NSA program: Mondale: "Were you concerned about its legality?" Buffham: "Legality?" Mondale: "Whether it was legal." Buffham: "In what sense? Whether that would have been a legal thing to do?" Mondale: "Yes." Buffham: "That particular aspect didn't enter into the discussion." n28 A 1976 book by four civil libertarians, including former NSC staffer Mort Halperin, summarized the evidence in its title: The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U. S. Intelligence Agencies. n29 Legalistic reforms were designed to cure this documented disease. Those reforms had three crucial and simultaneous features: imposition of new substantive rules given the status of law rather than policy; some limited court enforcement of those rules; and empowerment of lawyers. The first two of these features have received

abundant attention: intelligence law was really born in the 1970s , n30 and has since blossomed. n31 It now has a body of precedent sufficient to justify a treatise n32 and casebooks. n33 [*123] The augmentation of lawyers' influence has gotten somewhat less attention. n34 But a crucial aspect of intelligence legalism is that even more than shifting power to the courts, it has shifted power to agency counsel and the Department of Justice, instituting internal rules governing intelligence operations and then deputizing the lawyers to see that those rules are implemented. Government lawyers accordingly loom very large in the reform documents of the late 1970s and thereafter. Over and over again, with dozens of specifics, the Church Committee recommended amplifying the authority and influence of lawyers within the executive branch. n35 The Committee summarized at the start of its domestic intelligence recommendations: Who should be accountable within the Executive branch for ensuring that intelligence agencies comply with the law and for the investigation of alleged abuses by employees of those agencies? . . . The Committee recommends that these responsibilities fall initially upon the agency heads, their general counsels and inspectors general, but ultimately upon the Attorney General. n36 The specific domestic recommendations proposed to obligate the Attorney General to review procedures, authorize operations, and conduct [*124] investigations. Even more notable, the Church Committee proposed a similar role for the Attorney General with respect to foreign intelligence, far afield from the Attorney General's natural bailiwick of law enforcement and the FBI (which is at least nominally part of the Department of Justice): The Attorney General should be required to report the President and to the intelligence oversight committee(s) of Congress any intelligence activities which, in his opinion, violate the Constitutional rights of American citizens or any other provision of law and the actions he has taken in response. Pursuant to the Committee's Domestic Recommendations, the Attorney General should be made responsible for ensuring that intelligence activities do not violate the Constitution or any other provision of law. Additional specifics abounded. For example, the Committee recommended that the Attorney General should advise the National Security Council and should even chair a counterintelligence subcommittee. n37 And the Church Committee's appreciation for the potential role of lawyers did not stop with the Attorney General. The reports included multiple recommendations, as well, to enhance the stature of intelligence agency general counsels-making their positions Senate confirmed, and requiring that they be consulted, have access to more information, and have investigatory powers. n38 I have already mentioned the first reform that came from the Church Committee report: Congress's new permanent intelligence committees, established in 1975 and 1976. n39 In addition, the Committee's approach underlay both FISA and Executive Order 12,333. I move now to those two documents, and how legalism infuses them. B. FISA As originally enacted, FISA made two key innovations, both highly legalizing. First, the Act subjected all domestic foreign intelligence surveillance, and some such surveillance abroad, to analogues of domestic warrant procedure. Surveillance of covered communications would have to be authorized by a judicial officer--under FISA, a federal district judge appointed by the Chief Justice to the FISA Court--after the government demonstrated probable cause for the surveillance. n40 Second, FISA [*125] introduced the idea of "minimization procedures"--rules "designed to protect, as far as reasonable, against the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of nonpublic information which is not foreign intelligence information" n41 that "concern[s] unconsenting United States persons." n42 The statutory "heart of minimization under FISA" n43 is the requirement that surveillance and retention processes be "reasonably designed . . . to minimize the acquisition and retention, and prohibit the dissemination, of nonpublicly available information concerning unconsenting United States persons consistent with the need of the United States to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information." n44 The FISA warrant requirement was, of course, borrowed from American criminal procedure. But the requirement of minimization procedures is far less familiar--indeed, it deviates foundationally from nonintelligence Fourth Amendment doctrine. In American criminal procedure, once the government gains lawful access to personal information, that information can usually be used for any lawful purpose--including purposes that would have invalidated the original access. So the government is authorized to search airplane travelers without any individualized suspicion, in order to be sure they are not, say, carrying a bomb that might bring down a plane. n45 Now, suppose that during that search, the government finds contraband that poses no aviation threat (drugs, perhaps, or a suspiciously large amount of currency). The evidence may then be used in a subsequent criminal prosecution, even though the very same search would have been illegal if its original purpose had been criminal prosecution. Likewise, if a police officer frisks a pedestrian in order to ameliorate the immediate threat of a gun, and along the way "plainly" feels drugs, the drugs are admissible in a criminal proceeding. n46 The

foreign intelligence approach is different. n47 As [*126] in the administrative search context, the regulation of information acquisition or collection is often very loose, with no requirement of individualized suspicion of wrongdoing in many situations. But, unlike with respect to criminal prosecution uses of evidence obtained by administrative search, the minimization procedures constrain what can happen next. n48 Prior to the Snowden leaks, only one of the FISA minimization procedures--for information collected under a FISA Title I warrant n49-had been declassified. Over the past months, the government has disclosed the terms of several others: for targeted surveillance of foreigners abroad (under FISA § 702), n50 the now-defunct internet metadata program (under FISA's pen register/trap-and-trace provision), n51 the ongoing telephony metadata [*127] program (under FISA's business records provision), n52 as well as some others. n53 All of these minimization procedures support the conclusion that FISA's minimization procedure requirement is legalizing in several analytically distinct ways. First, the procedures are themselves highly legalistic; they read like statutes or regulations. Second, the minimization procedures frequently use the strategy of designating a particular high official to make specified decisions. n54 Implementation then forces subordinate personnel into using the [*128] legalistic method of reasoned elaboration, n55 as they explain why the outcome they favor should be adopted by the official authorized to decide. As Mary Lawton, the Department of Justice lawyer who helped to draft FISA and was for several decades the most influential bureaucrat of intelligence legalism, n56 explained in 1993, "[i]mplicit in these requirements are certain formidable bureaucratic constraints: articulation, consideration, consensus and personal accountability," which together slow down and rationalize actions proposed. n57 Both "articulation" and "consideration" are characteristic of legalized decisions. Third, the procedures empower lawyers: they must be approved by the Attorney General, and therefore first by DOJ lawyers, prior to being offered to the FISA Court for its signoff. n58 Fourth, once approved, the procedures acquire the privileged status of federal court orders. Obedience becomes a compliance, rather than a policy, task for the NSA, subject to requirements of court disclosure and correction. n59 So if NSA fails--particularly if it fails systematically--the court might impose various consequences ranging from embarrassment for particular lawyers to withdrawing approval for a whole NSA program. n60 It is evident that these consequences are only loosely coupled with the substantive importance of the disregarded minimization feature; the FISA court has sometimes scolded [*129] the government for noncompliance with minimization orders whose features it agrees to relax in the very same opinion. n61 Post-September 11 amendments to and interpretations of FISA have vastly reduced the warrant-style individuation required for FISA-authorized surveillance. Under the FISA Amendments Act, the FISA Court now signs off on a massive program of targeted surveillance of foreigners--including when their communication is with an American--and on some smaller amount of targeted surveillance of U.S. persons abroad, without adjudicating the existence of probable cause for the targets. n62 And we now know that at least two bulk metadata programs--one examining a broad array of domestic internet communications, and the other focusing on an even larger share of domestic phone calls--have been deemed authorized by FISA without individuated suspicion of any party to the communications. Much of FISA surveillance, n63 that is, no longer resembles ordinary domestic criminal practice. Nonetheless the basic legalizing structure has remained intact: lawyers prepare, and judges approve, the proposed surveillance, and it is accompanied by court-ratified minimization procedures given the force of law. C. Executive Order 12,333 Executive Order 12,333 (invariably referred to orally as, simply, "twelve triple three") is the "foundational" federal surveillance authority, applicable to all activities not otherwise regulated that touch or might touch U.S. person information. n64 Executive Order 12,333 has been amended three times since President Reagan issued it first in 1981, most recently and significantly in 2008, but it has retained its basic character. n65 As the [*130] organizing document for the nation's intelligence operations, it applies to the entire Intelligence Community (IC). n66 Individual IC elements then implement it via more focused guidelines, which are required to be signed by the Attorney General. n67 For the wide swathes of foreign intelligence surveillance that are not covered by FISA, regulation under Executive Order 12,333 occurs without judicial involvement. That is, where FISA does not apply, it is 12,333 that limits the collection, retention, use, and dissemination of U.S. person information, no matter what the method of surveillance--even if, for example, the communications are acquired from some foreign partner agency. The Executive Order explains that its "general principles . . . in addition to and consistent with applicable laws, are intended to achieve the proper balance between the acquisition of essential information and protection of individual interests." n68 For surveillance, its basic approach is two-fold: it insists on in-advance fully vetted written procedures, and it authorizes specific surveillance without court approval only if the Attorney General approves. On the first point, surveillance, retention, use, and dissemination procedures must be approved in advance at a very high level within the administration; the Executive Order does not use the word "minimization" but the idea is the same. Such procedures are generally developed by the IC element involved, in consultation (in the most recent version) with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and then must be approved by the Attorney General. n69 Attorney General-approved procedures are required for: . Coordination of counterintelligence activities and the clandestine collection of foreign intelligence inside the United States. n70 . Intelligence collection, retention, and dissemination concerning U.S. persons. n71 . Intelligence collection within the U.S. or directed against U.S. persons abroad. n72 [*131] . How information possessed by all the executive agencies is provided to or accessed by the IC, and how that information may be used or shared. n73 . Dissemination of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). n74 Evidently the Attorney General's disapproval on "constitutional or other legal grounds" is final. But the Attorney General is authorized to disapprove for other, non-legal reasons as well: "[W]here the element head or department head and the Attorney General are unable to reach agreements on other than constitutional or other legal grounds, the Attorney General, the head of department concerned, or the Director shall refer the matter to the NSC [National Security Council]." n75 What has emerged from this E.O. 12,333 process is a number of ICelement-specific "AG Guidelines." Once issued, these are bureaucratically difficult to change. n76 For the NSA, as part of the Department of Defense, the Executive Order 12,333 Attorney General guidelines were signed in 1982 as part of Department of Defense Directive 5240.1-R, and have not since been modified. n77 These are joined by other similarly amendment-resistant documents. At the NSA, such documents include a (now mostly de)classified annex governing NSA's role and procedures n78 ; another document titled U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (generally referred to as USSID 18), which in turn has its own (de)classified annex and was apparently last updated in 2011; n79 and a formal policy document most recently issued in 2004, with yet another (de)classified annex. n80 Substantively, these documents together function like FISA minimization procedures, although they are laxer in several ways. Procedurally, however, they are very different. For FISA minimization, written justifications and [*132] explanations of each program are filed with the FISA Court and undergird each eventual court approval. Any change in the underlying processes might be material to the Court's approval, and therefore needs to be explained. n81 For E.O. 12,333 processes, the AG Guidelines are more freestanding; there is no subsequent formal implementation check. Thus even apart from the greater leeway allowed by the AG Guidelines, compared to FISA-approved minimization procedures, the result is substantially more operational freedom under 12,333 than under FISA. In addition to its requirements of Attorney General-approved processes, Executive Order 12,333 "delegate[s]" to the Attorney General the authority "to approve the use for intelligence purposes, within the United States or against a United States person abroad, of any technique for which a warrant would be required if undertaken for law enforcement purposes," if the Attorney General finds "probable cause to believe that the technique is directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power." n82 Under this provision, the Attorney General operates essentially like a warrant granting magistrate, with operational control of the decision to initiate surveillance. (This requirement has been largely superseded by FISA Title VII, but it remains operative in some rare situations, and also in emergencies. n83) While there is no judicial involvement, the process is very similar to a judicial one; the same lawyers who prepare FISA applications prepare a similar application for the Attorney General to approve (or reject). n84 As a whole, then, notwithstanding the entire absence of court involvement, E.O. 12,333 is a key source of intelligence legalism. It is worth noting, too, that its text was one of the sites around which intelligence legalism was hotly contested. One of the Order's drafters, Richard Willard, recounted a few years later that when he arrived at the Department of Justice early in the Reagan administration, as Attorney General Smith's Counsel for Intelligence Policy, "holdover [career] officials in the intelligence [*133] community were busily drafting a new Executive order on intelligence activities that would virtually eliminate the legal oversight role of the Attorney General," because of the "enormous pent-up hostility in the intelligence community toward lawyers and legalistic restrictions." n85 This "attitude was not an invention of the Republican political appointees--who at that time were not yet that numerous--but permeated the career service." n86 It was his assignment, he explained, to mold Executive Order 12,333 into something more "balanced" n87--that is, more pro-lawyer. He succeeded; E.O. 12,333 inserted the Attorney General deep into intelligence policy and even operations. This intervention marked a sharp change. Willard notes that in his time at the department [t]he Attorney General was not a full member of the cabinetlevel group that considered these [foreign intelligence and policy] matters but was only 'invited' to attend. It is my understanding that Attorney General Meese was later made a member of the group, but that even then some effort was made to insist that he was a member in his personal capacity and not as Attorney General. . . . As a consequence of the Attorney General's uncertain status in the process, his subordinates were generally excluded from working groups and subcabinet-level deliberations. n88 In total, while the tendency is more extreme for FISA, each of the two foundational documents for foreign intelligence surveillance, FISA and Executive Order 12,333, has moved surveillance programs in legalistic

directions, emphasizing rules and empowering lawyers. The political theories underlying both of the 1970s intelligence reform strategies, disclosure and legalism, are obvious: disclosure serves accountability,

and legalism serves the rule of law. But neither one directly seeks the appropriate balance between liberty and surveillance, however appropriateness is evaluated. One would therefore expect institutional arrangements premised on these two theories to serve disclosure and legalism, but to fail to prioritize, or even to weigh, individual's liberty interests when they are in tension with surveillance goals. This produces what I call the civil liberties gap. Part II explores whether this gap exists in practice, describing the NSA's existing compliance and oversight systems in some detail.

2AC/1AR

And, our interpretation goes our way – church committee believed we need MORE than legal constraints to stop surveillance – oversight is a critical element of curtailment

Schlanger 15(Margo, Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, University of Michigan, Harvard National Security Journal, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency's Civil Liberties Gap,” pg lexis//um-ef)

So there has long been agreement that the Constitution alone is insufficient to achieve optimal

civil liberties protections with respect to surveillance . What about non-constitutional law? Are the statutes that have been passed sufficient? Or, even if

they are not, might new statutory law--which can then be implemented via intelligence legalism--be the best way to fill the gap that remains after constitutional adjudication? Start with the small subset of the Church Committee's proposed reforms implemented by FISA. The statutory text imposes a probable cause requirement for domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes, as the Supreme Court hinted in the Keith case it might someday require as a matter of constitutional law. FISA's other contributions are procedural rather than substantive. I have suggested that optimal policy requires calibration of privacy and surveillance--that surveillance should be conducted only when its security benefits outweigh its privacy infringement. FISA includes no such constraint. Rather, to the extent surveillance requires an invasion of U.S. person privacy, FISA allows that invasion to occur, directing implementation to "minimize the acquisition and retention, and prohibit the dissemination, of non-publicly available information concerning unconsenting United States persons" only insofar as such minimization is "consistent with the need of the United States to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information." n290 Thus FISA categorically gives security more weight than liberty; its text directs that any foreign intelligence "need" trumps privacy. [*178] You may be thinking that the Congress that enacted FISA chose a thumb on the scale for security because it disagreed with me on the merits, believing that FISA's trump card for security constituted optimal policy. That is, perhaps the 1978 Congress saw FISA as

closing whatever civil liberties gap there was. The historical record suggests otherwise, however. Reformers in the 1970s made clear that they didn't intend for congressional protection of civil liberties against surveillance to end with FISA.

Rather, the Church Committee's view was on top of FISA itself, executive/congressional disclosure would both minimize the future use of liberty-infringing techniques and facilitate future interventions The Committee made formal findings that Congressional dereliction of oversight responsibilities had "helped shape the environment in which improper intelligence activities were possible." n291 Accordingly, it explained: Procedural safeguards--"auxiliary precautions" as they were characterized in the Federalist Papers--must be adopted along with substantive restraints . . . . Our proposed procedural checks range from judicial review of intelligence activity before or after the fact to formal and high level Executive branch approval and more effective Congressional oversight. n292 Committee members (Senators) evidently believed that the congressional disclosure it urged would facilitate liberty as well as accountability, allowing future lawmakers to intervene where salutary, using either soft or hard methods, to appropriately balance liberty and security. As Loch Johnson- first Senator Church's special assistant, then the first staff director of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence Oversight, and then an intelligence scholar--has summarized, "The purpose of these new arrangements was to prevent a further erosion of American liberties at the hands of the intelligence agencies." n293

Oversight = Curtails

And, prefer our evidence – the church committee ESTABLISHED oversight as the method to CURTAIL domestic surveillance

Sottek 13(T.C. “The edge of the abyss: exposing the NSA's all-seeing machine,” pg online @ http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5082666/the-edge-of-the-abyss-exposing-the-nsas-all-seeing-machine //um-ef)

There is currently no clear path to reform. All three branches of US government have, in some measure, enabled, allowed, or justified the existence and continued use of unprecedented NSA programs that collect data on American citizens. President Obama, who is the NSA’s top brass as commander-in-chief of the US military, has shown no genuine interest in reforming the agency. In addition to broadly defending the bulk surveillance programs before the public, his NSA review

panel — created in response to leaks from Edward Snowden — is filled with insiders who are unlikely to provoke change. Congress, which is responsible for oversight of the intelligence community, is currently divided on the issue of

mass surveillance. It has arguably failed to fully meet its oversight role, neglecting to collect adequate information

from the NSA about its activities, and opting not to hold intelligence officials accountable for blatantly lying to Congress and the public. For instance Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander each, in separate Congressional hearings, testified that the NSA was not collecting data on US persons. In fact, is has been collecting data on billions of phone records and other information belonging to US

citizens. Ironically, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Congressional body charged with overseeing the NSA and other intelligence groups, was established precisely to prevent domestic surveillance abuses. The Church Committee, established in 1975 to audit the intelligence community following Watergate, learned that in the 1950s the CIA and the FBI had intercepted and collected the contents of over more than 215,000 pieces of mail belonging to US citizens. And indeed, surveilling US citizens is in the NSA’s pedigree; recently, declassified documents revealed that Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali, and other prominent Americans were targets of NSA surveillance during the Vietnam War, from 1967 to 1973. The current chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), is one of the most ardent supporters of NSA bulk surveillance and originally downplayed the Verizon leak as business-as-usual. In October, Feinstein took out an op-ed in USA Today, arguing that metadata deserves no Fourth Amendment protection. On October 31st, Feinstein passed an NSA “improvement” bill in Congress offering no real reform; in fact, the Feinstein bill legitimizes the mass data collection that has so far been justified in secret. “What happens to our civil liberties if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked?” Some lawmakers, however, are working to reverse mass surveillance of US citizens. On October 29th, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Patriot Act co-author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R, WI) introduced the “Freedom Act,” which would end bulk data collection by rewriting Section 215 of the Patriot Act and creating new limits on FAA Section 702. Others, like Senator Ron Wyden, (D, OR), have issued repeated warnings about the NSA’s capabilities. “The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed,” Wyden said earlier this year. “What happens to our government, our civil liberties, and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked?”

Oversight key Limit D.S.

And, oversight is the DEFINING CONCEPT regarding domestic surveillance – its critical to the privacy debate

Cate 7(Fred H. Cate is a Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, and a senior policy advisor to the Center for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee, “Domestic Surveillance and the Decline of Legal Oversight,” pg online @ http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2287&context=facpub //um-ef)

The political wrangling in Congress and coverage in the press about revising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) have tended to obscure the most critical issue at stake in the regulation of electronic surveillance: the declining role of law and legal oversight . The government conducts surveillance outside of the United States without statutory (or

apparently constitutional) constraint, but within the nation's borders, surveillance is regulated by two statutes. FISA permits the Attorney General to authorize domestic electronic surveillance (and physical searches) of foreign powers, but requires recourse to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court where U.S. persons who are acting as the agents of foreign powers are involved and a "significant purpose" of the surveillance is to obtain foreign intelligence information. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act applies to all other domestic surveillance. Or so we thought until December 16, 2005, when the New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency was intercepting communications within the United States and without complying with either FISA or ECPA. In the face of the ensuing controversy, the Bush Administration acknowledged the existence of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program," which it described as involving communications into and out of the United States where there is a "reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communications is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda." Rather than seeking review by a court, as required by statute, the Administration was operating pursuant to an order by the Attorney General that was renewed "approximately every 45 days." In an effort to blunt the controversy over the TSP, the Administration agreed in January 2007 to subject it to the oversight of the FISC, the eleven-judge court responsible for authorizing surveillance under, and ensuring compliance with, FISA. But in May 2007, a FISC judge refused to renew a "basket warrant" (under which the Court would authorize surveillance on a programmatic, rather than a case-by-case basis). The Administration responded by withdrawing its commitment to comply with FISA and seek review by the FISC of surveillance conducted under the TSP, and demanding that Congress enact statutory authorization that would not require future recourse to the FISC. Congress responded in August with the Protect America Act of 2007, which permits the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to authorize surveillance "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States," whether or not the person is an agent of a foreign power. The role of the FISC is reduced to reviewing the Attorney General's procedures for implementing the Act to determine whether they are "clearly erroneous." The Attorney General is also required to inform four congressional committees on a semi-annual basis of "acquisitions" made under the statute, including incidents of noncompliance. The Protect America Act sunsets in six months, which has set the stage for the current debate in Congress and press over its reauthorization and the future role of FISA. Much of that debate

has focused on whether telecommunications carriers that aided the Administration in its warrantless surveillance should receive retroactive as well as prospective immunity. But there are bigger

issues at stake, especially with regard to the protection of individual privacy from government intrusion. The most important by far is whether by the time the Bush Administration and Congress are finished with the law, there is going to be any legal oversight of domestic surveillance at all. In the USA PATRIOT Act, Congress already changed the requirement

that to qualify for the lower standard of review under FISA, the collection of foreign intelligence must be only "a significant purpose," rather than the "primary purpose," of the surveillance. The Act also permitted greater sharing of information obtained from FISA warrants with criminal investigators, which was then further expanded by a decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. Even before the Protect America Act, commentators worried whether the FISA process was in danger of becoming an end run around the requirements of ECPA and the Constitution for protecting U.S. persons from surveillance by their government.

AT: Must Reduce/Eliminate Program

D.A. to your interpretation – few comprehensive legal suggestions at reform – the literature all aligns with oversight as the key check on surveillance

Rosenzweig 14(Paul, “The NSA Doesn't Need Wholesale Reform, Just Greater Oversight,” pg online @ http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115392/nsa-reform-not-essential-congressional-oversight //um-ef)

What should we do about the NSA? Should we do anything at all? These question are on the forefront these days. The right answer, of course, is complex. The perception of illegality at the NSA has outrun the reality by a fair bit. On the other

hand, it seems quite clear that the NSA has often done things of which it is technically capable without considering whether or not they were wise in the context of a broader strategy. As Lisa Monaco the White Couse Counterterrorism advisor said the other day in USA Today: “Today’s world is highly interconnected, and the flow of large amounts of data is unprecedented. That’s why the president has directed us to review our surveillance capabilities, including with respect to our foreign partners. We want to ensure we are collecting information because we need it and not just because we can.” Last week, I was scheduled to give some testimony on the very subject to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (the hearing was cancelled and rescheduled). Those who want to can review the entire testimony for an explanation of the theory that underlies much of what I proposed and a consideration of many more proposals. But for the curious, here’s a short summary, with footnote citations excised, of some of the reform proposals and their merits (or demerits, as the case may be): Congress should probably provide for an in-house advocate before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to be called called at the court’s discretion. This would improve decision-making; Data retention rules and distributed databases (that is the idea of asking the telecommunications companies to hold the data on behalf of the NSA) will be ineffective and no more privacy protective than current rules; Post-collection judicial assessment of reasonable articulable suspicion is worth considering; We should reject the assertion that the FISA court is somehow either a rubberstamp or a packed court; The most effective reforms are likely structural rather than legislative; and Finally, our current system of intelligence oversight generally works. It is incumbent on

this Committee and those in Congress with knowledge of how our intelligence apparatus operates to defend that system as effective and appropriate. Here’s a deeper analysis: First, we can’t with one breath condemn government access to vast quantities of data about individuals as a return of “Big Brother,” and at the same time criticize the government for its failure to “connect the dots” (as we did, for example, during the Christmas 2009 bomb plot attempted by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab). More to the point—large scale data analytical tools of the type the NSA is apparently using are of such great utility that governments will expand their use, as will the private sector. Old rules about collection and use limitations are no longer technologically relevant.

If we value privacy at all, these ineffective protections must be replaced with new constructs . The goal then is the identification of a suitable legal and policy regime to regulate and manage the use of mass quantities of personal data . We should therefore favor those

reforms that create delegated or calibrated transparency (enough to enable oversight without eliminating essential capabilities) and respond to the new paradigm of data analytics and privacy (by controlling use rather than collection): Adversarial Advocate: This proposal would create a standing team of attorneys to respond to and present a counter argument before the FISC to requests for permission to collect information against an individual or entity. Presumably, this team of attorneys would either be from within the government (such as the DNI’s Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer) or a cadre of non-government attorney’s with clearances. There is much to be said in favor of this proposal. With regular criminal warrants the ex parte nature of the application for a warrant does not systematically create a lack of a check on overreaching because of the possibility for post-enforcement review during criminal prosecution with its adversarial process. By contrast, in intelligence investigations that post-execution checking function of adversarial contest is often missing—few if any intelligence collection cases wind up before the courts. As a result there is no systematic way of constraining the authority of the United States government in this context. Providing for an adversarial advocate would give us the general benefits of adversarial presentation and provide a useful checking function on the overarching broad effect of FISA law on the public. To be sure, this would be a novel process. We don’t typically do pre-enforcement review of investigative techniques. And if poorly implemented, this sort of process risks slowing down critical time sensitive investigations. Perhaps most importantly, many worry (not without justification) that the adversarial advocate will in the end have an agenda that may distort legal developments. On balance, this seems to be a positive idea — but only if it is implemented in a limited way for novel or unique questions of law. It should be is limited to situations where the FISA court itself requests adversarial presentation. That would limit the number or circumstances where the process was used to those few where new or seminal interpretations of law were being made. The adversarial advocate should not appear routinely and should not appear on his or her own motion. The court is, in my view, capable (and likely) to define when it can benefit from adversarial argument quite well. Phone Company Data Retention: Some have suggested that, instead of NSA collecting and retaining telephone call metadata, Congress should amend the law and impose a data retention requirement on phone companies and ISPs, requiring them to retain metadata for a fixed period of time, say five years. NSA and the FBI would, in turn, only be able to access this data set after a FISC court had passed on the validity of the request and determined that it met some evidentiary threshold, say, of relevance. While the idea is attractive it is, in the end, more problematic than beneficial. To begin with, the FISC pre-access review would be more privacy protective–but it would achieve this protection in the old fashioned way of limiting access to the underlying data. More effective ways that focus on managing end uses rather than collection are to be preferred. More to the point, this sort of system would be extremely cumbersome. Searching on multiple distributed databases is always more difficult than searching a single database. Worse, this architecture would require the disclosure of classified threat information to private actors, on a regular basis–a structure that we ought to try and avoid. And, of course, though we might begin by limiting use of this database to counter-terrorism activities, I have no doubt that political pressures will soon push us down the slippery slope to other attractive uses (e.g. combatting drug cartels or child pornography). In the end, we might fear that databases held by the private telecommunications companies would be the target of other legal process in the civil system. Finally, at bottom, we cannot be sure that large commercial data bases are actually more privacy protective than government ones. As Stewart Baker has said in assessing a comparable set of laws in Europe: “Not only does the ‘data retention’ requirement in European law cover more personal information, it comes with far fewer safeguards. In Europe, unlike the United States, the authorities need only ask for stored data; companies can and do “volunteer” their data without any court order or other legal process.” We should be skeptical that any system we design for use here in American would not be subject to the same sorts of issues. Non-NSA Determination of Reasonable Articulable Suspicion: One variant on the forgoing would break off a piece of the data retention proposal — namely the portion that requires external approval before NSA analysts access the Section 215 metadata database. Logically, this requirement could be implemented even if the database were housed in NSA rather than, as proposed above, in distributed databases at the telecommunications companies. In other words, Congress could add a requirement that every time the NSA determines that there is a reasonable articulable suspicion that a phone number is associated with terrorism, that the determination be promptly adjudicated before access is granted. The identity of “who” might adjudicate the reasonable articulable suspicion and “when” is capable of many variations–it might be the FISC, before access is granted; or it might be post-access review by the FISC. Or, it might even be pre-access review by some other portion of the Executive Branch, like DOJ’s NSSD. In all its variants, this proposal has several positive aspects to it. First, by requiring external non-NSA approval, we enhance the credibility of the determination of reasonable articulable suspicion. Second, by invoking FISC jurisdiction or DOJ oversight we limit the likelihood that the database will be subject to mission creep and repurposed to non-counter-terrorism uses. Third, and most saliently from a theoretical viewpoint, this paradigm of review after collection and in a control of use is more consistent with what we see as the technological reality of data analytics today. Regarding the modality of review, some argue that pre-use review by the FISC would be, in their judgment, too slow and cumbersome. This argument may not be persuasive—after all, many warrant applications are approved on an emergency basis. But if we were to reject pre-access judicial review the credibility of the section 215 program would be most enhanced by a combination of two other structures—pre-access approval outside of NSA within the Executive Branch (say at DOJ), followed by post-access approval by the FISC. Reforming the FISA Court: A wide range of proposed reforms have been suggested for changing how the FISA court is staffed and operates. These include suggestions to add more FISC judges to the process (i.e. have decisions made by panels); mandating more diversity of views among judges; changing the appointment authority, and so on. The grounds for these proposed reforms are a series of false and pernicious premises–ones that, regretfully, are fostered by our friends in the media. They suggest that the

Chief Justice has been preferentially appointing pro-government judges to the FISC,and that the FISC is a rubber stamp for government action. While that Manichean view of justice is one that many liberal doubters of the court system espouse, it should be resisted with every fiber of our being. In the first place, it simply isn’t true. As anyone who has read the recent FISC opinions recognizes, the judges of that court have been vigilant (some critics even say too vigilant) in overseeing the NSA’s activities, having called large scale programs into question on at least three occasions that are publicly known and having declared at least one aspect of one program unconstitutional. More to the point, we now know (and this is actually one of the few good results stemming from the Snowden disclosures) that the FISC requires substantive modification to roughly one-quarter of all FISA warrant applications. We don’t know what the comparable figures are for traditional criminal investigations (and I don’t think they are collected) but my own experience as a prosecutor suggests that the rate of substantive amendment is far lower in that context. And, of course, the premise of the entire argument is the ipse dixit that judges reflect their political views. As a society we must reject that premise, lest law become nothing more than politics by other means. It says everything you need to know about the validity of that premise that the original Section 215 order, authorizing metadata collection was (according to public reports–though it has not been declassified itself) issued in 2006 by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Judge Kollar-Kotelly was appointed to the FISC by Chief Justice Rehnquist (i.e. before Chief Justice Roberts’ tenure) and appointed to the bench by President Clinton. If the most controversial decision of which we are aware is a counter-factual to the general charge, we should doubt the charge itself. Worse yet, the cure would be worse than the disease. Imagine, if you will, subjecting FISC appointments to Senate confirmation. Nothing would be more likely to politicize the process. Likewise, attempting to democratize the process by spreading it across the circuits would be impractical (since most FISC matters occur here in Washington) and would simply devolve the criticism one

step lower. The problem isn’t with the FISC so much as its critics. Structural Changes: Finally, most of the more effective possible changes lie not in significant legislative tinkering, but rather in interstitial structural and operational reforms that improve the audit and oversight process without fundamentally altering the capabilities of NSA or the IC organizations . Here are a few, listed just in bullet point form, that might be worth thinking about: Make the NSA Inspector

General, a presidential appointment, with Senate confirmation; Require statutorily, the appointment of an NSA Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer; Change the jurisdiction of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to include all intelligence activities, not just those with a counter-terrorism focus; Create panels of cleared external reviewers for consultation by the DNI regarding new programs; Institutionalize privacy and civil liberties concerns by making it a factor in performance reviews; and Have the DNI annually report in a public forum on privacy and civil liberties matters.

Disad to your interpretation – no one rationally suggests an end to programs – oversight is critical to effective aff solvency ground

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 pg online @ http://csis.org/files/publication/141209_Lewis_UnderestimatingRisk_Web.pdf)Broad surveillance of communications is the least intrusive and most effective method for discovering terrorist and espionage activity. Many countries have expanded surveillance programs since the 9/11 attacks to detect and prevent terrorist activity, often in cooperation with other countries, including the United States. Precise metrics on risk and effectiveness do not exist for surveillance, and we are left with conflicting opinions from intelligence officials and civil libertarians as to what makes counterterrorism successful. Given resurgent authoritarianism and continuing jihad, the new context for the surveillance debate is that the likelihood of attack is increasing. Any legislative change

should be viewed through this lens. New Requirements for Surveillance: Better Congressional Oversight, More Transparency No president will take the risk of ending surveillance programs, but continuing them without increasing oversight and transparency will erode public confidence and trust . Surveillance programs create serious and legitimate concerns about oversight and constitutionality that must be addressed by the Congress. Congress needs to modify the 1970s intelligence oversight process to provide greater accountability on the size, scope, and accuracy of domestic collection programs, and increase transparency for FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) decisions. Much of what is secret could be made public in summary form without harm to national security. The United Kingdom, for example, publishes an annual report on surveillance programs that at a minimum makes the public aware of these activities and their scope. Our goal should be to increase accountability without an unacceptable increase in risk. Some proposed measures would do the exact opposite. Adding a permanent advocate to the FISA Court, for example, could return the United States to pre-9/11 gridlock for counterterrorism. The United States should reconsider foreign espionage activities in light of political risk and availability of other sources of information. We have not adjusted intelligence collection to the information age, where the availability of intelligence reduces the need for collection. Collection against some foreign targets can be eliminated without harm, given the availability of commercial information sources. The United States should also act to protect American companies against retaliatory trade

practices, where countries use surveillance as an excuse to promote their own industries. Almost all countries approach communications interception as an untrammeled privilege of the sovereign that requires little oversight or consent by citizens. This needs to change, not just in the United States. A good outcome would be to create an initiative to develop international norms for responsible state behavior in cyberspace that constrains surveillance by all

actors and protects both personal data and intellectual property

Oversight = Question of Who, How

And, oversight is the critical issue when investigating surveillance – comes from courts, executive, and congress

Rosenzweig 10(Paul, “The Sky Isn’t Falling,” pg online @ http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/08/13/paul-rosenzweig/sky-isnt-falling //um-ef)

Oversight Is Robust Greenwald’s principal complaint is that oversight of surveillance activity is inadequate. It must have been slightly embarrassing to have written that on the same day that the D.C. Circuit demonstrated the robustness of judicial oversight by limiting the use of GPS tracking surveillance systems. Perhaps Greenwald sees court oversight as separate and apart from other institutions of control — but that would be a

mistake. What we have seen, since September 11, is the growth of a robust and complex system of oversight and regulation of surveillance activity with many elements. It includes: courts that are willing to overturn executive branch action; investigative and legislative Congressional activity; the growth of investigative journalism in the blogosphere; the rise of the public interest groups (who are, in effect, the “canary in the

mineshaft,” serving as an early warning system of abuse); and a more empowered and aware public. To cite an example, nobody can doubt the extensive Congressional engagement over the past nine years on issues of surveillance. The Patriot Act has been considered substantively on four separate occasions. Various systems

like Total Information Awareness and Secure Flight have been subject to repeated Congressional scrutiny. And with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act, Congress has twice made major substantive revisions to the structures and rules governing surveillance. Non-governmental oversight is equally robust. I’m not one who views WikiLeaks as a beneficial development. But it would blink reality to deny its effectiveness as a check on governmental activity and to

understand that the panoply of oversight ranges from the official to the informal. Beyond these external mechanisms, Greenwald gives no weight to the truly significant structural changes we have made in internal institutional oversight of surveillance activity. The Department of Homeland Security was created with a statutorily required Privacy Officer (and another Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties), the first of its kind in American history. Now Privacy Officers proliferate in virtually every Federal agency. More recently, Congress created a Civil Liberties Protection Officer within the intelligence community. Inspectors General in the various agencies have been active in their constructive review, with the IG at the Department of Justice being particularly effective. If the Administration were to staff the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (a failure which I join Greenwald in decrying) it would be a significant further step. Surely Greenwald should at least be willing to acknowledge (if only grudgingly) the utility of these new structures. Of even greater significance, the very same surveillance systems used to advance our counterterrorism interests are equally well suited to assure

that government officials comply with the limitations imposed on them in respect of individual privacy. Indeed, there are already indications that these strong audit mechanisms work quite well. Recall the incident in the last Presidential campaign in which contractors hacked Barack Obama’s passport file. There was no lawful reason to disclose the file; it was done solely for prurient, political reasons. As a result, candidate Obama suffered an adverse consequence of disclosure which had not met any legal trigger that would have permitted the disclosure. The same was true of the Toledo Police Department employees who released “Joe the

Plumber’s” tax returns. A strong audit function quickly identified the wrongdoers and allowed punitive action to be taken. Finally, it is not beneficial to the debate to mischaracterize the precise contours of the law. Greenwald, for example, characterizes the National Security Letters (NSLs) as “the ability to obtain private, invasive records about Americans without the need for any judicial supervision.” But the truth is less scary: Under 18 USC §3511, an NSL recipient may file a petition for review of the NSL in District Court and the court may set aside the NSL request for records if compliance would be unreasonable,

oppressive, or otherwise unlawful. This not-so-small detail shows that Greenwald’s real complaint is not that oversight is lacking. Rather, he considers the level of oversight insufficient . It seems he wants NSLs to be subject to some

form of relevancy requirement, just as grand jury subpoenas are, or perhaps a notice requirement. Those are reasonable positions to take – though I wouldn’t take them. But to leap from there to an overwrought condemnation of the America as a “Surveillance State” simply leaps too far. While reasonable minds can disagree, Greenwald seems to think that any disagreement with his concerns is “dangerous” and unreasonable.

2AC Card??

Wittes 14(Benjamin, “Legal Safeguards, Not Disarmament,” pg online @ http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/11/benjamin-wittes/legal-safeguards-not-disarmament //um-ef)

The reason is that the technical capability for a surveillance event to take place does not alone amount to the reality—or likelihood—of that event’s taking place. And though the D.C. police certainly have the

battering rams to take down my door, there are at least two other less-visible barriers to their entry. One is the substance of the law, which forbids their

entry in the absence of probable cause of a crime. The other is the compliance and oversight mechanisms that ensure the police follow the law. If one has confidence in those two things, the technical capability of government to conduct an abuse actually does not pose an unmanageable threat. For much the same reason as I am not rushing home to guard my house, I have a great deal of confidence that the National Security Agency is not spying

on me. No doubt it has any number of capabilities to do so. No doubt those capabilities are awesome—in the wrong hands the tools of a police state. But there are laws and rules that protect me, and there are compliance mechanisms that ensure that the NSA follows those laws and rules. These systems are, to be sure, different from those that restrain the D.C. cops, but they are robust enough to reassure me. They are not, however, robust enough to reassure Julian Sanchez. Sanchez does not especially question NSA’s compliance mechanisms—nor does he question the integrity of the people who operate the agency’s programs. At a recent Brookings event, in fact, he declared of former NSA Deputy Director John “Chris” Inglis—with whom he was appearing—that “If we absolutely must have a nigh-omniscient, planet-spanning electronic Panopticon, then Chris Inglis is the sort of person whose hands I want on the lever.” Sanchez’s problem, by and large, is instead with the substance of the law, which in his view permits too much and poses inherent dangers. This is the right

focus. The fundamental problem here is not the government’s capabilities. It is not the names of scary-sounding programs. It is not the occasionally bombastic language of PowerPoint presentations. And it is not ultimately a

concern that the NSA will fail to follow the rules we give it. At the base of the NSA controversies, rather, is a lack of social

agreement about the proper contours of the rules . It is a lack of agreement about the nature and integrity of the judicial and legislative oversight mechanisms we have created and the degree to which they can reasonably function in secret. It is a lack of agreement about the degree to which the Internet requires patrolling both for threats to the platform itself and for evidence on the platform of threats exogenous to it. It is a lack of agreement about the relative weight we should give to each of several different kinds of security—both personal and collective security—against each of several different kinds of violation. But like a lot of NSA’s

critics in the current debate, Sanchez sometimes mingles fears about the rules with fears about the capabilities themselves. Indeed, he concludes with the arresting observation that “the question we should ask about … systems [like the NSA’s] is the

question we should ask about, say, biological weapons: Not whether we are satisfied with how (as far as we know) they are currently being used, but whether the consequences of their misuse are so great that, if and when it occurs, it will be too late to do much about it.” The analogy here is, of course, imprecise. Biological weapons are not being used against us every day—though cyber attacks, exploitations, and espionage are a daily reality. More fundamentally, we have not all opened our veins to a collective intravenous drip to which the whole world has access and can introduce pathogens the way we have all put the Internet on our desk, in our briefcases, in our pockets

and on our bodies. We can plausibly talk about banning biological weapons, at least at the state level. We cannot plausibly talk about banning Internet spying or signals intelligence or even offensive cyber operations. We are in a land, rather, in which some significant amount of this activity is simply part of the landscape and is going to remain so. And the restraints are not going to be—as with biological weapons—flat categorical bans on the development of capabilities or even on their situational deployments and use. The restraints are going to lie, rather, in the development of rules and compliance mechanisms in which we feel comfortable reposing trust. In other words, we need to separate more rigorously discussion of capabilities from discussion of rules. Yes, these capabilities are dangerous. But so are any number of other government capabilities—the ability to conduct air strikes, for example. Sanchez worries about programs that insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, implant back doors in routers, and track individuals. But despite his analogy to banning biological weapons, he is presumably not arguing against ever doing these things. If he is, he

arguing for a remarkable unilateral disarmament in an ongoing international cyber arms race. But if he’s not, the question necessarily pivots away from the inherent menace of the programs and precisely to the question Sanchez disclaims: “whether we are satisfied with how … they are currently being used,” and to what extent

the rules we have in place do or do not prevent the uses with which we are uncomfortable. There is no one right answer to this question. A democratic polity can come down in any number of places along a spectrum of aggressiveness and restraint, reflecting different allocations of different sorts of risk—the risk that NSA is tapping you as you tap your keyboard and risk that NSA is dark on subjects against whom we expect aggressive collection.

Curtail = Oversight

Curtail includes oversight and constraints on executive power

Buttar 13(Shahid, “USA vs. NSA: Legislative Efforts to Curtail Spying,” pg online @ http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18122-the-nsa-vs-usa //um-ef)

The sustained grass-roots uproar over domestic surveillance has reached the ear of Congress, which is considering more than a dozen legislative measures to curtail the National Security Agency's various programs that spy on Americans en masse. While most address merely the pieces of the problem, one in particular would address the many facets hidden even in the wake of the Snowden leaks. Strange bedfellows have coalesced in Congress to restore fundamental rights, including representatives of each of the major political parties. With a bipartisan establishment facing off against populists in each party responding to the outrage among their constituents, rarely has Washington presented so fascinating a drama. While the controversy surrounding dragnet domestic spying portends the inevitability of fundamental reforms, the only bill commensurate with mounting transpartisan outrage remains politically marginal. Meanwhile, meager proposals proliferate, skewing the debate and potentially undermining the possibilities of meaningful

restrictions on NSA spying. Rather than coalesce around shared proposals, members of Congress have instead clouded the debate by introducing a growing litany of bills that could potentially compete with, rather than support, each other. Transparency without substantive reforms Several bills present relatively weak alternatives by merely expanding transparency at the margins. For instance, the "Ending Secret Law Act" (SB 1130 and HR 2475) sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, would require the disclosure (of at least summaries) of the secret FISA court's classified opinions that currently remain hidden from Congress and the public. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, introduced an essentially identical measure in HR 2440 , the "FISA Court in the Sunshine Act of 2013." Revealing the substance of FISA court opinions to the public is crucial, given the court's modus operandi of

undermining constitutional principles in secret. Disclosure alone, however, does not restore any of the legal principles eroded over the past decade. And while these proposals would at least require summaries of even classified opinions, they leave the decision over what level of disclosure to the executive branch, which has proven its unreliability. Other proposals also aim to

expand transparency, not by revealing secret judicial opinions but rather by requiring additional disclosures from the executive branch. While helpful, like the disclosure bills, none of these suffice, either. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Washington, introduced the "Government Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013" (HR 2736), which would require corporations and government agencies to disclose aggregate data about their surveillance practices. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, has introduced a bill (SB 1452) to require greater disclosure and allow voluntary disclosure by private entities. Like the "Ending Secret Law Act," the Larsen and Franken bills would claw at the margins of NSA secrecy, without doing anything to actually

restrain its abuses. Transparency with some minimal substantive reforms Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Massachusetts, introduced the "Telephone Surveillance Accountability Act of 2013" (HR 2684) to force disclosure, as well as minimal judicial oversight. In particular, the bill requires the

FBI director to compile a report for the Senate and House intelligence committees about searches of telephone metadata. It also requires the government to demonstrate that its metadata search requests are justified by reasonable suspicion of material facts specifically relevant to an authorized investigation.

Corey 14(pg online @ https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37319/COREY-THESIS-2014.pdf //um-ef)

The U.S. system of governance is outlined in the U.S. Constitution. It gives the government its structure and it provides the government boundaries in its relationship with American citizens. It dictates that the U.S. will be a state ruled by laws. Those concepts frame the options the government has at its disposal for conducting intelligence in defense of the state. If dissatisfied with intelligence policy within the executive branch or intelligence oversight within the legislative branch the citizenry has elections at its disposal in order to change representation. Schmitter and Karl also identify the public realm where the government is authorized to act in traditional American liberal thought, is often narrowly defined to protect freedom. These concepts are directly connected to American perceptions of a secretive IC and the trust Americans have in their government. 1 Phillipe C Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What democracy is...and is not,” In Essential Readings In Comparative Politics., eds. Patrick H. O'Neil, Ronald Rogowski. 4th ed., (New York: WW Norton & Company Inc, 2006), 204. Schmitter and Lynn Karl derive their definition of democracy from Joseph Schumpeter who defined democracy as an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (pg. 212). However, Schmitter and Lynn Karl note that Schumpeter’s definition for democracy failed to address the role of accountability and other methods of competition beyond the vote that existed. 3 There is more to congressional oversight than the idea that unresponsive legislators fail to win reelection. Robert Dahl suggests that in any democracy there is a “democratic bargain” that exists between the government and the citizenry, whereby the citizenry agree to obey the laws enacted by their representatives even if the opposition was voted into power.2 There is a trust in the elected government and in the system to allow for predetermined future elections. Democracy only works if both sides trust that everyone will abide by the rules laid out in constitution. These foundational principles allow the U.S. government to enact legislation that builds an IC designed to spy on U.S. adversaries. They also begin to dig at the theoretical reasons intelligence

oversight exists. According to the U.S. Constitution, Congress shall have the power to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this

constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” 3 Herein lies the foundation for oversight, Congress

is enabled to ensure that the executive branch carries laws into execution as prescribed in Article I, Section 8. Joel Aberbach adds substance to Congress’ responsibility by suggesting that oversight helps prevent executive branch abuses of power and holds the president accountable for his actions. He defines oversight as “congressional review of the actions of federal departments, agencies, and commissions and of the programs and policies they administer .” 4 The 1946 Legislative Reorganization 2 Ibid., 208. 3 The U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription., (September 17, 1787). 4 Joel D Aberbach,

“Changes in congressional oversight,” The American Behavioral Scientist 22 no.5 (1979): 494-495. 4 Act created “continuous watchfulness” by the legislature over the executive branch.5 In 1976, the SSCI was created to service oversight of the IC for Congress and U.S. citizens. Each chapter in Crossing the Rubicon explores a different facet of IC oversight. Considerable scholarship is devoted to studying the SSCI and this research builds upon the past and adds rebuttals and nuance to the narrative of dysfunctional or irrelevant oversight. Chapter one explores growing trends in partisan membership on the SSCI and evaluates roll call data on national security related legislation over the last thirty years. Chapter two has a more narrow scope and studies the SSCI’s oversight of the IC in the cyber domain from 2003 to 2013. In a case study of open hearings the SSCI is evaluated on four principles of oversight effectiveness. In chapter three an informed public reveals its perceptions of intelligence oversight through a public opinion survey that uniquely advances scholarship on IC oversight. Chapter One. “Voting for National Security,” studied changes in partisanship among SSCI members and associated voting trends on national security related legislation. Membership data, dynamic-weighted nominate scores, and senate roll call data, alongside other control variables served as the foundation to a panel data set, from which conclusions could be drawn on changes in the SSCI over time. The data revealed modest increases in the strength of partisan leanings among SSCI membership over the course of its history. In addition, voting trends became slightly more polarized over time. The results supported other scholarship that suggested the SSCI had lost some of its bipartisan heritage. It highlighted a disconcerting trend towards increased partisan membership that could inhibit the SSCI’s ability to gather consensus for action. 5 Ibid., 493. 5 There is a line of thought arguing increased partisan membership on the SSCI is useful for energizing investigations and reviews. In preventing IC violations of law it is important to have members paying close

attention to policies and programs implemented by the executive branch, even if the motivation to do so stems from a place of political opposition. However, there is a thin line of effective oversight between politically driven oversight that degrades the trust between the IC and legislative overseers versus energized oversight motivated by a desire to improve national security, defend civil liberties and capitalize on political missteps of an oppositional administration. Chapter two tackled the thin line of effective oversight. Chapter Two. “The Cyber Domain: A Case Study in Oversight Effectiveness,” was a targeted review of SSCI oversight in the cyber realm. Reviewing open hearings over the course of ten years

illuminated the challenge to overcoming the topic du jour and providing effective oversight in a single policy area. The SSCI was evaluated during open hearing dialogue on its ability to offer the IC strategic guidance, ensure IC constitutional adherence, demonstrate legislative activism, and provide public advocacy. This qualitative assessment of SSCI oversight effectiveness in the cyber realm identified strong public advocacy in a bipartisan manner during open hearings. However, it also demonstrated the difficulty for policymakers to provide “over the horizon” oversight to the IC. “The Cyber Domain: A Case Study in Oversight

Effectiveness,” suggests legislators are paying attention to oversight issues as they arise and IC issues are not ignored. It also suggests the rhetoric between SSCI members in open hearings is productive and fosters a bipartisan atmosphere. The challenges to effective oversight 6 revealed in chapter two revolve around strategic guidance to the IC. Committee members in conjunction with the IC, the executive branch, and the private sector need to clarify the operating environment’s boundaries. Partisanship plays a small role in philosophically different approaches to IC freedom in the cyber domain, but overseers are most challenged by the complexity of the problem. More importantly, the complexity of the cyber operating environment, changing technology, and a lack of effective legislation leave SSCI members ill-equipped to provide very effective oversight. Chapter Three. “If Angels Were to Govern Men,” examined the public’s opinion of intelligence oversight. The IC is dependent upon public perceptions of legitimacy to ensure congressional support and funding. National security issues require some level of transparency to American citizens. Through an online public opinion survey it was possible to identify perceptions of IC oversight and assess areas legislators could improve perceptions. Survey questions were designed to evaluate the significance of IC oversight to the public, perceptions of oversight effectiveness, and the structure of congressional oversight. The survey helps to better organize IC oversight issues based on respondent opinions. The results suggested respondent’s believed the oversight committees were important institutions and somewhat effective. This conclusion was buttressed by perceptions the committees were in need of some structural changes to provide more effective oversight. A strong majority of respondents supported a “hands-on” approach to intelligence oversight with a broad diversity of opinions regarding the primary purpose of oversight. Respondents leaned towards allowing intelligence oversight more secrecy than transparency, while a plurality believed oversight failures were most often the result 7 of failing to understand a problem. Although, the results were not representative of all American citizens, they provided a useful data set from informed observers of intelligence oversight. Chapter three offers a completely unique assessment of

congressional oversight of the IC. In the context of the American democratic experiment, the institution of congressional IC oversight is in need of some changes, but remains relevant to the U.S. democratic system of governance and is considered important by American citizens. Crossing the Rubicon is a rebuttal to arguments that the SSCI should be dismantled. It is a confirmation of the perceived and actual added value of congressional oversight. It criticizes various aspects of congressional oversight provided by the SSCI, specifically the direction it provides the IC and the influence of partisanship. Some shortfalls in congressional oversight are externally influenced, such as the committee’s limitation in appropriating power. However, this research highlights shortfalls to oversight internal to the SSCI, which means committee members can make changes. All three chapters evaluate different issues related to

congressional oversight of the IC. However, without historical perspective of the formal oversight institutions in place today, it is impossible to understand the role and importance of intelligence oversight. HISTORY AND INTENT Before the mid-seventies, oversight of the IC was largely an informal process. Following the end of the Cold War, oversight was vested in the Senate Armed Services Committee and dominated by its Chairman, Senator Richard Russell (D- Georgia). Russell viewed the newly created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a positive light and for years 8 ensured any attempts of others to claim oversight responsibility of the IC was rebuffed.6 In time however, the Watergate scandal, the conflict in Vietnam and the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile contributed to the demand for congressional action. As the Cold War consensus

dissolved the New York Times article by Seymour Hersh in December 1974 laid bare a multitude of CIA indiscretions and became the catalyst for a congressional response. The Church Committee was established following revelations of CIA domestic spying and FBI operations

targeting civil rights activists and anti-war protests.7 Ultimately, the Church Committee found misconduct on the part of the IC significant enough to warrant the establishment of a permanent congressional oversight body .[8 ][9 ] Watergate, Vietnam, and conclusions of the Church Committee all contributed to growing distrust in the government. The mood of

the mid-seventies demanded increased oversight, but by creating the SSCI, Congress was forced to grapple with the conflict between personal liberty and national security as it related to the secretive IC.[10][11]

The SSCI was endowed with a number of significant responsibilities and left pining for others. They were authorized to legislate on all matters relating to the IC,

investigate allegations of misconduct and to monitor and audit programs. The Senate was given the responsibility to confirm senior IC officials, and the SSCI was to be

provided prior notification of covert actions and given access to sensitive IC information.12 However, the committee also competed with existing oversight institutions in two important regards.

First, it was only created with jurisdiction for authorizing the National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP) --meaning they authorized the CIA’s budget-- but no power to appropriate funds to IC programs.13 This left a constant tension between “hollow budget authorities” provided to the SSCI and “appropriated but not authorized” budget control in the Appropriations Committee.[14][15] Second, for intelligence matters of a defense nature, the Senate Armed Services Committee contained oversight responsibilities for many Department of Defense entities and left the SSCI with an institutional weakness regarding control over a significant portion the IC.16 Considering the two weaknesses, the only silver lining for the SSCI was the motivation for stronger internal relationships and better relationships with IC officials, which over time improved the committee’s credibility and stature.

Various Neg Stuff

T – Embassies

Embassies are sovereign states - Also a diplomatic space and an embassy is NOT the same thing

U.S. Diplomacy Center No Date("WHAT IS A U.S. EMBASSY?" Discover Diplomacy, diplomacy.state.gov/discoverdiplomacy/diplomacy101/places/170537.htm, MX)

U.S. embassies and consulates abroad, as well as foreign embassies and consulates in the United States, have a special status. While diplomatic spaces remain the territory of the host state, an embassy or consulate represents a sovereign state. International rules do not allow representatives of the host country to enter an embassy without permission --even to put out a fire -- and designate an attack on

Circumvention

The plan will be circumvented - recent FISC ruling proves

Bernstein 7/3 (Leandra Bernstein [reporter with extensive experience covering the US Congress], 7/3/15, "Former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Coleen Rowley claims that the US government will likely continue its pattern of domestic surveillance," Sputnik International, sputniknews.com/us/20150703/1024143850.html, MX)

Former F ederal B ureau of I nvestigation agent Coleen Rowley claims that the US government will likely continue its pattern of domestic surveillance . WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra

Bernstein — The US government will likely continue its pattern of domestic surveillance following the Monday court ruling to temporarily extend bulk data collection , whistleblower and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Coleen Rowley told Sputnik. “I think, if the past is any predictor of the future, that US government officials will find yet another way around any legal restrictions to continue their ‘Total Information Awareness’ project,” Rowley said. On Monday, the Foreign Information Surveillance Act (FISA) Court issued a ruling upholding the National Security Agency (NSA) to continue bulk collection of metadata, a program that was supposed to be ended with the passage of the USA Freedom Act in May 2015. The ruling was based on a motion filed by civil libertarian groups demanding an immediate end to the metadata collection program, which was deemed unconstitutional by a US federal appeals court in May 2015. Asked what the Monday ruling means for the future of government surveillance reform, Rowley stated, “I think the Judge [Michael Mosman] probably

answered this in his ‘Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose’ [the more things change, the more they stay the same] quote.” The new portion of the classified files published by The Intercept now reveals how easily it can be done: “as easy as typing a few words in Google.” The FISA decision to take advantage of the five-month period to continue mass surveillance did not come as a surprise “based on the past record of illegal government spying,” Rowley explained.

The FISA Court authorizes surveillance carried out by the US intelligence community. The Court is permitted to operate in secret, due to the classified activity it oversees.

The recently leaked XKEYSCORE program GUTS aff solvency

Lawyer Greenwald et al. 7/1 (Morgan Marquis-Boire [director of security for First Look Media, a senior researcher and technical advisor at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs], Glenn Greenwald [journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law], Micah Lee [technologist with a focus on operational security, source protection, privacy, and cryptography. He is a founder and board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation and the author of the “Encryption Works” handbook.], "XKEYSCORE: NSA’S GOOGLE FOR THE WORLD’S PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS," The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/01/nsas-google-worlds-private-communications/, MX)

One of the N ational S ecurity A gency ’s most powerful tool s of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided

by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless

people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s

communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well

as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers. These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that

tens of billions of records are stored in its database . “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. “At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both

processing power and storage.” XKEYSCORE also collects and processes Internet traffic from Americans, though NSA analysts are taught to avoid querying the system in ways that might result in spying on U.S. data. Experts and privacy activists, however, have long doubted that such exclusions are effective in preventing large amounts of American data from being swept up. One document The Intercept is publishing today suggests that FISA warrants have authorized “full-take” collection of traffic from at least some U.S. web forums.

The NSA will circumvent the 4th amendment - XKEYSCORE empirically proves

Lawyer Greenwald et al. 7/1 (Morgan Marquis-Boire [director of security for First Look Media, a senior researcher and technical advisor at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs], Glenn Greenwald [journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law], Micah Lee [technologist with a focus on operational security, source protection, privacy, and cryptography. He is a founder and board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation and the author of the “Encryption Works” handbook.], "XKEYSCORE: NSA’S GOOGLE FOR THE WORLD’S PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS," The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/01/nsas-google-worlds-private-communications/, MX)

By the nature of how it sweeps up information, XKEYSCORE gathers communications of Americans, despite the Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” — including searching data without a warrant. The NSA says it does not target U.S. citizens’ communications without a warrant, but

acknowledges that it “incidentally” collects and reads some of it without one , minimizing the information that is retained or shared. But that interpretation of the law is dubious at best . XKEYSCORE training documents say that the “burden is on user/auditor to comply with USSID-18 or other rules,” apparently including the British Human Rights Act (HRA), which protects the rights of U.K. citizens. U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) is the American directive that governs “U.S. person minimization.” Kurt

Opsahl, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s general counsel, describes USSID 18 as “an attempt by the intelligence community to comply with the Fourth Amendment . But it doesn’t come from a court, it comes from the executive .” If, for instance, an analyst searched XKEYSCORE for all iPhone users, this query would violate USSID 18 due to the inevitable American iPhone users

that would be grabbed without a warrant, as the NSA’s own training materials make clear. Opsahl believes that analysts are not prevented by technical means from making queries that violate USSID 18 . “The document discusses whether auditors will be happy or unhappy. This indicates that compliance will be achieved by after-the-fact auditing, not by preventing the search.” Screenshots of the XKEYSCORE web-based user interface included in slides show that analysts see a prominent warning message: “This system is audited for USSID 18 and Human Rights Act compliance.” When analysts log in to the system, they see a more detailed message warning that “an audit trail has been established and will be searched” in response to HRA complaints, and as part of the USSID 18 and USSID 9 audit process. Because the XKEYSCORE system does not appear to prevent analysts from making queries that would be in violation of these rules, Opsahl concludes that “there’s a tremendous amount of power being placed in the hands of analysts.” And while those analysts may be subject to audits, “at least in the short term they can still obtain information that they shouldn’t have.” During a symposium in January 2015 hosted at Harvard University, Edward Snowden, who spoke via video call, said that NSA analysts are “completely free from any meaningful oversight.” Speaking about the people who audit NSA systems like XKEYSCORE for USSID 18 compliance, he said,

“The majority of the people who are doing the auditing are the friends of the analysts . They work in the same office. They’re not full-time auditors, they’re guys who have other duties assigned. There are a few traveling auditors who go around and look at the things that are out there, but really it’s not robust .”

Iran Deal Solves US-Russia War

Iran Deal solves US-Russia war, despite Ukraine - Russia was central to negotiations, it helps their economy and it stops European missile construction

Herszenhorn 7/14 (David M. Herszenhorn [Reporter for the New York Times; Breaking News Award Recipient, The Society of American Business Editors and Writers 14th Annual Best in Business Contest, 2009], 7/14/15, "Russia Quickly Maneuvers to Capitalize on Iran Nuclear Deal," The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/world/europe/russia-quickly-maneuvers-to-capitalize-on-iran-nuclear-deal.html, MX)

MOSCOW — Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, lost no time in talking about the accord on Iran’s nuclear program. He was on television minutes after the deal was clinched, and even before the formal news conference had begun, announcing the landmark agreement to the audience back home and emphasizing the many potential benefits, strategic and economic, that it holds for Russia. The deal reopens the door for lucrative contracts to expand Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program, which Russia has been looking forward to for years. And it may neutralize a major reason the United States has offered for developing a missile defense system in Europe, a project that President Vladimir V. Putin and other Kremlin officials have said was a threat to Russian security. “We

all probably remember how in April 2009, giving a speech in Prague, the U.S. president, Barack Obama, said that if Iran’s nuclear program is successfully regulated, then the aim of the European segment of the missile defense will be dropped,” Mr. Lavrov said straight into the cameras of statecontrolled Russian television. “This is why today we drew the attention of our American colleagues to this fact. We will expect a reaction.” Of course, Iran’s nuclear program will not be declared “successfully regulated” anytime soon — certainly not by President Obama or by the many skeptics in Congress who will review and may vote on the nuclear accord. The White House is also likely to disagree with Mr. Lavrov’s characterization of Mr. Obama’s remarks in Prague. In his speech then, Mr.

Obama said: “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is costeffective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed.” Still, Mr. Lavrov’s lightning effort to capitalize on the deal underscored just how much Russia has invested in Iran’s returning to normal diplomatic

relations. Mr. Putin himself issued a statement on Tuesday welcoming the deal, underlining Russia’s role and noting that his government would move ahead with its nuclear power agreements and with strengthening bilateral ties. He described the accord as “important for the implementation of largescale plans of peaceful nuclear cooperation between Russia and Iran that got support

in the documents approved today.” Russia possesses some of the world’s foremost expertise in atomic energy, and has helped build and operate atomic reactors in Iran for many years. Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy company, helped build and expand

the Bushehr nuclear plant and already has contracts to build two more reactors there. Mr. Lavrov said Russia and Iran have “very ambitious plans for the development of Iranian nuclear power.” He also said Russia expected to have a major role in putting the accord with Iran into effect, including two areas specified in the agreement: the

shipment of lowenriched uranium from Iran to Russia in exchange for supplies of natural uranium, and the modification of the Fordo enrichment processing plant to produce stable isotopes for medical and industrial purposes instead of bomb fuel. Beyond the energy sector, Russia expects to make substantial sales of conventional weapons to Iran. In the late stages of negotiations, Mr. Lavrov made a hard, dramatic push for an immediate and complete lifting of an international arms embargo against Iran, apparently helping set the stage for a deal. In the end, a compromise was reached that will continue the embargo for five to eight years. Still, Mr. Lavrov suggested that Russia stood to benefit even sooner from renewed arms deals with Tehran because exceptions would be allowed under new notification and United Nations approval procedures. Mr. Putin said this year that Russia intended to deliver to Iran some S 300 surfacetoair missile systems that Iran ordered in 2007, three years before the United Nations imposed the embargo. He said that the

missiles were not covered by the ban because they were defensive in nature, and that because the contract predated the embargo, Russia’s suspension of it in 2010 was voluntary and could be lifted legally at any time. Russian officials have made great efforts throughout the nuclear talks to portray themselves as central to the decision making. Not only did Mr. Lavrov make sure he was the first of the senior officials in Vienna to go on television, his ministry was also first to post the full text of the Iran accord on its

website. In his televised remarks to Russian reporters in Vienna, Mr. Lavrov said Russia deserved credit for reviving the longstalled negotiations with Iran three years ago. “We managed to bring the negotiations from a dead end, because it was Russian experts who proposed the step by - step concept of reciprocity, in which every step of Iran to meet the demands of the international community would be accompanied by countersteps from the six and the United Nations to ease the pressure of

sanctions.” The “six” referred to the powers that negotiated with Iran: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. Mr. Obama, in an interview Tuesday with Thomas L. Friedman, an oped columnist with The New York Times,

praised Mr. Putin and Russia for helping to clinch the deal, even amid the tensions over Russia’s policies in Ukraine. “Russia was a help on this,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ll be honest with you. I was not sure given the strong differences we are having with Russia right now around Ukraine, whether this would sustain itself. Putin and the Russian government compartmentalized on this in a way that surprised me, and we would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the

other P5plus members in insisting on a strong deal.” Mr. Lavrov boasted that the final result “is fully consistent with the targets set out in the concept of Russia’s foreign policy, namely to achieve recognition of Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear activities, including the right to enrich uranium, with the formulation of this activity

under the tight control” of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The prospect of resumed trade with Iran may also provide some relief to the Russian economy, which has been battered by international sanctions over the Kremlin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and its support for proRussian separatists in eastern Ukraine. With

many important Russian companies now cut off from business dealings with the West, Mr. Putin has been looking eastward to Asia for new economic opportunities. In his remarks, Mr. Lavrov expressed some bitterness toward the West over sanctions against Iran that he said “really hindered our companies, including carrying out financial transactions

and realizing other projects together with our Iranian partners.”

Iran Deal Solves Econ

Iran deal improves the world economy and solves US-Russia War

Aslam 7/14(Naeem Aslam [Chief Market Analyst at AvaTrade], 7/14/15, "In Iran deal, the whole world wins," CNBC www.cnbc.com/2015/07/14/in-iran-deal-the-whole-world-wins-commentary.html, MX)

Historic deals are not achieved every day, but Iran has clinched a deal with its negotiators in the face of outright fear mongering and pessimism. Both parties have ended up with a deal which is beneficial for them, unlike what we have experienced in the Greek saga. Perhaps US Secretary of State John Kerry should have handled the negotiations there, rather than German Chancellor Angela

Merkel! World powers have curbed Iran's ability to produce a nuclear weapon. This is not only in the interest of more stable Middle East, but it also paves the way for more economic growth around the world. We believe that the Iranian nuclear deal is welcome news for many emerging and frontier markets. The deal is driving optimism across Turkey, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Pakistan and India. The Turkish lira, which is under constant downward trajectory

against the G10 currency, bounced back upon the news. Turkey is a major importer of oil, and with Iran producing more, it will not only bring Turkey's oil cost lower, but it will also help expand its exports of goods and services to Iran. Shares of

Turkish Airlines popped on the news as this raises more prospects of business travel between the two countries. The Iran deal will also be propitious for Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Both economies have been diversifying their economies into real estate and Iran is a neighbor. Vast numbers of Iranians go to Dubai for holidays. With sanction being lifted, this will persuade them to buy holiday homes and expand their businesses in this region. We've seen real-estate stocks rebound and

we do believe this trend will continue over time. Another frontier economy, which is being assessed by Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) to be included in its emerging-market list, is Pakistan. The country has been struggling with a shortage of natural gas in recent years and on Tuesday, it reconfirmed its commitment to a gas pipeline with Iran which will be completed once the sanction are lifted. Therefore, raising curtain on sanctions will not only help Iran to produce more oil, but we trust its other energy sector will also see a lift off. Two of the major players during these negotiations that cannot be ignored were China and Russia. It is relatively effortless to gauge why China wants Iran to sign the nuclear deal — so that there is increased availability of cheap oil. And Russia, by agreeing to this deal, not only burnishes its relationship with Iran, but at the same time it reduces conflict with the U.S. as U.S. sanctions are crippling Russia's economy, along with lower oil prices. Russia's play is certainly long term, and, while Iran

will be a competitor in oil markets, the country understands its losses will be covered through other dealings with Iran. Finally, the U.S. will benefit with lower oil prices. There is no doubt

that there could be more damage to the U.S. shale oil industry with Iran coming back online. However, given that shale rig counts have been picking up for the past two consecutive weeks even at current prices, this shows that the rig operators are finding more

efficient techniques. Moreover, with the average consumer saving more due to lower oil prices, we expect them to spend more — something which we have been waiting to see.

Alt Causes to FDA Cred Loss

Alt causes to FDA cred loss - Companies don’t report side effects

Rapaport 6/27(Lisa Rapaport [Senior Communications Specialist at Columbia University Medical Center], 6/27/15 "Some serious drug side effects not told to FDA within 15 days," Reuters, www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/27/us-health-fda-drug-reports-idUSKCN0Q11OX20150727?irpc=932, MX)

(Reuters Health) - Companies fail to report roughly one in 10 serious and unexpected medication side effects to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within a 15-day window specified by federal regulations to protect patient safety, a study finds. Drug manufacturers are also less likely to disclose

serious adverse events within this window when patient deaths are involved than when complications aren’t fatal, according to an analysis of 1.6 million side effect reports to the FDA from 2004 to 2014. “Timely reporting of adverse drug events is critical for ensuring patient safety,” said senior study author Pinar Karaca-Mandic, a researcher at the University of Minnesota

School of Public Health in Minneapolis. “Ours is the first study to empirically examine the extent of delays in reporting,” she told Reuters Health by email. Under U.S. regulations, when drug manufacturers become aware of serious complications linked to patient deaths, hospitalizations, disabilities, birth defects or previously unknown side effects, they are supposed to disclose these issues to the FDA more quickly than they would for minor problems or complications already described on medication labels, the researchers note in JAMA Internal Medicine. Karaca-Mandic and colleagues examined how many days passed from the time

companies were told of serious side effects – usually by doctors – until they reported the problems to the FDA. Overall, 160,383 serious adverse events, or 10 percent of reports, were not disclosed by companies within 15 days – including nearly 40,500 reports involving patient deaths. About 91 percent of the nonfatal complications were reported within 15 days, compared with 88 percent of cases involving patient deaths. It’s possible that the study underestimates reporting delays, and that encouraging clinicians to report

side effect directly to the FDA instead of to manufacturers might ease delays, the researchers suggest. FDA spokesman Christopher Kelly declined to comment on the study, citing a lack of opportunity to review the findings. While the delays aren’t surprising, the focus on the 15-day time limit doesn’t account for the

labor-intensive process manufacturers face in verifying adverse events before submitting reports to the FDA, said Kenneth Getz, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University School of Medicine. “There is no question that it is

critical that manufacturers report adverse events, accurately attributed to their respective products, in a timely manner to ensure patient safety,” Getz, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. But speed shouldn’t be prioritized over accuracy, he said. “Inaccuracies may lead drug safety professionals to draw incorrect conclusions, manufacturers may be wrongly forced to suspend and withdraw medications and interventions, health professionals may mistakenly alter their clinical practices, and patients may be denied safe and effective treatments,” Getz said. The FDA has the ability to suspend drug sales or withdraw approval for unsafe medications, a tool that might also be deployed when companies fail to report serious side effects in a timely fashion, Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, wrote in an editorial.

Drug Market Drives Spying

The war on drugs underpin SQ surveillance policy

Greenberg 7/17(Andy Greenberg [senior writer for WIRED, covering security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture.], 7/17/15, "Two Charts Show How the Drug War Drives US Domestic Spying," WIRED, www.wired.com/2015/07/drug-war-driving-us-domestic-spying/, MX)

THERE’S A REASON the television show The Wire wasn’t just called “The Cops vs. Drug Dealers Show.” Law enforcement’s surveillance in America—and particularly its ever-increasing use of wiretaps—have been primarily driven for the last 25 years by drug cases. And as the chart above shows, that’s now truer than ever before. Earlier this month the US court system released its annual report of every wiretap over the last year for which it granted law enforcement a warrant .

And of those 3,554 wiretaps in 2014, fully 89 percent were for narcotics cases. That’s the highest percentage of wiretaps focused on drugs in the report’s history, and it continues a steady

increase in the proportion of drug-focused spying. Twenty-five years ago, just 62 percent of wiretaps were for drug cases. In fact, that constant swell in drug-focused wiretaps may help to explain the general increase in all American wiretaps. In total, the count of US state and federal wiretaps has jumped from

768 in 1989 to more than four times that number today. But take out those drug cases, and the collection of wiretaps of all other kinds increased only 29 percent in those 25 years, from 297 in the year 1989 to just 384 last year. The past year’s record number of drug-related wiretap warrants is just the latest symbol of how the War on Drugs shapes how America spies on its citizens. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Hanni Fakhoury told WIRED in April, a list of surveillance cases that set legal precedents shows that practically every new surveillance technique American law enforcement tries out—whether it’s GPS tracking of vehicles, aerial surveillance with drones, or searching a cell phone taken from a suspect at the time of arrest—has first come to light in a drug case. Even the NSA’s bulk phone metadata surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 was first implemented for a decade by the DEA with even less oversight, as USA Today reported in April. “The War on Drugs and the surveillance state are joined at the hip,” ACLU lead technologist

Christopher Soghoian told WIRED at the time. To explain that connection between surveillance and drugs, Soghoian points out that drug dealers work in groups and require coordination, leaving them vulnerable to electronic spying on their communications. And he also argues that the frequent seizure of dirty money at the end of a successful case incentivizes a focus on drugs. Surveillance is expensive—a wiretap costs an average of $39,485 in 2014 according to the latest report—and unlike other types of crimes, those seizures mean that drug cases can pay for themselves. “When agencies bust a drug dealer and get $5 million and a kilo of coke, they keep the money,” says

Soghoian. “In many ways, the drug cases subsidize the surveillance technology used by law enforcement.” With

nearly nine out of ten wiretaps now targeting drug suspects, it would seem there are hardly any other types of surveillance cases left to subsidize. If the next 25 years are anything like the last, the drug war’s appetite for spying won’t be waning. But there are some glimmers of hope that the government may be ready to reconsider its war on drugs. Just this week, President Obama has been on a

justice-reform kick, arguing that the drug laws since the 1980s and mandatory-minimum sentencing for petty drug offenses have led to a mass-incarceration epidemic in America.

Asteroids Securitization Link

Asteroid threat discourse justifies the militarization of space

Mellor 7(Felicity Mellor [PhD in theoretical physics from Newcastle University and was a lecturer in astronomy at Sussex University before deciding to focus on critical analyses of science], 2007, “Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space,” Social Studies of Science 37/4, Pages 520-522, MX)

During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of planetary scientists and astronomers set about actively promoting the asteroid impact threat. They drew on an expanded empirical base, but also on narratives of technological salvation. Despite their concerns that their warnings were greeted by a ‘giggle factor’ and that funding remained

too low, they succeeded in capturing the attention of the media and of some policy-makers and in establishing the impact threat as a legitimate and serious topic for scientific study. By the eve of the new millennium, the meaning of asteroids had undergone a significant transformation. Asteroids had gone from being distant relics of Solar System history to being a hidden enemy that could strike at any time with catastrophic consequences. The reconceptualization of asteroids was accompanied by a reconceptualization of both space and astronomy. In Newtonianism, space had been conceived as an empty

geometrical abstraction in which God’s handiwork was displayed to the knowing observer. Space was both predictable and distant. Now, with the promotion of the impact threat, space was configured as the source of an enemy against which we must defend ourselves. This threatening conception of space matched the conception of space as a theatre of war promoted by the supporters of SDI.

Space had become a place, a technologized location for human action where wars could be fought and human salvation sought. Thus astronomy was also reconceptualized. Further developing the violent metaphors already appropriated by impact–extinction theory (Davis, 2001), astronomers recast their role as impassioned prophets of doom and saviours of mankind rather than as cold calculators of cosmic order. Traditionally, Solar System astronomy had dealt with the grand narratives of planetary

history and the timeless certainties of celestial dynamics. The technologies of astronomy – telescopes and, later, space probes – were the tools through which new knowledge had been sought. They were not, on the whole, instruments of action. Now, however, astronomy was to be prophetic and interventionist. As comets had been in a far earlier period, both asteroids and comets were now treated as ‘monsters’ – portents of Earthly calamities. It was the purpose of planetary astronomy to watch for these portents. Equally, it was the duty of astronomers to warn the unsuspecting public and to intervene to save the world. Planetary astronomy was transformed from the passive observation of the heavens to the active surveillance of the heavens, and the instruments of astronomy were

to be supplemented with the technologies of war. By the 1980s and 1990s, asteroid science, defence science and science fiction all presented space as an arena for technological intervention where an invisible enemy would be defeated for the greater good of mankind. Science fiction provided a culturally available resource that could give concrete form to the ideas of both asteroid scientists and weapons designers. Through narrative, the timeless and universal speculations of

science could be converted into a specific sequence of events. By drawing on narratives of technological salvation, asteroid scientists made their case more compelling, but they also became dependent on narrative scenarios shared by the defence scientists. Even as the scientists themselves attempted to pull back from concrete proposals for weapons systems,

their own discourse irresistibly drew them towards the militaristic intervention demanded by the narrative imperative. The identification of asteroids as a threat required a military response. Astronomer Duncan Steel (2000b), writing about the impact threat in The Guardian newspaper, put it most clearly when he stated that ‘we too need to declare war on the heavens’. Just as the overlap between science and science fiction

was mutually supportive, so the overlap between impact science and defence helped legitimize both. The civilian scientists could draw on a repertoire of metaphors and concepts already articulated by the defence scientists to help make the case for the threat from space. They would no longer be a marginalized and underfunded group of astronomers, but would take on the ultimate role of defending the world. Similarly, in the context of the

impact threat, the defence scientists could further develop their weapons systems without being accused of threatening the delicate nuclear balance of mutually assured destruction or, in the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks, of irresponsibly generating a climate of fear in the absence of an identifiable enemy. The civilian scientists attempted to still their consciences in their dealings with the defence scientists by suggesting that, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of SDI, the latter had lost their traditional role. This argument was naive at best. In fact, as we have seen, the US defence scientists had taken an interest in the impact threat since the early 1980s, from the time that SDI had greatest political support during the defence build-up of the Reagan era. Even at the time of the fractious Interception Workshop, George H.W. Bush was maintaining SDI funding at the same level as it had been during the second Reagan administration. If outwardly the Clinton administration was less supportive when it took office in 1993 and declared that SDI was over, many of those involved in the programme felt that it would actually go on much as before (FitzGerald, 2000: 491). SDI was renamed, and to some extent reconceived, but funding continued and was soon increased when the Republicans gained a majority in Congress.33 After George W. Bush took office in 2001, spending on missile defence research was greatly increased, including programmes to follow on from Brilliant Pebbles (Wall, 2001a; 2001b). Thus the defence scientists had shown an interest in the impact threat from the time of the very first meeting onwards, regardless of the state of funding for missile defence, which in any case continued throughout the Mellor: Colliding Worlds 521 Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on July 24, 2015 period. This is not to suggest that the impact threat was not used by the defence scientists as a means of maintaining the weapons establishment. Indeed, the impact threat offered a possible means of circumventing or undermining arms treaties.34 But it does mean that the attempt to access new sources of funding, while being an important factor in the promotion of asteroids as a threat, did not fully explain either the weapons scientists’ interests or the civilian scientists’ repeated

meetings with them. The asteroid impact threat offered a scientifically validated enemy onto which could be projected the fears on which a militaristic culture depends. Far from providing a replacement outlet for weapons technologies, the promotion of the asteroid impact threat

helped make the idea of war in space more acceptable and helped justify the continued development of spacebased weaponry. Arguably, with the Clementine and Deep Impact missions, the asteroid impact threat even facilitated the testing of SDI-style systems. The asteroid

impact threat legitimized a way of talking, and thinking, that was founded on fear of the unknown and the assumption that advanced technology could usher in a safer era. In so doing, it resonated with the politics of fear and the technologies of permanent war that

are now at the centre of US defence policy. In this post-Cold War period, scholars of the relation between military and civilian science need to examine carefully claims about ‘ploughshare’ or ‘conversion’ technologies. New technologies arise not just out of funding and policy decisions, but also out of the social imaginaries in which new weapons can be imagined and construed as necessary. Concepts such as ‘dual use’ or ‘cover’ also need to be assessed critically.35 One way of characterizing the Clementine missions

would be as dual-use technologies whose scientific aims served as cover for the testing of SDI technologies. Yet this fails to reveal the ways in which these missions were just one concrete output of a more fundamental conceptual alliance between weapons designers and astronomers. In this paper, I have attempted to show that by also considering the narrative context in which such initiatives are located, it is possible to throw some light on the cultural web that binds civilian science to military programmes. But the focus on narrative also begs a question: Which stories would we prefer to frame our science? Should science be driven by fear or by curiosity? Should it be aimed at creating technologies of war or cultures of compassion? These are normative questions, but they

are also precisely the questions that make the military influence on science such an important issue. Narratives are inherently ideological and a refusal to see them as such does no more to enhance the scholar’s objectivity than it does the scientist’s. The stories told by the asteroid scientists led them into collaborations with weapons scientists and helped fuel a discourse of fear that served a particular ideological purpose. This should be both recognized and challenged, not for the sake of regaining some impossible ideal of an undistorted science but because there are other stories, based on different

ideological assumptions, that we could tell in order to guide science towards more peaceful ends.

Aff T Answer

Oversight =/= reform

And, Oversight isn’t reform – two are distinct

Ombres 15(Devon, J.D. 2006 from Stetson University College of Law; L.L.M. 2013 from American University Washington College of Law; “Nsa Domestic Surveillance From The Patriot Act To The Freedom Act: The Underlying History, Constitutional Basis, And The Efforts At Reform ,” pg online @ http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=shlj //um-ef)

It goes without saying that the standalone bills addressing only small portions of the NSA surveillance regime will not alone address the overreach concerns prevalent among the public, corporations, and Congress itself. Even taken together, they do not meet the level of institutional reform necessary to adequately address what is occurring. Senator Feinstein’s proposal also does not sufficiently address concerns about the NSA’s surveillance programs; rather, it appears to codify the NSA’s ongoing activities, as it provides for additional oversight rather than reform as she believes that “[t]he NSA call-records program is legal and subject to extensive congressional and judicial oversight.”13

Stuff that wasn’t finished

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 pg online @ http://csis.org/files/publication/141209_Lewis_UnderestimatingRisk_Web.pdf)

There are legitimate concerns about surveillance and espionage, but the way to address these concerns is not to end surveillance—that would create unacceptable risk—or to create layers of rules and bureaucracy that return us to pre-9/11 gridlock or try to recreate pre-Internet standards of privacy. Change is essential, and the United States could consider several modifications to its existing practices: increased transparency, strengthened oversight, a greater role for courts, modernizing federal privacy laws, and gaining international agreement on principles for data protection. In 1976, the Final Report of the Church Committee (the Senate Select Committee created to study governmental intelligence activities and operations) stated: The capabilities that NSA now possesses to intercept and analyze communications are awesome. Future breakthroughs in technology will undoubtedly increase that capability. As the technological barriers to the interception of all forms of communications are being eroded, there must be a strengthening of the legal and operations safeguards that protect Americans. The Committee was prescient in its predictions, and its report led to the congressional oversight committees we have today and to FISA. But this is one of the problems that created the furor over surveillance—the oversight structure we now have is almost 40 years old and no longer fits the expectations of citizens for greater transparency into the operations of their government. A delegated approach, where only a few members of Congress were fully apprised of intelligence activities, was sufficient in the 1970s. It is not adequate today. New mechanisms for an appropriate degree of transparency into intelligence activities, particularly any domestic intelligence activities, are essential. The oversight process that has served us since the 1970s must change to reflect the expectations of citizens for greater transparency and greater accountability. Delegating responsibility to representatives is no longer by itself sufficient. The United States can strengthen the case for intelligence activities by providing the American people examples of where and how these programs have prevented harm. People will not take on faith or assurances alone that the benefits of surveillance outweigh the risk to civil liberties, and we harm national security by not discussing what these programs have stopped. Oversight involves more than Congress. The biggest change to intelligence oversight is that it must be expanded to include a greater degree of public oversight. This should involve annual reporting, more open hearings, and other activities, such as public speaking engagements by leaders of the intelligence community. The usual reason for not increasing public oversight is that intelligence programs are secret and must remain so. There is a degree of truth in this, but it should not be an excuse for avoiding all transparency. Whatever the merits of the argument that the surveillance programs cannot be made public even at some high level of detail as this would damage their effectiveness and warn our opponents that the lack of public knowledge and debate is what drives much of the public concern and misunderstanding. Democratic governance today requires greater transparency and debate, even for secret activities. Congress and the executive branch must expand its activities in this important public function.

Ex post facto releases on intelligence programs and activities, while useful, do not really provide for accountability, as they are too late to provide guidance. The more important structural change to oversight involves the executive branch. The intelligence agencies are the tool of the president for carrying out American foreign policy and for defense. Congress and the courts have the primary oversight responsibility for ensuring that agencies operate in a legal manner, but the president, while ensuring that espionage is conducted in accordance with the law, has primary responsibility for ensuring that agencies are operating in ways that make political and strategic sense. To do this, he or she must rely on the staff of the National Security Council. Success requires dynamic engagement and leadership among the agencies and a clear sense of U.S. goals. It is the NSC that must weigh, as in the cases of Germany and Brazil, when the political risks of espionage outweigh the benefits. A passive approach will lead either to excess or failure. The greatest weakens in the oversight structure inherited from the 1970s is its lack of transparency. Adding a privacy advocate to the FISA Court does not solve the transparency problem. It continues the existing overreliance on representative oversight rather than increasing public knowledge. An overreliance on representation is a key flaw in the current oversight system. A privacy advocate would slow the processes of the count—and one of the criticisms of the FISA process as it existed before 9/11 was that it was cumbersome and this contributed to a situation where “the information flow withered.”22 Adding an advocate to the FISA Court smacks of elitism, and a more democratic approach is preferable in the new political environment created by the Internet, which has changed public expectations about how much access to information they should have and where they should have a voice. The key to a prudent approach to surveillance is deciding what is “reasonable.” In making this decision the court, Congress, and the president have acted as agents of the citizen body. This is not a decision that can be left to individual agencies or even to the executive branch. The courts alone decide when a specific search is reasonable, within the limitation defined by the Constitution and by legislation passed by Congress. Court authorization must be mandatory. Some have argued that while this administration can be trusted to undertake surveillance in a responsible fashion, programs should be dismantled because some later government might be tempted to use them for political purposes. This is of course the origin of espionage oversight in America—the discovery that the president had used foreign intelligence agencies for domestic political purposes, leading to the Watergate crisis. As a result, the Congress placed a range of strictures on the domestic use of intelligence agencies and intelligence collection techniques. The oversight system we have now was designed to prevent such activities, and this safeguard would be strengthened by greater transparency and public awareness. The worry about misuse seems farfetched, and there has been no evidence that either this administration or its predecessor engaged in such misconduct. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of reforming privacy law. The United States has a hodgepodge of rules written decades ago. The weakness of privacy protection in the United States is one factor that contributed to the uproar over the Snowden leaks. There are two interconnected dilemmas in reforming privacy. First, an overly restrictive approach will hurt innovation and economic growth. Second, we are likely to get an overly restrictive approach if we do not recognize the change in public attitudes and behavior toward privacy. Privacy is not an absolute and consumers are less concerned about it (judging from their online behavior) than activists. It will take a long debate to reorient thinking about privacy and develop sensible laws, but starting this honest debate is essential. A final adjustment is international. Most governments surveil communications, and most have little oversight and less transparency in their surveillance activities. Surprisingly, the American oversight system is almost unique in the world. This does not vitiate the reaction to the

Snowden revelations, but it points in a useful direction. If NSA and America’s closest allies were to end all their surveillance activities, surveillance would continue unabated and privacy would not be greatly improved. This is a global problem—in Washington, D.C., for example, perhaps as many as six nations engage in some kind of communications surveillance against American targets. While agreement on rules of espionage is unlikely, it would be possible to reach agreement on principles of national oversight and on principles to protect data, both of citizens and companies. Data protection is an indirect way of approaching and regulating communications surveillance that avoids the problem that no sovereign will concede its ability to conduct espionage (and in many cases, even admit to it). The EU data protection rules are inadequate as they do not apply to Europe’s national intelligence agencies (whose actions fall outside the scope of Commission authorities), and are not widely observed in other regions of the worlds. Common understandings on data protection and on oversight and transparency would help to regulate the conduct of espionage in a new technological environment. The United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom have strong oversight systems and a degree of transparency into intelligence activities not found in most other countries. The UK model, with annual reporting (albeit redacted), comprises a special tribunal to receive and hear complaints.23 These are not substitutes for strong congressional or parliamentary oversight but useful additions. While each nation’s parliamentary culture is different, there are enough commonalities among democracies that best practices for oversight and transparency could be identified. The Risk of Attack Is Not Going Away These six steps would address the concerns created by surveillance programs. Now is not the time to dismantle them. But the use of communications surveillance for security must be reexamined and carried out in ways that do not pose risks to the values that are the ultimate foundation of our strength. Strong oversight mechanisms and greater transparency are the keys to acceptance and credible accountability. While every nation must undertake some activities in secret, democracies require that national priorities and policies be publicly debated and that government be accountable to the citizens for its actions. To rebuild trust and strengthen oversight, particularly for collection programs that touch U.S. persons, greater openness is essential. Too much secrecy damages national security and creates the risk that Americans will perceive necessary programs as illegitimate.