Contents

Courts Updates........................................................................................................... 1
Courts AFF Updates................................................................................................. 1
Congress Counterplan Answers: Court Key to Democracy..................................1
Human Rights Add-on.......................................................................................... 1
Courts NEG Updates................................................................................................ 1
Human Rights Add-On Answers............................................................................1
AFF Case Updates....................................................................................................... 1
Economy Updates................................................................................................... 1
Economic Decline Impact Extensions...................................................................1
Economic Decline Impacts--Racism......................................................................1
Internet Advantage Extensions............................................................................... 1
Internet Key to Economy Extensions....................................................................1
Internet Key to Tech............................................................................................. 1
Internet Solves Disease........................................................................................ 1
Bigotry Advantage Extensions.................................................................................1
Bigotry Advantage is Utilitarian............................................................................1
Legalism K Answer..................................................................................................... 1
Terrorism DA Updates................................................................................................. 1
Terrorism UQ: ISIS is losing now..........................................................................1
Links: NSA Surveillance Stops ISIS Attacks..........................................................1
Impacts: Bioweapons are Feasible/Possible.........................................................1
ISIS Impacts......................................................................................................... 1
Terrorism Link Turns.................................................................................................... 1
Terror Link Turns...................................................................................................... 1
Politics Link Turns....................................................................................................... 1
Politics Link Turn...................................................................................................... 1
Terrorism Non-Uniques............................................................................................... 1
Afro-Pessimism Links.................................................................................................. 1

Courts Updates

Courts AFF Updates

Congress Counterplan Answers: Court Key to

Democracy
(--) Courts prevent democratic backsliding:
Sam Issacharoff, 7/1/2015 (American law professor @ NYU School of Law,

Fragile Democracies: An Interview with Sam Issacharoff,

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2015/07/fragile-democracies-interview-with-sam.html,
Accessed 7/21/2015, rwg)
JB: You are one of the foremost experts on American election law. How did you get interested in the constitutional problems of
emerging democracies? Sam Issacharoff: Two events in the U.S. had the paradoxical effect of directing my attention abroad. The
precipitating events were the debates over the trade-offs between liberty and security in the wake of 9/11 and the role of the Court
in resolving the contested presidential election of 2000. Each struck me as a familiar point of crisis in democracies: a threat to the
political openness of democratic politics, and a succession crisis and the risk of a vacuum of leadership. I realized that I did not
have a good command of how these matters were dealt with in countries that faced real threats to security more regularly. And, I
watched with some amazement as the Mexican Supreme Electoral Tribunal handled the 2006 presidential election contest (their

The more I looked at newly minted democracies , as in

the more I was struck by the generalizable pattern of courts
serving as stabilizing institutions during periods of what I would term
democratic fragility. JB: A key claim of the book is that courts can play an important
role in keeping emerging democracies from backsliding into authoritarianism and
dictatorship. Why are courts able to do this? Sam Issacharoff: The paradoxical claim of the book is that courts can
help stabilize democracy at the moments when political power is most contested.
equivalent of Bush v. Gore) with relative ease.
Mexico and South Africa,

Since courts notoriously lack the power of the purse or the sword, the paradox is why there should be any expectation that they can
play this role. In many instances when courts have tried to intercede, they have failed catastrophically, with Peru and Russia as

courts reining in political power and that demands

courts help lower the stakes of what is up for

ready examples. But there are too many counterexamples of

some explanation. The main one offered in the book is that

grabs in any election.

The problem of the post-colonial periods of state consolidation of the twentieth century, and
particularly the third wave of democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union, is that most of the new countries were democracies
without a well-established demos, to borrow from Joseph Weiler. An election in such circumstances risks becoming a one-shot
referendum on who will hold state power to do in the rivals. An earlier effort to lower the risk was based on consociationalism,
formalized power sharing. The new efforts at democracy try to lower the downside risk by imposing a strong set of constitutional

Constitutionalism is then entrusted to courts that have

strong powers of judicial review and offer an institutional ally to those that stand to
lose in the electoral process. This is a strategy I call democratic hedging.
constraints on what governments can do.

(--) NSA surveillance crushes democracy:

JIMMY WALES and LILA TRETIKOV, 3/10/2015 (the founder of Wikipedia, is a
board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, of which Lila Tretikov is the executive
director, Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/stop-spying-on-wikipedia-users.html?
_r=2, Accessed 7/22/2015, rwg)
SAN FRANCISCO TODAY, were filing a lawsuit against the N ational Security Agency to protect
the rights of the 500 million people who use Wikipedia every month. Were doing so because
a fundamental pillar of democracy is at stake: the free exchange of knowledge and
ideas. Our lawsuit says that the N.S.A.s mass surveillance of Internet traffic on American
soil often called upstream surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the right
to privacy, as well as the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of expression and association. We also
argue that this agency activity exceeds the authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that
Congress amended in 2008. Most people search and read Wikipedia anonymously, since you dont need an account
to view its tens of millions of articles in hundreds of languages. Every month, at least 75,000 volunteers in the
United States and around the world contribute their time and passion to writing those articles and keeping the site
going and growing. On our servers, run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, those volunteers discuss their
work on everything from Tiananmen Square to gay rights in Uganda. Many of them prefer to work anonymously,
especially those who work on controversial issues or who live in countries with repressive governments. These
volunteers should be able to do their work without having to worry that the United States government is monitoring
what they read and write. Unfortunately, their anonymity is far from certain because, using upstream surveillance,
the N.S.A. intercepts and searches virtually all of the international text-based traffic that flows across the Internet
backbone inside the United States. This is the network of fiber-optic cables and junctions that connect Wikipedia

with its global community of readers and editors. As a result, whenever someone overseas views or edits a
Wikipedia page, its likely that the N.S.A. is tracking that activity including the content of what was read or typed,
as well as other information that can be linked to the persons physical location and possible identity. These
activities are sensitive and private: They can reveal everything from a persons political and religious beliefs to
sexual orientation and medical conditions. The notion that the N.S.A. is monitoring Wikipedias users is not,
unfortunately, a stretch of the imagination. One of the documents revealed by the whistle-blower Edward J.
Snowden specifically identified Wikipedia as a target for surveillance, alongside several other major websites like
CNN.com, Gmail and Facebook. The leaked slide from a classified PowerPoint presentation declared that monitoring
these sites could allow N.S.A. analysts to learn nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet. The harm to

Pervasive surveillance
has a chilling effect. It stifles freedom of expression and the free exchange of
knowledge that Wikimedia was designed to enable.
Wikimedia and the hundreds of millions of people who visit our websites is clear:

Human Rights Add-on

A) Curtailing NSA surveillance bolsters international human
rights:
Alex Sinha, 3/25/2015 (Aryeh Neier Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union

and Human Rights Watch, Better Privacy Protections Key to US Foreign Policy
Coherence, http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/03/better-privacy-protectionskey-us-foreign-policy-coherence/108469/, Accessed 7/22/2015, rwg)
While Washington has nominally supported internet freedom around the globe, its
surveillance programs have undermined human rights. For all its interest in
promoting human rights around the world, youd think the U nited States would be
more sensitive to the ways its own surveillance policies undermine those very
rights. Over the last few years, U.S. officials say they have spent more than $125 million to advance Internet
freedom, which the State Department describes as a foreign policy priority. The U.S. rightly links Internet freedom
with the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and association, as well as with the work of human rights
defenders. It makes sense, therefore, that the U.S. also actively funds human rights defenders, and calls out other
governments for mistreating them. Yet surveillance conducted by the U.S. government some of it
unconstitutional and contrary to international human rights lawcompromises Internet freedom, undermines the
rights the government seeks to promote, and directly harms human rights defenders. Two weeks
ago, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the NSAs upstream surveillance, which involves tapping the Internet
backbone to copy and search countless communications as they enter and leave the country. Among the plaintiffs
in that suit are human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Both organizations
send researchers around the world to document and report on human rights abuses, often in conflict zones or
countries with oppressive governments. Both rely on local human rights defenders to help collect evidence, and
both often solicit the testimony of victims and survivors of atrocities. Upstream surveillance undermines this critical
work by raising the costs of communicating securely and exposing and frightening away sources. Those sources are
understandably reluctant to provide sensitive information when they know it can easily be collected by the U.S. and
shared with other governmentssometimes the very governments they have spoken out against. Today, we are
releasing a report that analyzes state obligations to protect privacy under the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, or, a treaty that imposes legal obligations on the U.S. and many other signatories. Our report urges
the U.N. body that monitors state compliance with the ICCPR, the Human Rights Committee, to update its
authoritative analysis of the right to privacy. This analysis, called General Comment 16, was published in 1988,
and some of its standards have fallen behind the times. Since its publication, we have become so heavily reliant on
information technologiescell phones, the Internet and morethat there now exist detailed digital records of our
daily lives. Meanwhile, government capacities to gather, store, and analyze those records have grown exponentially.
The U.N. calls this the digital age. The State Department calls it an inflection point in human history. But
whatever label we use, this new reality explains why were calling on the Human Rights Committee to establish
modern standards that give governments much needed guidance on how to meet their privacy-related human
rights obligations. Our report is designed to help the committee revisit General Comment 16. It draws on a broad
range of existing human rights laws and standards to collect and organize relevant data points, distilling the
requirements they reflect. And, until the committee updates its analysis, our report will also help human rights
advocates in their continuing efforts to ensure that their governments respect the international human right to

Despite its lofty rhetoric about promoting Internet freedom and associated
human rights, the U.S. needs a new general comment on privacy as much as
anyone. It has resisted modernizing international privacy protection standards in the same statements it uses to
privacy.

reaffirm its commitments to privacy rights. It simultaneously funds secure communications technology and weakens
the security of such technology. Its surveillance programs have had chilling effects here at home on the exact rights
it aims to promote around the world. Now its being sued by major human rights defenders for hindering their work,
even as it trumpets its commitment to their cause. Privacy lies at the center of this tangle of contradictions. Of

we believe the U.S. should respect the human right to privacy because its legally
Its the first step toward a
coherent foreign policy on human rights.
course,

obligated to do so. But if thats not a good enough reason, there is another:

B) Human rights prevent global slavery and war.

William W. Burke-White, 2004 Lecturer in Public and International Affairs and
Senior Special Assistant to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs, Princeton University The Harvard Environmental Law Review
Spring, 2004 LN

The second effect of institutionalized protections of human rights is to set a

minimum floor of treatment for all citizens within the domestic polity. Even in a nondemocracy, minimum human rights protections ensure that [*266] rights are
accorded to individuals not directly represented by the government. By ensuring a
minimum treatment of the unrepresented, human rights protections prevent the
government from externalizing the costs of aggressive behavior on the
unrepresented. In human rights respecting states, for example, unrepresented
individuals cannot be forced at gunpoint to fight or be bound into slavery to
generate low-cost economic resources for war, and thus restrain the state from
engaging in aggressive action . On the other hand, in a state where power is
narrowly concentrated in the hands of a political elite that systematically represses
its own people, the state will be more able to bear the domestic costs of war. By
violating the human rights of its own citizens, a state can force individuals to fight
or support the military apparatus in its war-making activities. Similarly, by denying
basic human rights, a state may be better able to bear the political costs of war.
Even if such a state had fair elections, denial of freedom of thought and expression
might well insulate the government from the electoral costs of an aggressive foreign
policy.

Courts NEG Updates

Human Rights Add-On Answers

(--) No modeling: different countries interpret human rights
laws differently:
Eric Posner, 1/14/2015 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School,

Charlie Hebdo proves just how broken human rights law is,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/14/human-rights-lawis-basically-dead-thats-a-good-thing/, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
You might think our international human rights treaties would guide us to the
answer. But in reality, these treaties are broad and do not resolve conflicting sets of
values. For example, Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says that the right to
freedom of expression is subject to certain restrictions [as] are necessary [f]or the protection of national security

countries interpret these restrictions for

public order and morals in greatly different ways . In the United States, we hardly ban
any offensive speech or images. But child pornography is forbidden, as is offensive language on public
broadcasts. In Europe, many countries ban various forms of hate speech , including Holocaust
denial, but not images of Mohammad. In many Islamic countries, a wider range of
images and text deemed offensive or blasphemous are banned .
or of public order or of public health or morals. But

(--) International human rights laws not taken seriously:

Eric Posner, 1/14/2015 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School,
Charlie Hebdo proves just how broken human rights law is,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/14/human-rights-lawis-basically-dead-thats-a-good-thing/, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
Most governments did not take these treaties seriously when they ratified
them. Moreover, human rights treaties are often so vague as to be almost
meaningless, and unenforceable even when a meaning can be discerned. Article 19 of

the ICCPR is just one of many examples where countries are permitted to balance an interest protected by a right
with the interest in order and morality. The treaties also contain numerous rights unfamiliar to Americanssocial
and economic rights that guarantee a minimum income, health care, education, and pensions. Developing countries
have interpreted these rights to give them a right to development, and their citizens a right to securitywhich
mean that governments can sacrifice political rights when those rights interfere with efforts to reduce poverty, fight
crime, and battle insurgencies. In some cases, governments go too far, but in others, they make reasonable
tradeoffs between freedom and security that westerners do not face, in light of moral traditions westerners do not

The vagueness of the treaties is no accident. It derives from

fundamental disagreement about what they are supposed to accomplish about what is
understand. * * *

the human good, and what is the role of the government in advancing it. During the Cold War, two diametrically
opposed ideological visionsliberal democracy and communismflourished.

(--) Multiple alternate causes to the US living up to human

rights law:
Eric Posner, 1/14/2015 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School,
Charlie Hebdo proves just how broken human rights law is,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/14/human-rights-lawis-basically-dead-thats-a-good-thing/, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
Even western countries often fail to live up to the values they espouse. The U nited
States has used torture, targeted killing, and mass surveillance to defend itself from these
new threats. Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, fought in part under the banner of
human rights, brought anarchy rather than improvement in peoples lives. Many
Europeans have turned against their Muslim immigrant populations, some of whom cheer on Islamist radicals in
their homelands. You can expect French security forces to strengthen reliance on profiling and administrative
detention after the most recent terrorist attacks.

(--) Human rights treaties cant be enforced:

Eric Posner, 1/14/2015 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School,

Charlie Hebdo proves just how broken human rights law is,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/14/human-rights-lawis-basically-dead-thats-a-good-thing/, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
The human rights treaties cannot stop these tidal currents. The various institutions
created to enforce themlike the UN Human Rights Councilare paralyzed by
disagreement and starved of funds. Russian and Chinese leaders have deftly exploited ethnic and
nationalist sentiments in their populations. Leaders of most non-western countries know that while significant
minorities crave liberal freedoms, the western lifestylesecular, consumerist, individualistis repulsive to most of
their people, who no longer believe (if they ever believed) that western human rights are compatible with the

the goals of
the international human rights movement are not universally accepted; that the full
panoply of western-style rights is not appropriate for all countries; and that efforts
to implement them in foreign countries through law and coercion are not effective
ways of improving peoples lives. Human rights law is a dead letter .
practices they cherish. What is there to do about this? We can start by recognizing three facts: that

(--) Torture and drone strikes are alternate causes to US human

rights credibility:
Eric Posner, 12/4/2014 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School, The
case against human rights, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-spcase-against-human-rights, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties there are nine core treaties have been
ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet

it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen

on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and

political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and
economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained
ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as
diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights Europe and the United States have
floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its

The United States, which used torture in the

years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of
its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A
Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels.

recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasnt supposed to be
like this.

(--) Human rights treaties have empirically failed to improve

human rights:
Eric Posner, 12/4/2014 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School, The
case against human rights, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-spcase-against-human-rights, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little
evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of
people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped,
and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international
law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights
movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades
tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where
development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its
failures. It is time for a reckoning.

(--) China prevents successful international human rights

regime:
Eric Posner, 12/4/2014 (professor at the University of Chicago Law School, The
case against human rights, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-spcase-against-human-rights, Accessed 7/23/2015, rwg)
The rise of China has also undermined the power of human rights. In recent years,
China has worked assiduously behind the scenes to weaken international human rights
institutions and publicly rejected international criticism of the political repression of its citizens. It has
offered diplomatic and economic support to human rights violators, such as Sudan,
that western countries have tried to isolate. Along with Russia, it has used its veto in the UN security
council to limit western efforts to advance human rights through economic pressure and
military intervention. And it has joined with numerous other countries major emerging powers such as Vietnam,
and Islamic countries that fear western secularisation to deny many of the core values that human rights are
supposed to protect.

AFF Case Updates

Economy Updates

Economic Decline Impact Extensions

(--) Econ decline leads to nuclear warempirics prove
LaRouche, 11 (Lyndon LaRouche's standing as an internationally known
economist, and his exceptional successes as a long-range forecaster, are the
outgrowths of his original discoveries of physical principle, dating from a project
conducted during the 1948-1952 interval. He forecast, that, if the dominant powers
resorted to a combination of increasingly rapacious, monetarist forms of austerity
measures, the result would be, not a new cyclical crisis, but, rather, a systemic
crisis, a general breakdown crisis of the global system. Since the October 1987 U.S.
stock-market crisis, and the strategic, economic, financial, and monetary decisions
of the 1989-1992 interval, the existing global financial-monetary system has
become locked into the presently erupting series of seismic-like shocks expressing
such a global systemic, or general breakdown crisis. The most recent famous
conclusion by LaRouche came in his July 25, 2007 webcast, on the cusp of the first
visible signs of the current world financial breakdown crisis, when he said, without
hedging, that the current bankrupt financial system was finished. Since that time,
LaRouche's credibility in certain limited, but significant U.S. professional economic
circles, and internationally, has skyrocketed, and his international campaign for the
return to a Glass-Steagall standard of banking, and a new agreement among
sovereign nation states for a fixed exchange rate credit system, has gained
increasing international support, 11/11/11, How Economic Collapse Can Lead to
World War, http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2011/eirv38n44-20111111/2327_3844.pdf). SZ
Warsworld wars especiallytend to come on in a certain way . Its been that way during this century. It
was that way with World War I; it was that way with World War II. World War I began with the assassination of U.S.
President McKinley, which resulted in a fundamental change in policy under Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Teddy
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were allies, in effect, of the British monarchy, in the British monarchys plan for a war against
Germany under Edward VII, a war which actually broke out in 1914. The war was obvious; it was coming. It was clear from 1905 on.

It was associated with a series of international financial and related economic crises.
In the United States, for example, where we had the famous 1907 crisis, 1905-1907 crisis. The RussianJapanese war of 1905. The Balkan Wars. They kept coming and coming. And then, suddenly, there was World
War I. And then there was World War II. World War II was essentially set into place when the former
chief of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, together with other British influences and with
support from the Morgan and Harriman banking interests in New York, put Hitler into power in
Germany in January 1933. Once Hitler was consolidated in power, with the death of Hindenburg in 1934, then the march toward
World War II became inevitable.

One of the conditions which made this connection, was the fact that
the world had gone into a great post Versailles worldwide depression, which broke out
officially with the U.S. stock market collapse in 1929; which became consolidated with the
1931 collapse of the British pound sterling. And under these conditions, processes unleashed
led to war in 1939. It led to war involving the United States on Dec. 7, 1941. Similar conditions exist now.
The world has been, especially since a foolish decision by President Nixon in 1971, when he destroyed the existing world monetary
system, and set into motion a new, so-called floating-exchange-rate monetary systemthe present IMF systemthe world has been
sliding downhill overall. Though many people are deceived by lying propaganda, to believe that theres prosperity in the United

there is no prosperity in the United States, except for the upper 20% of income
brackets. They have more money, more cash. The 80% of the population, does not. ... [LaRouche also describes the economic
crisis in Europe and Africa.] These are the realities. It is in this condition, as this present financial system
approaches collapse, that the danger of war begins to emerge. Now thisthe current danger of
States,

war came to the surface beginning August of 1998. What happened? Well, the previous November, October-November, there had
been a major financial collapse which had been bailed out with hyperinflationary growth and asset values. That is, the central banks
began printing money, in effect, and pumping money into financial markets stock markets and other financial markets. So that
had led into a new situation by the Summer of 1998. The blowout occurred. It started with the Russian bond debt. In August of that
year, at the same time that President Clinton was being distracted by being called to testify before the Special Prosecutor, Russia
declared bankruptcy, state bankruptcy. As a reaction to this effect, [Vice President] Al Gore and others, behind the back of the
President, pushed through, fraudulently, a bombing attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. I believe, now the President knows

You have a system

which is intrinsically, systemically bankrupt. It cannot be saved. The only thing that can be
done, is action by governments to put the bankrupt financial system and the bankrupted monetary system, into
that was fraudulent; but nothing has been done effectively to correct it. That was the beginning....

government-supervised financial reorganization; in other words, to apply the thinking of a Franklin Roosevelt to the current

This creates a crisis, a crisis in which powerful financial interests are

totally panic-stricken, are driven mad by the fact that the system in which their investments are located, is about to be
emergency situation.

liquidated; that the nation-state which they thought they were eliminating with globalization, is the only institution which can save
nations from total destruction.

It is under these conditions that plans to move toward military

adventures, even wars, even general wars, and that risk of nuclear war is pushed by madmen ;
some in the United States, some in the Congress who dont even know what theyre doing, as well as in Britain and elsewhere. This
is the situation....

(--) Econ decline will cause nuclear war by 2025

McCoy 2010 (Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA
Interrogation, "From the Cold War to the War on Terror." Later this year, "Policing
America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the
Surveillance State," a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas
counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at
home, 12/6/2010, How America will Collapse (by 2025),
http://www.salon.com/2010/12/06/america_collapse_2025/). SZ
A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Dont bet on it. The demise of the U nited States as the global superpower could
come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a
more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025 , just 15
years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting. Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind

when things start to go truly bad, empires

regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the
Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great
Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States , counting from the crucial year 2003. Future
us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that,

historians are likely to identify the Bush administrations rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of Americas downfall. However, instead of the

, this twenty-first century

collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic
collapse or cyberwarfare. But have no doubt: when Washingtons global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a
loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to
have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a
generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise,
often sparking serious domestic unrest. Available economic, educational, and
military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly
by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II,
bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered
imperial

will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030. Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted
for the first time that Americas global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council
cited the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East and without precedent in modern history, as the
primary factor in the decline of the United States relative strength even in the military realm. Like many in Washington, however, the Councils
analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long retain

Under current projections, the

United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the worlds second largest economy) in
economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory
unique military capabilities to project military power globally for decades to come. No such luck.

toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as Americas current supply of brilliant
scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation. By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon
will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washingtons
last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, Chinas global network of communications
satellites, backed by the worlds most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the
weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe. Wrapped in imperial hubris,
like Whitehall or Quai dOrsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of
the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that I do not accept second place for the United States of America. A few days
later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedys prophecy that we are going to be a great nation
that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended. Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign
Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of Chinas economic and military rise, dismissing misleading metaphors of organic
decline and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway. Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more
realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that

65 percent of Americans believed the

country was now in a state of decline. Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional
U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and
naval maneuvers with China. Already, Americas closest economic partners are backing away from Washingtons opposition to
Chinas rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up this
way: Obamas Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too. Viewed
historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will
be. In place of Washingtons wishful thinking, lets use the National Intelligence Councils own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for
how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we
are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities
when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future. Economic Decline: Present Situation Today,

three main threats exist to Americas dominant position in the global economy: loss
of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of
American technological innovation, and the end of the dollars privileged status as
the global reserve currency. By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just
11 percent of them compared to 12 percent for China and 16 percent for the European Union. There is no reason to believe
that this trend will reverse itself. Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S.

was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400 percent

: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed
when it came to change in global innovationbased competitiveness during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October
Chinas Defense Ministry unveiled the worlds fastest supercomputer , the Tianhe-1A, so powerful,
said one U.S. expert, that it blows away the existing No. 1 machine in America. Add to
this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and
innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds
with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United
States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010.
Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners , most
increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline

by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation

of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism

of the dollars role as the worlds reserve currency. Other countries are no longer
willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best on economic policy, observed
shortage of talented scientists.

Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the worlds central banks holding an astronomical $4
trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end the artificially maintained unipolar system based on
one formerly strong reserve currency. Simultaneously, Chinas central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency
disconnected from individual nations (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist

After
years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally
loses its special status as the worlds reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of
imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury
notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under
Michael Hudson has argued, to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order. Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is

. Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India,
Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S.
dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising
unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and
divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and
despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric,
demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or
economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence. Oil Shock: Present Situation One casualty
far too late

of Americas waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by Americas gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China
became the worlds number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued
that this change means China will set the pace in shaping our global future. By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the worlds natural gas
supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National
Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could emerge as energy kingpins. Despite remarkable ingenuity, the
major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater
Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BPs sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on spillcam: one of the corporate
energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls tough oil miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up. Compounding the
problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they
wont), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging
into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative
sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36 percent of
energy consumed in the U.S. to 66 percent. Oil Shock: Scenario 2025 The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse
developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months)

look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollars plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a
basket of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery
contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into
building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Irans exploitation of the world largest percent natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran,
Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that Chinas new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian
Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego
Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport,
effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean. With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the Carter Doctrine, by
which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless
supplies of low-cost oil from that region logistics, exchange rates, and naval power evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an
insignificant 12 percent of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy
consumption. The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive
proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With
thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With
long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases. Within a
few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century. Military Misadventure: Present Situation
Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of
empire as micro-militarism and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new
territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or
humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power. Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever
deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a
dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by
attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington
has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters
large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires. Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014 So irrational, so unpredictable is
micro-militarism that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the
Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold. Its mid-summer 2014
and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft
are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16
fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U Spooky gunships rake the rubble with
devastating cannon fire. Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces
to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons
across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians
from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar. Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPECs leaders impose a new oil embargo
on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East.
With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf.
This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to
bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this Americas Suez, a telling reference to the 1956
debacle that marked the end of the British Empire. World War III: Present Situation In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China
began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American lake. Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As
Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britains global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its
export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific. With its
growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed
a national interest in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijings official Global Times responded angrily,
saying, The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.
Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds the capability to attack [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean and
target nuclear forces throughout the continental United States. By developing offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities, China seems
determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace. With ongoing
development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five,
Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an independent network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and
reconnaissance capabilities by 2020. To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air
and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth
in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan,
the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient
modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance. Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the
exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation
of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before. World War
III: Scenario 2025 The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by
a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we
can gain a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare, and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be
fought. Its 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home
electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens
suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommands operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries
that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army. ADVERTISEMENT The first overt strike is one
nobody predicted. Chinese malware seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. Vulture drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over
the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal
missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon. Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House
authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 Fractionated, Free-Flying satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California
transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their Triple Terminator missiles at
Chinas 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific
Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are
suddenly inoperative. As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail
to crack the malwares devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets
begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is
exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called the ultimate high ground: space. Within hours, the military power
that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty. A New World Order? Even if future
events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025
than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning. As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the
cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling
Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making
military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed. Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined
above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They
will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a
sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery. As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of
possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both
China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying
them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S. In a dark,
dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could
conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While
denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to
urban and rural wastelands. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion

people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make the feral, failed cities of the Third World the
distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century. As darkness settles over some future super-favela, the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of
repression as hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts Every morning the slums reply with
suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and
2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce
an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900. Another possibility: the rise of regional
hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian
world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region Brasilia in South
America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of
the former planetary policeman, the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or
some ad hoc body. All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of
decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position. If Americas decline is in
fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us
from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars. If only 15 years remain, the odds of
frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to
jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved
education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize
our countrys role and prosperity in a changing world. Europes empires are gone and Americas imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the
United States will have anything like Britains success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears
the imprint of its best values.

(--) Econ decline cause nuclear war

Lieberthal and OHanlon, 2012 (Kenneth Lieberthal and Michael O'Hanlon
are foreign policy scholars at the Brookings Institution and coauthors with Martin
Indyk of "Bending History: Barack Obama's Foreign Policy, 7/3/12, The Real
National Security Threat: Americas debt,
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/03/opinion/la-oe-ohanlon-fiscal-reform20120703). SZ

Drones, kill lists, computer viruses and administration leaks are all the rage in the current political debate. They indeed merit serious scrutiny at a time
when the rules of war, and technologies available for war, are changing fast. That said, these issues are not the foreign policy centerpiece of the 2012
presidential race. Economic renewal and fiscal reform have become the preeminent issues, not only for domestic and economic policy but for foreign
policy as well. As the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm.Michael G. Mullen, was fond of saying,

national debt has

become perhaps our top national security threat . And neither major presidential candidate is doing enough about
it. This issue needs to be framed as crucial not just for our future prosperity but for international stability as well. The United States has been running
trillion-dollar deficits, resulting in a huge explosion in the country's indebtedness. Publicly held debt now equals 70% of gross domestic product, a

, half of our current deficit

financing is being provided by foreigners . We are getting by with low interest rates and tolerable levels of domestic
threshold many economists consider significant and highly worrisome. Making matters worse

investment only because they find U.S. debt attractive, which may not last. COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012 According to the
nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, President Obama's long-term budget plan would allow publicly held debt as a fraction of GDP to
rise further, up to 75%, within a decade. Mitt Romney's proposal, featuring tax cuts and defense spending increases and as-yet-unspecified (and thus less
than fully credible) entitlement reform, appears worse. It would probably drive publicly held debt to 95% of GDP over the same period. Put differently,
though both are serious and pragmatic men, neither major party's presidential candidate is adequately stepping up to the plate, with Romney's plan the

? First, we are headed for a level of debt that within

a decade could require us to spend the first trillion dollars of every year's federal
budget servicing that debt. Much less money will be left for other things . That is a prescription
more troubling of the two. Why is this situation so serious

for a vicious cycle of underfinancing for our infrastructure, national education efforts, science research and all the other functions of government that are

Robust defense spending will be unsustainable too. Once we get in this rut,
a chronic economic decline would undercut what has been
70 years of strong national political consensus in favor of an activist and engaged
American foreign policy. One reason the United States was so engaged through the Cold War and the first 20 years of the post-Cold
crucial to long-term economic growth.

getting out will be very hard. Second, such

War world was fear of threats. But the other reason was that the strategy was associated with improvements in our quality of life as well. America became
even more prosperous, and all major segments of society benefited. Alas, globalization and automation trends of the last generation have increasingly

. Another decade of underinvestment in what is

required to remedy this situation will make an isolationist or populist president far
more likely because much of the country will question whether an internationalist
role makes sense for America especially if it costs us well over half a trillion
dollars in defense spending annually yet seems correlated with more job losses . Lastly,
American economic weakness undercuts U.S. leadership abroad. Other countries
sense our weakness and wonder about our purported decline. If this perception
becomes more widespread, and the case that we are in decline becomes more
persuasive, countries will begin to take actions that reflect their skepticism about
America's future. Allies and friends will doubt our commitment and may pursue
nuclear weapons for their own securit y, for example; adversaries will sense opportunity and be less restrained in throwing
around their weight in their own neighborhoods. The crucial Persian Gulf and Western Pacific regions will likely become less stable. Major war
will become more likely. When running for president last time, Obama eloquently articulated big foreign policy visions: healing
called the American dream into question for the working classes

America's breach with the Muslim world, controlling global climate change, dramatically curbing global poverty through development aid, moving toward a

world free of nuclear weapons. These were, and remain, worthy if elusive goals. However, for Obama or his successor, there is now a much more urgent
big-picture issue: restoring U.S. economic strength. Nothing else is really possible if that fundamental prerequisite to effective foreign policy is not
reestablished.

Economic Decline Impacts--Racism

Econ decline leads to more racism

Connor 14 (Steve Connor is the Science Editor of The Independent and i. He has
won many awards for his journalism, including five-times winner of the prestigious
British science writers award; the David Perlman Award of the American
Geophysical Union; four times highly commended as specialist journalist of the year
in the UK Press Awards; UK health journalist of the year and a special merit award of
the European School of Oncology for his investigations into the tobacco industry. He
has a degree in zoology from the University of Oxford and has a special interest in
genetics and medical science, human evolution and origins, climate change and the
environment, 6/9/14, Financial hardship can make people more racist, scientists
claim, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/financial-hardship-can-makepeople-more-racist-scientists-claim-9516092.html). SZ
People unwittingly become more racially aware and less generous towards those of a
different skin tone when they feel financially squeezed, according to a study
showing how racism thrives in an economic recession. A series of psychological tests has
revealed the deep-seated prejudices of white people towards black faces when they
experience financial pressures resulting from an economic downturn similar to the global crash of 2008.
When times are hard, people are more likely to judge mixed-race individuals as
black. Previous research in the US has shown that the more prototypically black a person is judged to
be, the more likely they are to be socially excluded, shot when unarmed in police
training tests, or sentenced to death after a guilty verdict The latest findings indicate that racial
stereotyping and discrimination in a recession is not just to do with institutional
racism but a psychological frame of mind, the researchers have suggested. When the economy
declines, racial minorities are hit the hardest . Although existing explanations for this effect focus on institutional
causes, recent psychological findings suggest that scarcity may also alter perceptions of race in ways that
exacerbate discrimination, according to Amy Krosch and David Amodio of New York University. We tested the hypothesis that
economic resource scarcity causes decision makers to perceive African Americans
as blacker and that this visual distortion elicits disparities in the allocation of
resources, they write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study involved a series of tests. The first investigated
how non-black volunteers judged the race of an individual based on a series of 110 morphed faces that ranged from 100 per cent white to 100 per cent
black. Those who believed that white and black people were competing with one another for resources judged from questionnaires were more likely to
categorise mixed-race faces as black compared with people who did not see competition between the races. The same test was run when the volunteers
were exposed to subliminal messages in the form of key words flashed on a screen for a few milliseconds. When words indicating a heightened sense of
resource scarcity were used, the volunteers showed a lower threshold for identifying mixed-races faces as black, the researchers found. A further test
showed that the non-black volunteers were more likely to judge a face as black when they felt they had been short-changed from a hypothetical

the blacker the perceived skin tone of an individual, the

more discrimination they face in predominately white society . It is well known that socioeconomic
endowment. The researchers point out that

disparities between white Americans and racial minorities expand dramatically under conditions of economic scarcity, said Professor Amodio, the studys

scarcity changes the way that the people visually perceive

another persons race, and that this perceptual distortion can contribute to
disparities, he said. Racial disparities in household wealth are known to increase
significantly between white Americans and African Americans during a recession
and this has been largely explained by institutional racism but the latest findings
suggest a subconscious form of racial prejudice , said Ms Krosch. The studys findings point to a new challenge to
senior author. Our findings indicate that

discrimination reduction, since perceptual effects appear to operate without a persons awareness. People typically assume that what they see is an
accurate representation of the world, so if their initial perceptions of race are actually distorted by economic factors, people may not even realise the
potential for bias, she said.

Internet Advantage Extensions

Internet Key to Economy Extensions

(--) Internet k2 econ development
Palis, 12 (Courteney Palis is a writer for the Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/internet-economyinfographic_n_1363592.html, Internet Economy: How Essential Is The Internet To
The U.S.? (INFOGRAPHIC), 3/20/12). SZ
Over the last 10 years, the Internet has grown to become a fundamental part of our
society. According to Nielsen data, 274.2 million Americans were hooked up to the Internet
in 2011 (more than double the number with access in 2000) and spent 81 billion minutes on social
networks and blogs. And now that the Internet is almost always at hand -- last year 117.6 million
people visited the Internet via a mobile device, per Nielsen -- it's not much of a surprise that
Americans spent a total of $256 billion on retail and travel-related purchases online
in 2011, a 12-percent increase from 2010, as noted in data released by comScore in February. So exactly how
essential has the Internet become to the U.S. economy offline? Global management consulting firm Boston
Consulting Group (BCG) sought to explore that question with $4.2 Trillion Opportunity: The Internet Economy in the
G-20, a March 19 report focusing on the Internet's impact on the world's top economies. The report, a second
release for BCG's Connected World series states

that by 2016, there will be approximately three

billion Internet users globally. (To put that into perspective, the total number of global 'net users is
currently pegged at 2.267 billion, based on Internet World Data's latest figures from December 2011 .) In the
same year, the combined Internet economy among G-20 member nations is
expected to reach nearly $4.2 trillion. Furthermore, BCG senior partner and co-author of the report
David Dean said in a company press release, "If [the Internet] were a national economy, it would
rank in the world's top five, behind only the U.S., China, India, and Japan, and ahead
of Germany." The report finds that in the coming years, online economies will play an even
larger role in the economies of both developed and developing countries. In the
U.S., the Internet economy accounted for 4.7 percent of the country's 2010 Gross
Domestic product (GDP) of $14.5 trillion, or approximately $68.2 billion. That number is expected to
pass $100 billion in 2016, when the Internet economy is projected to comprise
about 5.4 percent of the country's estimated GDP of $18.6 trillion. At present, the Internet
contributes more of a percentage to America's GDP than traditional industry sectors
like information and technical services, construction, education, agriculture, and
arts, entertainment, and recreation. And it comprises about 5 percent or $252 billion
of all retail. BCG researchers also asked U.S. 'net users how much online access meant to them. According to
BCG's report, 73 percent of Americans would give up alcohol, 77 percent would give up chocolate and 21 percent
would give up sex instead of going without the Internet for a year. Outside of the U.S., the Internet's impact on the

there are 800

million people surfing the web in developing G-20 countries. That's more than the
combined number of Internet users in all developed G-20 countries . One of these
developing nations, India, has an Internet economy growth rate of 23 percent, second
economies and societies of other G-20 nations has also been large. According to the report,

only to Argentina's 24.3 percent, reported The Times of India. Indian online consumers find the Internet so essential
that 36 percent told BCG that they would forgo showering for a year, 64 percent would cease eating chocolate, and
70 percent would give up alcohol -- just to keep Internet access. Meanwhile, the U.K.'s Internet economy comprises
a larger percentage of its whole economy than that of any other country. According to the BBC, the Internet
contributes about 8.3 percent to the country's whole economy and will continue to grow as the years pass.

(--) Internet k2 econ

Dean et al, 12 (Dr. David Dean is a Senior Partner, Senior Advisor, and

Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group GmbH. Dr. Dean served as a
Senior Vice President at The Boston Consulting Group GmbH. For several years, he
was the global leader of BCG's technology, media and telecommunications practice.
For more than 28 years, he has worked with many high-tech and
telecommunications companies around the world on issues of strategy and

corporate development, globalization, organization, The Internet Economy in G20,

https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/media_entertainment_strategic_p
lanning_4_2_trillion_opportunity_internet_economy_g20/?chapter=2#chapter2,
3/19/12). SZ
Since the day the first domain was registered in 1985, the Internet has not stopped growing. It has
sailed through multiple recessions and one near-collapse and kept on increasing in
use, size, reach, and impact. It has ingrained itself in daily life to the extent that most of us no longer
think of it as anything new or special. The Internet has become, quite simply, indispensible. By
2016, there will be 3 billion Internet users globally almost half the worlds population. The
Internet economy will reach $4.2 trillion in the G-20 economies. If it were a national economy, the Internet economy
would rank in the worlds top five, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, and India, and ahead of Germany. Across the
G-20, it already amounted to 4.1 percent of GDP, or $2.3 trillion, in 2010surpassing the economies of Italy and
Brazil. The Internet is contributing up to 8 percent of GDP in some economies, powering growth, and creating jobs.

The scale and pace of change is still acceleratin g, and the nature of the Internetwho uses it,
how, and for whatis changing rapidly too. Developing G-20 countries already have 800 million Internet users,
more than all the developed G-20 countries combined .

Social networks reach about 80 percent of

users in developed and developing economies alike . Mobile devicessmartphones and tablets

will account for four out of five broadband connections by 2016. The speed of these developments is often
overlooked. Technology has long been characterized by exponential growthin processing speed, bandwidth, and
data storage, among other thingsgoing back to Gordon Moores observation nearly five decades ago. The Intel
80386 microprocessor, introduced in the same year as that first domain name, held 275,000 transistors. Today,
Intels Core i7 Sandy Bridge-E processor holds 2.27 billion transistors, or nearly 213 times as many. As the growth
motors along, it is easy to lose track of just how large the exponential numbers get. The power of exponential
growth is illustrated by an ancient fable, repopularized by Ray Kurzweil in his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. It
tells of a rich ruler who agrees to reward an enterprising subject starting with one grain of rice on the first square of
a chessboard, then doubling the number of grains on each of the succeeding 63 squares. The ruler thinks hes
getting off easy, and by the thirty-second square, he owes a mound weighing 100,000 kilograms, a large but
manageable amount. Its in the second half of the chessboard that the real fun starts. Quickly, 100,000 becomes
400,000, then 1.6 million, and keeps growing. By the sixty-fourth square, the ruler owes his subject 461 billion
metric tons, more than 4 billion times as much as on the first half of the chessboard, and about 1,000 times global
rice production in 2010. The Internet has moved into the second half of the chessboard. (See Exhibit 1 .)

It has
reached a scale and level of impact that no business, industry, or government can
ignore. And like any technological phenomenon with its scale and speed, it presents myriad
opportunities, which consumers have been quick and enthusiastic to grasp .
Businesses, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs)the growth engine
of most economieshave been uneven in their uptake, but they are moving online
in increasing numbers and with an increasingly intense commitment . There are threats
too, some misunderstood, and policymakers and regulators alike are challenged to make the right choices in a fastmoving environment. As is often the case with fast-paced change and complex issues, many governments are still
trying to determine what their role should be. Meanwhile the rice pile on the next square keeps getting bigger. This

the benefits are large and

getting larger, identifies the drivers behind them, and examines their clout. It quantifies gainseconomic
growth, consumer value, and jobsin the context of the economies of the G-20. It demonstrates that no one
individual, business, or governmentcan afford to ignore the ability of the Internet to deliver
more value and wealth to more consumers and citizens more broadly than any
economic development since the Industrial Revolution. The economic impact of the Internet is
getting biggerjust about everywhereand it already has an enormous base. In the U.K., for
example, the Internets contribution to 2010 GDP is more than that of construction
and education. In the U.S., it exceeds the federal governments percentage of GDP.
The Internet economy would rank among the top six industry sectors in China and
South Korea. Policymakers in developed countries cite with envy the GDP growth
rates of 5 to 10 percent per year being achieved in China and India, particularly in
todays troubled economic environment. At the same time, they can often look past similar, or even
higher, rates close to home. The Internet economy in the developed markets of the G-20
will grow at an annual rate of 8 percent over the next five years, far outpacing just
report assesses the far-reaching economic impact of the Internet. It shows how

about every traditional economic sector, producing both wealth and jobs. The
contribution to GDP will rise to 5.7 percent in the EU and 5.3 percent for the G-20 . Growth rates will be
more than twice as fastan average annual rate of 18 percentin developing markets, some of
which are banking on a digital future with big investments in broadband infrastructure. Overall, the Internet
economy of the G-20 will nearly double between 2010 and 2016, when it will
employ 32 million more people than it does today. The growth is being fueled in large part by two
factors: more users and faster, more ubiquitous access. The number of users around the globe will rise to a
projected 3 billion in 2016 from 1.9 billion in 2010. Broadening access, particularly via smartphones and other
mobile devices, and the popularity of social media are further compounding the Internets impact. In the developing
world in particular, many consumers are going straight to social. (See Exhibit 2.) National levels of Internet
economic activity generally track the BCG e-Intensity Index, which measures each countrys level of enablement
(the amount of Internet infrastructure that it has in place), expenditure (the amount of money spent on online retail
and online advertising), and engagement (the degree to which businesses, governments, and consumers are
involved with the Internet). Big differences are apparent among the 50 countries examined, with five clusters
emerging according to their performance on the index in absolute terms and relative to per capita GDP. (See Exhibit

Consumption is the principal driver of Internet GDP in most countries, typically

representing more than 50 percent of the total in 2010 . It will remain the largest single driver
3.)

through 2016. Investment, mainly in infrastructure, accounts for a higher portion of the total in aspirant nations
as they are in the earlier stages of development .

Several natives on BCGs e-Intensity Index

the U.K., South Korea, and Japanare among those nations with the largest Internet
contributions to GDP. China and India stand out for their enormous Internet-related
exportsChina in goods, India in serviceswhich propel their Internet-economy rankings toward the
top of the chart. Mexico and South Korea have also developed significant Internet export
sectors. Among G-20 players, the United States benefits from a vibrant Internet economy, while Germany and
France tend to lag. The picture will change by 2016 as, for example, the Internet economies of India and the EU-27
grow rapidly to move into the top five. (See Exhibits 4 and 5.) Retail represents almost one-third of total GDP in the
G-20, and online retail contributes a significant and increasing share in many countries. (See Exhibit 6.) Nowhere is

Thanks in part to high Internet penetration, efficient

delivery infrastructure, a competitive retail market, and high credit-card usage, the
U.K. has become a nation of digital shopkeepers , to paraphrase Adam Smith. Several European
the impact more apparent than in the U.K.

economiesDenmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K.to name but fourperform strongly on BCGs eIntensity Index. But various barriers hold back the EU as a whole, the worlds biggest single market, when it comes
to cross-border e-commerce. In January, the European Commission announced plans to catch up, removing these

that e-commerce can

double its share of overall retail sales by 2015. As significant as the GDP figures are, they capture
only part of the story. In retail alone, G-20 consumers researched online and then
purchased offline (ROPO) more than $1.3 trillion in goods in 2010the equivalent of
about 7.8 percent of consumer spending, or more than $900 per connected
consumer. ROPO is a bigger factor in developed economies, as one would expect, but consumers everywhere
impediments and creating a digital single market. The commission believes

research a wide variety of products online before purchasing them elsewhere. In China, groceries are a popular
ROPO purchase; in the United States, cars; India, technology products; Brazil, electronics, appliances, and travel
packages. Multiple factors affect e-commerce and ROPO. In addition to regulatory barriers like those cited above,
the state of infrastructure for online and bricks-and-mortar retail plays a big role, as do Internet penetration, creditcard use, and consumer confidence in online payment systems, delivery, and fulfillment. ROPO spending is higher

In the U.S., online retail sales

totaled $252 billion in 2010, and ROPO added another $482 billion. ROPO dwarfs online
than online retail in virtually all the nations we studied. (See Exhibit 7.)

retail in Turkey$37 billion compared with $2 billionowing in large part to poor delivery infrastructure and
consumer concern over fulfillment. In Mexico, although low credit-card penetration and security concerns over
online payments hold back online commerce, Mexican consumers without credit cards can pay for their online
purchases at 7-Eleven stores. Like the U.S., Japan has a busy online retail market, which totaled $89 billion in 2010.
ROPO added $139 billion because Japanese consumers still prefer the experience of shopping in stores. Across the

Mobile shopping
using a smartphone to identify deals, compare products and prices, and seal the
deal while on the gois growing in popularity worldwide . As device prices fall, especially in
G-20, ROPO would add an additional 2.7 percent if it were counted as part of Internet GDP.

developing markets, increased smartphone penetration will have a dramatic impact on both retail commerce and e-

Mobile apps such as RedLaser, Google

Remembers make it ever easier for consumers to research

commercefurther blurring the lines between online and offline buying.

Shopper, and Amazon

products, compare deals, and make purchases as they see fit at any given moment .
Retailers of all stripes face an especially fast-changing and increasingly competitive environment in the years
ahead. With the rapid growth of e-commerce and its potential to disrupt both the top and bottom lines, retail may
be ripe for a transformation similar to the one seen in media. A multichannel offering that captures sales wherever
they occur will become a must have for most businesses .

Online advertising, a $65 billion

business in the G-20 in 2010, is forecast to grow 12 percent a year to almost $125
billion in 2016. In countries with more developed Internet economies, 15 to 30
percent of advertising spending has migrated online. Online advertising spending in the U.K.

overtook spending on television advertising in 2011and it now exceeds spending on all other media categories.
Consumer-to-consumer Internet commerce is a big factor in China, facilitated by websites such as Taobao, a
marketplace for goods of all sorts. More products were purchased on Taobao in 2010 than at Chinas top-five brickand-mortar retailers combined. The Internet is having a big impact on how enterprises do business and interact with
one another, too. Cloud-based data storage, integrated procurement systems, and enterprise social networks that
facilitate communication within and among organizations in real time are helping companies address a host of

With spending in the $3 trillion

range, both the U.S. and Japan lead the world in business-to-business e-commerce ,
procurement, coordination, communication, and fragmentation issues.

but penetration is picking up in other countries. South Koreas percentage of business-to-business e-commerce is
approaching 50 percent, as is Japans.

(--) Internet k2 accessing every privilege level, economic

sector, healthcare, and financial services.
Dean et al, 12 (Dr. David Dean is a Senior Partner, Senior Advisor, and

Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group GmbH. Dr. Dean served as a
Senior Vice President at The Boston Consulting Group GmbH. For several years, he
was the global leader of BCG's technology, media and telecommunications practice.
For more than 28 years, he has worked with many high-tech and
telecommunications companies around the world on issues of strategy and
corporate development, globalization, organization. The Connected World; The
Digital Manifesto: How Companies and Countries Can Win in the Digital Economy,
1/27/12https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/growth_innovation_conne
cted_world_digital_manifesto/ ). SZ
The Internet is for real. In many countries, it has become both a vital economic force and
a driver of growth. In 2010, it contributed up to 8 percent of overall GDP in some of the leading G-20 nations.
While the size of the Internet economy is much smaller in emerging markets, many of these countries are making

The Internet also conveys

sizable economic benefits that do not get captured directly by calculations of GDP . In
big investments in broadband infrastructure that will pay future dividends.

the G-20 nations in 2010, consumers researched online but purchased offline more than $1.3 trillion in goodsthe
equivalent of about 7.8 percent of consumer spending in those nations. In addition, in many leading G-20 nations,
the Internet generated a consumer surplus of about 4 percent of GDP. (This consumer surplus is the value that
consumers place on the Internet above what they pay for it in device, application, and access costs for everything

Further
economic benefits include business-to-business e-commerce and collaboration
within and across companies. Not all countries, however, are created equal. The BCG e-Intensity Index
from live streaming coverage of the Arab Spring and Justin Bieber videos to e-mail and video chats.)

provides a picture of the depth and reach of digital activity across countries. It measures a nations level of
enablement (the amount of Internet infrastructure that it has in place), expenditure (the amount spent on online
retail and online advertising), and engagement (the degree of involvement of businesses, governments, and
consumers with the Internet). Big differences were apparent among the 50 countries we examined, with five
clusters emerging according to their performance on the index in absolute terms and relative to per capita GDP.
(See the exhibit below.) But it takes more than a strong broadband infrastructure to become a nativeone in the
top cluster of countrieson the BCG e-Intensity Index. Investments in fixed and mobile infrastructure need to be
accompanied by other strengths, such as a favorable regulatory environment, strong payment systems, consumer
protection for e-commerce transactions, and a willingness on the part of governments, businesses, and consumers
to go online. While the basic macroeconomic story provided by the e-Intensity Index gives a broad overview of the
economic punch and prospects of the Internet, the view is more nuanced at the intersection of microeconomics and
human behaviorthat is, in terms of the ways in which companies and consumers are using the Internet. It is a
scene of rapid change, disruption, uncertainty, and potential. Companies have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to
reinvent everything about the way they do business .

Twenty years ago, at the Internets

commercial birth, its use was restricted to the relatively wealthy. Today it is almost

literally everywhere. Residents of many villages around the world are more familiar with Internet content
than with indoor plumbing or air conditioning. By 2016, 3 billion consumers, or 45 percent of the
worlds population, will use the Internet. This shift from a luxury good to an ordinary good is one of
just several changes under way as the Internet matures and becomes fully embedded in everyday life. From Fixed

When the Internet gained popularity in developed nations, users

accessed it through and viewed it as an adjunct to the PC. No longer. Increasingly,
the Internet is everywherenot just on mobile phones but also in cars, refrigerators,
and watches. In emerging markets, in particular, most consumers are more familiar with a mobile than with a
landline phone. By 2016, mobile devices will account for about 80 percent of all
broadband connections in the G-20 nations. From Developed to Emerging Nations. Emerging
markets have become a major engine of online commercial activity. The Internet economy
to Ubiquitous Access.

of China will approach the size of the U.S. Internet economy in 2016. In China, consumer-to-consumer transactions
through online marketplaces are also sizable. These resales are not part of official GDP calculations but
nonetheless have big ramifications for brands and retailers. By 2016, China will have nearly 800 million Internet
users, about the same number as France, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. combined. Emerging nations
will be responsible for about 34 percent of the overall Internet economy of the G-20 nations and for 48 percent of
their growth. From Passive to Participatory. Social media have taken hold everywhere, especially in emerging

More than 90 percent of Internet

users in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico participate in social media, a higher percentage than
markets. Indonesia has the second-largest number of Facebook users.

in any developed nation. Across all nations, social media are responsible for most of the new time spent on the
Internet22 percent of total Internet minutes. Some are predicting the death of e-mail, since Millennials prefer the

Consumers have far more power than

before, and companies will need to discover ways to meaningfully engage with
them. The shift to a participatory Web fundamentally changes the nature of companies interactions with
instantaneous nature of messaging and social media.

customers, from messages delivered to passive recipients to conversations conducted in real time. As the Internet
becomes ubiquitous, it naturally takes on the contours of the particular nations economy, reflecting its structure
and norms. Just as the ocean looks very different depending on whether you are at the coast of Maine, Mexico,

As a tangible presence in
national markets, the Internet can help enhance the strengths and overcome the
structural weaknesses of the traditional economy. The U.K., for example, has become a nation of
Morocco, or Malaysia, so too does the Internet. The Evolving Local Experience.

digital shopkeepers, but the Netherlands has not, even though the fixed-broadband infrastructure is much stronger
there. The reason: the Dutch are light credit-card users. The Czech Republic has a relatively strong e-commerce
market, reflecting the poor retail experience in its physical stores. Hong Kong, which also has a strong Internet
infrastructure, has relatively weak business-to-consumer activity because traditional merchants in this densely
populated shoppers paradise have an easier time holding on to nearby customers. Indias relatively small ecommerce market, on the other hand, is hampered by the nations poor distribution network, but dating and online
betting sites are highly popular. It is easier to make a payment using a mobile phone in Kenya than in Kansas.
Kenya is unencumbered by the infrastructure, regulations, and inertia that hamper mobile payments in developed
markets, and consumers are eager to access banking services. In China, the shortage of television programming
and weak enforcement of intellectual property laws have made the Internet a prime vehicle for entertainment.
About 83 percent of Internet users listen to music online, compared with 34 percent in the U.S.; 76 percent watch
videos online, compared with 68 percent in the U.S. Moreover, the nations one-child policy encourages the use of
chat rooms and social networking among young people with no siblings at home .

In emerging markets,
social media are the Internet medium and mobile is the access medium of choice.
Consumers have leapt past e-mail, portals, and the other stages of the Internet experience in much the same way
that they jumped straight to mobile phones, bypassing landlines altogether. Straight to social and mobile-only
access are powerful new trends that are most prominent in emerging markets but are also prevalent among young
consumers in developed markets. The Retail Experience. Online purchases will account for more than 20 percent of
retailing in the U.K. and between 8 and 12 percent in other leading economies by 2016. But online retail is affecting
the shopping experience in all nations, even those without a large e-commerce footprint. By allowing businesses
and consumers to conduct fast and high-quality interactive research, it is creating better-informed shoppers and
improving the offline shopping experience as well. For example, the online tools at Ikeas website allow shoppers to
see how a piece of furniture will actually look in their home. The world is rapidly becoming populated by companies
of all shapes and sizes that have the Internet in their DNA and have built up strong digital balance sheets. They are
Main Streets version of Amazon.com. For example, Wiggly Wigglers, a U.K. organic-garden-supply shop, and
Hiwave Dry Seafood, a Hong Kong vendor, were founded prior to the creation of the commercial Internet and
figured out how to thrive on it. The services industry is not immune either: Open English, a company born in the
cloud, teaches English to Latin Americans. All three are companies in traditional categories that are comfortable
seeing the world as their marketplace, creating an online brand and presence, analyzing data patterns, using apps
in the cloud, and taking advantage of the network effects that accrue to companies that build a loyal customer base
early. Small Is Beautiful. Many smaller companies, which do not have the advantages of scale and market position

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs),

historically the growth engine of national economies, are also becoming Internet
successes. Over the last 18 months, BCG has surveyed employees at more than 15,000 companies with fewer
but can innovate more quickly, are leading the way.

than 250 employees in the worlds biggest economies (in the U.S., the cutoff was 500 employees). We divided the

The Internet is driving

sales and job growth at these companies. In the U.K., the overall sales of high- and medium-Web
survey respondents into four groups: high Web, medium Web, low Web, and no Web.

businesses grew by 4.1 percent annually from 2007 through 2010about seven times faster than the overall sales
of low- and no-Web businesses. In Hong Kong, 79 percent of high- and medium-Web businesses reported higher
sales over the past five years, compared with 63 percent of no-Web businesses. In the U.S, high- and medium-Web
businesses expect to grow by 17 percent over the next three years, compared with 12 percent for their low-Web
and no-Web counterparts. High- and medium-Web businesses have also increased the size of their workforces to
support their Internet operations over the past three years, an otherwise dire period for job growth in the developed

One of the most interesting findings is that in most nations, high-Web

businesses tend to engage their workforces more broadly than their low-Web peers.
Employees other than owners and founders at these companies have a much
greater ability to introduce new online services and initiatives . From flower shops to
economies.

restaurants to real estate operations, SME owners who do not feel comfortable with technology themselves look to
their employees to help them build a social-media presence and exploit online business opportunities. SMEs are
rapidly adopting social-media tools to increase the richness of their interactions with customers and employees.

Over 40 percent of these businesses in the U.S. and the U.K. report using socialmedia tools. Among high-Web businesses, 60 percent use social media as a source
of new ideas from customers, and more than 45 percent have created socialnetworking groups. Digital Champions. Some large companies, too, have figured out how to thrive in the
digital world. In many of its markets, Tesco is the leading retailer, with the traditional advantages of infrastructure,
brand, locations, and distribution. In South Korea, however, Tesco was trailing the market leader, E-mart, in sales
and number of stores. So it turned to the Internet to design an innovative strategy. It created virtual shops in
subway stationsbillboards designed to replicate the look of store shelves, down to the arrangement of products.
With their mobile phone, commuters can scan the QR code of any item on display, buy it, and have it delivered to
their homes that day. These virtual displays enabled Tesco to turn the time spent waiting for a train into shopping
timeand become South Koreas number-one online supermarket and its second-largest supermarket overall.
Chinas Tencent has a broad portfolio of Internet services , but it is known mainly for its messaging service, QQ,
which offers its more than 700 million users games and opportunities to purchase virtual goods. Its success,
however, is built on more than just a fad. Tencent is relentlessly focused on understanding consumers and
delivering services that are in demand. It has tailored its products to the specific interests, needs, and usage
profiles of Chinese Internet consumers. It has recognized local trends, such as the popularity of instant messaging
and social networking, and the unmet demand for online and home entertainment in a nation where television
penetration is still low. By following a deliberate strategy to build traffic, create stickiness, and then generate
revenues, Tencent has become the number-two global leader in creating shareholder value over the past five years.
Many companies not under immediate threat are nonetheless taking steps to use the Internet to their advantage. In
emerging markets, traditional companies wanting to build their online retail presence are creatively overcoming
constraints. In Mexico, for example, 7-Eleven stores allow offline payment for online purchases. In China and India,
cash on delivery is becoming a standard form of payment in online transactions. In Argentina, where poor roads and
heavy congestion make home delivery difficult, Wal-Mart limits deliveries to the immediate neighborhood
surrounding its stores and encourages store pickup of online purchases. Burberry, a British fashion house founded in
1856 that allocates 60 percent of its marketing budget to digital initiatives, has generated a boost in sales through
such efforts. It broadcasts live 3D video streams of fashion shows in its stores and on the iPad. Shoppers can order
clothes before they are available on store shelves. When Burberry recently launched a new fragrance, Body, it
received 225,000 requests for samples through Facebook. Industry Disruption. Many industries have been and will
be disrupted by the Internet. While posing challenges, disruption can also create opportunities. For example, over
time and to varying degrees, record companies have discovered how to live in the digital world. Universal Music,

A material portion of its revenue

now comes from merchandising, licensing, ticketing, touring, e-commerce, and
digital-music partnerships. Health care is an industry that could be ready to
experience the disruptive force of the Internet. It took $300 million and 13 years to
map the first human genome. Now, less than ten years later, the cost is only
$3,000, and every five months it is cut in half. Soon the cost to fully sequence a
human genome will be $100. But unlocking the causes of illness and developing cures do not depend
only on falling per-unit costs. The health care industry also needs to mine and combine
genomic data and to synthesize this information with medical records and data
about costs and patient outcomes. If the leading health-care and insurance
the largest record label, has diversified away from recorded music.

providers fail to figure out how to deliver better diagnoses, medicines, and
treatmentsand better value in the processan attacker certainly will. The same
type of information explosion is occurring in financial services, where the
proliferation of smart cards, debit cards, and mobile payments is creating rich veins
of intelligence about consumer behavior that are waiting to be tappe d. Likewise in the
utility industry, smart meters and connectivity between the grid and the Internet are creating an environment in
which information about energy usage is almost as important as energy itself. In developed countries, the Internet
can support a return to economic growth. In emerging economies, it creates the potential for enormous economic
and social development. But the growth of the Internet economy is not a foregone conclusion. Our projection of a
$4.2 trillion Internet economy among the G-20 nations by 2016 is grounded in analysis but also assumes that
governments will not take actions that impede progress.

(--) The internet creates jobs and bolsters the econ

Manyika and Roxburgh 11 (James Manyika and Charles Roxburgh are

directors at Mckinsey Global Institute in San Fransisco and London, October 2011,
The great transformer: The impact of the Internet on economic growth and
prosperity
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_great_transform
er ). SZ
In a paper prepared for the Foreign Commonwealth Office International Cyber Conference, MGI examines what more

The Internet is changing the way we work,

socialize, create and share information, and organize the flow of people, ideas, and
things around the globe. Yet the magnitude of this transformation is still underappreciated. The
Internet accounted for 21 percent of the GDP growth in mature economies over the
past 5 years. In that time, we went from a few thousand students accessing Facebook to more than 800 million
users around the world, including many leading firms, who regularly update their pages and share content.
While large enterprises and national economies have reaped major benefits from
this technological revolution, individual consumers and small, upstart entrepreneurs
have been some of the greatest beneficiaries from the Internets empowering
influence. If Internet were a sector, it would have a greater weight in GDP than
agriculture or utilities. And yet we are still in the early stages of the transformations the Internet will
unleash and the opportunities it will foster. Many more technological innovations and enabling
capabilities such as payments platforms are likely to emerge, while the ability to
connect many more people and things and engage them more deeply will continue
to expand exponentially. As a result, governments, policy makers, and businesses
must recognize and embrace the enormous opportunities the Internet can create ,
can be done to fully capture the benefits of the Internet.

even as they work to address the risks to security and privacy the Internet brings. As the Internets evolution over
the past two decades has demonstrated, such work must include helping to nurture the development of a healthy
Internet ecosystem, one that boosts infrastructure and access, builds a competitive environment that benefits users
and lets innovators and entrepreneurs thrive, and nurtures human capital. Together these elements can maximize
the continued impact of the Internet on economic growth and prosperity.

(--) The Industrial Internet of Things create new markets and

enable workers to undertake more advanced tasks
Daugherty, 15 (Paul Daugherty is Accentures chief technology officer and also
leads the Accenture Technology Innovation & Ecosystem groups, writing for Forbes,
Transforming Economic Growth With The Industrial Internet Of Things, 1/21/15,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2015/01/21/transforming-economicgrowth-with-the-industrial-internet-of-things/) SZ
As the world struggles to leave behind a period of weak demand and poor
productivity growth, many business and government leaders are looking to the next
wave of technology innovation to revitalize their economies. The Industrial Internet
of Things (IIoT) could be the largest driver of economic growth and employment in
the next decade. But much of its potential is at risk of being lost as companies and policy makers fail to

The IIoT will create new markets as data from billions of connected
devices unleashes an era of services innovation that will generate new revenue
streams for manufacturers and those who serve the industrial sectors. Its impact
will extend to two-thirds of the world economy. It could add as much as $14.2 trillion
to 20 of the worlds major economies over the next 15 years , according to the latest analysis
exploit the opportunity.

from Accenture. It also promises a greater fillip to hard-pressed, mature economies than to their emerging market
competitors. This would help restore a more healthy trade balance in the global economy. The Industrial Internet of

Today, global positioning system (GPS) navigation, smart phone

health kits and connected vehicles make life more convenient for consumers. But the
Things is already here.

industrial world has barely begun to take note. Where it has, companies have used Industrial Internet of Things

Oil refiners use wearable

devices that protect workers with gas sensors that can call for help when they
detect dangerous events. Miners use remote-controlled equipment to dig with
greater precision and realize higher rates of output. The opportunity for new
revenue streams comes from unlocking the value of the data that can be captured
and shared by smart, connected devices. As a result, engine manufacturers can go
beyond selling products to charging fees for the reliability that can be achieved by
pre-empting equipment failures. This is the outcome economythe delivery of measurable results that
effectively to reduce costs, enhance worker safety or improve efficiencies.

are tailored to the needs of customers and how they use products. While digital technology will automate more
routine tasks, its capacity to create new markets and enable workers to undertake more advanced tasks will not
only spawn new categories of jobs, but also increase the sophistication of jobs and inspire greater collaboration to
deliver outcome economy services. The vast majority of businesses are not ready for this opportunity, however. In a
survey of more than 1,400 business leaders, half of whom are CEOs, 71 percent confess that their companies have
yet to make any concrete progress with the Industrial Internet of Things. Just seven percent have developed a
comprehensive strategy with investments to match. This slow start may be due to the fact that many countries do
not have the sufficient underlying conditions to enable this new digital revolution to sweep through their
economies. Accenture analysis shows while the Industrial Internet of Things could lift the annual gross domestic
product (GDP) of United States, the Nordics or Switzerland by at least 2 percent by 2030, Spain and Italy look likely
to enjoy gains of about half that. That dramatic difference can, in part, be attributed to the quality of their
infrastructure, technology skills and innovative capacity, as well as the ease of creating new business models.
Rather like the advent of electricity, which saw some countries lead in the wide application of the new technology

The United States was the first to

use electricity to power assembly lines and transform manufacturing. It then went
on to pioneer new electricity-based markets, from domestic appliances to software.
The IIoT presents a similar opportunity to transform economies for those countries
willing to put in place the necessary conditions. If the IIOT is to be harnessed to drive both
throughout their economies, we can expect a similar variance today.

productivity and growth, business and government leaders need to work together in three key areas. They must
prepare for entirely new and more open organizational structures as business models arise from the shift to a more
sophisticated outcome economy. They need to collaborate across industry sectors and borders to establish
standards to promote the security and interoperability of data and machines, as well as create governance
structures that encourage and reward the appropriate sharing of valuable data. Finally, they will need to invest in
the new skills that will be needed in working environments which increasingly blend digital and human labor. The
potential of the Industrial Internet of Things to kick start greater innovation and growth is clear. The evidence is that
business leaders and policy makers need to do more to make the best of the opportunity.

Internet Key to Tech

A) The internet can develop tech from drug development to
biofuels.
Boyle, 11 (Alan Boyle, since joining NBC News Digital (a.k.a. MSNBC.com) in

1996, Boyle has won awards from the National Academies, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science
Writers, Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Space Frontier
Foundation, IEEE-USA, the Pirelli Relativity Challenge and the CMU Cybersecurity
Journalism Awards program. He is the author of "The Case for Pluto," a contributor
to "A Field Guide for Science Writers," the blogger behind Cosmic Log and an
occasional talking head on MSNBC, NBC's TODAY and Nightly News, Gamers solve
molecular puzzle that baffled scientists, 9/18/11,
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/gamers-solve-molecular-puzzlebaffled-scientists-f6C10402813). SZ
Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for
years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to
crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other disease s. "This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to
help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on

using a
collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science a burgeoning field that
the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. The feat, which was accomplished

enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't
accomplish as easily. "People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer
scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together

For more than a decade, an international

team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a
protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such
enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus' spread and if
the strengths of computers and humans." Unraveling a retrovirus

medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. The strategy
has been compared to designing a key to fit one of Mother Nature's locks. The problem is that enzymes are far tougher to crack than
your typical lock. There are millions of ways that the bonds between the atoms in the enzyme's molecules could twist and turn. To
design the right chemical key, you have to figure out the most efficient, llowest-energy configuration for the molecule the one
that Mother Nature herself came up with. That's where Foldit plays a role. The game is designed so that players can manipulate
virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical
rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a
lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn't
reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower. More than 236,000 players have registered for the game since its debut in 2008.
The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib's at the university, Frank
DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. "This was
one of the cases where his method wasn't able to solve it," Khatib said. Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the
Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit's teams to work on. "This was really kind of a last-ditch

"Can the Foldit players really solve it?" They could. "They actually did it
in less than 10 days," Khatib said. A screen shot shows how the Foldit program posed the monkey-virus molecular
effort," he recalled.

puzzle. University of Washington One floppy loop of the molecule, visible on the left side of this image, was particularly tricky to
figure out. But players belonging to the Foldit Contenders Group worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, lowenergy model for the monkey-virus enzyme. "Standard autobuilding and structure refinement methods showed within hours that

the solution was almost certainly correct," the researchers reported in the paper published today. "Using the
Foldit solution, the final refined structure was completed a few days later." Khatib said the Seattle team's collaborators in Poland
were in such a celebratory mood that they insisted on organizing a simultaneous champagne toast, shared over a Skype video
teleconference. "Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the
first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem," Khatib and his colleagues
wrote. The parts of the molecule that formed the floppy loop turned out to be of particular interest. " These

features
provide exciting opportunities for the design of retroviral drugs, including AIDS
drugs," the researchers said. Looking for new problems to solve The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit
and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of
other scientific challenges ranging from drug development to genetic engineering
for future biofuels. "My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases," Khatib said. He's not
alone in that hope. "Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable
of producing first-class scientific discoveries," Zoran Popovic, director of University of Washington's Center

for Game Science, said in today's news release. "We are currently applying the same approach to change the way math and science
are taught in school." That's something that Carter Kimsey, program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of
Biological Infrastructure, would love to see happen. "After this discovery, young people might not mind doing their science
homework," she quipped. One caveat, though: Playing Foldit isn't exactly like playing Bejeweled. "Let's be honest, proteins aren't the
sexiest video game out there," Khatib told me. Give the game a whirl, and let me know whether it's addictive or a drag. Tale of a
Contender The final decisive move in the Foldit Contender Group's solution to the monkey-virus puzzle involved twisting around that
floppy loop, or "flap," in the structure of the enzyme. The paper published today notes that one of the Contenders, nicknamed
"mimi," built upon the work done by other gamers to make that move. I got in touch with mimi via email, and here's the wonderfully
detailed response she sent back today from Britain: "I have been playing Foldit for nearly three years, and I have been in the
Contenders team for two and a half years. "Although there are 35 names on the members list on the website, when you take off
duplicate names and non-active players, it comes down to about 12 to 15 people. "The team members come from a wide range of
backgrounds, chiefly scientific or IT [information technology], although our best player is from neither. "One of the main features of
Foldit is the ability to communicate via chat within the game. There is both global chat, which everyone can access, and individual
group chat, which allows team members to talk easily to one another. The Contenders are spread out between Canada, USA, UK,
Europe and New Zealand, so this is essential. "Each player can work on a solo solution to a puzzle, but we can also exchange
solutions between the team and add our own improvements to achieve a better result. Often the evolved solution for a team scores
higher than the top solo score. "The game is not only an interesting intellectual challenge, allowing you to use your problem-solving
skills, 'feel' for protein shapes, and whatever biochemical knowledge you have to obtain a solution to each puzzle, but it also
provides a unique society of players driven by both individual and team rivalry with an overall purpose of improving the game and
the results achieved. A body of knowledge has been built up in the Wiki by contributions from players, and ideas are constantly fed
back to the game designers. "In the case of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, I had looked at the structure of the options we were
presented with and identified that it would be better if the 'flap' could be made to sit closer to the body of the protein one of the
basic rules of folding is to make the protein as compact as possible but when I tried this with my solo solution, I couldn't get it to
work. However, when I applied the same approach to the evolved solution that had been worked on by other team members, I was
able to get it to tuck in, and that proved to be the answer to the structure. I believe that it was the changes made by my colleagues
that enabled mine to work, so it was very much a team effort. "We were all very excited to hear that we had helped to find the
answer to this crystal form, especially since it had been outstanding so long and other methods had been unsuccessful. The feeling
of having done something that could make a significant contribution to research in this field is very special and unexpected. Foldit
players have achieved a number of successes so far, and I hope we will go on to make many more. "You may be aware that we
asked for accreditation for the Foldit Contenders Team within the article, rather than being named individually. "Many of the people
playing the game are known only by their user name, even within a team. "I would be grateful if you could refer to me as 'mimi'
rather than using my full name." Update for 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20: I've added an MSNBC video about the Foldit project, and I've
also heard back via email from another one of the Contenders, a player known as "Bletchley Park": "We are all very excited about
the discovery, to see the story unfold now is very gratifying. The main motivator of the Contenders group, and most Foldit players
for that matter, is the advancement of science. It is very typical for mimi not to have her real name listed or even to claim the
discovery as her own. "Contenders is a group of like-minded individuals. The strength lies in comradeship, cooperation and
perseverance. Most of us have been 'folding' for several hours each day over the past years. "To be part of this adventure is a very
fulfilling experience. Quite a few of us have or have had family members who suffered from the modern terminal diseases and find
energy in those experiences to keep folding with the intention to make a difference."

(--) Strong tech sector key to US military dominance and

solving war around the globe:
Dr. Mary L. Good, 1996(Chair, Undersecretary for Technology, Dept. of

Commerce, Technology in the national interest, accessed via google books)

Technology and the National Defense On the battlefield, technology can be the decisive edge .
Americas technological superiority has provided our men and women in uniform the wherewithal to protect the
freedom, democracy, and security of the United States. Beyond our own borders, U .S.

military strength
built on a foundation of high-technologyhas enabled the U nited States to stand in
defense of our allies, preserve the peace, deter hostilities, repel aggression,
and foster fledging democracies around the globe. During the Cold War, an arsenal of advanced

weapons allowed the United States to field a technologically superior force to counter the numerically superior
Soviet threat. Today, these high-technology weapons and the transportation and logistics systems that support
their deployment provide the United States with the ability to undertake global military operations and conduct
surgical strikes on strategic military targetsas in recent operations in Iraq and Bosniawhile minimizing the risk to

Continued technological leadership is essential to U.S. national

security, military readiness, and global influence .
U.S. soldiers and civilians.

Internet Solves Disease

A) Internet is k2 reduced costs and transparency of early
detection of disease outbreaks
Wilson and Brownstein, 09 (Kumanan and John S. From the Department of

Medicine (Wilson), Ottawa Health Research Institute, University of Ottawa, Ottawa

Ont., the Childrens Hospital Informatics Program (Brownstein), Childrens Hospital
Boston; and the Department of Pediatrics (Brownstein), Harvard Medical School,
Boston, USA, Early detection of disease outbreaks using the Internet, 3/12/9,
http://www.cmaj.ca/content/180/8/829.full). SZ
Rapidly identifying an infectious disease outbreak is critical, both for effective
initiation of public health intervention measures and timely alerting of government
agencies and the general public. Surveillance capacity for such detection can be
costly, and many countries lack the public health infrastructure to identify outbreaks
at their earliest stages. Furthermore, there may be economic incentives for
countries to not fully disclose the nature and extent of an outbreak.1 The Internet,
however, is revolutionizing how epidemic intelligence is gathered, and it offers
solutions to some of these challenges. Freely available Web-based sources of
information may allow us to detect disease outbreaks earlier with reduced cost and
increased reporting transparency. A vast amount of real-time information about
infectious disease outbreaks is found in various forms of Web-based data streams .2
These range from official public health reporting to informal news coverage to individual accounts in chat rooms and blogs.35 Because Webbased data sources exist outside traditional reporting channels, they are invaluable
to public health agencies that depend on timely information flow across national
and subnational borders. These information sources , which can be identified through Internet-based tools,
are often capable of detecting the first evidence of an outbreak, especially in areas with a limited
capacity for public health surveillance. For example, the World Health Organizations Global Outbreak Alert
and Response Network relies on these data for day-to-day surveillance activities .3,4
Revised international health rules have authorized the World Health Organization to act on this information to issue recommendations to prevent the
spread of diseases.6 Canadians were leaders in introducing Web-based surveillance technologies to the world. In the 1990s, Health Canada created the
Global Public Health Intelligence Network.7 Its software application retrieves articles that provide relevant information pertaining to the possibility of a

Every 15 minutes, the network obtains information from news feed

aggregators based on established search queries . Although automation is a key component, the Global Public
Health Intelligence Network also employs trained analysts who provide essential linguistic, interpretive and analytical expertise . These data
are disseminated to various public health agencies, including the World Health
Organization, which then perform public health vetting of the informal report . The
value of this network was demonstrated when the system identified the outbreak of
severe acute respiratory syndrome in Guangdong Province, China, as early as
November 20027, more than 2 months before the World Health Organization
publically published details on cases of the new respiratory illness . A parallel pioneering effort in
Internet-based surveillance was started by the International Society for Infectious Diseases Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases. 8 Rather
than rely on automated news scanning, this program draws from its membership to
find, comment and disseminate reports on emerging disease threats through a
freely available and open mailing list . This program is now one of the largest publicly available emerging disease and
outbreak reporting systems in the world. There are a number of online resources that deliver similar
real-time intelligence on emerging infectious diseases to diverse audiences, from
public health officials to international travelers on user-friendly, open-access
websites. These systems combine freely available data sources and open-source software technology to create online surveillance systems. For
public health emergency.

example, HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated real-time system that monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, visualizes and disseminates online
information about emerging diseases.9 The site pulls from over 20 000 sources every hour, many of which come from news aggregators such as Google
News. Syndromic surveillance has emerged over the last decade as a new strategy for early detection of outbreaks. In this form of surveillance, efforts are
focused on monitoring symptoms or other evidence of a disease, which may be identified before the diagnosis is confirmed and formally recognized.10

Unlike traditional surveillance efforts, an outbreak investigation would be triggered

when certain health-related outcomes exceeded expected baseline levels. Examples of this
type of surveillance include examining increases in visits to emergency departments, the volume of calls to health advice lines and the sales of
prescription or over-the-counter medications. A new frontier in syndromic surveillance has emerged that uses Web-based clickstream- and keywordsearching aggregated across Internet users. This application has the opportunity to provide important insights into public health trends for a fraction of the
cost. Eysenbach originally demonstrated the potential value and cost-effectiveness of such a strategy for surveillance of influenza in Canada.11 Similarly,
recent efforts that used data from Google12 and Yahoo13 have shown that search query data can be harnessed as a form of collective intelligence where
patterns of population-level searching mirror and may even predict disease outbreaks. Google Flu Trends, for example, now provides both public health
professionals and the general population with a real-time geographically specific view of influenza search activity in the United States. Analysis of the
recent listeriosis outbreak in Canada that resulted from contaminated deli meat provides some interesting insights into the potential power of these tools.
We investigated data sources other than traditional reporting that may have been available at the time of the outbreak. The public was officially informed
by federal officials that 1 death and 16 cases were linked to a listeriosis outbreak on August 20, 2008.14 HealthMap collected 89 original articles that
provided detailed information about the outbreak, the earliest of which appeared on August 17, although the majority of reports followed the federal
announcement. However, search-term surveillance using the word listeriorisis showed a spike beginning in mid to late July, nearly a month before the
declaration of the public outbreak. Interestingly, peak searching for listeriosis correlated more with the retrospective epidemic curve (Pearson correlation
= 0.62, p = 0.005) than with the publicity of the outbreak (Pearson correlation = 0.55, p = 0.014) as measured by news volume. In comparison, a massive
increase in searching for the word Listeria coincided perfectly with news media attention (Figure 1). Therefore, it appears that there was a clear Internet
signal related to Listeria that preceded the official federal announcement. A potential explanation for these findings is that the term listeriosis is more
technical and that the data reflect queries by food inspection or industry officials investigating the possibility of the outbreak. Or it could have reflected
queries by family and friends of people diagnosed early or people concerned about the initial voluntary recalls. A question that arises from this analysis is
whether knowledge of this information, either by public health officials or members of the public, could have prompted an earlier response that may have
reduced exposure to the contaminated products. These data and aggregating Web-based technologies provide valuable information, but there are
important limitations (Box 1). Although the utility of news media scanning is better established than surveillance of Internet search terms, there is limited
evidence of the ability of these systems to detect emerging threats before signals from more traditional systems.4,15,16 Clearly, these data sources
require in-depth evaluation, especially with respect to false positives and gaps in coverage.17 Lack of specificity, in particular, may be a primary limitation
of these technologies (i.e., spikes in search terms or news stories potentially related to a disease outbreak may not necessarily mean that an outbreak
exists). This may be less of an obstacle if the analysis is supported by trained public health officials who can investigate signals as they develop. However,
these inefficiencies create the possibility of overload of signals that require verification and suggest that further work be conducted to determine how
much of a change from baseline warrants further investigation. Public awareness of such signals, if they are openly accessible, could create problems in
terms of risk communication for public health officials. The operating characteristics of these technologies need to be more precisely defined, as do their
ability to detect disease before conventional systems and their application to a wide spectrum of diseases. Privacy implications are also need to be
considered and balanced with the public health need to drill down to the highest possible geographic resolution.18 Given that search data contains
associated internet provider information, which can be identified to the level of the household, appropriate decisions need to be made as to the level of
appropriate spatial aggregation.18 Another potentially major obstacle to the use of these technologies is the requirement for Internet access. This is

the dissemination of hand-held devices

and mobile phones that connect to the Internet and have the ability to use short
message service, or SMS, can help fill in technology gaps in resource-poor settings .19
especially true in developing countries where surveillance is important. However,

In the future, we expect that the diagnostic accuracy of these instruments will be improved through an iterative process and that search term surveillance

Internet scanning represents an important advancement in

health surveillance, and search term surveillance is a provocative new tool that has
much potential. However, both technologies merit further evaluation. The new application of these technologies could provide earlier access
to information on potential disease outbreaks and promote greater transparency in disease reporting . Most importantly, these
technologies may provide important benefits to outbreak control at local, national
and international levels, ultimately reducing the health consequences of these
outbreaks. Internet surveillance tools can assist in the early identification of disease outbreaks and raise public awareness about emerging disease
will be expanded to other diseases.

threats. Surveillance based on trends of specific terms entered into search engines offers the potential to assist in earlier detection, but this technique
requires further evaluation. Search engine queries of the term listeriosis demonstrated a possible signal of an outbreak before the official announcement
was made in Canada.

B) Diseases cause extinction

Guterl 12 [Fred, award-winning journalist and executive editor of Scientific American, worked for ten
years at Newsweek, has taught science at Princeton University, The Fate of the Species: Why the Human
Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, 1-2, Google Books, online]
Over the next few years, the bigger story turned out not to be SARS, which trailed off quickly, bur avian influenza, or bird flu. It had been making the rounds among
birds in Southeast Asia for years. An outbreak in 1997 Hong Kong and another in 2003 each called for the culling of thousands of birds and put virologists and health
workers into a tizzy. Although the virus wasn't much of a threat to humans, scientists fretted over the possibility of a horrifying pandemic. Relatively few people
caught the virus, but more than half of them died. What would happen if this bird flu virus made the jump to humans? What if it mutated in a way that allowed it to
spread from one person to another, through tiny droplets of saliva in the air? One

bad spin of the genetic roulette wheel and a deadly

new human pathogen would spread across the globe in a matter of days . With a kill rate of 60 percent, such a pandemic
would be devastating, to say the least. Scientists were worried, all right, but the object of their worry was somewhat theoretical. Nobody knew for certain
if such a supervirus was even possible. To cause that kind of damage to the human population, a flu virus has to combine two traits: lethality and transmissibility. The
more optimistically minded scientists argued that one trait precluded the other, that if the bird flu acquired the ability to spread like wildfire, it would lose its ability to
kill with terrifying efficiency. The virus would spread, cause some fever and sniffles, and take its place among the pantheon of ordinary flu viruses that come and go
each season. The optimists, we found out last fall, were

wrong. Two groups of scientists working independently managed to create bird

flu viruses in the lab that had that killer combination of lethality and transmissibility among humans . They did it for
the best reasons, of courseto find vaccines and medicines to treat a pandemic should one occur, and more generally to understand how influenza viruses work. If
we're lucky, the scientists will get there before nature manages to come up with the virus herself, or before someone steals the genetic blueprints and turns this
knowledge against us. Influenza is a natural killer, but we have made it our own. We

have created the conditions for new viruses to

flourishamong pigs in factory farms and live animal markets and a connected world of international trade and travel and
we've gone so far as to fabricate the virus ourselves. Flu is an excellent example of how we have, through our technologies and our dominant presence on the
planet, begun to multiply the risks to our own survival .

Bigotry Advantage Extensions

Bigotry Advantage is Utilitarian

Solving for discrimination is utilitarian millions of minorities
are surveilled
Cyril 15 (Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, an organization that cultivates
grassroots movements for a more participatory democracy; Malkia Amala, Black Americas State of
Surveillance, The Progressive, April 2015, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/blackamericas-state-surveillance, RX)

In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies,

law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of

indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. Concerned
advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal.
Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned

The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the

indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not
involved in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of
privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either
as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded
privilege of the inherently innocent.

culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits
programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent
address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history
of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology
that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago. Predictive policing, also known as Total Information Awareness, is described
as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities
found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it

In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system,

surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination,
predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de
facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices,
conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate
more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or
punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places
presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent.

an undue focus on quality of life crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death.
Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profilingindiscriminate data
collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance
technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements
of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do
all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be
disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition,
biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for
any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward
accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear.
They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance
device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and
identifying information. When used to track a suspects cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless
bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to
conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remotecontrolled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase
interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence
community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for
increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of
pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in
massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off

Predictive policing doesnt

just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop and frisk
legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color,
almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious
activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities
of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately
75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as
a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true.

it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially
those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power.

One of the most terrifying aspects

of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The

NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic
surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to
FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to
treat mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations
by Muslims as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a
Death Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York
City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded
unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of
any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time,
almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers,
families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore

According to the Sentencing Project,

of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60
percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black
people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than
were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality , a
2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be
imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a
system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not
have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people,
Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement
subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices.

agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in
the context of structural racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier read. To me, freedom from
repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with
the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and
not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, Everything we see is a shadow cast by
that which we do not see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible
time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women,
queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But

the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive
structural racism in the twenty-first century.

Solving for discrimination is utilitarian millions of minorities

are surveilled
Cyril 15 (Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, an organization that cultivates
grassroots movements for a more participatory democracy; Malkia Amala, Black Americas State of
Surveillance, The Progressive, April 2015, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/blackamericas-state-surveillance, RX)

In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of
data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect

massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological
advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted
surveillance is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned
privilege of the inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate
collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. For targeted communities,
there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched,
either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and

spying, from AT&T

and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as
much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In
coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which

a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most
significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to
every member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago. Predictive
policing, also known as Total Information Awareness, is described as using advanced technological tools and data
analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make
determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes
data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies
reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle

Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police
practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of
social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing
approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimeslike
selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight,
accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profilingindiscriminate data

As local law enforcement agencies

increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways:
to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of
individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like
Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use
technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be
disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of
being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled
collection that drives discriminatory policing practices.

out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to
use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the
results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use
Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance
device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their
locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspects cellphone, they also gather information about
the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in
increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed,
drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets,
tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the
purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to
Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for
increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation of observed behavior

reports
and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and
Prism. As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost
impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is
incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesnt just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on
reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These

it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90
percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of
fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows
approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you
as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of
white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of
the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The
NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on
Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau
taught agents to treat mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as
a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is
to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded
unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national
security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities
throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the
elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal
policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2
million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far,
the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More
black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret
that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent

This is not a broken system, it is a

system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not
have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people,
Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and
integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made
invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural
more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime.

racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and
racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up
with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the

technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said,
Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories
that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation
buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been

the Internet also

makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive
structural racism in the twenty-first century.
placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But

We should solve for discrimination even in a utilitarian

framework
Burkhart et al. 7 (Students at Leeds School of Business, Laurie, The Effect of Government
Surveillance on Social Progress, Ethica Publishing,
http://www.ethicapublishing.com/confronting/5CH1.pdf, RX)

Under utilitarian, duty-based, and rights-based ethical theories the act of heavy government
surveillance policy is an ethical violation. From a utilitarian perspective, one must
look at the consequences of an action, and determine which consequence would be
the most desirable for the greatest number of people involved. In this case, the
government is not acting in line with what is the greatest good for the greatest
number. The greatest good is allowing a society to have the ability to freely
participate and change the system in order to adhere to what is best for the people.
By limiting radical political groups the government can effectively take away this ability. In taking the ability
to change and progress away from the people in a democratic system the
government violates the greatest good for the greatest number. The use of government
surveillance to hinder radical movements is causing a chilling effect on political participation and results in an

The consequences of these government actions are

undesirable, the actions are considered to be unethical under utilitarian or
consequence-based theory.
obstruction of social progress.

Even in a utilitarian framework, discrimination from

warrantless surveillance outweighs it suppresses peoples
thoughts
Fournier 13 (Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France, graduate teaching

assistant at City University of Hong Kong, internally quoting Research Professor of Law Daniel Solove;
Knut; The Right to Anonymity in Political Activities: A Comparative Look at the Notion of Political
Surveillance; Digital Democracy and the Impact of Technology on Governance and Politics;
http://tinyurl.com/pebzd6a; 2013; RX)

Utilitarianism has been used to justify a massive warrantless surveillance

of all electronic communication on US soil: the theory that acts are morally justified if their
outcome, in terms of well-being, is overall positive (Cohen. 2010, p. 178). In the justification of the TIA, this
justification, which has been used by the Bush administration, is flawed. Indeed the justification in the fight against
terrorism, following 9/11. is the prevention of further attacks. However, no such an extreme and disproportionate
way of preventing crime is put forth by governments to prevent other forms of criminality, despite the
overwhelming danger that it represents for the civilian population. compared to the terrorist threat. From that

the harm caused to the right to privacy by warrantless

surveillance data mining and analysis cannot be seriously justified by the
harm it is trying to prevent. A second aspect of the justification of this blanket surveillance is the
perspective,

'nothing to hide' argument, expressed by a majority of the population when the surveillance by the government is
mentioned. According to this popular belief. meaningless information, and non-sensitive data about law-abiding
citizen could be amassed by the government, since those who have nothing to hide have nothing to be afraid of.
The feeling expressed by people who agree, tacitly or not, to data collecting and mining from the government is
also a utilitarian one (Solove, 2007, p. 753). Solove, in his classification of information collection and usage,
identifies clearly which step of the government surveillance disrupts the idea that only people engaged in illegal

which the individual,

knowing that his privacy is constantly violated, modifies his behaviour constantly as
well (Solove, 2007. p. 758). He becomes his own censor, and sees the shadow of the guard
at the centre of Bentham's panopticon. What begins, and is presented as a simple 'information
activities should be afraid of this type of surveillance. The decisional interference, in

collection,' ends up controlling people's behaviour through a self-censorship mechanism that is simply logical:

none of us acts totally in the same way when alone, and when we know that we are
watched. Individuals cannot constantly evolve under the eye of the rest of the society (or under the eye of a
watching minority). and require moments of complete privacy. Thus, the violation of privacy is the
start of multiple violations: through the harm caused to a right that has asocial
value, the government, and consenting individuals or groups, infringes other
fundamental political freedoms such as free speech (Solove. 2007, p. 764). That all information
mined by the TIA computer system have been disclosed by the individuals concerned is not enough to overcome
the necessary condition of expectation of privacy that might protect individuals in that type of situation. The
aggregate of the information, which has not been authorized, neither tacitly nor specifically by citizens, combines
with the inhibiting power of a constant surveillance to delegitimize a dis-proportionate practice that is a political
project, as opposed to a simple policing tool as stated.

Discrimination affects a large portion of the Muslim community

solving for it does the most good for the most people
Knefel 13 (Independent journalist, John, Police Spying on American Muslims Is a Pointless
Shame, Rolling Stone, 11 March 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/police-spying-onamerican-muslims-is-a-pointless-national-shame-20130311, RX)

the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition released a new report

today detailing the detrimental effects of the NYPD's spying on Muslim communities in
recent years. The report, called Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American Muslims, alleges that more
than a decade of surveillance of Muslims throughout the Northeast "has chilled
constitutionally protected rights curtailing religious practice, censoring speech and
stunting political organizing." They describe their communities as being under "a pervasive climate
of fear and suspicion" that affects "every aspect of individual and community life."
Civil liberties groups led by

The report combines publicly available documentation about the NYPD's snooping regime including the Associated Press'
groundbreaking investigations into the department's Demographics Unit with original interviews of 57 Muslims in New York City.

the significance of this report reaches far beyond New York's Muslim community and
even beyond the American Muslim community at large. The authors have provided a needed rebuttal
But

to the common argument that surveillance isn't a problem if you have nothing to hide, and that spying itself is essentially value-

The Muslims interviewed in the report

describe a terrifying reality where trust and privacy are virtually impossible, and
where lives are severely harmed by spying alone. The pervasive spying regime has
effectively intimidated many would-be critics. "Many of the Shi'a organizations who
were approached by activists to speak up or speak out were hesitant to do so ," says
neutral so long as you don't become a target of an investigation.

community organizer Ali Naquvi in the report. "A lot of it seems to be fear. They don't want to be targeted for additional
surveillance." Discouraging this legitimate, constitutionally protected behavior isn't simply an unfortunate by-product of total
surveillance, but rather a primary and predictable outcome. As anyone who has ever suspected themselves of being under
surveillance will tell you, that fear changes the way you think and act. Instilling such fears is an extremely effective form of social
control. And whether limiting civil rights and liberties in this way was the stated aim of the Intelligence Division doesn't really matter.
That has been the effect one that was entirely foreseeable. So what has all this surveillance, this so-called "intelligence gathering,"
gotten us? A terrorized local Muslim population, a police department that grossly exaggerates the terror plots it has disrupted and a
crown jewel investigation of a troubled man named Ahmed Ferhani that was so problematic even the FBI recently dubbed "the
terror factory" by one author because of its role in manufacturing plots that its own agents then disrupt wanted nothing to do with
it. And as the report reminds us, Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the NYPD's Intelligence Division, "admitted during sworn
testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single criminal

While Muslims in the Northeast are the people most directly affected by this
surveillance, it is a national problem both in the sense that all of our rights are
infringed if anyone's are, but also in a more concrete way. The state's capacity for surveillance is
already enormous, and will only expand as technologies, including domestic drones, continue to increase in sophistication . When
total surveillance of one population becomes normalized, we are all at a greater risk
of being illegally spied on. This report is an important document that illustrates just how damaging that can be.
lead."

Legalism K Answer
(--) Alt Fails- Cedes the Political
Orly Lobel 2007, University of San Diego Assistant Professor of Law, The Paradox of Extralegal Activism:
Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics, 120 HARV. L. REV. 937,
http://cdn.harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/lobel.pdf

Both the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by
extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to broaden our inquiry to the underlying
assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics - that is, attempts to produce
meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes . The suggested
alternatives produce a new image of social and political action. This vision rejects a shared theory of social reform,
rejects formal programmatic agendas, and embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices. Thus, it is described in
such terms as a plan of no plan, n211 "a project of projects," n212 [*984] "anti-theory theory," n213 politics rather
than goals, n214 presence rather than power, n215 "practice over theory," n216 and chaos and openness over
order and formality. As a result, the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive vision of common
social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues,

the

commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights
movement has disappeared. n217 There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion
to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns that this move away
from grand narratives is self-defeating precisely because only certain parts of the
political spectrum have accepted this new stance: "The opposition is not playing
that game ... . Everyone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives ... ." n218 Intertwined with the
resignation from law and policy, the new bromide of "neither left nor right" has become axiomatic only for some.
n219 The contemporary critical legal consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in
progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are interested, for example, in a more competitive
securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of "conservative public interest

Although "public interest law" was originally associated exclusively with

liberal projects, in the past three decades conservative advocacy groups have
rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of traditional legal strategies
to promote their causes. n221 This growth in conservative advocacy [*985] is
particularly salient in juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive
advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested that there may be
"something inherent in the left's conception of social change - focused as it is on
participation and empowerment - that produces a unique distrust of legal expertise ."
lawyering." n220

n222 Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform. Although
the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to legal reform models and as capable of
producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited improvement in existing
social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound risk

The common pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe

grassroots strategies, n223 and
then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into
a more complete transformation. This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an
of the typology - that of legitimation.

an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for example, to

aggregate approach - an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something substantial. In fact, the
myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced, while the broader pattern of equating

There are few

instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macroextralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change.

redistribution. Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the
power to unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit. n224 Unrelated efforts become related

At the same time, the elephant in the room - the

rising level of economic inequality - is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural
and part of a whole through mere reframing.

and inevitable. n225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers' selfmystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the [*986] product of their own
actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their willed reality.
The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance
between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism - the law and organizing
model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate
nongovernmental sphere of action - all produce a fantasy that change can be brought about through small-scale,
decentralized transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and
the audience is national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a
comparable challenge to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and
community studies, the latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble. n226 The aspiration
of these genres was that each individual story could translate into a "time of the nation" body of knowledge and

motivation. n227 In contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger,
translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few
new local-state-national federations have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of
the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline. n228 There is,
therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent intermediate public sphere, which has

New social movements have for

the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant institutional
change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the
been termed "the missing middle" by Professor Theda Skocpol. n229

ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism. n230 Is the focus on smallscale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate? It is important for next-

not all
extralegal associational life is transformative. We must differentiate, for example, between inwardgeneration progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness, to recognize that

looking groups, which tend to be self- [*987] regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate in
political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities. n231 We must
differentiate between professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for

extralegal activism tends to operate on

a more divided and hence a smaller scale than earlier social movements, which had
national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need to recognize the
limited capacity of small-scale action. We should question the narrative that imagines consciousnesslarger segments of the community. n232 As described above,

raising as directly translating into action and action as directly translating into change. Certainly not every cultural

it is questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed

to programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as
social movements. In fact, when groups are situated in opposition to any form of
institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are fighting against
and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the narrow space that
is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted, and
contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.
description is political. Indeed,

Terrorism DA Updates

Terrorism UQ: ISIS is losing now

Squo solves for terrorism
McNeill et al 11. Jena Baker McNeill is a senior director of government relations
at the U.S. Travel Association. In this position, she performs outreach to advance
U.S. Travels legislative priorities in Congress. She also creates policy messages and
thought leadership efforts that will engage lawmakers on travel issues, working in
conjunction with U.S. Travels communications and research teams. [39 Terror Plots
Foiled Since 9/11: Examining Counterterrorisms Success Stories The Heritage
Foundation- By Jena Baker McNeill, James Jay Carafano, Ph.D. and Jessica
Zuckerman May 20, 2011 URL:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/05/39-terror-plots-foiled-since-911examining-counterterrorisms-success-stories] JC
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, at least 39 terror plots against
the United States have been foiled thanks to domestic and international
cooperation, as well as efforts to track down terror leads in local communities. Such
a successful track record of preventing terror attacks should garner the attention of
policymakers around the country as both Congress and the Administration wrestle
with the difficult decision of where to best spend precious security dollars. The
death of Osama bin Laden serves as a reminder that the war on terrorism is not
over, and as a call to focus on strategies that have made the nation a harder target
for terrorism, while examining which reforms are still necessary.

ISIS is losing
Harris 15
(Johnny Harris, 4-15-2015, "ISIS is still a ruthless group, but it no longer has the
territorial advantage it has enjoyed.," Vox,
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8410501/ISIS-losing-Iraq, DSG)
After ISIS's seemingly unstoppable nine-month rise, the group is being turned back
in Iraq. The Iraqi army, along with Shia militias and an international air power
coalition, is retaking territory.
ISIS's successes relied in part on Arab Sunni support in western Iraq. But ISIS made
a mistake in approaching the city of Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital. The Kurds, who
have an independent fighting force, were able to stall ISIS's advance. Shortly after,
the US intervened with airstrikes.
Airstrikes don't usually work very well on terrorist groups, whose strategies often
depend on hiding among civilians. But ISIS is different. It is obsessed with acquiring
land, a key aspect to its mission. The group seeks to establish a state, complete
with justice, governance, and, most important, territory. This obsession has left
them in plain sight for airstrikes.
Since the US airstrikes started last August, ISIS's territorial ambitions have been
significantly disrupted. The Iraqi army, the Kurdish peshmerga, and Shia militias
(which are often sponsored by Iran) have been pushing them back. This is why
many analysts are confident ISIS will soon lose it territory in Iraq and once again
end up where it started a year ago, a delusional group of hardened warriors
festering in the chaos of a Syrian civil war.

Links: NSA Surveillance Stops ISIS Attacks

NSA Surveillance key to stop ISIS attacks
Carroll 15
(Before joining The Guardian Rory worked as a reporter for the Irish News in Belfast.
He was born in Dublin and holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City
University., Rory Carroll, 4-1-2015, "NSA surveillance needed to prevent Isis attack,
claims former intelligence chair," Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2015/apr/22/mass-surveillance-needed-isis-attack-mike-rogers, DSG)
Mass surveillance should be retained because of the prospect of Islamic State
attacks within the United States, a key Republican ally of the National Security
Agency has claimed. Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence
committee, said the NSA needed to preserve its wide powers in case Isis used its
bases in Syria and Iraq to unleash atrocities on the US homeland. Now you have a
very real face on what the threat is, Rogers told the Guardian on Tuesday.
Somebody calling back from Syria to Minnesota, either recruiting somebody or
giving the operational OK to do something. Thats real and its serious. Before it
seemed all hypothetical. Now you can see it. He added: Think about how many
people are in Syria with western passports or even American passports. I want to
know if they pick up the phone. If theyre calling back to the States, I dont know
about you, but I want to know who theyre talking to and what theyre talking
about. Rogers gave the warning as negotiators in the House of Representatives
wrangled over a revamp of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that aimed to stop the NSA
from its daily collection of US phone records in bulk which failed in the Senate in
2014, and is now returning to Congress. A coalition of civil libertarian groups on the
left and right wants a landmark law to reform the intelligence services in the wake
of revelations to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. Part of
the Patriot Act known as section 215, which the NSA uses to justify domestic mass
surveillance, expires on 1 June. Reformers hope that deadline will give them the
leverage to make sure the Freedom Act only reauthorises those provisions on
condition of much greater privacy protections. Republicans, however, are signalling
possible resistance. Senator Charles Grassley, the powerful chair of the Senate
judiciary committee, whose support is crucial, told reporters on Tuesday he had
concerns about finding a balance between national security and privacy in the bill.
The National Journal reported that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, may
try to thwart reformers by introducing a bill that would reauthorise section 215 until
2020. Rogers, speaking in a brief interview after addressing the Rand Corporation
thinktank in Los Angeles, sought to persuade Democrats and his fellow Republicans
of the need to keep extensive surveillance, and expressed hope that cooler heads
in Congress will renew section 215 without ceding big concessions to reformers.
Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation,
said reauthorising the provision without comprehensive reform would be against the
constitution. Ending the bulk collection of phone records under section 215 is the
first step in reforming the NSA. The time for Congress to take that step is now. She
said NSA defenders would falsely claim that it was necessary to keep the mass
surveillance. But the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the Presidents
Review Group, and senators who are familiar with how bulk phone records collection
works have all said we dont need the program. Kayyali accused reform opponents
of peddling fear and discredited claims, such as mass surveillance having stopped

54 terrorist attacks. We hope at least Congress has some frank, truthful discussion
about NSA spying as we head towards the 1 June deadline. In his address to the
Rand Corporation audience Rogers, a former FBI agent, painted a dark picture of
terrorists and other enemies exploiting the naivety and complacency of certain
Americans including Barack Obama who did not grasp the urgency of nurturing
and projecting US power. He lamented that the uproar over Snowdens leaks gave
the public a completely wrong impression about NSA collection of metadata,
which he compared to a postman noting an envelopes addressee and sender. It
got so distorted, as if the government was collecting everything and hoarding it in
the basement and couldnt wait to find out about Aunt Mays bunions. The political
narrative got ahead of the facts. It was very frustrating. Rogers, a close ally of John
Boehner, the House majority leader, expressed confidence Congress would strike an
acceptable balance. Im hoping cooler heads will prevail knowing what we have
now. I mean, Isis is a mess. And this interconnected world we live in, with these
folks having the ability to get back to the United States, is really troubling. We
better have some mechanism to protect ourselves and still protect our civil rights.

NSA Surveillance foiled an ISIS plot on the Capitol

Friedman 15

(Dan Friedman joined the Washington bureau of the Daily News in December 2012.
He covers Congress, the White House and the New York delegation., Dan Friedman,
1-16-2015, "Boehner credits NSA for stopping ISIS plot against Capitol," NY Daily
News, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/boehner-credits-nsa-stopping-isisplot-capitol-article-1.2080689)
National Security Administration snooping helped stop an ISIS backers plot against
the Capitol, House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday.
He credited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, saying: "We would have never
known about this had it not been for FISA program and our ability to collect
information on people who pose an imminent threat.
Speaking at a news conference at a retreat for House and Senate Republicans in
Hershey, Pa., he Ohio Republican said he wanted to emphasize the issue because
Congress will consider renewing the FISA act in coming months.
"Our government does not spy on Americans, unless they are Americans who are
doing things that frankly tip off our law enforcement officials to an imminent threat,"
he said. "It was those law enforcement officials and those programs that helped us
stop this person before he committed a heinous crime in our nation's capital."
The FBI arrested Christopher Cornell, 20, of Green Township, Ohio, near Cincinnati,
Wednesday, and charged him with plotting to detonate pipe bombs in the Capitol
building.
Caldwell is an apparent Islamic State supporter and talked of setting up an ISIS cell
in the United States, authorities say. He was charged after sharing his plans with an
uncover informant dispatched by the FBI. They received a tip that Caldwell was
making pro-ISIS statements on Twitter under an alias.
'I hope that he gets the help that he needs.' Michael Hoyt, 44, was indicted last
week on charges of threatening to shoot or poison Boehner.

Impacts: Bioweapons are Feasible/Possible

ISIS is trying to build bioweapons
Ynet 14
(Israels largest and most popular news and content website, ISIS laptop reveals
project to build biological weapons, Israel news, September 1, 2014,
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4566367,00.html, DSG)
US intelligence officials discovered that one of the world's nightmare scenarios may
have some base in reality as, according to a report in Foreign Policy last Friday, a
laptop was recently discovered in war-torn Syria, detailing the attempts and
ambitions of the Islamic State (ISIS) to build and use weapons of mass destruction.
According to the report, the computer was discovered in the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria, near the Turkish border after fierce battles in which other resistance
groups captured the area, and with it an ISIS post. An ISIS militant brandishes a
knife over captured Syrian soldiers. (Photo: AP) An ISIS militant brandishes a knife
over captured Syrian soldiers. (Photo: AP) Foreign policy said that the computer
belonged to a Tunisian national who studied chemistry at two separate universities
in his home country before leaving to join ISIS in Syria. The Syrian rebels who
captured Idlib didn't know what was on the computer or what importance it may
have and therefore passed it on to Foreign Policy reporters who initially thought that
the laptop was empty. Only after further investigation did they discover tens of
thousands of folders and documents in French, English and Arabic. The computer's
contents were originally unsurprising for a terrorist organization like ISIS. Reporters
found old videos of Osama Bin Laden, a guidebook for building a bomb and stealing
a vehicle, and how jihadists should use disguises and fake identities to travel from
country to country without being caught. Finally, after hours of filing through the
computer's documents, Foreign Policy reporters found documents proving that the
Tunisian had taught himself how to construct biological weapons for attacks that
would astound the world. Perhaps the most alarming of the documents however,
detailed ISIS sanctioned work to weaponize the bubonic plague and other viruses
that would have an even greater affect than that of a localized chemical attack.
"The benefits of a biological weapon are that it doesn't come up often, and the
losses are massive," said the instructions on the laptop. "When a mouse is injected
by the bacteria, the symptoms of the disease begin to show after 24 hours. It's best
to use in places like underground trains or soccer fields and it can be used in a
suicide attack as well." Alongside the instructions was also a message of religious
approval for the use of such weapons - part of a Fatwa which says that, "If the
Muslims can't overwhelm the infidels in any other way, they are allowed to use
weapons of mass destruction to kill everyone and erase them and their descendants
from the earth." While the idea of ISIS establishing such devastating weapons can
easily conjure fear, this isn't the first time that terrorist organizations have brought
the issue of biological weapons to the forefront of the war on extremism. Even
before the September 11 attacks in the US, al-Qaeda was involved in attempts to
use chemical weapons in Afghanistan. In a CNN report from 2002, members of the
extremist group could be seen using toxic gas on dogs. The US invested substantial
efforts to prevent al-Qaeda from getting biological weapons, but the information on
the laptop from Syria proves that terrorist organizations are still working to develop
such weapons, which can kill thousands of people in one breath. The fear is that the
longer ISIS continues to exist, the more specialists may join its ranks and use labs in
the areas already capture by ISIS to work toward chemical weapons capabilities.

Such labs exist in Mosul in Iraq and Ar Raqqah in Syria, both in the hands of ISIS
militants.

Al-Qaeda is a Bioweapons threat

Soffer 13

(The managing editor of Arutz Sheva, Ari, Experts Warn of Al Qaeda Biological
Weapons Threat, Arutz Sheva, October 16, 2013,
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/172897#.Vaz4cPlViko, DSG)
As international attention in Syria focuses on efforts to dismantle the Assad
regime's chemical weapons stockpile, British experts are warning of another,
potentially more lethal threat. Experts from the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) have
issued a stark warning over what they say is the "clear and present danger" of Al
Qaeda gaining possession of the Assad regime's stockpile of biological weapons,
claiming to have substantial evidence that Al Qaeda-linked groups may already
have possession of toxic agents. Unlike chemical weapons, which utilize chemical
agents to poison victims, biological weapons make use of diseases, toxins and other
contagious agents. Biological weapons have the potential to kill far greater
numbers, and are also far harder to detect or protect against. Both are banned
under international treaties, but the Syrian government possesses active programs
in both fields. However, whilst the use of chemical weapons during the Syrian civil
war has been seen on numerous occasions - most notably, but by no means
exclusively, during the August 21 attack which killed more than 1,000 people in a
number of Damascus suburbs - biological weapons have not been used by either
side. That is likely because bioweapons are notoriously difficult to control or contain.
But the HJS report, released on Tuesday, says that jihadists in Syria are actively
seeking to gain control of the regime's biological weapons' stockpile and, chillingly,
suggests they may already have done so. The report claims that the Assad regime is
losing control of its bioweapons arsenal, in part because it was never centrallycontrolled in the way the country's chemical weapons stockpile has been. "Unlike
chemical weapons, maintained in military designated stockpiles which are generally
identifiable and which Assad maintains command and control over, the structure of
Syria's biological warfare programs are latent, compartmentalized and spread
across its remaining bio-pharmaceutical infrastructure. The programs are designed
to be highly agile to allow swift production if required." Worryingly, the report
suggests that the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front may already have possession of
"biological pathogens or weaponized agents either of which would pose a threat to
the international community." It points to the widespread looting of biopharmasuitical laboratories throughout the country, and cites a "credible
eyewitness" as claiming to have personally witnessed "a looted pharmaceutical
laboratory," near Aleppo, where Syria's biological weapons program is concentrated,
"which was probably a cover for a biological weapons production site." The fact that
a Malaysian Al Qaeda operative named as Yazid Sufaat, identified as "Al Qaeda's
primary biological weapon expert", was arrested in February as he attempted to
enter Syria, was said to indicate the clear interest that the group has in developing
such a program in the country. Other Al Qaeda branches, most notably in Yemen
and North Africa, have previously attempted to obtain such weapons, and the
group's founder, Osama Bin Laden, had expressed an interest in them prior to the
infamous 9/11 attacks. While the report does not cite any clear and definitive
evidence of Al Qaeda physically possessing biological agents, the circumstantial
evidence paints a fairly alarming picture. On the other hand, analysts will find some

solace in the fact that neither Al Qaeda nor any other terrorist group has
successfully manufactured and deployed biological weapons to lethal effect. But
HJS's Associate Fellow Dr Bellamy van Aalst, a former EU and NATO bio-defence
consultant, warned against complacency, in light of the relative availability of
already-weaponized and readily-deployable biological weapons in Syria.
Establishing the extent to which Assad may have developed biological WMDs is
extremely difficult, given that their production is indistinguishable from benign
biological lab processes. But this is certainly a risk to which we should not turn a
blind eye. If Assad has been developing biological weapons, as the evidence
suggests, and if those weapons fall into the hands of extremists, global health
security could be in grave danger.

Al Shabaab trying to get bioweapons

Kelley 13

(Maria Kelley is a well-rounded intelligence professional with experience in four

distinct areas of analysis as both a service member and a civilian. While deployed
she was devoted to understanding and dismantling terrorist networks and analyzing
their ideology. She holds two Bachelor degrees in Law and was inducted into Golden
Key International Honour Society for academic excellence. While earning her
Master's in Intelligence with a concentration in Analysis she was again academically
recognized and inducted into Pi Gamma Mu. She is currently working on expanding
upon her research on WMDs and applying it to other terrorist organizations., Maria,
Terrorism and the Growing threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction- Al-shabaab,
GRIN, August 5, 2013, http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/230939/terrorism-and-thegrowing-threat-of-weapons-of-mass-destruction-al-shabaab, DSG)
In 2008, the then Director of National Intelligence, J. Michael McConnell, told the US
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the safety of the United States was
threaten by the ongoing efforts of nation-states and terrorists to develop and/or
acquire dangerous weapons and delivery systems (Spiers 2010, 90). Mr. McConnell
was right to be concerned; some chemical and biological weapons can be produced
easily and inexpensively, hence the reference poor mans atomic bomb (Spiers
2010, 96). There is some suspicion that some countries are secretly pursuing
nuclear capabilities while others are openly seeking these capabilities.
(1) al-Shabaab, given its current area of operation, control, and affiliations, already
possesses the ability and capability of obtaining materials and producing chemical
and biological weapons of mass destruction. (2) The most common reason these
chemical and biological cocktails have not been used is that the best method of
delivery has not been ascertained by al-Shabaab. (3) The effectiveness and
potential success of the weapons is still undetermined by al-Shabaab.

ISIS is trying to use ebola as a bioweapon

Fitzgerald 14

(A writer, journalist, and analyst for newsmax, Sandy, "ISIS Could Turn Ebola Into
Bioweapon, Security Expert Warns," Newsmax, October 10, 2014,
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Ebola-ISIS-terroristsbioweapons/2014/10/10/id/599965, DSG)
The Islamic State (ISIS) may be thinking of using human carriers to infect its
enemies with the Ebola virus, a national security expert claims, saying terror groups
would not have to weaponize the deadly virus to spread the disease. "In the context

of terrorist activity, it doesn't take much sophistication to go that next step to use a
human being as a carrier," Retired Capt. Al Shimkus, a professor of national security
affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, told Forbes. Shimkus said the "individual
exposed to the Ebola virus would be the carrier," and with West Africa in an open
epidemic, it would not be difficult for terrorists to steal infected bodily fluids to use
elsewhere. Shimkus said that ISIS or another terror group could also send some
operatives into an outbreak region so they could intentionally expose themselves to
the virus, and once exposed, they could head to a target city or country. Troops
have been using human carriers to spread disease for centuries, even during the
Middle Ages, said Shimkus, when they threw corpses of people who had died of the
bubonic plague over enemy walls to spread the disease. Shimkus is not alone in
believing Ebola could be used as a weapon, Forbes reports. Amanda Teckman, who
wrote the paper "The Bioterrorist Threat of Ebola in East Africa and Implications for
Global Health and Security" says "the threat of an Ebola bioterrorist attack in East
Africa is a global health and security concern, and should not be ignored."

Al-Qaeda is already attempting to strike the US with

bioweapons
Bell 13
(a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where he founded
and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the
graduate program in space architecture. His background deals extensively with
research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for
applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. he have recently written
a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global
Warming Hoax"., Larry Bell, 10-20-2013, ""Black Wind To America": A Deadly
Terrorist Bioweapon Program Agenda?," Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/10/20/black-wind-to-america-a-deadlyterrorist-bioweapon-program-agenda/, DSG)
Larry, while we cant be certain, the advisor to the European Union on bioweapons
has told them of the evidence of smallpox being tested on prisoners in Syriaand
that was years before the current uprising. The word smallpox was also found
written on incubation containers in Iraq after the first Gulf War.
More recently there has been chatter of a black wind to America. After the attack
in Spain, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri said, claiming to speak for al-Quaeda,
We announce the good news for the Moslems in the world that the strike of the
black wind of death against America, is now at its final stage, 90 percent ready and
it is coming soon, by Gods will.
Some have interpreted this as a reference to a bio-attack. Again, we cant be sure
thats what they are referring to, but it would be a mistake not to plan for every
contingency.

ISIS Impacts
ISIS causes causes toxic warfare
Karasik 14
(Dr. Theodore Karasik is a Gulf-based analyst of regional geo-political affairs. He
received his Ph.D in History from UCLA in Los Angeles, California in four fields:
Middle East, Russia, Caucasus, and a specialized sub-field in Cultural Anthropology
focusing on tribes and clans., Theodore, 7-23-2015, "ISIS and the potential for toxic
warfare," No Publication, http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middleeast/2014/07/13/ISIS-and-the-potential-for-toxic-warfare.html)
Reports over the past few days of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) capturing
chemical and uranium compounds is bringing to light the issue of how violent
terrorist groups may use such materials for nefarious purposes. If ISIS incorporates
these materials into its capabilities and can justify their use, it means Caliph Ibrihim
and his lieutenants will find an important tool that can cause psychological panic.
Neighboring states and the international community need to be fully aware of the
potential impact and be ready to implement mitigation strategies necessary to halt
this potentially destructive problem, resulting in potential Toxic Warfare scenarios.
ISIS appears to have an increased interest in weapons that incorporate harmful
materials that are inexpensive and relatively easy to acquire. Such toxic weapons
provide a means for non-state actors - in this case ISIS - to improve their capabilities
to achieve goals within the context of asymmetrical warfare. In basic terms, toxic
warfare refers to the use of chemicals or harmful materials to hurt or alter the
behavior of an opponent during kinetic operations. Toxic warfare does not, however,
require the use of traditional weapons but seeks to psychologically damage an
opponent and create havoc.
Toxic warfare can be used by both state and non-state actors to achieve a number
of objectives. Toxic warfare can cause casualties among opposing militaries by
incapacitating and, in some cases, killing the adversary. Toxic warfare can also halt
or force delays in military logistics flows or operations and can disrupt the
functioning of the urban infrastructure through contamination or corrosion. ISIS can
perhaps use toxic warfare for a strategic advantage in their holy war against their
enemies.
Toxic weapons can, moreover, derive power from the uncertainty that stems from
their potential use. Toxic substances often represent an unknown threat, and the
level of uncertainty surrounding the potential damage these substances might
cause can increase their impact even when little or no physical harm has been
done. ISIS can use substances with profound psychological impact and based on
their superior information campaigns, will know how to capitalize on any potential
use with full effect.
Now lets turn to two major events that occurred within 48 hours of each other. In
mid-June, ISIS captured the Muthanna site, 56 kilometers north of Baghdad. This
achievement, only reported in the open press recently, asserted that ISIS militants
now had access to Sarin and Mustard gas. Muthanna was Saddam Husseins main
chemical weapons facilities and was used to store the remainder of the former
despots stockpile. But the Sarin and Mustard gas is not of concern here because of
degraded composition. Instead, sodium cyanide is the main risk. According to a
Jordanian official, ISIS took a large quantity of sodium cyanide from Muthanna which
is a very toxic chemical and a precursor for the warfare agent tabun. During the

American occupation, the tabun-filled containers were all treated with

decontamination solution and likely no longer contain any agent, but the residue of
this decontamination would contain cyanides, which would still be a hazard. This
cyanide can be potentially used to poison water supplies with toxic results and
creating general panic.
Less than 24 hours later, news of an Iraqi government appeal dated July 8 to United
Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, appeared in the mass media. The Iraqi
government asked for international help in regarding 40kg of uranium compounds
stolen by ISIS from Mosul University. Iraqs ambassador to the U.N., Mohammad Ali
al-Hakim said that terrorist groups have seized control of nuclear material at the
sites that came out of the control of the state. At first glance, the uranium in
question appears to be used by Mosul University faculty in determining the impact
of U.S. use of Depleted Uranium (DU) shells on, for instance, local flora and fauna.
However, the tone of the request seemed to be almost alarmist for simple uranium.
The Russian press picked up the Iraqi concern while the Western press downplayed
the event. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said the
sheer fact that the terrorists ... show unmistakable interest in nuclear and chemical
materials is, of course, very alarming.
Maybe the Kremlin should be concerned. After all, any ISIS chemical and uranium
agents are indeed in Moscows area of worry both geographically and logistically
given the presence of Chechen leader Abu Umar al-Shishani. According to an Arab
official, shockingly, the material taken from Mosul University was Plutonium 238: It
came from Ukraine in 2011 via personnel at the Vostochny Integrated Mining and
Concentrating Plant (VostGOK). It is completely illegal and was brought via Turkey to
Iraq for use for eventual Sunni/Saddamist enrichment. The material got into Iraq
through the black market with middlemen and transport without inspection. The
Mosul University work on DU studies was a cover. If true, this story adds an
additional danger to ISIS capabilities as well as their ability to create a Radioactive
Dispersal Device (RDD) which is capable of spreading panic and making a unholy
mess via a vaporization process. If not true, then there are certainly questions to be
asked regarding Mosul Universitys security procedures, along with missing
government oversight, for their experiments given that the uranium compounds are
toxic.
Overall, the events of the last weeks regarding ISISs growing holdings of toxic
substances raises the question of how they will be used. The group clearly has
extreme violence in its portfolio of weapons, and toxic warfare should not be ruled
out. Chemical and radiation detection will be a necessity with clear civil defense
procedures in place. In the Levant, this type of response may be practically
impossible to implement and therefore regional and international powers may have
to intervene either before its too late or to clean-up the resulting poisonous
disorder. As a warning from ISIS, the first issue of the Caliphates English language
magazine, Dabiq, said tawahhush (mayhem) is necessary.

ISIS sparks nuclear war

Batchelor 15

(Online news reporter for daily express and freelances the ipaper, Tom Batchelor, 611-2015, "ISIS fighters plot nuclear war after they obtain radioactive material to
build dirty bomb," Express.co.uk,
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/583563/Islamic-State-radioactive-materialnuclear-weapon)

According to the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, Nato members are
growing increasingly worried about radioactive material seized by the terror group,
with fears that it could be turned into a nuclear weapon.
It is thought that ISIS fighters have stolen or captured the toxic loot from
government-controlled research centres and hospitals across the region.
The radioactive matter is thought to have been destined for use by authorities for
health and science research - but it has now fallen into the hands of ISIS radicals.
Middle East expert Afzal Ashraf
Ms Bishop claimed the jihadi organisation had recruited "highly technically trained
professionals" and was already using chlorine as a weapon.
She added that ISIS was "prepared to use any and all means, any and all forms of
violence they can think of, to advance their demented cause.
"That includes use of chemical weapon."
ISIS supporters in Mosul, IraqAP
ISIS has been operating in its current form for just a year but has already made
sweeping gains
A former commander of the British army's chemical weapons unit has spoken out in
support of the Australian foreign minister's comments, calling the development of a
dirty bomb by ISIS a "very real threat".
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon also described as "worrying" reports that ISIS fighters
had got hold of chemical weapons previously controlled by Syrian president Bashar
al-Assad's troops.
Middle East expert Afzal Ashraf told Express.co.uk that the group's long-term plan
hinged on obtaining the deadly weapon.

ISIS causes regional instability

World Review 14

(It is an online information platform with access to a worldwide network of experts

and in-depth research and analysis providing insight on relevant topics in
geopolitics, economics, defense & security and energy., World Review, 06-24-2014,
"ISIS advance in Iraq poses threat to regional instability,"
http://www.worldreview.info, http://www.worldreview.info/content/isis-advance-iraqposes-threat-regional-instability)
Short of real and effective political power-sharing in Iraq, this group is unlikely to be
pacified. Continued political sectarianism by the Shia government will only
exasperate the extremist threat with the possibility that Iraq will splinter into three
regions.
There will be consequences, particularly in terms of an increased threat of terrorism,
regional instability and possibly limited disruption to the flow of oil. The most likely
scenario is that there will be no strategic redeployment of forces or renewed
military intervention.
US President Barack Obamas decision to deploy 300 military advisers in Iraq is
unlikely to lead to 'mission creep'. The protagonists are likely to fight in a replay of
the 2006 eruption of the Iraqi civil war regardless of any last-minute concessions
from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to grant Sunnis real political power - or even if he
leaves office.

An ISIS victory would be regionally destabilising as a large, strategically important

tract of territory will be considered 'ungovernable space' for purposes of
conventional diplomacy, politics and state craft. The Syrian civil war would become
more vicious as ISIS would be emboldened and its new-found territory would provide
a strategic military and logistical depth to its Syrian operations.
This new ungovernable space would produce more global security threats by
training jihadists who return to their home countries after being radicalised and
battle-hardened during their stints fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. These people,
born and bred in Western countries, are then sent home to commit terrorist acts.
This could prove to be the most serious security threat to European countries over
the next couple of years.

ISIS cyberattack leaves US vulnerable

Blosser 15

(John Blosser, 4-16-2015, "Experts Warn ISIS' Cyberattack Capabilities Leave US

Vulnerable," Newsmax, http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/ISIS-computers-IslamicState-United-States/2015/04/16/id/639010/)
Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists are becoming more cyber-savvy than ever, experts
warn, showing surprisingly sophisticated capability at recruiting young computer
mavens to their cause, hacking into worldwide websites and posing a serious threat
to Western emergency systems, utilities, communications, and transportation
systems.
A "cyberattack" on the U.S. "launched by foreign hackerscould cripple the country
by taking down the power grid, water infrastructure, transportation networks and
the financial system," warn Mitchell Silber, former director of intelligence analysis
for the New York Police Department, and Daniel Garrie, of the Journal of Law and
Cyber Enforcement, writing in The Wall Street Journal.
"In a major U.S. city, a combined physical and cyber terrorist attack could result in
hundreds wounded and killed. It could also impair first responders ability to get to
the scene of the attack, and the ability of local government to communicate with
the citys population in a chaotic and confusing environment," the pair wrote.
Already, an ISIS group called CyberCaliphate has taken over the French TV network
TV5 Monde for 24 hours and invaded the Twitter accounts of the U.S. Central
Military Command (Centcom), posting the chilling messages, "American soldiers, we
are coming. Watch your back," and "We broke into your networks and personal
devices and know everything about you. You'll see no mercy, infidels. ISIS is already
here. We are in your PCs, in each military base," the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
(CBC) reported.
Three years after Congress mandated the development of a cyber-protected
national public safety broadband network, it is still not up and running, Garrie and
Silber wrote.
"To successfully prevent future attacks, whether cyber-enhanced terrorism or
otherwise, federal and local authorities in likely urban targets will need to increase
their cyber situational awareness, preparedness and resilience," the Journal
reported.

Terrorism Link Turns

Terror Link Turns

False positives in big data leads to less reliable results
Nassim M. Taleb 13. Nassim N. Taleb is the author of Antifragile, which this piece

is adapted from. He is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and

philosophical essayist. Taleb is currently a distinguished Professor of risk
engineering at New York Universitys Polytechnic Institute. His works focus on
decision making under uncertainty, in other words what to do in a world we dont
understand. His other book is The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly
Improbable. [Beware the Big Errors of Big Data wired.com 02/08/13 URL:
http://www.wired.com/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-people/] JC
Big-data researchers have the option to stop doing their research once they have
the right result. In options language: The researcher gets the upside and truth
gets the downside. It makes him antifragile, that is, capable of benefiting from
complexity and uncertainty and at the expense of others. But beyond that, big
data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to
the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more
attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). Its a property of
sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researchers computer,
there is. Large deviations are likely to be bogus. We used to have protections in
place for this kind of thing, but big data makes spurious claims even more tempting.
And fewer and fewer papers today have results that replicate: Not only is it hard to
get funding for repeat studies, but this kind of research doesnt make anyone a
hero. Despite claims to advance knowledge, you can hardly trust statistically
oriented sciences or empirical studies these days.

Overreliance on Big Data fails in counterterror ops

Frances Goullart 13. Francis Gouillart is the president of Experience Co-Creation

Partnership, a management education and consulting firm in Concord, Mass. and

author of The Power of Co-Creation. [Big data NSA spying is not even an effective
strategy Fortune.com June 10, 2013 http://fortune.com/2013/06/10/big-data-nsaspying-is-not-even-an-effective-strategy/] JC
FORTUNE The Obama Administration thinks it can prevent terrorism by collecting
and linking immense volumes of private phone call, credit card, and Internet data.
Unfortunately, as the administration trades privacy for intelligence insights,
President Obama is exchanging a cherished American value for an unproved
theory. The Obama Administration loves data. It argues that the president was
reelected because of its enormous people database and use of polling and social
media. And the Affordable Care Act is built in part on a belief that massive troves of
electronic health records will pave the way for predictive algorithms that will
prevent costly hospital readmissions, or identify medical practices that lead to
better patient health. But the evidence for big data is scant at best. To date, large
fields of data have generated meaningful insights at times, but not on the scale
many have promised. This disappointment has been documented in the Wall Street
Journal , Information Week , and SmartData Collective. Yet, for years now,
corporations and public organizations have been busy buying huge servers and
business intelligence software, pushed by technology providers and consultants
armed with sales pitches with colorful anecdotes such as the Moneyball story in
which general manager Billy Beane triumphed by using player statistics to predict
the winning strategies for the Oakland As baseball team. If it worked for Billy

Beane, it will work for your global multinational, too, right? Well, no. MORE: Spying:
Good for business as long as it stays secret The worship of big data is not new.
Twenty-five years ago, technology salespeople peddled data using an old story
about a retailer that spotted a correlation between diaper purchases and beer
drinking, allowing a juicy cross-promotion of the two products for young fathers.
Today, most data warehouses are glorified repositories of transaction data, with
very little intelligence. Working with multinationals as a management consultant, I
have chased big data insights all my life and have never found them. What I have
learned, however, is that local data has a lot of value. Put another way, big data is
pretty useless, but small data is a rich source of insights. The probability of
discovering new relationships at a local, highly contextual level and expanding it to
universal insights is much higher than of uncovering a new law from the massive
crunching of large amounts of data. According to my firms research, local farmers
in India with tiny fields frequently outperform in productivity and sustainability
a predictive global model developed by one of the worlds leading agrochemical
companies. Why? Because they develop unique planting, fertilizing, or harvesting
practices linked to the uniqueness of their soil, their weather pattern, or the rare
utilization of some compost. There is more to learn from a local Indian outlier than
from building a giant multivariate yield prediction model of all farms in the world.
The same is true for terrorism. Dont look for a needle in a giant haystack. Find one
needle in a small clump of hay and see whether similar clumps of hay also contain
needles.

Big data counterproductive to finding terrorism

Julia Angwin 13. Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to

2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy
investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in
2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010. Her book "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for
Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance," was published
by Times Books earlier this year, and was shortlisted for Best Business Book of the
Year by the Financial Times. [NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance
Data- Spy Agency Drowns in Useless Data, Impeding Work, Former Employee
Claims December 25, 2013 The Wall Street Journal URL:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304202204579252022823658850]
JC
The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct
legitimate surveillance, claims Mr. Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a
general during more than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are
swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the
enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse. Mr. Binney's warning
has gotten far less attention than legal questions raised by leaks from former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden about the agency's mass collection of information
around the world. Those revelations unleashed a re-examination of the spy agency's
aggressive tactics. MORE Snowden Warns of Dangers of Citizen Surveillance But
the NSA needs more room to store all the data it collectsand new phone records,
data on money transfers and other information keep pouring in. A new storage
center being built in Utah will eventually be able to hold more than 100,000 times
as much as the contents of printed materials in the Library of Congress, according
to outside experts. Some of the documents released by Mr. Snowden detail
concerns inside the NSA about drowning in information. An internal briefing
document in 2012 about foreign cellphone-location tracking by the agency said the

efforts were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" data. In March
2013, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a
program called Muscular because the "relatively small intelligence value it contains
does not justify the sheer volume of collection," another document shows. In
response to questions about Mr. Binney's claims, an NSA spokeswoman says the
agency is "not collecting everything, but we do need the tools to collect intelligence
on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies." Existing
surveillance programs were approved by "all three branches of government," and
each branch "has a role in oversight," she adds. In a statement through his lawyer,
Mr. Snowden says: "When your working process every morning starts with poking
around a haystack of seven billion innocent lives, you're going to miss things." He
adds: "We're blinding people with data we don't need." A presidential panel
recommended earlier this month that the agency shut down its bulk collection of
telephone-call records of all Americans. The federal government could accomplish
the same goal by querying phone companies, the panel concluded.

Squo data collection increases terrorist risks

Peter Maass 2015. Peter Maass has written about war, media, and national

security for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Washington
Post. He reported on both civilians and combatants during the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan. He is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, an awardwinning memoir about the conflict in Bosnia, and he wrote Crude World: The Violent
Twilight of Oil. Peter, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, has focused most
recently on government and corporate surveillance, and is working on a book about
surveillance for Alfred A. Knopf. He has taught writing at Princeton and Columbia
universities, and he has been awarded fellowships at the Shorenstein Center at
Harvard and the American Academy in Berlin. He is on the advisory boards of the
Solutions Journalism Network, and the Program for Narrative and Documentary
Practice at Tufts University. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he
lives in New York City. [INSIDE NSA, OFFICIALS PRIVATELY CRITICIZE "COLLECT IT
ALL" SURVEILLANCE May 28 2015 The Intercept URL:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/28/nsa-officials-privately-criticize-collect-itall-surveillance/] JC
Alexander, the NSA director from 2005 to 2014 and chief proponent of the agencys
collect it all strategy, vigorously defended the bulk collection programs. What we
have, from my perspective, is a reasonable approach on how we can defend our
nation and protect our civil liberties and privacy, he said at a security conference in
Aspen in 2013. He added, You need the haystack to find the needle. The same
point has been made by other officials, including James Cole, the former deputy
attorney general who told a congressional committee in 2013, If youre looking for
the needle in the haystack, you have to have the entire haystack to look through.
NSA Slide, May 2011 The opposing viewpoint was voiced earlier this month by
Snowden, who noted in an interview with the Guardian that the men who committed
recent terrorist attacks in France, Canada and Australia were under surveillance
their data was in the haystack yet they werent singled out. It wasnt the fact that
we werent watching people or not, Snowden said. It was the fact that we were
watching people so much that we did not understand what we had. The problem is
that when you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.
In a 2011 interview with SIDtoday, a deputy director in the Signals Intelligence
Directorate was asked about analytic modernization at the agency. His response,
while positive on the NSAs ability to surmount obstacles, noted that it faced

difficulties, including the fact that some targets use encryption and switch phone
numbers to avoid detection. He pointed to volume as a particular problem. We
live in an Information Age when we have massive reserves of information and dont
have the capability to exploit it, he stated. I was told that there are 2 petabytes of
data in the SIGINT System at any given time. How much is that? Thats equal to 20
million 4-drawer filing cabinets. How many cabinets per analyst is that? By the end
of this year, well have 1 terabyte of data per second coming in. You cant crank that
through the existing processes and be effective.

Curtailing drone use creates less terrorists

Hassan Abbas 13 Hassan Abbas is a senior advisor at Asia Society and the author of
the forthcoming book The Taliban Revival. [How Drones Create More TerroristsMilitants take advantage of fearful communities to draw new recruits. August 23
2013 The Atlantic URL:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/how-drones-create-moreterrorists/278743/] JC
Recently, strong evidence has begun to suggest that terrorists use drone strikes as
a recruitment tool. Of course, the value of drones in the arena of intelligencegathering and secret surveillance of foes (and even friends) is unmistakable. In
warzones too, it can support ground operations in significant and even decisive
ways. None of this is controversial, though the ones on the receiving end will
certainly not like it. What is debatable is its use as a counter-terrorism instrument in
theaters that are not declared war zones, or in cases where a sovereign state is not
fully and publicly on board with this policy. Lack of transparency in regulations that
govern this new type of warfare, the unverifiable nature of targets, and questions
over the credibility of intelligence only complicates the matter. Mark Bowden's
important contribution to the drone debate raises critical questions that policy
makers will be wise to consider for the future use of this new tool of war. One of the
important arguments mentioned in the piece revolves around the notion that drone
strikes might be less provocative than ground assaults for terrorists, meaning that
standard warfare might create more terrorists than drones do. Lets first accept what
is obvious: more civilians are killed in standard warfare, and the history of warfare in
the 20th century sufficiently proves the point. When it comes to drones strikes, the
ratio of civilian deaths is certainly lower, but the issue is not about the number of
civilian casualties alone. The inherently secret nature of the weapon creates a
persistent feeling of fear in the areas where drones hover in the sky, and the
hopelessness of communities that are on the receiving end of strikes causes severe
backlash -- both in terms of anti-U.S. opinion and violence. Response to drone
strikes comes in many varieties. First, revenge is targeted at those within the easy
range of the insurgents and militants. The victims of those revenge terrorist attacks
also consider the drone strikes responsible for all the mayhem. Consequently,
terrorists and ordinary people are drawn closer to each other out of sympathy,
whereas a critical function of any successful counter-terrorism policy is to win over
public confidence so that they join in the campaign against the perpetrators of
terror. Poor public awareness -- which is often a function of inadequate education -about terrorist organizations indeed plays a role in building this perspective. Public
outrage against drone strikes circuitously empowers terrorists. It allows them space
to survive, move around, and maneuver. Pakistan is a perfect example of this
phenomenon.

Bulk data tradesoff with other successful counterterror ops

Schneier 15. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist
and author. Described by The Economist as a "security guru" [Why Mass
Surveillance Can't, Won't, And Never Has Stopped A Terrorist digg.com Adapted
from the book Data and Goliath March 24 2015 URL: http://digg.com/2015/whymass-surveillance-cant-wont-and-never-has-stopped-a-terrorist] JC
The three problems listed above cannot be fixed. Data mining is simply the wrong
tool for this job, which means that all the mass surveillance required to feed it
cannot be justified. When he was NSA director, General Keith Alexander argued that
ubiquitous surveillance would have enabled the NSA to prevent 9/11. That seems
unlikely. He wasnt able to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, even
though one of the bombers was on the terrorist watch list and both had sloppy
social media trails and this was after a dozen post-9/11 years of honing
techniques. The NSA collected data on the Tsarnaevs before the bombing, but
hadnt realized that it was more important than the data they collected on millions
of other people. This point was made in the 9/11 Commission Report. That report
described a failure to connect the dots, which proponents of mass surveillance
claim requires collection of more data. But what the report actually said was that
the intelligence community had all the information about the plot without mass
surveillance, and that the failures were the result of inadequate analysis. Mass
surveillance didnt catch underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in 2006,
even though his father had repeatedly warned the U.S. government that he was
dangerous. And the liquid bombers (theyre the reason governments prohibit
passengers from bringing large bottles of liquids, creams, and gels on airplanes in
their carry-on luggage) were captured in 2006 in their London apartment not due to
mass surveillance but through traditional investigative police work. Whenever we
learn about an NSA success, it invariably comes from targeted surveillance rather
than from mass surveillance. One analysis showed that the FBI identifies potential
terrorist plots from reports of suspicious activity, reports of plots, and investigations
of other, unrelated, crimes. This is a critical point. Ubiquitous surveillance and data
mining are not suitable tools for finding dedicated criminals or terrorists. We
taxpayers are wasting billions on mass-surveillance programs, and not
getting the security weve been promised. More importantly, the money
were wasting on these ineffective surveillance programs is not being
spent on investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: tactics that
have been proven to work. The NSA's surveillance efforts have actually
made us less secure.

Politics Link Turns

Politics Link Turn

Freedom Act popular and bipartisan support for Freedom Act
Dan Roberts 13 Roberts is the Guardian's Washington Bureau chief, covering politics
and US national affairs. Previously, he worked as the national editor in London and
was head of business. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. [Congressional duo
launch NSA overhaul bill and urge 'meaningful reform' October 29 2013 The
Guardian URL: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/nsa-overhaul-billlegislation-usa-freedom-act] JC
The bill also calls for a special advocate to focus on the protection of privacy rights
and civil liberties before the court that oversees Fisa requests by the NSA, and
requires more detailed public reporting about the numbers and types of court orders
that are issued. It does not yet include reforms of overseas activity, although such
amendments are expected to be introduced soon, according to congressional staff
involved in the drafting. The legislation draws on earlier reform efforts in the House
that were narrowly defeated before further NSA revelations appeared over the
summer, and has already attracted support from many members of Congress who
were previously sceptical of the need for legal change. Washington must regain
Americans trust in their government, said Sensebrenner. |The USA Freedom Act is
an essential first step. The bill has 16 co-sponsors in the Senate including
senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Dick Durbin (D-Ill), Dean Heller (R-Nev), Richard
Blumenthal (D-Conn), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tom Udall
(D-NM), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc), Martin Heinrich (D-NM),
Ed Markey (D-Mass), Mark Udall (D-Colo), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Jeff Merkley
(D-Ore), Jon Tester (D-Mont), and Joe Schatz (D-Hawaii). The measure also has
more than 70 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House and enjoys the diverse support of
groups ranging from the National Rifle Association to the American Civil Liberties
Union.

Tech sector loves the Freedom Act

ITI 4/29 2015 The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) is the global voice of
the tech sector. As the premier advocacy and policy organization for the worlds
leading innovation companies, ITI navigates the relationships between
policymakers, companies, and non-governmental organizations, providing creative
solutions that advance the development and use of technology around the world.
[Tech Encourages Congress to Act Swiftly on Bipartisan Surveillance Reform
Legislation 4/29/2015 Information Technology Industry Council URL:
http://www.itic.org/news-events/news-releases/tech-encourages-congress-to-actswiftly-on-bipartisan-surveillance-reform-legislation] JC
WASHINGTON The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), the global voice
for the tech sectors leading companies, issued the following statement from Andy
Halataei, senior vice president for government affairs, encouraging Congress to
move quickly to enact the USA Freedom Act. Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), John
Conyers (D-Mich.), James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.); and
Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the bipartisan
legislation today: "We applaud Reps. Goodlatte, Conyers, Sensenbrenner, and
Nadler; and Sens. Leahy and Lee, for their commitment to finding a bicameral,
bipartisan approach to reforming our governments surveillance authorities. The
USA Freedom Act, H.R. 2048, builds on the foundation laid by the House Judiciary
Committee last Congress and the result is a bill that strengthens privacy protections

while maintaining the interests of national security. The bill, among other things,
ends indiscriminate bulk collection of data and enables the private sector to be
more transparent about the orders it receives. These reforms are critical to restoring
user trust across the globe in both the U.S. government and U.S.-based technology
companies as well as the open and borderless Internet our innovation economy
depends upon." "We urge the House Judiciary Committee to quickly approve the
USA Freedom Act and avoid harmful amendments that would jeopardize this
carefully crafted bipartisan bill." Earlier in April, ITI joined in a multi tech association
letter to members of Congress encouraging lawmakers to enact needed surveillance
reforms. Reforming the nations surveillance authorities is one of techs top agenda
items and ITI President and CEO Dean Garfield testified on the need for reforms last
year before committees in the House and Senate.

Tech sector dedicated to lobbying Capitol Hill, especially with

surveillance

Romm 15. Tony Romm is a senior technology reporter for POLITICO Pro. He closely
covers the intersection of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., tracking how top tech
and telecom companies lobby in the nation's capital from the ways the industry
donates to its regulators, to the sectors activities to shape state and federal
debates on privacy, cybersecurity, net neutrality and more. [Tech giants get deeper
into D.C. influence game- Apple, Amazon and Facebook all shelled out record
amounts last year to lobby Washington, according to new disclosures Politico.com
1/21/15 URL: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/tech-lobby-apple-amazonfacebook-google-114468.html] JC
Apple, Amazon and Facebook shelled out record amounts to influence Washington;
Google posted one of its biggest lobbying years ever; and a slew of new tech
companies dipped their toes into politics for the first time in 2014 a sign of the
industrys deepening effort to shape policymaking in D.C. The sharp uptick in
spending reflects the tech sectors evolution from an industry that once shunned
Washington into a powerful interest thats willing to lobby extensively to advance
the debates that matter most to companies bottom lines from clamping down on
patent lawsuits to restricting NSA surveillance to obtaining more high-skilled
immigration visas and green cards. Story Continued Below There is increasingly a
sense from companies that they need to engage earlier and smarter, said Ryan
Triplette, a Republican lobbyist for Franklin Square Group, which represents
companies like Apple and Google. They began opening up their view as their
businesses have grown and not just looking at traditional technology issues.
Apple, which mostly avoided D.C. under the watch of late CEO Steve Jobs, grew its
lobbying balance sheet to just over $4.1 million last year from $3.3 million in 2013,
according to an analysis of lobbying reports, the latest of which were filed midnight
Tuesday. The iPhone giant recently has shown a greater willingness to engage
Washington under CEO Tim Cook: It even dispatched executives to Capitol Hill in
September to talk about its new smart watch and health tracking tools hoping to
assuage lawmakers fears about the new technologys data-tracking abilities.
Amazons lobbying expenses more than $4.7 million, up from around $3.5 million
in 2013 correspond with the companys own Washington makeover. The ecommerce giant last year jumped into new lines of business, expanding its pursuit
of government contracts while eyeing a new drone delivery service, prompting it to
hire a slew of new lobbyists and move to a bigger downtown D.C. office. Amazon is
also fighting the Federal Trade Commission over how it handled app purchases
made by kids. Apple, Amazon and Google declined to comment on the record.

Facebook did not reply to a request for comment. For all their efforts, these tech
giants failed to advance their political priorities in the last Congress but the fights
are sure to return in 2015 under the Republican-majority Congress. GOP leaders in
both chambers have already promised to revive the debate over patent litigation
reform a critical issue for tech companies like Google that want to curb lawsuits
from so-called patent trolls. Theres also talk of boosting the number of foreign highskilled workers, something industry titans have coveted as part of broader
immigration reform. The looming expiration of key Patriot Act surveillance
authorities means Congress must also wade back into the fight over what
data the NSA can collect a major issue for tech companies stung by
Edward Snowdens leaks about the agencys spying via popular Internet
services. And lawmakers are plugging into new issues like drones and
wearable technology that are important to Silicon Valley.

Tech sector influential and lobbying in Capitol Hill

Bolluyt 15. Jess Bolluyt is a recent graduate of Cedar Crest College, where she

wrote and edited for the college's newspaper, and received a degree in English. Her
work in poetry and fiction has appeared in Lines + Stars, Pitch, Onyx and The
Laconic. [How Much Influence Does Google Have in Washington? The Cheat Sheet
April 5, 2015 URL: http://www.cheatsheet.com/technology/how-much-influencedoes-google-have-in-washington.html/?a=viewall#ixzz3gY9jyt4i] JC
Nathan Ingraham, writing for The Verge, notes that Google has been a major
influence on U.S. politics for years, though its tried to keep that influence out of the
spotlight. But as its influence grows, thats becoming more difficult to do. A recent
report by The Wall Street Journal suggested that Google tampered with a 2012
investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into whether the search engine
giant was engaging in anticompetitive practices. Googles access to high-ranking
Obama administration officials during a critical phase of the antitrust probe is one
sign of the Internet giants reach in Washington, wrote Brody Mullins for the
Journal. One of Googles biggest victories is the defeat of the FTCs antitrust probe.
A lawsuit would have challenged the core of some Google business strategies. In a
sign of the stakes, Google announced the hiring of 12 additional lobbying firms one
week after news broke that the FTC had begun subpoenaing documents related to
the investigation. While the FTC decided not to bring a lawsuit against Google
the company made voluntary changes and the investigation was closed reports
published by the Journal indicated that the commission was deeply divided on
whether it should sue. The reports also exposed the close ties between Google and
the Obama administration. The Journal quoted an FTC staff report which
characterized the evidence against Google as a complex portrait of a company
working toward an overall goal of maintaining its market share by providing the best
user experience, while simultaneously engaging in tactics that resulted in harm to
many vertical competitors, and likely helped to entrench Googles monopoly power
over search and search advertising. The implication of its reporting was that
Google used its influence in Washington to influence the FTCs decision in its favor.

Terrorism Non-Uniques
US losing the war on terror-ISIS Proves
Macias 15 (Amanda Macias, 6-4-2015, "The US is 'probably losing' in the
campaign against ISIS," Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-isprobably-losing-in-the-campagin-against-isis-2015-6,VR)
When asked if the US-led coalition against ISIS was winning or losing, retired four-star General David Petraeus told
CBS News, "These

are fights where if you're not winning, you're probably losing,

because time is not on your side." Despite US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken's
announcement that 10,000 Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) militants have been killed
since the beginning of nine-month long campaign , Petraeus called the situation "worrisome." He
added that the loss of Ramadi, the provincial capital of the Anbar province, is"an
operational and a strategic setback, a significant one." The Obama administration contends
that the lsos of Ramadi is a temporary setback, but that's not how Iraqis are seeing it . Sunni tribes in Anbar
crucial to US success have reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS, and Baghdad
is relying on Iran-backed Shia militias more than ever. Petraeus continued by saying that
"[ISIS] is clearly a threat to the United States, to our allies and partners around the
world, and of course, very much in the region, where it's fomenting instability,
violence and indeed, far beyond Iraq and Syria. It's also into North Africa. It's even
trying to recruit in Afghanistan and Pakistan." "This is a moment, when you sit back and say, 'What
do we need to do in the military arena? What also do we need to do in the political arena?'" ISIS Islamic State Iraq

Obama administration is reluctant to commit more US

troops to the fight despite the campaign's shortcomings. Earlier this month in an interview
with Frontline, America's top military officer admitted that ISIS caught the US off guard.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey explained that the
Pentagon was unprepared when Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, fell to the ISIS in
June 2014. When asked if there were plans on how the US could react to ISIS' possible seizure of Mosul,
Syria controlReuters Militarily, the

Dempsey responded, "Well no, there were not." Politically, the US has allowed Iran, which is currently negotiating a
nuclear deal with world powers, to entrench itself in the sectarian government t in both Syria and Iraq. In terms of
Syria, the Obama administration has pretty much ignored the civil war for fear of upsetting Tehran.

US losing the war on cyber terror

Trugman 14 (Jonathon M. Trugman, New York Post Writer, 12-21-2014, "How the
US is losing the escalating cyberwar," New York Post,
http://nypost.com/2014/12/21/how-the-us-is-losing-the-escalating-cyber-war/, VR)
Last week we witnessed the repercussions of a cyberattack on American business
interests like we have never seen before. Sony Pictures, which has a massive
presence here in America, was intimidated into canceling the release of its movie
The Interview. Sonys stock got crushed. Its shares, which trade on the NYSE, lost
roughly 10 percent of their value as the leak of confidential corporate
communications became public. That amounts to a drop of about $2.5 billion in
market value. This series of events shows that not only any company is
vulnerable to cyber-invasion, but that existing security methodologies
need to improve to combat this threat. Its not just Sony it also has happened with banks. In
October, after JPMorgan got hacked, CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank would probably double its $250 million cybersecurity budget

And it has also happened with Target, Home Depot, and on Friday,
Staples said 1.1 million customers were hacked. Last year, Target was hacked, and
40 million customers had their credit and debit card data compromised. But the Sony
attack was different, deeper and seemingly personal. And it represents a huge escalation in the
cyberwar that we are losing. With the battle charged, its time for our Silicon Valley whiz kids to come to the
over the coming years.

defense of the US cyber-infrastructure. Stop developing the latest SnapTweetBook app! Get to work on a robust cyber defense shield
in the US. Clearly, if hackers can gain access to embarrassing company email correspondence and make it public, as in the case of
Sonys Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin, just imagine what they have access to we dont know about. Dr. Georgios Portokalidis,
cybersecurity expert and professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, said, Security

usually
comes as an afterthought when companies are building their systems . As opposed to doing
it as an add-on to create a more secure network and system, he said, it must be part of the design of the systems from the designphase principles. Out of crisis comes opportunity, and security could become the next big growth sector in technology. If this calling
doesnt attract the next wave of brash, brilliant, boy-band-wannabe billionaires, nothing will.

Theres a known need,

and the problem is now defined.

We are losing the war on terror-empirics prove

Rothkopf 14(David Rothkopf, CEO and Editor of foreign policy magazine, 6-102014, "We Are Losing the War on Terror," Foreign Policy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/10/we-are-losing-the-war-on-terror/)VR
Terrorism is spreading worldwide. Our enemies have sustained our blows, adapted, and grown. Two questions loom large as a
consequence: Where did we go wrong and what do we do now? Recent headlines and new studies support the conclusion that global
terror trends are heading in an ever more dangerous direction.

In early June, the Rand Corporation

released a study that detailed the growing threat. It reports that in 2007, there were
28 Salafi-jihadist groups like al Qaeda. As of last year, there were 49. In 2007, these
groups conducted 100 attacks. Last year, they conducted 950. The study estimates that there
were between 18,000 and 42,000 such terrorists active seven years ago. The low-end estimate for last year, at 44,000, is higher
than the top estimate for 2007, and the new high-end estimate is 105,000. The administration rightly argues that "core al Qaeda"
has sustained "huge" damage. But "core al Qaeda" no longer poses the principle threat to the U.S. homeland. That comes, according
to the Rand report, from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As Rand summarizes the report: " Since

2010, there has

been a 58 percent increase in the number of jihadist groups, a doubling of jihadist
fighters and a tripling of attacks by Al Qaeda affiliates . The most significant threat to the United
States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan." As legitimate as the
questions that have emerged in the Bowe Bergdahl case may be, they are secondary to the deteriorating situation associated with
the war the recently released prisoner went to Afghanistan to fight. There is no denying that the contempt for Congress shown in
failing to inform it of the deal even as perhaps 100 in the administration knew of it starkly reveals the cynicism behind last
years faux deferral to Congress on Syria. But it would be far more cynical to continue with the Obama teams variation on the

The war in Iraq was not over or won when

we said it was. Nor is the war on terror won or the threat it poses resolved simply by
no longer using the term or suggesting our goal was merely to inflict damage on the
tiny fraction of terrorists who were associated with the 9/11 attacks . The reality is that we are
"mission accomplished" misrepresentations of his predecessor.

still fighting the last war on terror even as a new set of risks loom and are made worse by our minimizing their implications for

the State Department

acknowledged the trend. It observes that last year attacks worldwide increased
almost by half, from 6,700 to 9,700. Nearly 18,000 people died and nearly 33,000 were injured. While the report
political purposes. In its recent assessment, "Country Reports on Terrorism 2013,"

hails allied forces for making progress combating al Qaedas core in the AfPak region, it also notes that the groups affiliates are
becoming more dangerous. The report takes particular note of the threat posed by foreign extremists in Syria, which has become a
kind of petri dish in which a growing global terror threat is being cultivated. Estimates on the number of such fighters range from
7,000 to over 20,000. The news that one recent suicide bomber in Syria was an American and that one of the attackers behind the

Its not
unlikely that, if left unchecked, the long-term consequences of a cadre of fighters
trained in Syria who will soon return to their home countries will be one of the
darkest legacies of that war a legacy that may well echo the long-term costs associated with training jihadists in
recent shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium spent time in Syria suggests how this threat may evolve over time.

the battle against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, among whom, of course, was Osama bin Laden.

Terrorism is running rampant and not backing down, prefer

evidence from last month.
Pollard 7/7/15 (Stephen Pollard, 7-7-2015,Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, "Ten
years later we are still losing the war on extremism, blasts STEPHEN POLLARD,"
Express.co.uk,
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/589212/Stephen-Pollardextremism-war-ten-years, VR)
Four years earlier, on 9/11 they had murdered nearly 3,000 people in the US. But
7/7 marked the first British Islamist terrorist outrage and, significantly, was the

product of home-grown extremists. Until 7/7 the security authorities had been
focused on the prospect of foreign based terrorists arriving in Britain and operating
here. But that changed when 7/7 brought home with devastating clarity the threat
from the enemy within. The story since then has been a constant battle by the security services to prevent
another mass terror attack. As the murders of 30 Britons in Tunisia showed last month, we
are no nearer defeating the extremists. It is, instead, a matter of doing our very best to find out what
they are up to and stopping them. But, as the old saying has it, we have to be lucky every time, they only have to
be lucky once. Which is why it is so worrying that so many so-called civil liberties types seem determined to hamper
the security services and stop them doing their best to protect us. David Davis the man who, it is easy to forget,
was favourite to become Conservative leader in 2005 is also doing his level best to frustrate the plans of David
Cameron and the Home Secretary Theresa May to ramp up the powers available to the security services and allow
them to do their job. RELATED ARTICLES Bus chiefs not told of Tube blasts 'Everyone screaming and running' Tube
commuters flee during rush... According to Mr Davis extra powers are not only wrong in principle, they also wont
work: Only by engaging with extremist views, opposing them and defeating them through debate can we hope to
deal with the threat of extremism. Only by engaging with them and debating them! Is he serious? How about for
a start infiltrating their networks, listening to their conversations and stopping their supplies of money and arms?

This is not a game. This is life and death. We are now on the second highest terror
alert level, severe, which means an attack is highly likely. Last week the Prime
Minister said that at least four Islamist terrorist plots had been stopped in recent
months. But the civil liberties crowd think all we need to do is defeat them in
debate. These people live in a fantasy land where Islamist terror isnt a real threat
and, for some, the real blame attaches to our security services. As when the husbands of
two of the three women who ran off last month from Bradford to Syria with their nine children then had the gall to
blame the police. Yes, of course there is an important role for argument and debate. But a good start to that would
be for Muslims themselves to do more to debate and deal with the extremist cancer that exists within parts of their
community. Reacting to the runaways last month Bana Gora from the Muslim Womens Council, said: As Muslims
we are getting to a point where we are really getting sick of it. This onslaught of counter-terrorism legislation thats
coming through is not going to help matters. Well, some of us are sick of terrorism. And we want to give the
authorities every chance of preventing it. So yes, it is going to help matters if counter-terrorism legislation stops
jihadis from murdering us. Freed from the Lib Dems shackles, the Government is now planning to introduce some of
the necessary measures: allowing the banning of some extremist groups, the closure of mosques that act as
hotbeds for radicalism and giving the security services wider powers to examine new technology communications.
All this is made more important and more difficult, in the wake of the leaks by US traitor Edward Snowden, which
has severely hindered our capabilities. A report from the Henry Jackson Society showed that since his leaks at least
three Al Qaeda affiliates have changed their communication methods, online jihadist forums now use new
encryption tools, GCHQs ability to track groups has been reduced by about 25 per cent and it can now take three

And many security operations had to stop

after Snowden revealed details to our enemies. As Sir John Sawers, the former head
of MI6, put it: Snowden threw a massive rock in the pool and the ripples havent
stopped yet. Sir John has been explicit since he left the service and was able to
speak publicly that it is simply not possible to stop terrorist attacks without a datasharing agreement with communications companies to allow the security agencies
to monitor peoples activity online. Of course that involves a loss of privacy but Id rather be alive,
times as long to decipher targets communications.

wouldnt you? And we should be able to trust them not to misuse these powers. Instead of dismissing plans to allow
the security services to do their job with sneering terms such as snoopers charter we must allow them to enter

It is deeply
depressing that 10 years after 7/7 we still have to have these arguments. But the
capacity for some people to act as the terrorists useful idiots knows few limits.
the world of modern communications and data that the terrorists long-ago started to use.

We are losing the war against Domestic Terror, prefer evidence

from this week.
Doblin 7/20/15 (Alfred P. Doblin, Editor for the New Jersey Group, 7-20-2015,
"Doblin: America chooses to lose the war against domestic terrorism," NorthJersey,
http://www.northjersey.com/opinion/america-chooses-to-lose-the-war-againstdomestic-terrorism-1.1377296, VR)
PRESIDENT OBAMA sang "Amazing Grace." On June 26, he went to Charleston, S.C., and sang
"Amazing Grace" at the funeral of Clementa Pinckney, one of nine people gunned

down in the Emanuel AME Church, allegedly by Dylann Roof, an avowed racist.

The
horror of the murders quickly shifted to the Confederate battle flag still flying high on the grounds of the South

The swiftness with which the

battle flag was denounced not just in the South Carolina statehouse, but also in
the Sovereign State of Walmart was remarkable. Remarkable until you realize it is
easier to pull down the Confederate battle flag in the Deep South than it is to pass
sensible gun-control legislation in Congress . Here's something I read Saturday in The New York
Times: More Marines died on American soil than in Afghanistan this year. That
sobering fact was in an article about the mass shooting at a Navy and Marine
training center Thursday in Chattanooga, Tenn. Four Marines were killed. On
Saturday, the Navy announced that a sailor wounded in the carnage had also died.
The body count this time is five. These men trained to defend our nation were shot
down like targets in an arcade game by a man with a weapon that sends bullets into
a body as fast as someone can say "NRA." Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was the
armed man. It has been reported that he had spent time in Jordan and may have
been inspired by ISIS. American Muslims are fearful of reprisals. Their fear is justified. Yet after Roof
Carolina capitol, while the federal flag had been lowered to half-staff.

allegedly murdered nine black people, there was no national conversation about the probability that loner white

Something is enabling these

young men to become domestic terrorists, and it is not ISIS. On Thursday, the same
day Abdulazeez killed four Marines and a sailor, James E. Holmes was pronounced
guilty 165 times for the murder and attempted murder of moviegoers in a theater in
Aurora, Colo., in 2012. Holmes has no ties to ISIS. Federal officials need to investigate whether
men and they are mostly loner white men are a menace to our society.

Abdulazeez was radicalized in Jordan and whether he was part of a terrorist cell, but let's not kid ourselves: America
is losing the war against domestic terrorism. When two high school students kill other students in Columbine, when
mere babes are slaughtered in an elementary school in Connecticut and when James E. Holmes is able to obtain the
firepower to shoot wildly into a crowded, darkened movie theater, we are in the middle of a war we choose not to
win. I have been rereading the Second Amendment. I'm not one of those take-away-everybody's-guns kind of
people.

The amendment states that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms.
But the amendment is silent on what those arms are. I fail to see how so many spineless public

officials can insist our Founding Fathers meant every citizen had the right to bear an assault-style weapon. The right
to keep and bear arms has become more important than the need to stop bearing the weight of caskets at funerals .

The only people benefiting in this deranged world besides gun manufacturers are
the people they pay to advocate for them. The primary role of the federal
government is to protect and defend the homeland. If every crazy loner has the
ability to get hold of high-powered weapons, government has failed to carry out its
most important mandate.

Afro-Pessimism Links
Targeted surveillance is still discriminatory
Cyril 15 (Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, an organization that cultivates

grassroots movements for a more participatory democracy; Malkia Amala, Black Americas State of
Surveillance, The Progressive, April 2015, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/blackamericas-state-surveillance, RX)

Thanks to new surveillance

technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of
indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this
technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem
and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit
may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned
privilege of the inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently
includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race
but not involved in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no
expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance . Instead, we are
watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect
us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying,
In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection.

from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the
streets covered in our blood.

Targeted warrants is MORE racist than bulk surveillance

Lennard 14 (Former freelancer at the New York Times, Natasha, The NSAs Racist Targeting of
Individuals Is as Troubling as Indiscriminate Surveillance, Vice News, 9 July 2014,
https://news.vice.com/article/the-nsas-racist-targeting-of-individuals-is-as-troubling-as-indiscriminatesurveillance, RX)
Revelations of the National Security Agencys massive surveillance programs have
highlighted how millions of ordinary internet and phone users that is, non-criminal targets have had their
communications data swept up by a vast, indiscriminate dragnet. This has occasioned justifiable outrage, but the
reaction has overshadowed discussion of how the NSA targets actual individuals a process that, it turns out,

be quite discriminatory.

can

As I noted last week, if our national security states dangerously loose

we should be as troubled
by the NSAs targeting of particular people as we are by its non-targeted
spying. The latest disclosure from The Intercept clearly illustrates why. According to documents leaked by
Edward Snowden, the NSA has been spying on five distinguished Muslim-Americans
under a law the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that is meant to
target international terrorists or foreign agents. The inclusion of the email accounts
of these five people in a spreadsheet listing the targeted accounts of more than
7,000 others belies the NSAs claim that its in the business of marking only terrorist
suspects. Here are the agencys suspected terrorists: Faisal Gill, who was
appointed to (and thoroughly vetted by) the Department of Homeland Security
under President George W. Bush; Asim Ghafoor, an attorney who has defended
clients suspected of terrorism; Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American
professor of public policy and international development at Rutgers University; Agha
Saeed, founder and chairman of the American Muslim Alliance and a former political
science professor at California State University; and Nihad Awad, the executive
director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations . This is anti-Muslim
discrimination pure and simple. While the NSAs broad data collection is disturbingly
total and unspecific, its targeted spying is evidently racist . Another leaked document
determination of what constitutes an imminent threat is any indication,

punctuates this point with a dull, disgusting thud: a 2005 training document explaining how to properly format

internal memos to justify FISA surveillance offers a sample memo that uses Mohammed Raghead as the name of
a fictitious terrorism suspect. Your NSA at work, ladies and gentlemen! As the existence of this document makes
clear, legality is a tortured issue at the heart national security misdeeds. NSA agents are trained to ensure that their
surveillance practices fall within the letter of the law and the law here is at fault, shaped not by a spirit of justice

Indeed, the
governments ability to monitor such high-profile Muslim-Americans with or
without warrants suggests that the most alarming and invasive aspects of the
NSAs surveillance occur not because the agency breaks the law, but because it is
able to exploit the laws permissive contours. The scandal is what Congress has made legal, says
but by surveillance-state paranoia. The Intercept report does not skirt around this point:

Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU deputy legal director. The claim that the intelligence agencies are complying with the laws
is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to the breadth of the laws themselves.

Targeted surveillance is still racist

Miller 12 (B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966 and Ph.D. from Columbia

University in 1973, Wilbur R., The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia,
7 August 2012, RX)

Racial minorities continue to serve as the primary victims of police surveillance.

African Americans and Hispanics are stopped most frequently by police and are more likely to be made subject to
search and arrested, according to national statistics. In 1998, African Americans comprised 11.6 percent of drivers
stopped by police but represented 19.9 percent of the drivers arrested, while Hispanics were 8.4 percent of drivers

Many individuals of Arab descent have

complained of increased police surveillance and racial profiling since 9/11. The
increased surveillance of Arab Muslims in the post-9/11 world has led to a greater
number of detainments, interrogations, and arrests among Arab Muslims . Native
stopped by police but made up 11.7 percent of those arrested.

Americans are also disproportionately made the subject of police surveillance, particularly in the states of the Great
Plains (where they make up a disproportionate number of the prison population compared to their actual

The prison industrial complex in the United States is disproportionately

populated by people of color as a result of targeted surveillance and unequal
sentencing.
population).