the benefits of domestic surveillance conducted by the nsa outweigh the harms

NEG NSA. The national security agency"s goal is to protect our country from both foreign and domestic threats. They have been doing this through hacking, and snooping on emails, text messages, phone calls, and computer searches. Resolved: The benefits of domestic surveillance by the NSA outweigh the harms. My partner and I strongly negate the resolution for the following reasons: Contention 1: The NSA is a waste of money. The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically. http://themonkeycage.org... by JOHN SIDES Contention 2: The NSA is not critical in helping stop terrorist threats. The head of the National Security Agency (NSA) admitted before a congressional committee this week that he lied back in June when he claimed the agency"s phone surveillance program had thwarted 54 terrorist "plots or events." NSA Director Keith Alexander gave out the erroneous number while the Obama administration was defending its domestic spying operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. He said surveillance data collected that led to 53 of those 54 plots had provided the initial tips to "unravel the threat stream." But Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Wednesday during a hearing on the continued oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that the administration was pushing incomplete or inaccurate statements about the bulk collection of phone records from communications providers. "For example, we"ve heard over and over again that 54 terrorist plots have been thwarted by the use of (this program)," Leahy said. "That"s plainly wrong," adding: "These weren"t all plots and they weren"t all thwarted." Alexander admitted that only 13 of the 54 cases were connected to the United States. He also told the committee that only one or two suspected plots were identified as a result of bulk phone record collection. http://thestateweekly.com... by Noel Brinkerhoff Contention 3: The NSA violates first amendment rights. The US government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001. Since this was first reported on by the press and discovered by the public in late 2005, EFF has been at the forefront of the effort to stop it and bring government surveillance programs back within the law and the Constitution Also in July, 2013, EFF filed another lawsuit, First Unitarian v. NSA, based on the recently published FISA court order demanding Verizon turn over all customer phone records including who is talking to whom, when and for how long " to the NSA. This so-called "metadata," especially when collected in bulk and aggregated, allows the government to track the associations of various political and religious organizations. The Director of National Intelligence has since confirmed that the collection of Verizon call records is part of a broader program. In addition to making the same arguments we made in Jewel, we argue in Unitarian First Unitarian v. NSA that this type of collection violates the First Amendment right to association. https://www.eff.org...