The Benefits of Domestic Surveillance by the National Security Agency Outweigh the Harms

Thank you to JonathanDebator999 for making this topic.Contending CON'S pointsCost-effectivenessThe point of spending money on counter-terrorism is to counteract terrorism. Therefore a low number of casualties caused by terrorist attacks since this program was put in place does not necessitate a poor cost-effectiveness. If anything it would be horribly cost-ineffective if they were spending all this money and there were still a lot of deaths.After all the mass deaths of 9/11 have not been repeated because they are no longer possible or are at least far less likely due to increased security checks at airports, even though this infringes on people's rights to privacy.What CON needs to show, but has not attempted to, is the difference between the number of deaths with the programs and the number of deaths that would occur without the programs. If the number was small then this could indicate that the program is cost-ineffective - although it would still need to deal with the issues that as a security program the details of it are widely unknown and that in complicated real life situations it is usually overly-simplistic to ascribe everything to one cause. It is perfectly possible for a terrorist attack to be foiled by multiple complementary reasons, none of which have obvious primacy.I feel that the comparison between terrorism and alcohol is also invalid due to they key issue that drinking alcohol is a consensual act while being killed by terrorism is not - as well as the wider geo-political implications of the latter.TotalitarianismCON does not offer any examples of the NSA promoting totalitarianism. The claim is unsupported.He further claims that the NSA has no right to violate privacy. In fact the programs have been run based on laws passed by congress[1] and with their continuing oversight. A requirement for all bills being passed through congress is that they specifies what constitutional right allows the law to be passed. In the example I give above, for instance, it states "Congress has the power to enact this legislation pursuant to the following: Article 1, Section 8, clause 3 and Article 1, Section 8, clause 18". They do in fact have the right to carry out these actions.This is in fact a law being passed by a democratic government with reference to the collectively decided rights defined in the constitution of this state. In this particular instance I cited they are even actually scaling back the NSA's powers slightly, readjusting what they are allowed to do as time progresses and they can reassess the situation. That is as far from totalitarianism as you can get."Abuses"Despite being titled "Abuses", CON never actually explains what the abuse is, merely listing numbers of calls. Is the assumption meant to be that because so many calls are 'listened' to there must be a significant number of some ill-defined abuses being carried out? Or is listening to that many calls meant to be inherently abusive? I don't know because CON never explains or makes the case.More importantly, even his contention is inconsistent. He states that every year the NSA listen to over one trillion ninety five billion phone calls. However the point is that even if collected meta-data on every single call made in the USA (which he does not show occurs), collecting meta-data is not the same as listening to calls.As he explains meta-data is phone numbers of the parties, date and time, length of call, etc. The meta-data being collected DOES NOT allow them to listen to calls and his argument is inconsistent.ToolsCON does not support his points. He states three different times that they are abusing their tools or that tools are abuses of the NSA. He never explains WHY " the truth is that these tools are abuses of the NSA"s power". It is merely the same unsupported claim being made three times across three sentences, each time in slightly different language.My CaseBoth the the right to privacy and the right for congress to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" are essential rights derived from the Constitution.What to do when they come into conflict and you have to choose between one or the other.This happens fairly often. See for instance the old example of someone shouting "FIRE" in a crowded auditorium where people could be trampled in a stampede. Another example is the conflict a few years ago in the UK where Lord Justice Leveson did a decent analysis of (amongst other thing) the conflict between the journalist's right to expression versus the individuals' right to privacy and how the conflict between these rights should be dealt with. [2]So the mere fact that people's rights will be infringed upon is not an adequate reason for supposing that the harm of domestic surveillance outweighs the benefits. Either way people will have rights infringed upon, whether it's the right to privacy or right for their government to keep them secure.We must therefore look at the other effects of the two competing policies to see what else happens beyond the identical effect of a right being infringed.As my opponent has admitted, although he tried to minimise it, there is a benefit to the people in terms of increased protection from terrorist attacks. Personally I believe that there will be far more than two terrorist attacks where the domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency had an effect, but the entire basis of this being a secret security program makes this hard to judge. What we must keep in mind however is that CON's admission is the barest minimum that we must accept as beneficial.However as to the harm of the domestic surveillance, there is none. it is a philosophical issue about a right being infringed upon, and as explained that will happen regardless because we are in a situation where rights conflict and one must be infringed either wayAs an infringed right and protection from terrorism (however small) is better than just having an infringed right, the issue under contention for this debate should be supported. The good outweighs the harm.Lastly many of the beliefs about what the NSA does domestically are outdated, for instance it ceased its bulk metadata collection program in November of last year.[3] As CON's beliefs seemed to indicate that he could simply assume that the NSA was monitoring every call in the USA when this is not the case, his statements about what the NSA is carrying out cannot be merely accepted at face value. As he has not provided evidence that they are happening, his argument cannot be deemed to support his claims. Vote PRO.[1] https://www.congress.gov... [2] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk...[3] http://www.theguardian.com...