Retaining Privacy Is More Important Than Forfeiting It In The Fight Against Terrorism

Firstly, I absolutely believe we can continue to protect our privacy, with respect to a terrorist organization of any size within reason. My opponent seems to believe that if we suspect an individual of terrorism, we should "inspect and search" and a warrant should be required before doing so. My opponent asserts that we should "follow all leads possible." Well, that's exactly right. A warrant is a constitutionally valid way of invading someone's privacy and absolutely is a great solution. Using the methods you've suggested, we actually do retain the right to privacy that we've enjoyed since the creation of the Constitution. However, no warrant will be issued to an individual before the government begins collecting their data. No warrant will be issued to an individual before businesses and corporations begin collecting their data. No warrant will be issued to an individual before businesses and corporations hand that data over to the government (this also occurs on a massive scale, legally.) A quick look at the NSA's website will give you an idea of what data is collected, how it's collected, and what can be done with it. The debate about whether or not this is legal is irrelevant. You might say you own this data, and you might say you don't own this data. Overall, the verdict seems to be that you don't own this data. A quick look at the NSA's data collection program seems to indicate that you do not. So I'll happily move on with the assumption that you do not own the data. The vast majority of people invite these modern day tools into their lives and the technology does what it does: it generates tons of usage data. The generation of this data is a function of the many different devices that product it. In some cases you're free to modify the code that executes this process, in some cases you will be prevented from doing so by design or by copyright infringement law. Today, roughly 61% of Americans own a smartphone, from roughly 31% in 2010. 91% of Americans own some type of cellphone. It seems reasonable to assume that nearly 91% of Americans will own a smart phone within a decade. The implications of government data collection will surely scale with adoption of the smart phone, let alone other devices such as vehicles, smart televisions, computers, and upcoming smart devices. We'll work with smart phones for now. A person who owns a smart phone will have quite a bit of data collected from them. Some of that data is as follows: Internet history, GPS and telemetry, text messages, economy and banking, voice samples, biometrics such as fingerprints and face recognition data, stored files such as pictures and copyrighted material, phone logs, contacts, emails. Advertising has evolved ingeniously with just corporation interpretation of this data. With some intuitive algorithms, we expect our government to be quite effective at finding terrorists. Biometrics could be matched with known terrorists. Internet history could expose individuals who visit known virtual junctures for terrorists like specific websites, chatrooms or even group messaging within certain services. Voice samples could be matched to actual conference call records from certain individual terrorists. GPS could identify friends of terrorists. Pictures and face recognition data could be combined to search internet records and find who they've taken pictures with, or pictures published throughout their life (perhaps before they became terrorists.) This could be used to find more potential threats. Phone logs, contacts, emails, banking and purchase history.. the list of uses are virtually infinite. Most of this should be possible with current technology. In the future it could be possible to work even more intuitively. The first step, obviously, is data acquisition. Back to our debate: Like I said, the debate about our legal right to privacy is second to the debate about the importance of it. We're debating about the whether it's more important to fight terrorism, or retain our privacy. We're presuming that our government has the right to collect this data. They also have the financial means, and a prerogative to do so. I propose that the risk of allowing our government to collect this data is greater than the risk of the terrorism and criminality that it's supposedly prevents. A government with this kind of information on it's populace is capable of things far beyond what terrorists and common criminals are. This type of data collection and analysis can be used to influence free political process. The inherent expectation of being spied on can restrict free speech. Upcoming politicians, in particular, may need to think twice before trying to charge the director of the NSA with the crime of perjury for lying to Congress during their investigation. That did happen, after all. Pondering such an action may cause the member of Congress to feel some concern over what data the NSA director has access to; how his reputation would be effected if a certain event in his long life were revealed to the public. Text or photo records. Purchase history. Search history? Forget reputation; just think of how strongly you could impact the effectiveness of a politician when you have the entire digital record of their life at your finger tips? Propaganda and overthrowing foreign governments is the name of the game for our secret intelligence agencies, after all. Today this type of occurrence may seems unlikely. Imagine, however, what we'll be dealing with if the technology and initiative for this data collection persists for the next 20 years. What happens if corruption spreads through the NSA, then? What if it's the same kind of corruption that occurred in the 60's, resulting in our own CIA requesting authorization from the president to commit a false flag attack on American soil to create a thirst for war among the populace? Are we to ignore this possibility even though there is documented, historical precedent? I propose that the implications of allowing this mass data collection are far more threatening than the implications of relying on traditional methods such as warrants to investigate suspected terrorists. If you look at history, you'll find nothing that has caused more death and disparity than governments run-amok. In my humble opinion, all of the actual purposes for retaining the right to privacy have been compromised and the inalienable human right to privacy has been reduced to a mere novelty. I look forward to my opponent's response.