Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and NSA reporting provided an overwhelming benefit to US public

In this round I shall present my case, and then next round I shall offer rebuttals. OBSERVATIONS As Pro is making the claim, he bear the BOP. Additionally, Pro must show the benefits provided by leaks of NSA programs to be "overwhelming," meaning "extreme, great". [1] Therefore, if Pro can show some benefits, but those benefits are marginal or mediocre at best, Pro has failed to uphold the resolution. CON's CASE C1: Oversight is Effective The NSA "is subject to oversight by both Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If the effort were being operated without due regard for privacy, the other branches of government could push back. For the most part, they apparently have approved of what's gone on." [1] Domestic surveillance is not "a program that has been hidden away or off the books. In fact, all three branches of government play a significant role in the oversight...the judiciary, through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court plays a role...The executive branch conducts extensive internal reviews to ensure compliance. And Congress passes the laws, oversees our implementation of those laws, and determines whether or not the current laws should be reauthorized and in what form." [2] ""The Government is prohibited ... from indiscriminately sifting through the data. The data-base may only be queried for intelligence purposes by NSA analysts where there is a reasonable, articulable suspicion, based on specific facts." If the government wants to take a closer look, any data gleaned must be associated with people or phone numbers already identified and approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2012, the letter revealed, the court approved fewer than 300 "query terms" that would allow intelligence analysts to pursue a phone call further. These protocols are overseen by the Justice Department and intelligence officials, and congressional intelligence committees are briefed regularly. "Thus, the program has been approved and is rigorously overseen by all three branches of the Government."" [3] "Over the years, a series of compliance issues were brought to the attention of the FISA court by the government. However, none of these compliance issues involved significant intentional misuse of the system. Nor has the Board seen any evidence of bad faith or misconduct on the part of any government officials or agents involved with the program." [4] Due to the effectiveness of oversight regulations, the leaks, which supposedly were designed to promote transparency and thus oversight, seem like redundancies at best, and harms at worst. C2: Surveillance Programs a Beneficial Sub-point A: Domestic Terror as a Major Threat "Second, the scale of damage that 21st-century terrorists can inflict is far greater than anything that their predecessors could have imagined. We are no longer dealing with threats from firearms and conventional explosives, but with the possibility of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices and biological and chemical agents. The damage that such attacks could inflict on the nation, measured in terms of loss of life, economic and social disruption, and the consequent sacrifice of civil liberties, is extraordinary. The events of September 11 brought this home with crystal clarity...In the years after the attacks of September 11, a former cabinet member suggested a vivid analogy. He compared "the task of stopping" the next terrorist attack "to a goalie in a soccer game who "must stop every shot,"" for if the enemy ""scores a single goal,"" the terrorists succeed. To make matters worse, ""the goalie cannot see the ball"it is invisible. So are the players"he doesn"t know how many there are, or where they are, or what they look like." Indeed, the invisible players might shoot the ball "from the front of the goal, or from the back, or from some other direction"the goalie just doesn"t know."" [5] Sub-point B: Surveillance Works "Given the clandestine and unpredictable nature of terrorism...resources may not be effective unless they are accompanied by mechanisms for detecting and preventing future threats. Reliable intelligence is an essential tool. Experience shows that, as long as the other components function as they should, success in the state's counter-terrorism campaign is directly proportional to the emphasis placed on the gathering and analyzing of reliable information...when intelligence is insufficient or inadequate, the terrorist group...will not hesitate to exploit this advantage by escalating its campaign of insurgent violence. In 1976...the Italian Government decided to dismantle the special anti-terrorist units it had created only a few years earlier...Terrorist attacks, which until then had been diminishing in frequency, immediately began to pick up and did not ease again until the early 1980s." [6] "At least 60 Islamist-inspired terrorist plots have been aimed at the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks. The overwhelming majority have been thwarted thanks to timely, operational intelligence about the threats. Congress should not go back to a pre-9/11 set of rules just to appeal to populist sentiment. Congress and the White House have an obligation to protect our liberties and to safeguard our security--in equal measure." [7] Sub-point C: More Intelligence May Have Mitigated 9/11 "if the phone records program had been up and running in 2001, it might have alerted the government that Khalid al-Mihdhar, a major al Qaeda operative from Saudi Arabia who was on NSA and FBI watch lists, was in San Diego, making calls to an al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. That information might have been a giveaway that the plan had "gone operational." Instead, the NSA sleuths tracking terrorists thought al-Mihdhar was overseas. He was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, where 189 people (including the hijackers) were killed when it crashed into the Pentagon." [8] C3: Leaks were not Beneficial Sub-point A: Wikileaks which doesn't always redact names or key details from its documents, has done harm to the U.S. security apparatus: "Tese massive leaks undermine the relationships we have with almost every country with which we have relations. Even though the cables involve lots of truth telling, no population wants to see its laundry hung on the front page of the world"s leading newspapers..It undoes some of the progress made after 9/11 to push information out of agency silos and share it widely across the government. That was why the State Department, with the support of the Pentagon, created the Net-Centric database, from which the cables were leaked." [9] Sub-point B: Wikileaks harms Scholarship "Governments do not respond to security breaches by surrendering themselves to the fates. American foreign-policy bureaucracies have and will continue to respond to WikiLeaks by clamping down on the dissemination of information. That means more compartmentalization, to make sure that someone like Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst suspected of disclosing documents to WikiLeaks, can't download classified files from multiple agencies. It means that more cables will be classified, reducing the number of people who can access them and delaying their release to the public. Most important, a lot less will be written down. State Department officials will opt for telephones over e-mail. As a result, future data dumps from WikiLeaks or its imitators are less likely. The cumulative effect of these measures will make it much harder for political scientists and diplomatic historians to piece together how decisions were made." [10] Sub-point B: Generic Security Harms It stands to reason that now that foreign governments know more about how our surveillance programs are run, they will be better able to counter those programs, thus undermining the benefits outlined in C2, without actually boosting any gains in oversight. SOURCES 1 - http://www.merriam-webster.com... 2 - http://www.lasvegassun.com... 3 - https://www.hsdl.org... 4 - https://www.eff.org... 5 - http://www.whitehouse.gov... 6 - http://www.ashgate.com... 7 - http://www.heritage.org... 8 - http://www.brookings.edu... 9 - http://www.thedailybeast.com... 10 - http://chronicle.com... I also would like to apologize to any formatting errors due to C/Ping from word. Thank you for this debate.