Resolved : The benefits of post- 9/11 security measures outweigh the harms to personal freedoms.

My partner and I negate the following he benefits of post- 9/11 security measures outweigh the harms to personal freedoms. We provide some definitions to help frame this debate. We define post 9/11 security measures as new security measures taken after 9/11. Seeing this there are two major security agencies that have been implemented since then, first the NSA in its current state operating under the Patriot Act; Second the TSA, which formed after the 9/11 attacks. Personal freedoms: freedom of the person in going and coming, equality before the courts, security of private property, freedom of opinion and its expression, and freedom of conscience subject to the rights of others and of the public. Contention 1 The TSA is ineffective and infringes on the rights given to us by the Constitution. The TSA has been operating since November 2001 and has failed to produce any real evidence that it is actually working. According to IVN.org TSA"s screen program is being funded billions of dollars a year but has failed to produce any results. According to a Hawaii Institute; the TSA is infringing on or fourth amendment right this amendment was put in place to protect Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. Purchasing an airline ticket ought not to be grounds for rescinding this basic right, yet that is exactly the power TSA presumptuously assumes for itself. In the 1979 case of Torres v. Puerto Rico, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to search and seize the bags of Terry Torres, even though law enforcement officials said he was noticeably nervous. This proves that the TSA is infringing on Americans rights. Also the TSA has failed to provide any evidence to warrant this infringement on the constitution. The have actually proved that they are ineffective and a waste of money when on November 1st 2013 they failed to stop a man getting through security with a gun. Almost immediately after the man got through security he pulled out the gun and started shooting at the TSA officers killing one and injuring 7 more. All of this proves that the benefits of this post 9/11 security measure do not outweigh the harms. Contention 2 NSA surveillance encourages selective interpretation of the constitution. The ACLU has stated "In a detailed, legal critique of the NSA program, the ACLU warned that such long-term surveillance "permits the government to assemble a richly detailed profile of every person living in the United States and to draw a comprehensive map of their associations with one another." They also reported that "The National Security Agency's mass tracking and collection of Americans' phone call data violates the constitution, has a chilling effect on first amendment rights and should be halted" It has been proven that the NSA violates the constitution at whim. This raises a much larger issue of selective interpretation of the constitution. This means that since the NSA believes they can violate certain parts of the constitution, they believe they can violate others. Our rights to speech, to bear arms, to religion, basically violating anything that is in the government"s best interest. Contention 3 NSA domestic surveillance does not prevent terrorism. In an October 2 hearing of the Senate judiciary committee, General Keith Alexander confirmed that there is only one or two examples where collection of bulk data is what stopped a terrorist activity. Furthermore, he actually references one of the terrorist attacks and names the perpetrator. His name was Basaaly Moalin. Moalin was a cab driver from San Diego and he was convicted of transferring $8,500 to Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Although many people may say that Al-Shabaab is a terrorist organization, al-Shabaab is involved in a local war, and is not invested in attacking the US homeland. The indictment against Moalin explicitly stated that al-Shabaab's enemies were the present Somali government and "its Ethiopian and African Union supporters". The second incident that the NSA allegedly stopped is the attempted subway bombing by Najibullah Zazi. Zazi, as Goldman and Matt Apuzzo explain, was foiled when officials intercepted an email to a Yahoo email address in September of 2009. Although 2007 and 2008 laws gave the FBI the go-ahead to monitor email accounts linked to known terrorists without a warrant, investigators would have easily gotten a warrant to monitor the account in question anyway: "To get a warrant, the law requires that the government show that the target is a suspected member of a terrorist group or foreign government, something that had been well established at that point in the Zazi case." From this, we can tell the Zazi plot does little to justify blanket surveillance of millions of phone and email accounts without a warrant, because authorities found the email address they needed without PRISM, and could have monitored that account without it, too.