Debate Nirvana

According to CNN in 2013, breaching a few people’s cyber privacy to gain information crucial to stopping potential terrorist attacks has already made real world impacts. CNN finds that prioritizing national security has stopped 54 terrorist attacks from occurring in the span of 5 years, saving hundreds of lives. Furthermore, the National Security Council’s senior director on cybersecurity, Ari Schwartz, stated that “we must be willing to sacrifice a few people’s cyber rights to protect hundreds of citizens rights to live. While it is obviously a lose-lose situation, we must act morally and in some cases national security must take precedence”. Additionally, Professor Omer Tene of Stanford Law School found that it is in fact the duty of the United States government to protect citizens’ right to live over citizens’ right to cyber privacy. Professor Tene furthers that as long as prioritizing national security over cyber privacy saves a single life, it must always take precedence since life is more valuable than cyber privacy in every case. A U.S. intelligence document provided to CNN by a congressional source in 2013 asserts that the dragnet of U.S. phone data and Internet information from overseas users "has contributed to the disruption of dozens of potential terrorist plots here in the homeland and in more than 20 countries around the world."

One specific example of the US preventing a cyber attack from spreading is in the case of the Citibank hack. This virus infected over 5,500 Citibank ATMs nationwide over the course of two weeks in 2008, and stole valuable information. However, the US government gained access to what would have been classified information and were able to trace the virus back to its origin. In fact, they traced the virus to two Russian hackers who worked for a larger hacking ring. Not only was the US able to contain the virus to just those 5,500 computers, but by breaching cyber privacy, the US was able to find the perpetrators of the attack. Subsequently, the US government took action against this specific hacking ring and what used to be an influential and dangerous hacking circle now is defunct. According to the Brookings Institute in 2016, the US has been able to stop an estimated  70,000 potential cyber attacks since last September alone.

Cyber attacks are extremely expensive to its victims.  Economist Jeffrey Mills calculated that the average cyber attack against the US causes around $8,000 in damages. So, since last September, since the US stopped almost 70,000 potential cyber attacks, the US government has saved around $560,000,000 in potential damages caused by cyber criminals  accessing information through breaching cyber privacy.

According to the House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner in a report on the constitutionality of violating cyber privacy for national security, he found that the total number of constitutional violations was “zero”. He further stated that “extensive  congressional oversight found no violations. Six reports by the Justice Department's   independent Inspector General, who is required to solicit and investigate any allegations of   abuse, found no violations. Intense public scrutiny has yet to find a single civil liberty abuse.”

There are multiple ways in which allowing the the US federal government the ability to put national security over cyber privacy violates the constitution. First off, the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU found that this prioritization violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing the FBI and NSA to search and seize records and personal information under the veil of “national security”. This is because the government can claim anything is a “national security” matter and subsequently investigate people’s cyber activity without a warrant. Second, the ACLU found that putting national security over the right to cyber privacy goes against the First Amendment because it “allows the FBI to obtain information about a person’s reading habits, religious affiliations, Internet searches, and other expressive activities that are constitutionally protected to be private under the First Amendment.”

According to a report by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, in the first five years after the government began cyber searches without warrants through the NSA with the Patriot Act, they initiated over 200,000 searches without warrants. And, through all 200,000 of those searches that violated individual privacy rights and put people’s liberties at risk, the US federal government was only able to arrest one terror-related actor. Clearly, even with giving national security precedence over cyber rights, the US government still takes advantage of it and it’s past actions show it is not very reliable or effective. More damning still is an analysis from New America, a nonpartisan think tank, which analyzed the cases of 225 individuals charged with terror-related crimes and found that bulk collection of metadata started only 1.8 percent of the investigations and contributed little to the remainder. The TSA’s no-fly list has over 20,000 people on it. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, also known as the watch list, has 680,000, 40% of whom have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”  In the years after 9/11, the NSA passed to the FBI thousands of tips per month; every one of them turned out to be a false alarm. The cost was enormous, and ended up frustrating the FBI agents who were obligated to investigate all the tips. We also saw this with the Suspicious Activity Reports —or SAR — database: tens of thousands of reports, and no actual results. Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that between 2004 and 2009, the FBI tripled its use of bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to compel businesses to turn over records and documents, and increasingly scooped up records of Americans who had no ties to official terrorism investigations. Our privacy rights are too important to be sacrificed based on the unverifiable claim that it will make us safer.

Just last June, one of the largest mass-data hacks took place and compromised the private information of over 4 million citizens. This breach was only possible as a result of mass-data collection that occurred because of the US government’s insistence that all information is essential for national security. The hack, according to Reuters, was one of the worst in the past five years. "This is deep. The data goes back to 1985. This means that they potentially have information about retirees, and they could know what they did after leaving government. Access to data from OPM's computers, such as birth dates, Social Security numbers and bank information, could help hackers test potential passwords to other sites, including those with information about weapons systems”. Not only were personal security compromised in this hack, but delicate codes and information about our nation’s top weapons programs were also stolen, meaning that in fact as a result of the government’s metadata collection, we ended up giving our enemies all of our secrets. In addition, Electronic Frontiers Executive Officer Jon Lawrence stated that “mandatory data retention was an unnecessary and disproportionate invasion of privacy that could further lead to personal information being compromised. The scope of risk in terms of, for example, systems administrators who manage this information is very high.”