1NC

1

1NC – Cuba DACuban normalization will pass with an ambassador confirmed – PC key-Will pass warrants: general momentum (which outweighs everything), public support, and previous progress

-Yes push – demands of Congress and press conferences

-Obama’s PC is high – Supreme Court victories on the ACA and same-sex marriage + SC speech

Milbank 7/5 {Dana, politics columnist based at The Washington Post and MSNBC, former senior editor of The New Republic, B.A. cum laude in political science (Yale), “Obama spending his windfall of political capital on Cuba,” Herald Net, 2015, http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20150705/OPINION04/150709675#THUR}

“This,” President Obama said in the Rose Garden on Wednesday as he announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, “is what change looks like .” This echo of his 2008 campaign theme was self-congratulatory but deserved,

coming at a time of unexpected hope late in his presidency. In the space of just over a week, Obama's tired tenure came back to life . He bested congressional Democrats and got trade legislation on his desk. The Supreme Court upheld the signature achievement of his presidency — Obamacare — and thereby cemented his legacy. The high court also made same-sex marriage legal across the land following a tidal change in public opinion that Obama's own

conversion accelerated. Had the court's decisions not dominated the nation's attention , Obama's eulogy Friday

for those slain in a South Carolina church, and his extraordinary rendition of “Amazing Grace,” would have itself been one of the most powerful moments of his presidency. It is little surprise, then, that this lame duck's job approval rating hit a respectable 50 percent this week for the first time in two years in a CNN poll, and his disapproval rating

dropped to 47. The good tidings of the past week have been arguably more luck than achievement for Obama, but he deserves credit for his effort to use the momentum of his victories to revive what had been a moribund presidency. When you earn p olitical c apital , as George W. Bush liked to say, you spend it . This is why it was shrewd of the surging Obama to

demand new action from Congress on Cuba . “Americans and Cubans alike are ready to move forward ; I believe it's time for Congress to do the same,” he said, renewing his call to lift the travel and trade embargo.

“Yes, there are those who want to turn back the clock and double down on a policy of isolation, but it's long past time for us to realize that this

approach doesn't work. It hasn't worked for 50 years. ... So I'd ask Congress to listen to the Cuban people, listen to the American people, listen to the words of a proud Cuban American, [former Bush commerce secretary] Carlos Gutierrez, who recently came out against the policy of the past.” Fifteen minutes later, Obama lifted off from the South Lawn in Marine One on his way to Nashville, where he tried to use the momentum generated by the Supreme Court Obamacare victory to spread the program to states where Republican governors have resisted. “What I'm hoping is that with the Supreme Court case now behind us, what we can do is ... now focus on how we can make it even better,” he said, adding, “My hope is that on a bipartisan basis, in places like Tennessee but all across the country, we can now focus on ... what have we learned? What's working? What's not working?” He said that “because of politics, not all states have taken advantage of the options that are out there. Our hope is, is that more of them do.” He urged people to “think about this in a practical

American way instead of a partisan, political way.” This probably won't happen, but it's refreshing to see Obama, too often passive,

regaining vigor as he approaches the final 18 months of his presidency. The energy had, at least for the moment,

returned to the White House , where no fewer than six network correspondents were doing live stand-ups before Obama's

appearance Wednesday morning. There was a spring in the president's step, if not a swagger , as he emerged from the Oval Office trailed by Vice President Biden. Republican presidential candidates were nearly unanimous in denouncing the plan to open a U.S. embassy in Havana. But Obama, squinting in the sunlight as he read from his teleprompters,

welcomed the fight . “The progress that we mark today is yet another demonstration that we don't have to be imprisoned by the past,” he said. Quoting a Cuban-American's view that “you can't hold the future of Cuba hostage to what happened in

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the past,” Obama added, “That's what this is about: a choice between the future and the past.” Obama turned to go back inside, ignoring the question shouted by Bloomberg's Margaret Talev: “How will you get an ambassador confirmed?” That

will indeed be tricky. But momentum is everything in politics — and for the moment, Obama

has it again .

Expanding scope of Freedom Act reforms drains PC – alienates Congressional leadership and requires political concessions despite popularity – empirics proveHattem, 15 (Julian Hattem, staff writer for The Hill, 4-30-2015, "Expansive surveillance reform takes backseat to House politics", The Hill, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/240641-expansive-spying-reforms-take-backseat-to-house-politics, DA: 5-23-2015)

Congress is waving the white flag about moving forward with more expansive intelligence reform . As

lawmakers stare down the barrel of a deadline to renew or reform the Patriot Act, they have all but assured that more expansive reforms to U.S. intelligence powers won’t be included . It’s not because of the substance of the reforms — which practically all members of the House Judiciary Committee said they support on Thursday — but because they would derail a carefully calibrated deal and are opposed by GOP leaders in the House and Senate . The House Judiciary Committee killed an amendment to expand the scope of the USA Freedom Act — which

would reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and some other provisions

— by a vote of 9-24. “If there ever was a perfect being the enemy of the good amendment, then this is it,” said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a supporter of the idea behind the amendment who ultimately voted against it. “What adoption of this amendment will do is take away all leverage that this committee has relative to reforming the Patriot Act. ...

If this amendment is adopted, you can kiss this bill goodbye ,” he added. The amendment from Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) would block the spy agency from using powers under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to collect Americans’ Internet communications without a warrant. The NSA has relied on the powers of Section 702 to conduct its “PRISM” and “Upstream” collection programs, which gather data from major Web companies such as Facebook and Google, as well as to tap into the networks that make up the backbone of the Internet. The amendment would have also prevented the government from forcing tech companies to include “backdoors” into their devices, so that the government could access people’s information. “Unless we specifically limit searches of this data on American citizens, our intelligence agencies will continue to use it for this purpose and they will continue to do it without a warrant,” Poe said. “A warrantless search of American citizens'

communication must not occur.” The discussion during Thursday’s markup offered a fascinating glimpse into the political calculations and sacrifices lawmakers make in order to advance legislation . While every committee member who spoke up was in support of the amendment, it ultimately failed because of fear that it would kill the overall bill. “We have been assured if this amendment is attached to this bill, this bill is going nowhere ,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said. “ This amendment is objected to by many in positions who affect the future of this legislation .” In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and

Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) have introduced legislation to renew the Patriot Act without changes. If the USA Freedom Act were to be scuttled because of the new amendment, backers said, that Senate effort would become the default path forward. The move to drop the fix was all the more frustrating, supporters of the amendment said, because Congress overwhelmingly voted 293-123 to add similar language to a defense spending bill last year. “How can it be when the House of Representatives has expressed its will on this very question, by a vote of 293-123, that that is illegitimate?” asked Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who supported the amendment. While lawmakers blocked Thursday’s amendment, many suggested that it would be brought up as an amendment

to various appropriations bills in coming months. The 702 powers are also set to sunset in 2017, which should force a debate on them then. Goodlatte also pledged to hold a hearing on the matter “soon.” But that provided little reassurance to critics of the NSA’s powers. “We’re talking about postponing the Fourth Amendment and

allowing it to apply to American citizens for at least two years,” said Poe.

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Full diplomatic ties key to normalized relations – vital to improved regional stability and counter-narcotics – status quo doesn’t solve and Obama has exhausted his available actionsBowman 7/1 {Michael, syndicated senate correspondent, “Global Chatter Greets US-Cuba Announcement ,” VOA, 2015, http://www.voanews.com/content/global-chatter-greets-us-cuba-restoration-of-diplomatic-ties/2845227.html#THUR}

The restoration of full diplomatic relations between the U nited S tates and Cuba sparked overwhelmingly positive reactions around the world , except in the United States, where opinions diverged widely. A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he “welcomes the announcement today that Cuba and the United States will reopen embassies in Havana and Washington, D.C.” “The

restoration of diplo matic ties is an important step on the path toward the normalization of relations. The secretary-general hopes that this historic step will benefit the peoples of both countries,” the spokesman added. For decades, Switzerland has served as a go-between for Washington

and Havana, housing the U.S. Interest Section in the Cuban capital. In a statement, the Swiss government said: “Switzerland strongly believes that the

reopening of the two embassies and the normalization process will overall be beneficial for the two states and contribute to security, stability and prosperity in the region. Switzerland views the normalization of relations between Cuba and the U.S. as

very positive – not only for these two countries but for the whole region and for world stability . ” ‘Incentivizing a police state’ By contrast, reactions are decidedly mixed in Washington and across the United States. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican John Boehner, said in a statement, “The Obama administration is handing the Castros a lifetime dream of legitimacy without getting a thing for the Cuban people being oppressed by

this brutal communist dictatorship.” Echoing the criticism, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the son of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba,

said: “Our demands for freedoms and liberty on the island will continue to be ignored, and we are incentivizing a police state to uphold a policy of brutality. A

policy of the United States giving and the Castro brothers freely taking is not in our national interest and not a responsible approach when dealing with repressive rulers that deny freedoms to [their] people. An already one-sided deal that benefits the Cuban regime is becoming all the more lopsided.” ‘New era of

possibility’ House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi disagreed. “Reopening embassies lays the foundation for a new, more productive relationship with Cuba that can support and advance key American priorities, including human

rights, counter-narcotics cooperation , business opportunities for American companies, migration, family unification, and cultural-

and faith-based exchanges,” she said. “President Obama’s bold leadership has opened a new era of possibility in U.S.-Cuban relations.” That sentiment was echoed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy.

Revitalized relations key to Cuban economic growth – further congressional policy keyGutierrez 6/23 {Carlos M, Chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, former President and Chief Executive Officer of Kellogg, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Visiting scholar at Miami University’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, “A Republican Case for Obama’s Cuba Policy,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/opinion/a-republican-case-for-obamas-cuba-policy.html#THUR}

Like many fellow Republicans and Cuban-Americans, I was critical when President Obama announced in December 2014 that his administration would begin to normalize ties between the United S tates and Cuba. After years of hostility and failed attempts at détente, I wondered: Did the Cuban government really want better ties with America, or was this simply another chess move in a tired game? After all, Mr. Obama is not the first president to try to change the relationship with Cuba — Mr. Castro’s revolution has outlived 10

American administrations. Today, I am cautiously optimistic for the first time in 56 years. I see a glimmer of hope that, with Cuba allowing even a small amount of entrepreneurship and many American companies excited

4

about entering a new market, we can actually help the Cuban people . My 30-year career at the

Kellogg Company taught me that, at its best, business can have a transformational and uplifting impact on communities and whole societies . It is because of that belief that I have always been proud to call myself a Republican. As secretary

of commerce in the administration of George W. Bush, I was a voice for American business abroad and saw firsthand that our private sector could be the best ambassador for American values, such as the power of free enterprise to raise living standards and the importance of being free to work where one chooses. I believe that it is now time for Republicans and the wider American business community to stop fixating on the past and embrace a new approach to Cuba. It has now been six months since Mr. Obama’s policy shift was announced. Both governments have

confirmed plans to open embassies, and negotiations have covered a variety of issues, including the extradition of

American fugitives who fled to Cuba. Almost every week a new congressional delegation lands in Havana. From a government-to-government perspective, there has not been so much communication between the United States and Cuba in 50 years. I never

expected negotiations to get this far. On the business side, scores of Americans have begun to travel to Cuba under

expanded licenses. American credit card companies have been authorized to handle transactions in Cuba .

Some of the most innovative companies in the world , like Airbnb and Netflix, have begun to offer their services in Cuba. The New York Cosmos soccer team has played exhibition matches on the island, and the National Basketball Association

has sponsored a workshop in Havana. Some presidential candidates, including the Cuban-American senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, have argued that Mr. Obama has conceded too much. The truth is that the changes so far have been incremental and this will be a long and gradual process . Contrary to popular belief , President Obama’s

executive actions do not allow for free and open commerce with Cuba , nor do they open the doors for Americans to visit the island as tourists; the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 codified the embargo that prohibits most American companies from undertaking transactions with Cuba, and travel remains restricted. Rather, the reforms have allowed some American companies and individuals to engage in limited additional activities in

Cuba. Perhaps most critical among these activities has been granting Americans the right to support a new generation of Cuban-born entrepreneurs and Cuban-run small businesses. This move is a logical response

to a change allowed by the Castro regime in recent years. These small-business owners and their employees will need tools, supplies, building materials and training in accounting, logistics and other areas. The new reforms allow American citizens and businesses to address such needs, and I am hopeful the Cuban government will allow its citizens to take full advantage of their

assistance. Cubans yearn not only for these interactions but also for a time when they can enjoy opportunities to chart their own

course in life without having to leave their home, as I did 55 years ago. There are those who will always wish for the past, whether it is pre-Castro Cuba or the days before the current rapprochement. Some of my fellow Cuban-Americans insist that continuing to squeeze Cuba economically will help the Cuban people because it will lead to democracy. I wonder if the Cubans who have to stand in line for

the most basic necessities for hours in the hot Havana sun feel that this approach is helpful to them. America must look to the

future instead — and pursue this opportunity to assist Cubans in building a new economy . There is

a lot of work to do, and progress will be slow. However, the business community and my fellow Cuban-Americans and Republicans should not ignore the possibilities ahead. The Cuban people need and deserve our help .

Cuban economic collapse and instability coming now – that creams global hotspot management and escalates GLOBAL conflict in Africa, Central Asia, Iran, Taiwan, and KoreaGorrell 5 – Tim Gorrell, Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, “CUBA: THE NEXT UNANTICIPATED ANTICIPATED STRATEGIC CRISIS?” US Army War College Research Project, 3-18, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA433074)

**The gigantic shrunk section compares various policies towards Cuba – don’t bother reading it, the conclusion is neg (as the “Conclusion and Recommendation” section underlined explains)

5

Regardless of the succession, under the current U.S. policy , Cuba’s problems of a post Castro transformation only worsen . In addition to Cubans on the island, there will be those in exile who will return claiming authority. And there are remnants of the dissident community

within Cuba who will attempt to exercise similar authority. A power vacuum or absence of order will create the conditions for instability and civil war. Whether Raul or another successor from within the current government can hold power is debatable. However,

that individual will nonetheless extend the current policies for an indefinite period, which will only compound the Cuban situation. When Cuba finally collapses anarchy is a strong possibility if the U.S. maintains the “wait and see” approach. The U.S. then must deal with an unstable country 90 miles off its coast. In the midst of this chaos, thousands will flee the island. During the Mariel boatlift in

1980 125,000 fled the island.26 Many were criminals; this time the number could be several hundred thousand fleeing to the U.S., creating a refugee crisis . Equally important, by adhering to a negative containment policy , the U.S. may be creating its next series of transnational criminal problems. Cuba is along the axis of the drug-trafficking flow into the U.S. from Columbia. The Castro government as a matter of policy does not support the drug trade. In fact, Cuba’s actions have shown that its stance on drugs is more than hollow rhetoric as indicated by its increasing seizure of drugs – 7.5 tons in 1995, 8.8 tons in 1999, and 13 tons in 2000.27 While there may be individuals within the government and outside who engage in drug trafficking and a percentage of drugs entering the U.S. may pass through Cuba, the Cuban government is not the path of least resistance for the flow of

drugs. If there were no Cuban restraints, the flow of drugs to the U.S. could be greatly facilitated by a Cuba base of operation and accelerate considerably. In the midst of an unstable Cuba, the opportunity for radical fundamentalist groups to operate in the region increases. If these groups can export terrorist activity from Cuba to the U.S. or throughout the hemisphere then the war against this extremism gets more complicated. Such activity could increase direct attacks and disrupt the economies, threatening the stability of the fragile democracies that are budding throughout the region. In light of a failed state in the region, the U.S. may be forced to deploy military forces to Cuba, creating the conditions for another insurgency. The ramifications of this action could very well fuel greater anti-American sentiment

throughout the Americas. A proactive policy now can mitigate these potential future problems. U.S. domestic political support is also turning against the current negative policy.

The Cuban American population in the U.S. totals 1,241,685 or 3.5% of the population.28 Most of these exiles reside in Florida; their influence has been a factor in determining the margin of victory in the past two presidential elections. But this election strategy may be flawed, because recent polls of Cuban Americans reflect a

decline for President Bush based on his policy crackdown. There is a clear softening in the Cuban-American community with regard to sanctio ns. Younger Cuban Americans do not necessarily subscribe to the hard-line approach. These changes signal an opportunity for a new approach to U.S.-Cuban relations . (Table 1) The time has come to look realistically at the Cuban issue. Castro will rule until he dies. The only issue is what happens then? The U.S. can little afford to be distracted by a failed state 90 miles off its coast. The administration , given the present state of world affairs, does not have the luxury or the resources to pursue the traditional American model of crisis management. The President and other government and military leaders have warned that the GWOT will be long and protracted. These warnings were sounded when the administration

did not anticipate operations in Iraq consuming so many military, diplomatic and economic resources. There is justifiable concern that Africa and the Caucasus region are potential hot spots for terrorist activity, so these areas should be secure. North Korea will continue to be an unpredictable crisis in waiting. We also cannot ignore China . What if China resorts to aggression to resolve the Taiwan situation? Will the U.S. go to war over Taiwan ? Additionally, Iran could conceivably be the next target for U.S. pre-emptive action. These are known and potential situations that could easily require all or many of the elements of national power to resolve .

In view of such global issues, can the U.S. afford to sustain the status quo and simply let the Cuban situation play out? The U.S. is at a crossroads: should the policies of the past 40 years remain in effect with vigor? Or should the U.S. pursue a new approach to Cuba in an effort to facilitate a manageable transition to post-Castro Cuba? ANALYSIS OF POLICY ALTERNATIVES The U.S. can pursue three policy alternatives in dealing with Cuba: SUSTAIN THE CURRENT POLICY AND FULLY ENFORCE THE ECONOMIC EMBARGO The crux of the argument for this policy is that sanctions and other restrictions will exert tremendous pressure on the Castro regime, in hope that the regime will fall prior to Castro’s death. There is little indication that this policy will succeed. The U.S. is virtually the only country pursuing a policy to isolate Cuba. In the 1990s Castro was able to develop new trade and markets. While Cuba is not a prosperous country, it has nonetheless managed to endure. The loss of Soviet subsidies, which amounted to 25% of Cuba’s national income, and the loss of the Eastern European bloc as trading partners, which amounted to 75% of Cuba’s import/export trade, left Castro with no alternative but to implement economic changes both internally and externally.30 These initiatives have stimulated steady, but modest, economic growth. Today in Cuba, 160,000 people (or 4% of the workforce) are self-employed.31 These entrepreneurial endeavors include small restaurants, taxi drivers, repairmen, and other service industries. If the present course of sanctions continues, the gains of these small reforms will be suppressed leading to significant deprivation for the people involved. Also, Cuba trades with over 100 countries worldwide, so while trade with the U.S. would certainly improve Cuba’s economic well-being, it is debatable whether the lack of U.S. trade is bringing the regime to its knees. The point is that sanctions are not hurting Castro, but are hurting the Cuban population. Restricting trade and travel hurts the small businesses, the tourist industry and others whose livelihood depends on a service economy. It also degrades the quality of life of those Cubans whose financial support comes from family members in the U.S. Strategists who subscribe to current policy argue that these limitations/hardships will eventually promote an uprising among the populace to overthrow Castro. There is no substantial evidence that this will occur and much that argues against it. While Castro will not live forever, he has outlasted over 45 years of such U.S. policy. He is 78 years old and his father lived to be 80 under significantly less desirable conditions.32 If the present policy course is to

6

wait Castro out this could potentially take another 5-10 years. The wait equates to 5-10 years of despair for the Cuban people, further decay of the country’s infrastructure and more dire conditions that would make democratic reform all the more difficult and costly when Castro actually expires. Pursuing the present steady state policy will further alienate the Cuban people at home and abroad. The U.S. often has a myopic vision in regard to other cultures. In the case of Cuba, by focusing only on Castro and ignoring the Cuban peoples’ culture and traditions, U.S. policy makers are blinded and have failed to see a future Cuba. RETAIN SANCTIONS AGAINST CUBA, BUT ENFORCE THEM IN VARYING DEGREES DEPENDING ON THE POLITICAL CLIMATE AND THE CUBAN REGIME’S CONDUCT IN REGARD TO AMERICAN INTERESTS Throughout the past 15 years, the U.S. has experimented with a variable enforcement option. During the Clinton administration, restrictions were occasionally eased. For example, in March 1998, President Clinton announced: 1) the resumption of licensing for direct humanitarian charter flights to Cuba; 2) the resumption of cash remittances up to $300 per quarter for the support of close relatives in Cuba; 3) the development of licensing procedures to streamline and expedite licenses for the commercial sale of medicines and medical supplies and equipment; and 4) a decision to work on a bipartisan basis with Congress on the transfer of food to the Cuban people.33 In January 1999, President Clinton ordered additional measures to assist the Cuban people, which included further easement of cash remittances, expansion of direct passenger charter flights to Cuba, reestablishment of direct mail service, authorization for the commercial sale of food to independent entities in Cuba, and an expansion of people-to-people exchanges (i.e. scientist, students, athletes, etc.)34 This policy ended when the new administration failed to see any reciprocal progress from Castro. Fragmenting the policy process may do more harm than good. It does too little too late and causes hard feelings among Cubans and American businesses. The carrot-stick diplomatic approach will not make Castro yield. Such policy breeds inconsistency as it can vary from administration to administration, as it has between the Clinton and Bush administrations. The rules constantly change and thus have a ripple effect on American businesses and the quality of life of Americans, Cuban-Americans and native Cubans. Cuban trade has already declined to a trickle since the Bush administration sought to further squeeze the Castro government. Prior to the Bush administration’s trade crack down, 2004 was emerging as a record year for U.S. imports to Cuba. By the end of December 2004 U.S. suppliers and shippers were projected to have earned some $450 million, a 20% increase over 2003 sales.35 Imposing restrictions, as the Bush administration did in June 2004, perplexed American businesses with unpredicted problems. These businesses make adjustments, as do Cuban- American citizens, then must abruptly alter their business strategies because of a Congressional vote or an Executive order. This political tug-of-war does not move the U.S. any closer to realizing its security objectives. On the Cuban American front there is eroding support for this U.S. policy position. In the 2000 presidential election, President Bush won 81% of south Florida’s Cuban-American vote. A recent poll by the William C. Veleasquez Institute-Mirram Global indicates that his support today has fallen to 66%.36 This decline signals a negative response to policy that limits travel, restricts the amount of goods people can bring to their relatives, and places limitations on sending money to family in Cuba. Cuban-Americans believe that this only hurts their poor relatives in Cuba. According to Jose Basulto, head of Brothers to the Rescue, and Ramon Raul Sanchez, head of the anti-Castro Democracy Movement, the U.S. government is using the Cuban people to harass Castro.37 Applying policy in a give-and-take manner, accomplishes little to facilitate the fall of Castro. The Cuban people enjoy brief periods of limited benefits, only to have these benefits withdrawn should the President or members of Congress wish to take another jab at Castro. American civilian businesses are also negatively affected. LIFT ALL SANCTIONS AND PURSUE NORMAL DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH CUBA Normalcy is the only policy that the U.S. has not attempted. The present policy misses the security implications, alienates allies and others worldwide, harms U.S. businesses, and is losing support domestically. First, the U.S. must reassess the threat posed by Cuba. There is, in fact, virtually no security threat. Further, policies that were applicable in the past, when there was a threat, should not be applied to the current environment. The U.S. Cuban policy is perplexing because it appears to conflict with the ends, ways and means that the National Security Strategy is applied in other regions of the world. The U.S. has normalized relations with Vietnam and Libya and has certainly opted for an open dialogue with Communist China. Likewise, there is abundant evidence that a new policy toward Cuba could very well achieve the ends that 43 years of embargo have failed to accomplish. Secondly, Cuba currently trades and has diplomatic ties with much of the world. The goal of U.S. sanctions is to isolate the Cuban regime; however, they have only slowed, not deterred economic growth. On 4 November 2003 the United Nations voted, for the 12th straight year, 173 to 3 (with 4 abstentions) against the four-decade U.S. embargo against Cuba.38 Voting with the U.S. were Israel and the Marshall Islands. The U.S.’ staunchest allies, the 15 members of the European Union, along with Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all object to the “extra-territorial” effect of U.S. legislation that they feel violates their sovereignty. 39 There are two schools of thought regarding trade and democracy. The first is that economic growth will promote democracy. The other questions this notion and argues that democracy must come first.40 There is strong opinion, however, that in Cuba’s case economic engagement will bring about the desired results. Certainly many Cuban-Americans and perhaps some others in the world would not agree with this course of action. However, there is evidence that a significant number of people both within the U.S. and abroad favor a policy change. In 1992 a pastoral letter from Cuba’s Bishops stated that the US embargo “directly affects the people who suffer the consequences in hunger and illness. If what is intended by this approach is to destabilize the government by using hunger and want to pressure civic society to revolt, then the strategy is also cruel.“41 The third consideration is U.S. business. Under the current rules, U.S. businesses are permitted to sell agricultural produce to Cuba.42 Today 27 firms from 12 U.S. states are doing business with Cuba, making Cuba 22nd among U.S. agricultural markets.43 These business activities are greatly influenced by Cuban-Americans and members of Congress. The economic power of the U.S. can be our most powerful weapon. The possibilities of economic engagement offer a myriad of branches and sequels that could promote a rapport between the American people and the Cubans. The aggressive pursuit of these endeavors would go far in ensuring an orderly transition to a post-Castro Cuba. It is an erroneous assumption to believe that Castro’s demise will miraculously trigger reform and all the problems of the last 40 years will vanish. A visionary policy, albeit constrained within the parameters of the Castro regime, will go far in setting agreeable social-economic conditions in Cuba both now and in the future. Finally, public opinion in the U.S. favors a new policy direction. A 1997 Miami Herald poll found that a majority of Cubans under the age of 45 supported “establishing a national dialogue with Cuba,” whereas for the most part their elders opposed such dialogue.44 Former President Jimmy Carter, writing in the Washington Post after his May 2002 visit to Cuba, reported that he found an unexpected degree of economic freedom. Carter went on to say that if Americans could have maximum contact with Cuban, then Cubans would clearly see the advantages of a truly democratic society and thus be encouraged to bring about orderly changes in their society. 45 Castro himself appears willing to consider greater reform. In 1998 he permitted Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba; Cubans are permitted to own property; he has opened trade; and in 2002 he broadcast former President Jimmy Carter’s address at the University of Havana.46 Additionally, he indicated that the Cuban

government would return any of the Guantanamo detainees in the unlikely event that they would escape.47 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

U.S. policy makers need to confront the real Cuba of today in order to build a “free” Cuba of tomorrow that is capable of taking its place in the world community as a responsible, democratic nation. Given the

history of the past 100 years, and particularly our Castro centric policy, the U.S. needs to make a bold change toward Cuba . The U.S. has pursued a hard-line approach toward the Castro regime for over 40 years. While this policy was easily justified during the Cold War era and, to a certain degree, during the 1990s, it fails to address the present U.S. national security concerns. The globalization trends of the 21st century are irreversible, Fidel Castro is in the

twilight of his life, and a new generation of Cuban-Americans is supportive of new strategies that will ease the transition to a post-Castro Cuba while buttressing economic and social opportunities in the near term. Furthermore, there is a new dimension that U.S. policy strategists must take into account in deciding the course of U.S.- Cuba relations – the GWOT. World-wide asymmetrical threats to U.S. interests, coupled with the Iraqi

occupation and the potential for any one of the present hot spots (i.e . Iran , North Korea , Taiwan , etc .) to ignite, should prompt strategic leaders to work harder to mitigate a potential Caribbean crises . The prudent action would then be to develop strategies that can defuse or neutralize these situations before they require the U.S. to divert resources from protecting its interests in the GWOT .

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HUMINT AdvantageTurn – broad data collection is betterPorter, 15(R.C. Porter, Retired Intelligence Official with more than 33 years of experience in both the military and civilian affairs, M.S. Middle Eastern Studies/National Security Policy Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. One year study program, National Defense University/Industrial College of the Armed Forces — National Security Resource Management, 1994. B.A., Criminal Justice, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge Louisiana, May, 1979, “THE DUMBING DOWN OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE; AND, WHY METADATA, AND THE ‘HAYSTACK’ MATTER — IN COMBATING TERRORISM AND PROTECTING THE U.S. HOMELAND – ‘YOU NEED A HAYSTACK….TO FIND A NEEDLE’”, http://fortunascorner.com/2015/05/11/the-dumbing-down-of-u-s-intelligence-and-why-metadata-and-the-haystack-matter-in-combating-terrorism-and-protecting-the-u-s-homeland-you-need-a-haystack-to-find-a-needle/, May 11, 2015, ak.)

The above is the title of an Op-Ed by Gordon Crovitz in the May 11, 2015 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Crovitz begins by noting that “FBI Director James Comey warned last week that the American Islamists who tried to assassinate free-speech advocates at a cartoon exhibition

near Dallas, Texas…..are not alone. There are “hundreds, maybe thousands” of potential terrorists in the U.S. being inspired

by overseas groups.” “The haystack is the entire country ,” he said. “We are looking for needles; but, increasingly the needles are unavailable to us.” “The needles will be even harder to find, if Congress weakens the Patriot Act, by reducing the intelligence available to national security ,” and law enforcement

agencies. “With the rise of the Islamic State and its global recruiting tools, intelligence agencies should be allowed to join the “big data” revolution,” Mr. Crovitz wrote. “Edward Snowden’s data theft raised privacy alarms; but, by now — it’s clear that no one working for the National Security Agency (NSA), leaked confidential data — other than Snowden himself,” Mr. Crovitz correctly observes. “He evaded the 300 lawyers and compliance officers who monitor how NSA staff use data.” “POTUS Obama, last year,

recalled how the 9/11 hijackers escaped detection — because laws prohibited NSA from gathering and connecting the dots. He explained that the Patriot Act was passed, to “address a gap identified after 911,” by having intelligence agencies collect anonymous metadata — date, time, and duration of phone calls. But, POTUS Obama

reversed himself and now wants to gut the program,” Mr. Crovitz warns. “Instead of the NSA gathering call information, phone companies would hold the data. With multiple, unconnected databases, the NSA would no longer be able to access data to mine. There wouldn’t be dots to connect to threats. As for privacy, the phone companies’ databases would be less secure than the NSA’S.” “Lawmakers will decide this month whether to extend the Patriot Act or, to

water it down. Instead, they should update it to maximize both privacy, and intelligence,” Mr. Crovitz argues. “Technology now has the answer, if only politicians would get out of the way.” “Recent innovations in big data allow staggering amounts of information to be collected and mined. These data deliver correlations based on an individually anonymous basis. This work was originally done to support the chief revenue engine of the Internet — advertising. The technology generates increasingly targeted marketing messages based on an individuals’ online activities.” “The techniques have other applications. Google used them to become better than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at predicting flu outbreaks by monitoring search terms like “flu medicine,” by location. Canadian researchers studied thousands of premature babies, and identified symptoms that precede fevers. Cities apply predictive policing by mining online data to assign cops where they’re needed.” “The fast shift to self-driving cars is possible, because of data transmitted among vehicles. Small drones share data that keep them from crashing into one another. A Brown University researcher discovered how banks could use metadata about

people’s cell phone usage to determine their creditworthiness.” “The Patriot Act was written in 2001, before any of these advances. It lets the NSA keep anonymous data about who is calling whom for five years; but, it isn’t able to apply algorithms to find suspicious patterns. Analysts may examine call logs for suspicious links, only if there is a pre-existing “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of terrorism, or another threat to national security. There were 170 such searches last year,” [2014]. “Before the Snowden leaks two years ago, Intelligence agencies had planned to ask Congress to broaden their access to anonymous data — so they could use modern tools of big data. Technology has moved far ahead, leaving intelligence -gathering stupider,” Mr. Crovitz wrote. “A measure of how far behind the technology curve the intelligence agencies have become is that one of the would-be cartoon killers posted a message on Twitter beforehand, with the hashtag #TexasAttack. Law enforcement [authorities] didn’t spot it until after the attack. In contrast, algorithms for delivering advertising parse signals such as hashtags to deliver relevant ads in real time…before the online page loads.” “In their 2013 book, “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, And Think,” Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier describe the history of information: “As centuries passed, we opted for more information flows rather than less, and to guard against its excesses — not primarily

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through censorship; but, through rules that limited the misuse of information.” In conclusion, Mr. Crovitz writes, “Congress should insist

that the NSA ensure its data are used properly — no more Snowdens — but, also give the agency authority to catch up to how the private sector uses data. Politicians should update the Patriot Act by permitting the intelligence use of data to prevent terrorism.” Mapping Terror Networks: Why Metadata And The ‘Haystack’ Matters Philip Mudd, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, and Senior Intelligence Adviser to the FBI, [at the time his article was published], wrote an Op-Ed in the Dec. 30, 2014 Wall Street Journal noting that the CIA, FBI, and the entire U.S. Intelligence Community and national security establishment had devoted countless hours as to “how best can [we] clarify [and posture ourselves regarding] the blurring picture of an emerging

terror conspiracy [aimed at the United States] originating overseas, or inside the United States. “How can we identify the key players (network/link analysis) and the broader network of their fundraisers [enablers], radicalizers, travel facilitators and

others….quickly enough so that they can’t succeed?,” as well as protect civil liberties. “And,” Mr. Mudd adds, “how do we ensure that we’ve ‘mapped’ the network enough to dismantle it?; or at a minimum, disrupt it?” Mr. Mudd

observes, “in essence, you need a haystack — in order to find a needle .” Last year, Federal Appeals Court Judge William

H. Pauley ruled NSA metadata collection lawful; and added, “the government needs a wide net that can isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data; HUMINT is the more desirable

method of collecting this kind of information — but, gathering critical HUMINT is often difficult and time consuming,” not to mention that the Obama administration has been great at droning terrorists; but, hasn’t added a single individual to Guantanamo Bay

Prison. Dead men tell no tales. You can’t get critical HUMIINT — if you stick your head in the sand and refuse to establish an interrogation facility for this very purpose. Treating terrorists as criminals to be tried in a ‘normal’ court of law is absurd, counterproductive, and dangerous. As Mr. Mudd wrote at the time, “mapping a network of people is simple in concept; but, complex in practice: find the key operators, and then find the support group. Map a network poorly, and you may miss peripheral players who

will recreate a conspiracy after the core of conspirators are arrested. The goal,” Mr. Mudd said, “is to eliminate the entire spider-web of conspiracy; cutting off a piece like an arm of a starfish, is a poor second choice — the starfish’s arm — regenerates.” “Investigators also need an historical pool of data,” Mr. Mudd argued at the time, “that they can access only when they have information that starts with a known, or suspected conspirator — in the middle of a spider-web they don’t fully understand,” and is missing a few corners. Who is watchers is a legitimate concern; and, a

healthy skepticism about government claims for access to even more personal data…is desirable, warranted, and needed. But, the further and further we move away — in time — from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack here on the U.S. homeland — the more we seem to lose the raison d’ tere for why we passed the Patriot Act in the first place. As the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement authorities with respect to the mass collection of phone data are allowed to atrophy and erode — our ability to ferret out and discover potential terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland also decay. I am not sure I know the right answer as to where the balance lied — between the protection of civil liberties, versus the requirement to collect ‘enough’ data — that enables our intelligence and law enforcement

professionals to — connect the dots. But, I think I know one thing for sure. If we do suffer a large-scale terrorist event here at home — on the scale of 9/11 or worse — and, it is determined that we likely would have been able to discover this event before hand — if we had allowed a more reasonable big data mining strata — there will be hell to pay — and, perhaps a Patriot Act on steroids . It is easy to criticize law enforcement and intelligence agencies desires for greater authority and flexibility in regards to the collection of data; but, how you see it — depends on where you sit. If you are charged with protecting the American homeland, it is a very difficult balancing act — with few clear answers.

No NSA overload – Accumulo tech solves.Harris ‘13(Not Scott Harris, because large data sets do sometimes overwhelm him… But Derrick Harris. Derrick in a senior writer at Gigaom and has been a technology journalist since 2003. He has been covering cloud computing, big data and other emerging IT trends for Gigaom since 2009. Derrick also holds a law degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This evidence is also internally quoting Adam Fuchs – a former NSA employee that was involved in software design. “Under the covers of the NSA’s big data effort” – Gigaom - Jun. 7, 2013 - https://gigaom.com/2013/06/07/under-the-covers-of-the-nsas-big-data-effort/)

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The NSA’s data collection practices have much of America — and certainly the tech community — on edge, but sources familiar with the agency’s

technology are saying the situation isn’t as bad as it seems . Yes, the agency has a lot of data and can do some powerful

analysis, but, the argument goes, there are strict limits in place around how the agency can use it and who has access. Whether that’s good enough is still an open debate, but here’s what we know about the technology that’s underpinning all that data. The technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis perspective is Accumulo — an open-source

database the agency built in order to store and analyze huge amounts of data. Adam Fuchs knows Accumulo well because he helped build it during a nine-year stint with the NSA; he’s now co-founder and CTO of a company called Sqrrl that sells a commercial version of the database system. I spoke with him earlier

this week, days before news broke of the NSA collecting data from Verizon and the country’s largest web companies. The NSA began building Accumulo in late 2007, Fuchs said, because they were trying to do automated analysis for tracking and discovering new

terrorism suspects. “We had a set of applications that we wanted to develop and we were looking for the right infrastructure to build them on,” he said. The problem was those technologies weren’t available. He liked what projects like HBase were doing by using Hadoop to mimic Google’s famous BigTable data store, but it still wasn’t up to the NSA requirements around scalability, reliability or security. So, they began work on a project called CloudBase, which eventually was renamed

Accumulo. Now, Fuchs said, “It’s operating at thousands-of-nodes scale” within the NSA’s data centers. There are multiple instances each storing tens of petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1,000 terabyes or 1 million gigabytes) of data and it’s the backend of the agency’s most widely

used analytical capabilities. Accumulo’s ability to handle data in a variety of formats (a characteristic called “schemaless” in database jargon)

means the NSA can store data from numerous sources all within the database and add new analytic capabilities in days or even hours. “It’s quite critical,” he added. What the NSA can and can’t do with all this data As I explained on Thursday, Accumulo is especially adept at analyzing trillions of data points in order to build massive graphs that can detect the connections between them and the strength

of the connections. Fuchs didn’t talk about the size of the NSA’s graph, but he did say the database is designed to handle months or years worth of info rmation and let analysts move from query to query very fast. When you’re talking about analyzing call

records, it’s easy to see where this type of analysis would be valuable in determining how far a suspected terrorist’s network might spread and who might be involved.

Aff exaggerates – NSA budget’s too small for untargeted mass data collectionHarris ‘13(Not Scott Harris, because large data sets do sometimes overwhelm him… But Derrick Harris. Derrick in a senior writer at Gigaom and has been a technology journalist since 2003. He has been covering cloud computing, big data and other emerging IT trends for Gigaom since 2009. Derrick also holds a law degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This evidence is also internally quoting Adam Fuchs – a former NSA employee that was involved in software design. “Under the covers of the NSA’s big data effort” – Gigaom - Jun. 7, 2013 - https://gigaom.com/2013/06/07/under-the-covers-of-the-nsas-big-data-effort/)

We’re not quite sure how much data the two programs that came to light this week are actually collecting, but the evidence suggests it’s not that much — at least from a volume perspective. Take the PRISM program that’s gathering

data from web properties including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and AOL. It seems the NSA would have to be selective in what it grabs. Assuming it includes every cost associated with running the program, the $20 million per year allocated to PRISM, according to

the slides published by the Washington Post, wouldn’t be nearly enough to store all the raw data — much less new datasets created from analyses — from such large web properties. Yahoo alone, I’m told, was spending over $100 million a year to operate its approximately 42,000-node Hadoop environment, consisting of hundreds of petabytes, a few years ago.

Facebook users are generating more than 500 terabytes of new data every day. Using about the least-expensive option around for mass storage — cloud storage provider Backblaze’s open source storage pod designs — just storing 500 terabytes of

Facebook data a day would cost more than $10 million in hardware alone over the course of a year. Using higher-performance hard drives or other premium gear — things Backblaze eschews because it’s concerned primarily about cost and scalability rather than performance —

would cost even more. Even at the Backblaze price point, though, which is pocket change for the NSA, the agency would easily run over $20 million trying to store too many emails, chats, Skype calls, photos, videos and other types data from the other companies it’s working with.

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India Advantage( ) Domestic not key. Plan can’t stop US surveillance on other countries. That’s vital to credibility. McCauley ‘13Lauren McCauley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Previously, while writing for Newsweek, Lauren was nominated for the 2008 GLAAD Media Award for Digital Journalism, Common Dreams, 6-27-2013 https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/27-7

However, the international community has reacted to the disclosures with alarm . Revelations that the NSA has been tapping the phone and internet communications of foreign individuals and governments has spurred world leaders to denounce the global superpower as a 'hypocrite' and, in a number of instances, offer asylum or assistance to Snowden.¶ "The Prism-gate affair is itself just like a prism that reveals the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding Internet security of the country concerned," said Chinese Ministry of National Defense Spokesperson, Colonel Yang Yujun.¶ Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the five individuals who is credited as being a 'father of the internet' agreed telling the London Times newspaper that the 'insidious' spying by the United States was hypocritical in light of the US government's frequent 'policing' of other states.¶ "In the Middle East, people have been given access to the Internet but they have been snooped on and then they have been jailed," he said. "It can be easy for people in the West to say 'oh, those nasty governments should not be allowed access to spy.' But it's clear that developed nations are seriously spying on the Internet."¶ "It can be easy for people in the West to say 'oh, those nasty governments should not be allowed access to spy.'

But it's clear that developed nations are seriously spying on the Internet." –Sir Tim Berners-Lee¶ The dramatic international backlash is a clear indication of the importance and severity of the leaked information and, in the interest of insuring that these revelations are not eclipsed by more distracting headlines, below is a summary of what we know so far about the NSA's spy program.¶ Forbes columnist Andy Greenberg offers this run-down of leaked documents published so far (bolding his own):¶ The publication of Snowden’s leaks began with a top secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) sent to Verizon on behalf of the NSA, demanding the cell phone records of all of Verizon Business Network Services’ American customers for the three month period ending in July. [...]¶ In a congressional hearing, NSA director Keith Alexander argued that the kind of surveillance of Americans’ data revealed in that Verizon order was necessary to for archiving purposes, but was rarely accessed and only with strict oversight from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges. But another secret document published by the Guardian revealed the NSA’s own rules for when it makes broad exceptions to its foreign vs. U.S. persons distinction, accessing Americans’ data and holding onto it indefinitely. [...]¶ Another leaked slide deck revealed a software tool called Boundless Informant, which the NSA appears to use for tracking the origin of data it collects. The leaked materials included a map produced by the program showing the frequency of data collection in countries around the world. While Iran, Pakistan and Jordan appeared to be the most surveilled countries according to the map, it also pointed to significant data collection from the United States.¶ A leaked executive order from President Obama shows the administration asked intelligence agencies to draw up a list of potential offensive cyberattack targets around the world. The order, which suggests targeting “systems, processes and infrastructure” states that such offensive hacking operations “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging.” [...]¶ Documents leaked to the Guardian revealed a five-year-old British intelligence scheme to tap transatlantic fiberoptic cables to gather data. A program known as Tempora, created by the U.K.’s NSA equivalent Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has for the last 18 months been able to store huge amounts of that raw data for up to 30 days. Much of the data is shared with the NSA. [...]¶ Another GCHQ project revealed to the Guardian through leaked documents intercepted the communications of delegates to the G20 summit of world leaders in London in 2009. [...]¶ Snowden showed the Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post documents that it said outlined extensive hacking of Chinese and Hong Kong targets by the NSA since 2009, with 61,000 targets globally and “hundreds” in China. [...]¶ The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald has said that Snowden provided him “thousands” of documents, of which “dozens” are newsworthy. And Snowden himself has said he’d like to expose his trove of leaks to the global media so that each country’s reporters can decide whether “U.S. network operations against their people should be published.” So regardless of where Snowden ends up, expect more of his revelations to follow.¶ Further, on Thursday journalists Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman revealed in a new Guardian exclusive that for ten years the US had conducted bulk collections of internet metadata, amassing information akin to 'reading one's diary' on both domestic and foreign individuals.¶ And, in their own cataloging of 'what we know so far,' Pro Publica poses the question, "Is all of this legal?"¶ Recently leaked court orders reveal how the Department of Justice, "through a series of legislative changes and court decisions," have evolved the parameters of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, enabling the expansive spy program.¶ They write:¶ By definition, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decides what it is legal for the NSA to do.¶ But this level of domestic surveillance wasn’t always legal, and the NSA has been found to violate legal standards on more than one occasion. Although the NSA’s broad data collection programs appear to have started shortly after September 11, 2001, the NSA was gradually granted authority to collect domestic information on this scale through a series of legislative changes and court decisions over the next decade. See this timeline of loosening laws. The Director of National Intelligence says that authority for PRISM programs comes from section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Verizon metadata collection order cites section 215 of the Patriot Act. The author of the Patriot Act disagrees that the act justifies the Verizon metadata collection program.¶ In March 2004, acting Attorney General James Comey ordered a stop to some parts of the secret domestic surveillance programs, but President Bush signed an order re-authorizing it anyway. In response, several top Justice Department officials threatened to resign, including Comey and FBI director Robert Mueller. Bush backed down, and the programs were at least partially suspended for several months.¶ In 2009, the Justice Department acknowledged that the NSA had collected emails and phone calls of Americans in a way that exceeded legal limitations.¶ In October 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment at least once. The Justice Department has said that this ruling must remain secret, but we know it concerned some aspect of the "minimization" rules the govern what the NSA can do with domestic communications. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently decided that this ruling can be released, but Justice Department has not yet done so.¶ Civil liberties groups including the EFF and the ACLU dispute the constitutionality of these programs and have filed lawsuits to challenge them.¶ And regarding the aforementioned international backlash, Pro Publica responds to the question "What if I'm not

American?"¶ All bets are off. There do not appear to be any legal restrictions on what the NSA can do with the

communications of non-U.S. persons. Since a substantial fraction of the world’s Internet data passes through the United States, or its allies, the U.S. has the ability

to observe and record the communications of much of the world’s population. The European Union has already complained to the U.S. Attorney General .

( ) Deterrence checks India-Pakistan war.Khan ‘12 (Ikram Ullah, analyst for the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute, “Nuclear Pakistan: Defence Vs Energy Development,” 7/26, http://www.eurasiareview.com/26072012-nuclear-pakistan-defence-vs-energy-development-oped/)

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We must be clear that nuclear weapons are here to maintain peace and stability between Pakistan and India . Pakistan was

forced to run its nuclear weapon program due to India’s nuclear weapon program and its hegemonic ambition. Pakistan has long said that its nuclear weapon program is security driven. While on other hand Indian nuclear weapon program is not security driven, rather it is based on

its regional and global aspirations.¶ The security threats still exist for Pakistan, but due to its credible nuclear deterrence Pakistan is capable of crushing such threats or plans. In the recent past, the tragedy, which many historians remember as the “Fall of Dhaka”, carries some lessons

for us to be learnt. If India could intervene at that time, then it is quite possible it could intervene in Baloachistan. Now the nuclear capability of Pakistan deters India from perusing any kind of intervention because of the fear of perceived consequences . ¶ It is Pakistan’s credible nuclear deterrence capability that effectively neutralizes any ill intent of its opponent against its integrity and sovereignty. It is evident that after the December 13, 20 01 terrorists attack on Indian Parliament, India mobilized its armed forces to attack on Pakistan, but refrained from doing so as it realized that any such irrational action would lead to a nuclear war . The same was the case after Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008 –

the nuclear deterrence prevailed and it prevented t he likelihood of an all out nuclear war in South Asia.

Indian financial markets aren’t keyKhan ‘13Address by Mr H R Khan, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India – “Indian financial markets – fuelling the growth of the Indian economy” - Comments at the ADB Annual Conference, Greater NOIDA, Delhi NCR, 4 May 2013. http://www.bis.org/review/r130514d.pdf

Dr. Arvind Mayaram, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Mr. S. Gopalakrishnan, President, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Mr. Jignesh Shah, Chairman, CII National Committee on Financial Markets, Mr. Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII, distinguished delegates. Let me start by

complimenting CII for selecting Indian Financial Markets: Fuelling the Growth of the Indian Economy as the theme of the session. It is now well known that a well-developed financial sector plays an important role in economic growth. As John Hicks observed, the technology that made industrial revolution in England possible was in existence for a long time before it was commercially exploited; it had to wait till the financial sector developed

well enough to make the necessary resources available1. But it has to be recognized that while absence of a robust financial sector can retard growth,

financial development on its own cannot secure growth. Finance thus is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for economic growth . In India, we have traversed a long way since the economic reforms started in the early 1990’s. The reforms of the early 90’s were focused on three pillars – Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG). The financial sector has also undergone significant changes during the period to not only to support the rapid growth but also to do so

without disruptive episodes. Let me briefly mention some of these changes, if only to stress that our confidence to meet future challenges is based on the bedrock of past achievements. I am deliberately not touching upon the issues relating to capital markets as they are not my areas of competence.

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Bigotry Advantage( ) Assessing Utilitarian consequences are good. Putting ethics in a vacuum is morally irresponsible. Issac, ‘2 (Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Vol. 49 No. 2, Spring)

Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold

Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility . The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intentions does not ensure the achievement of what one intends . Abjuring violence or refusing to

make common cause with morally comprised parties may seem like the right thing, but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness, it is often a form of complicity in injustice . This is why, from the standpoint of politics-as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a potentially

immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather tha n the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence,

it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important , always , to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized

ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment . It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

( ) NSA isn’t sinister – surveillance is a far-cry from the mass privacy violations their authors assume.

Wittes ‘13Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He co-founded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, , “Five In-Your-Face Thoughts in Defense of the NSA”, Lawfare – 9/9/13 www.lawfareblog.com/2013/09/five-in-your-face-thoughts-in-defense-of-the-nsa/

First, the NSA is an intelligence agency, and intelligence agencies collect intelligence. The NSA collects a huge amount of data. It spies on other countries and their leaders. It tries to make sense of the material it collects using data-analytic techniques. It breaks encryption systems that its potential targets use to protect their communications. It develops relationships with private companies that can provide it data. And it engages in activity that is illegal in the countries against which

it operates. As we used to say in grade school, “Duh!” That’s why we have a signals intelligence agency. Critics of the agency, at home and abroad, trot out many of these facts as damning indictments. Brazil and Mexico and our European allies are outraged—or pretend to be—that we spy on them. Our

domestic conversation is laced with fear of the sheer size of NSA collection, as though data volume is what makes Big Brother big. But the criticism is silly. Of course, the agency collects a large volume of material. An intelligence agency is not a think tank or a university. It doesn’t just read newspapers, collect what’s public and analyze what such data say. ”We steal secrets,” former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden put it in the excellent movie about Wikileaks that

used this arresting phrase as its title. This is what spy agencies do. The NSA is good at it— very good at it . I, for one, think that’s a great thing. Second, what the agency is actually doing is far less threatening than what people think it is doing. The tone of the conversation about NSA activity is so over-the-top that the agency’s actual activity gets lost in the story. The intelligence community’s own efforts to explain itself have been less than

brilliant, but the truth is that the NSA has implemented its set of broad authorities in a tightly-controlled fashion. One

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can argue that the authorities in question are too broad, or one can argue that the controls should be tighter still. But it’s hard to look at the details of the actual programmatic activity of the NSA and emerge as alarmed as one would reasonably be on reading the screaming headlines. The disparity, and it is a vast one, between the story in those headlines and the story in the details is partly the product of a lot of shoddy journalism. But it’s partly also a product of the technical and legal density of the subject matter. The costs of entry to the conversation about how the NSA is spying on millions of Americans is low. The cost of entry to a serious conversation about what the agency is doing, how it is doing it, and how both interact with relevant statutory and constitutional law is not low. It’s very high. And a great many more people—journalists, members of Congress, and members of the public—thus feel pulled to the story about an out-of-control spy agency. It’s so much easier, and it maps so neatly onto all of the post-Watergate prejudices of our political culture. Third, while a lot of people aren’t interested in the details, those details really matter. At the time of the last document release, Lawfare published a series of detailed posts describing what the released documents actually said (we will do the same with this week’s disclosures). Very few people read them. Taken together, they attracted a few thousand readers, according to Google Analytics. By contrast, nearly 30,000 people read one day’s worth of our coverage of a possible Syria AUMF. The contrast gives you some idea of just how few people really want to understand what did and didn’t happen when the FISA Court declared part of the 702 collection process deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds. Yet the number of people who feel entitled to express an opinion—often a very strong opinion—on the same subject is much larger. The result, for the agency, is a debate that is remarkably resistant to disclosures of information unless they come from Edward Snowden and remarkably resistant to the sort of fine-grained details on which the

actual difference between legality and lawlessness necessarily depends. This brings me to my fourth point: the NSA’s activities are legal. We are not living in the age of COINTELPRO or the Watergate- era intelligence scandals . We are living in an age in which the intelligence activities about which we harbor anxieties take place pursuant to statute and subject to judicial review . People may object to the government’s interpretation of Section 215, about which I

have my own doubts, but nobody can argue that it is a lawless or crazy interpretation of the statute; in fact, it’s on its face quite plausible. And it’s one that the courts have approved, and to which Congress has assented. Similarly, nobody can deny that Section 702 grants sweeping collection powers with regard to communications by persons reasonably believed to be overseas; that’s the point of the law, and it’s the reason the FISA Amendments Act was controversial as a legislative matter. Yes, there have been errors and compliance issues, as there are with any government (or private sector) program. And yes, there was a substantial dialog with the FISA Court over one component of Section 702, in which the court held that component unconstitutional, forced changes to it, and referred to two other incidents in which the government had misrepresented aspects of 702 collection to the judges. But this sort of back-and-forth is little different from the iterative discussion that takes place between, say, the courts and a big city police department over the conduct of searches or, for that matter, the discussion between any agency and the courts that review its activities. They are examples of the mechanisms Congress set up to keep the NSA within the law doing just that.

( ) Counter-bias – their epistemology’s more flawed. Excess fear of surveillance means Aff scholarship’s MORE of an exaggeration than ours.McDonough ‘15(Shannon McDonough – Instructor in Social Sciences at Allen University. The author holds a B.A. in Sociology from Miami University, Ohio and an M.A. Sociology from The University of South Carolina. This article is co-authored by Mathieu Deflem – a Professor at the University of South Carolina in the Department of Sociology. His research areas include law, policing, terrorism, popular culture, and sociological theory. “The Fear of Counterterrorism: Surveillance and Civil Liberties Since 9/11” – From the Journal: Society - February 2015, Volume 52, Issue 1, pp 70-79 – obtained via the Springer database collection).

Civil liberties organizations as well as a number of academic scholars have routinely criticized post-9/11

counterterrorism initiatives as unconstitutional and major threats to civil liberties and privacy. Harmonizing with the claims from civil

liberties groups are contributions in the popular and scholarly discourse on surveillance and counterterrorism that lament the purported negative impact of government al policies and related surveillance and intelligence activities on personal rights and

liberties. The revelations by former security contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013 concerning alleged spying practices by the

National Security Agency (NSA) greatly reinvigorated these debates. We investigate here if there is any counter-evidence to the alarmist statements that are often made in the popular and scholarly discourse on civil liberties and surveillance. Against the background of academic scholarship on surveillance and criticisms from civil liberty and privacy groups, we rely on archival sources , government documents, and media reports to examine a variety of claims made concerning civil liberties

violations by security agencies. Our analysis reveals that at least a sizeable number of claims raised against counterterrorism practices are without objective foundation in terms of any actual violations. As an

explanation for this marked discrepancy, we suggest that, as various survey data show, there is a relatively distinct , albeit it uneven and not

entirely stable, culture of privacy and civil liberties in contemporary American society which independently

14

contributes to a fear of counterterror ism, rather than of terrorism . These specific cultural sensitivities bring about an increase in the amount of civil rights allegations independent of actual violations thereof.

( ) Legalism K:- Narrow reforms like the Aff are insufficient to solve racism. The plan just

re-assures white, middle class America. That’ll divide and hamper grassroots movements that challenge Laws supporting the surveillance state. The Alternative is to reject the Aff’s approach to Law in favor of deeper appreciation of the centrality of race.

Kumar & Kundnani ‘15Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012). Arun Kundnani is research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. He is a writer and activist, and a professor at NYU. “Race, surveillance, and empire” – International Socialist Review - Issue #96 – Spring - http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire

Today, we are once again in a period of revelation, concern, and debate on national security surveillance. Yet if real change is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will need to be fully confronted —or opposition to surveillance will once again be easily defeated by racial security narratives. The significance of the Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of the NSA’s mass surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider can have. The result has been a generalized level of alarm as people have become aware of how intrusive surveillance is in our society, but that alarm remains constrained within a public

debate that is highly abstract, legalistic , and centered on the privacy rights of the white middle class . On the one hand, most

civil liberties advocates are focused on the technical details of potential legal reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard privacy. Such initiatives are likely to bring little change because they fail to confront the racist and imperialist core of the surveillance system. On the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government

surveillance can be fixed simply by using better encryption tools. While encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a government agency would need to monitor an individual, they do nothing to unravel the larger surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns about loss of sales to foreign customers concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon Valley, what should be a debate about basic political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits.6 Another and perhaps deeper problem is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit the current situation—such as George Orwell’s discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the type of government surveillance we face today.70 Reference to Orwell’s 1984 has been widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the book were said to have soared following Snowden’s revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother is, on one level, supported by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groups—Muslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalists—state surveillance certainly looks Orwellian. But this level of scrutiny is not faced by the general public. The picture of surveillance today is therefore quite different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwell’s 1984, which assumes an undifferentiated mass population subject to government control. What we have instead today in the United States is total surveillance, not on

everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by their race, religion, or political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as the “bad guys.” In March 2014, Rick Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told an audience: “Contrary to some of the stuff that’s been printed, we don’t sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you’re not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.”72

In the national security world, “connected to” can be the basis for targeting a whole racial or political community so,

even assuming the accuracy of this comment, it points to the ways that national security surveillance can draw entire communities into its web, while reassuring “average people” (code for the normative white middle class) that they are not to be troubled. In the eyes of the national security state, this average person must also express no political views critical of the status quo. Better oversight of the sprawling

national security apparatus and greater use of encryption in digital communication should be welcomed. But by themselves these are likely to do little more than reassure technologists , while racialized populations and political dissenters continue to experience massive surveillance. This is why the most effective challenges to the national security state have come not from legal

reformers or technologists but from grassroots campaigning by the racialized groups most affected. In New York, the campaign against the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims has drawn its strength from building alliances with other groups affected by racial

15

profiling: Latinos and Blacks who suffer from hugely disproportionate rates of stop and frisk. In California’s Bay Area, a campaign against a Department of

Homeland Security-funded Domain Awareness Center was successful because various constituencies were able to unite on the issue, including homeless people, the poor, Muslims, and Blacks. Similarly, a demographics unit planned by the Los Angeles Police Department , which would have profiled communities on the basis of race and religion, was shut down after a campaign that united various groups defined by race and class. The lesson here is that, while the national security state aims to create fear and to divide people, activists can organize and build alliances across race lines to overcome that fear. To the extent that the national security state has targeted Occupy,

the antiwar movement, environmental rights activists, radical journalists and campaigners, and whistleblowers, these groups have gravitated towards opposition to the national security state. But understanding the centrality of race and empire to national security surveillance means finding a basis for unity across different groups who experience similar kinds of policing: Muslim, Latino/a , Asian , Black , and white dissidents and

radicals. It is on such a basis that we can see the beginnings of an effective multiracial opposition to the surveillance state and empire.

- Only our grassroots Alt solve. Plan fails – working through legal structures creates the appearance of reform, but just leads to circumvention.

Abbas ‘14Gadeir Abbas is a staff attorney for The Council on American-Islamic Relations. The author holds a JD from Case Western Reserve University and a BA in Philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago – “How NSA Spying Impacts Muslim Communities and Cultivates Islamophobia”. This piece is an transcribed interview conducted by - Rania Khalek - January 26, 2014 – Transcribed and posted at Dispatches from the Underground - http://raniakhalek.com/2014/01/26/how-nsa-spying-impacts-muslim-communities-and-cultivates-islamophobia/

KHALEK: I wanted to ask a more broad question about NSA surveillance. I love all the things you’re mentioning because a lot of this stuff really been I feel left out of the debate because a lot of the debate has been had between people who maybe haven’t been quite as effected or targeted by surveillance over the last decade or so. It seems the debate is just between white people, who are upset about this, and rightly so because it’s targeting everyone. We talked about how this is sort of the outgrowth of these policies that targeted Muslims but in general surveillance and spying in this country has always existed in a

really intense manner in communities of color, whether it be Muslim communities or the black community or black Muslim communities. Do you think there’s an important lesson to learn from that, that this has been ongoing and people need to be concerned when it’s marginalized communities that are being targeted? ABBAS: Really it’s up to the communities that are most affected to stand up and advocate for themselves on behalf of their own community as well as everyone else. I tend to take a slightly

pessimistic view on what the Snowden revelations will ultimately accomplish because as you said we have a long history of undue surveillance in this country and it’s very easy for what they’re doing now to be reformed and for it to just become a part of the black budget and we not know about it but it still happens. But like

we’re seeing in the push by the African American community and their allies against draconian drug laws, these are starting to have an effect. I think you’re seeing more sensible prison policies start to get considered.

( ) Mass surveillance good – equalizes current power imbalances. It would net decrease the quantity of police and associated brutality. Also decreases selective enforcement and child abuse.Armstrong ‘13

16

Dr. Stuart Armstrong is the James Martin Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University – “Life in the fishbowl” - Aeon Magazine - September 30, 2013 http://aeon.co/magazine/society/the-strange-benefits-of-a-total-surveillance-state/

Maybe we should start preparing. And not just by wringing our hands or mounting attempts to defeat surveillance. For if there’s a chance that

the panopticon is inevitable, we ought to do some hard thinking about its positive aspects. Cataloguing the downsides of mass surveillance is important, essential even. But we have a whole literature devoted to that. Instead, let’s explore its potential benefits. The first, and most obvious, advantage of mass surveillance is a drastic reduction in crime. Indeed, this is the advantage most often put forward by surveillance proponents today. The evidence as to whether current surveillance achieves this is ambiguous; cameras, for instance, seem to have an effect on property crime, but not on incidences of violence. But today’s world is very different from a panopticon full of automatically analysed

surveillance devices that leave few zones of darkness. If calibrated properly, total surveillance might eradicate certain types of crime almost

entirely. People respond well to inevitable consequences, especially those that follow swiftly on the heels of their conduct. Few would commit easily monitored crimes such as assault or breaking and entering, if it meant being handcuffed within minutes. This kind of ultra-efficient police capability would require not only sensors capable of recording crimes, but also advanced computer vision and recognition algorithms capable of detecting crimes quickly. There has been some recent progress on such algorithms, with further improvements expected. In theory, they would be able to alert the police in real time, while the crime was still ongoing. Prompt police responses would create near-perfect deterrence, and violent crime would be reduced to a few remaining incidents of overwhelming passion or extreme

irrationality. If surveillance recordings were stored for later analysis, other types of crimes could be eradicated as well,

because perpetrators would fear later discovery and punishment. We could expect crimes such as low-level corruption to vanish, because

bribes would become perilous (to demand or receive) for those who are constantly under watch. We would likely see a similar reduction in police brutality. There might be an initial spike in detected cases of police brutality under a total surveillance regime, as incidents that would previously have gone unnoticed came to light, but then, after a short while, the numbers would tumble. Ubiquitous video recording, mobile and otherwise, has already begun to expose such incidents. On a smaller scale, mass surveillance would combat all kinds of abuses that currently go unreported because the abuser has power over the abused. You see this dynamic in a variety of scenarios, from the dramatic (child abuse) to the more mundane (line managers insisting on illegal, unpaid overtime). Even if the victim is too scared to report the crime, the simple fact that the recordings existed would go a long way towards equalising existing power differentials . There would be the constant risk of some auditor or analyst stumbling on the recording, and once the abused was out of the abuser’s control (grown up, in another job) they could retaliate and complain, proof in hand. The possibility of deferred vengeance would make abuse much less likely to occur in the first place. With reduced crime, we could also expect a significant reduction in police work and, by

extension, police numbers. Beyond a rapid-reaction force tasked with responding to rare crimes of passion, there would be no need to keep a large police force on hand. And there would also be no need for them to enjoy the special rights they do today. Police officers can, on mere suspicion, detain you, search your person, interrogate you, and sometimes enter your home. They can also arrest you on suspicion of vague ‘crimes’ such as ‘loitering with intent’. Our present police force is given these powers because it needs to be able to investigate. Police officers can’t be expected to know who committed what crime, and when, so they need extra powers to be able to

figure this out, and still more special powers to protect themselves while they do so. But in a total-surveillance world, there would be no need for humans to have such extensive powers of investigation. For most crimes, guilt or innocence would be obvious and easy to establish from the recordings. The police’s role could be reduced to arresting specific

individuals, who have violated specific laws. If all goes well, there might be fewer laws for the police to enforce. Most countries currently have an excess of laws, criminalising all sorts of behaviour. This is only tolerated because of selective enforcement; the laws are enforced very rarely, or only against marginalised groups. But if everyone was suddenly subject to enforcement, there would have to be a mass legal repeal. When spliffs on

private yachts are punished as severely as spliffs in the ghetto, you can expect the marijuana legalisation movement to gather steam. When it becomes glaringly obvious that most people simply can’t follow all the rules they’re supposed to, these rules will have to be reformed. In the end, there is a chance that mass surveillance could result in more personal freedom, not less.

17

( ) Turn- Marijuana Legalization. Mass surveillance good – it causes legal pot reform.Armstrong ‘13Dr. Stuart Armstrong is the James Martin Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University – “Life in the fishbowl” - Aeon Magazine - September 30, 2013 http://aeon.co/magazine/society/the-strange-benefits-of-a-total-surveillance-state/

On a smaller scale, mass surveillance would combat all kinds of abuses that currently go unreported because the abuser has power over the abused. You see this dynamic in a variety of scenarios, from the dramatic (child abuse) to the more mundane (line managers insisting on illegal, unpaid overtime).

Even if the victim is too scared to report the crime, the simple fact that the recordings existed would go a long way towards equalising existing power differentials. There would be the constant risk of some auditor or analyst stumbling on the recording, and once the abused was out of the abuser’s control (grown up, in another job) they could retaliate and complain, proof in hand. The possibility of deferred vengeance would make abuse much less likely to occur in the first place. With reduced crime, we could also expect a significant reduction in police work and, by extension, police numbers. Beyond a rapid-reaction force tasked with responding to rare crimes of passion, there would be no need to keep a large police force on hand. And there would also be no need for them to enjoy the special rights they do today. Police officers can, on mere suspicion, detain you, search your person, interrogate you, and sometimes enter

your home. They can also arrest you on suspicion of vague ‘crimes’ such as ‘loitering with intent’. Our present police force is given these powers because it needs to be able to investigate. Police officers can’t be expected to know who committed what crime, and when, so they need extra powers to be able to figure this out, and still

more special powers to protect themselves while they do so. But in a total-surveillance world, there would be no need for humans to have such extensive powers of investigation. For most crimes, guilt or innocence would be obvious and easy to

establish from the recordings. The police’s role could be reduced to arresting specific individuals, who have violated specific laws. If all goes well, there might be fewer laws for the police to enforce. Most countries currently have an excess of laws,

criminalising all sorts of behaviour. This is only tolerated because of selective enforcement; the laws are enforced

very rarely, or only against marginalised groups. But if everyone was suddenly subject to enforcement, there would have to be a mass legal repeal. When spliffs on private yachts are punished as severely as spliffs in the ghetto, you can expect the marijuana legalisation movement to gather steam. When it becomes glaringly obvious that most

people simply can’t follow all the rules they’re supposed to, these rules will have to be reformed. In the end, there is a chance that mass surveillance could result in more personal freedom, not less.

18

2NC

19

HUMINT

20

No Bioterror Impact---1NCNo impact – acquisition and deployment failKeller 13 (Rebecca, 7 March 2013, Analyst at Stratfor, “Bioterrorism and the Pandemic Potential,” Stratfor, http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/bioterrorism-and-pandemic-potential)

The risk of an accidental release of H5N1 is similar to that of other infectious pathogens currently being studied. Proper safety standards are key, of course, and experts in the field have had a year to determine the best way to proceed, balancing safety and research benefits. Previous work with the virus was conducted at biosafety level three out of four, which requires researchers wearing respirators and disposable gowns to work in pairs in a negative pressure environment. While many of these labs are part of universities, access is controlled either through keyed entry or even palm scanners. There are roughly 40 labs that submitted to the voluntary ban. Those wishing to resume work after the ban was lifted must comply with guidelines requiring strict national

oversight and close communication and collaboration with national authorities. The risk of release either through accident or theft cannot be completely eliminated, but given the established parameters the risk is minimal . The use of the pathogen as a biological weapon requires an assessment of whether a non-state actor would have the capabilities to isolate the virulent strain, then weaponize and distribute it. Stratfor has long held the position that

while terrorist organizations may have rudimentary capabilities regarding biological weapons, the likelihood of a successful attack is very low . Given that the laboratory version of H5N1 -- or any influenza virus, for that matter -- is a contagious pathogen, there would be two possible modes that a non-state actor would have to instigate an attack. The virus could be refined and then aerosolized and released into a populated area, or an individual could be infected with the virus and sent to freely circulate within a population. There are severe constraints that make success using either of these methods unlikely . The tech nology needed to refine and aerosolize a pathogen for a biological attack is beyond the capability of most non-state actors . Even if they were able to develop a weapon, other factors such as wind patterns and humidity can render an attack ineffective . Using a human carrier is a less expensive method, but it requires that the biological agent be a contagion. Additionally, in order to infect the large number of people necessary to start an outbreak, the infected carrier must be mobile while contagious, something that is doubtful with a serious disease like small pox. The carrier also cannot be visibly ill because that would limit the necessary human contact.

21

Broad Data Key---2NCComputer algorithms and cross referencing solveBobbitt, 13 – Bobbitt is leading constitutional theorist and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Life Member of the American Law Institute, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London). He is a member of the Commission on the Continuity of Government. He has served as Law Clerk to the Hon. Henry J. Friendly (2 Cir.), Associate Counsel to the President, the Counselor on International Law at the State Department, Legal Counsel to the Senate Iran-Contra Committee, and Director for Intelligence, Senior Director for Critical Infrastructure and Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council. Before coming to Columbia he was A.W. Walker Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. He is a former trustee of Princeton University; and a former member of the Oxford University Modern History Faculty and the War Studies Department of Kings College, London. He serves on the Editorial Board of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism. He has published eight books: Tragic Choices (with Calabresi) (Norton, 1978), Constitutional Fate (Oxford, 1982), Democracy and Deterrence (Macmillans, 1987), U.S. Nuclear Strategy(with Freedman and Treverton) (St. Martin's, 1989), Constitutional Interpretation (Blackwell, 1991), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Knopf, 2002), , Terror and Consent (Knopf, 2008), and most recently The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made (Atlantic, 2013) His latest essay is “The Age of Consent,,” (American legal history since Grant Gilmore’s 1974 Storrs Lectures, The Ages of American Law). 123 Yale L. J. 2334 (2014). (Philip, “NSA is upholding, not subverting, the law”, Financial Times, 6/10/13, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2da229bc-d1bc-11e2-9336-00144feab7de.html#axzz3eU8L1ClM)//KTC

Last week two revelations about US intelligence collection exploded in the press: a court order directing Verizon to turn over call logs from its telephone network was revealed along with details of the Prism program that gives the US intelligence community access to servers through

which foreign communications are routed. How would these collection capabilities actually help prevent attacks ?

Would they not simply swamp analysts? First, a law enforcement agency must have some hard knowledge – a name,

a photograph, a location. Computers can then use these data to draw links among all the Fvarious lines out from the

initial factual starting point: what numbers were called, at what location and of what duration. Once networks emerge, computers can analyse them to determine which nodes are central to them (Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 leader, clearly emerges from such

an exercise). Rather than overloading agents doing actual surveillance, this cross-hatching is done by a computer that eventually turns up the most promising leads . After the 9/11 atrocity, it was revealed that two of the terrorists were known to the FBI. Had their names been cross-referenced only with credit card accounts,

frequent-flyer numbers and mobile phone numbers, US agencies might have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them flying on the same day at the same time

( ) It’s key to hindsight and foresight – ensures terrorists don’t slip through the cracksHines, 13

(Pierre Hines is a defense council member of the Truman National Security Project, “Here’s how metadata on billions of phone calls predicts terrorist attacks”, http://qz.com/95719/heres-how-metadata-on-billions-of-phone-calls-predicts-terrorist-attacks/, June 19, 2013, ak.)

Yesterday, when NSA Director General Keith Alexander testified before the House Committee on Intelligence, he declared that the NSA’s surveillance programs have provided “critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events.” FBI Deputy Director Sean Boyce elaborated by describing four instances when the NSA’s surveillance programs have had an impact: (1) when an intercepted email from a terrorist in Pakistan led to foiling a plan to bomb of the New York subway system; (2) when NSA’s programs helped prevent a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange; (3) when intelligence led to the arrest of a U.S. citizen who planned to bomb the Danish Newspaper office that published cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad; and (4) when the NSA’s programs triggered reopening the 9/11 investigation. So what are the practical applications of internet and phone records gathered from two NSA programs? And how can “metadata” actually prevent terrorist attacks? Metadata does not give the NSA and intelligence community access to the content of internet and phone communications. Instead, metadata is more like the transactional information cell phone customers would normally see on their billing statements—metadata can indicate when a call, email, or online chat began and how long the communication lasted. Section 215 of the Patriot Act provides the legal authority to obtain “business records” from phone companies. Meanwhile, the NSA uses Section 702 of the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize its PRISM program. According the figures provided by Gen. Alexander, intelligence gathered based on Section 702 authority contributed in over 90% of the 50 cases. One of major benefits of metadata is that it provides hindsight —it gives intelligence analysts a retrospective view of a sequence of

22

events. As Deputy Director Boyce discussed, the ability to analyze previous communications allowed the FBI to reopen the 9/11 investigation and determine who was linked to that attack. It is important to recognize that terrorist attacks are not orchestrated overnight ; they take months or years to plan . Therefore, if the intelligence community only catches wind of an attack halfway into the terrorists’ planning cycle, or even after a terrorist attack has taken place , metadata might be the only source of information that captures the sequence of events leading up to an attack. Once a terrorist suspect has been identified or once an attack has taken place, intelligence analysts can use powerful software to sift through metadata to determine which numbers, IP addresses, or individuals are associated with the suspect. Moreover, phone numbers and IP addresses sometimes serve as a proxy

for the general location of where the planning has taken place. This ability to narrow down the location of terrorists can help determine whether the intelligence community is dealing with a domestic or international threat . Even more useful than hindsight is a crystal ball that gives the intelligence community a look into the future . Simply knowing how many individuals are in a chat room , how many individuals have contacted a particular phone user, or how many individuals are on an email chain could serve as an indicator of how many terrorists are involved in a plot. Furthermore, knowing when a suspect communicates can help identify his patterns of behavior. For instance, metadata can help establish whether a suspect communicates sporadically or on a set pattern (e.g., making a call every Saturday at 2 p.m.). Any deviation from that pattern could indicate that the plan changed at a certain point; any phone number or email address used consistently and then not at all could indicate that a suspect has stopped communicating with an associate. Additionally, a rapid increase in communication could indicate that an attack is about to happen. Metadata can provide all of this information without ever exposing the content of a phone call or email . If the metadata reveals the suspect is engaged in terrorist activities, then obtaining a warrant would allow intelligence officials to actually monitor the content of the suspect’s communication. In Gen. Alexander’s words, “These programs have protected our country and allies . . . [t]hese programs have been approved by the administration, Congress, and the courts .”

23

Accumulo Solves---2NC ( ) Yes, accumulo tech solves – it’s effective and quickGallagher ‘13Sean Gallagher is the IT editor at Ars Technica. Sean is a University of Wisconsin grad, a former systems integrator, a former director of IT strategy at Ziff Davis Enterprise. He wrote his first program in high school – “What the NSA can do with “big data”” - Ars Technica - Jun 11, 2013 - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/what-the-nsa-can-do-with-big-data/2/

Ironically, about the same time these two programs were being exposed, Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo were solving the big data storage and analysis problem . In November of 2006, Google published a paper on BigTable, a database with petabytes of capacity

capable of indexing the Web and supporting Google Earth and other applications. And the work at Yahoo to catch up with Google's GFS file system—the basis for

BigTable—resulted in the Hadoop. BigTable and Hadoop-based databases offered a way to handle huge amounts of data being captured by the NSA's operations, but they lacked something critical to intelligence operations: compartmentalized security (or any

security at all, for that matter). So in 2008, NSA set out to create a better version of BigTable, called Accumulo —now an Apache Foundation project. Accumulo is a "NoSQL" database, based on key-value pairs. It's a design similar to Google's BigTable or Amazon's DynamoDB, but

Accumulo has special security features designed for the NSA , like multiple levels of security access. The program is built on the open-source Hadoop platform and other Apache products. One of those is called Column Visibility—a capability that allows individual items within a row of data to have different classifications. That allows users and applications with different levels of authorization to access data but see more or less information based on what each column's "visibility" is. Users with lower levels of clearance wouldn't be aware that the column of data they're prohibited from

viewing existed. Accumulo also can generate near real-time reports from specific patterns in data . So, for instance, the system could look for specific words or addressees in e-mail messages that come from a range of IP addresses; or, it could look for phone

numbers that are two degrees of separation from a target's phone number. Then it can spit those chosen e-mails or phone numbers into a nother database, where NSA workers could peruse it at their leisure. In other words, Accumulo allows the NSA to do what Google does with your e-mails and Web searches—only with everything that flows across the Internet, or with every phone call you make. It works because of a type of server process called "iterators." These pieces of code constantly process the information sent to them and send back reports on emerging patterns in the data. Querying a multi-petabyte database and waiting for a

response would be deadly slow, especially because there is always new data being added. The iterators are like NSA's tireless data elves.

24

India

25

No Indo-Pak Impact---2NCThey say terrorist acquisitions---it won’t happen and there’s no impact even if it doesMearsheimer 14 John Mearsheimer, IR Prof at UChicago, National Interest, January 2, 2014, "America Unhinged", http://nationalinterest.org/article/america-unhinged-9639?page=show

Am I overlooking the obvious threat that strikes fear into the hearts of so many Americans, which is terrorism? Not at all. Sure, the United States

has a terrorism problem. But it is a minor threat . There is no question we fell victim to a spectacular attack on September 11, but it

did not cripple the United States in any meaningful way and another attack of that magnitude is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future . Indeed, there has not been a single instance over the past twelve years of a terrorist organization exploding a primitive bomb on American soil, much less striking a major blow. Terrorism—most of it

arising from domestic groups—was a much bigger problem in the United States during the 1970s than it has been since the Twin

Towers were toppled. What about the possibility that a terrorist group might obtain a nuclear weapon ? Such an occurrence

would be a game changer, but the chances of that happening are virtually nil . No nuclear-armed state is going to supply terrorists with a nuclear weapon because it would have no control over how the recipients might use that weapon. Political turmoil in a nuclear-armed state could in theory allow terrorists to grab a loose nuclear

weapon, but the U nited S tates already has detailed plans to deal with that highly unlikely contingency .

Terrorists might also try to acquire fissile material and build their own bomb. But that scenario is extremely unlikely as well : there are significant obstacles to getting enough material and even bigger obstacles to building a bomb and then delivering it . More generally, virtually every country has a profound interest in making sure no terrorist group acquires a nuclear weapon , because they cannot be sure they will not be the target of a nuclear attack, either by the terrorists or another country the terrorists strike. Nuclear terrorism , in short, is not a serious threat . And to the extent that we should worry about it, the main remedy is to encourage and help other states to place nuclear materials in highly secure custody.

Lack of first strike capability checks conflict and ensures stabilityTellis ‘2 (Ashley, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Orbis, Winter, p. 24-5)

In the final analysis, this situation is made objectively "meta-stable" by the fact that neither India, Pakistan , nor China has

the strategic capabilities to execute those successful damage-limiting first strike s that might justify initiating nuclear attacks either "out of the

blue" or during a crisis. Even China, which of the three comes closest to possessing such capabilities (against India under truly hypothetical scenarios),

would find it difficult to conclude that the capacity for "splendid first strikes" lay within reach. Moreover, even if it could

arrive at such a determination, the political justification for these actions would be substantially lacking given the nature of its current

political disputes with India. On balance , therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that a high degree of deterrence stability , at least with respect to wars of unlimited aims, exists within the greater South Asian region.

26

Financial Markets Not Key---2NC ( ) Even if they win that – India’s economy is resilient Wolf ‘11Martin Wolf is a British journalist, widely considered to be one of the world's most influential writers on economics. He is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. He holds a a master of philosophy degree in economics from Oxford - “In the grip of a great convergence” – Financial Times - January 4, 2011 - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AU6qxSkE2FwJ:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/072c87e6-1841-11e0-88c9-00144feab49a.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#axzz3d327QUO7

Until recently, political, social and policy obstacles were decisive. This has not been true for several decades. Why should these re-emerge? True, many reforms will be required if growth is to proceed, but growth itself is likely to transform societies and politics in needed directions. True, neither China nor India may surpass US output per head: Japan failed to do so. But they are far away today. Why should they be unable to reach, say, half of US productivity? That is Portugal's level. Can

China match Portugal? Surely. Of course, catastrophes may intervene. But it is striking that even world wars and depressions merely interrupted the rise of earlier industrialisers . If we leave aside nuclear war, nothing seems likely to halt the ascent of the big emerging countries , though it may well be delayed. China and India are big enough to drive growth from their domestic markets if protectionism takes hold. Indeed, they are big enough to drive growth even in other emerging countries as well.

27

Bigotry

28

NSA Not That Bad( ) NSA isn’t sinister – surveillance is a far-cry from the mass privacy violations their authors assume.Wittes ‘13Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He co-founded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, , “Five In-Your-Face Thoughts in Defense of the NSA”, Lawfare – 9/9/13 www.lawfareblog.com/2013/09/five-in-your-face-thoughts-in-defense-of-the-nsa/

First, the NSA is an intelligence agency, and intelligence agencies collect intelligence. The NSA collects a huge amount of data. It spies on other countries and their leaders. It tries to make sense of the material it collects using data-analytic techniques. It breaks encryption systems that its potential targets use to protect their communications. It develops relationships with private companies that can provide it data. And it engages in activity that is illegal in the countries against which

it operates. As we used to say in grade school, “Duh!” That’s why we have a signals intelligence agency. Critics of the agency, at home and abroad, trot out many of these facts as damning indictments. Brazil and Mexico and our European allies are outraged—or pretend to be—that we spy on them. Our

domestic conversation is laced with fear of the sheer size of NSA collection, as though data volume is what makes Big Brother big. But the criticism is silly. Of course, the agency collects a large volume of material. An intelligence agency is not a think tank or a university. It doesn’t just read newspapers, collect what’s public and analyze what such data say. ”We steal secrets,” former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden put it in the excellent movie about Wikileaks that

used this arresting phrase as its title. This is what spy agencies do. The NSA is good at it— very good at it . I, for one, think that’s a great thing. Second, what the agency is actually doing is far less threatening than what people think it is doing. The tone of the conversation about NSA activity is so over-the-top that the agency’s actual activity gets lost in the story. The intelligence community’s own efforts to explain itself have been less than

brilliant, but the truth is that the NSA has implemented its set of broad authorities in a tightly-controlled fashion. One can argue that the authorities in question are too broad, or one can argue that the controls should be tighter still. But it’s hard to look at the details of the actual programmatic activity of the NSA and emerge as alarmed as one would reasonably be on reading the screaming headlines. The disparity, and it is a vast one, between the story in those headlines and the story in the details is partly the product of a lot of shoddy journalism. But it’s partly also a product of the technical and legal density of the subject matter. The costs of entry to the conversation about how the NSA is spying on millions of Americans is low. The cost of entry to a serious conversation about what the agency is doing, how it is doing it, and how both interact with relevant statutory and constitutional law is not low. It’s very high. And a great many more people—journalists, members of Congress, and members of the public—thus feel pulled to the story about an out-of-control spy agency. It’s so much easier, and it maps so neatly onto all of the post-Watergate prejudices of our political culture. Third, while a lot of people aren’t interested in the details, those details really matter. At the time of the last document release, Lawfare published a series of detailed posts describing what the released documents actually said (we will do the same with this week’s disclosures). Very few people read them. Taken together, they attracted a few thousand readers, according to Google Analytics. By contrast, nearly 30,000 people read one day’s worth of our coverage of a possible Syria AUMF. The contrast gives you some idea of just how few people really want to understand what did and didn’t happen when the FISA Court declared part of the 702 collection process deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds. Yet the number of people who feel entitled to express an opinion—often a very strong opinion—on the same subject is much larger. The result, for the agency, is a debate that is remarkably resistant to disclosures of information unless they come from Edward Snowden and remarkably resistant to the sort of fine-grained details on which the

actual difference between legality and lawlessness necessarily depends. This brings me to my fourth point: the NSA’s activities are legal. We are not living in the age of COINTELPRO or the Watergate- era intelligence scandals . We are living in an age in which the intelligence activities about which we harbor anxieties take place pursuant to statute and subject to judicial review . People may object to the government’s interpretation of Section 215, about which I

have my own doubts, but nobody can argue that it is a lawless or crazy interpretation of the statute; in fact, it’s on its face quite plausible. And it’s one that the courts have approved, and to which Congress has assented. Similarly, nobody can deny that Section 702 grants sweeping collection powers with regard to communications by persons reasonably believed to be overseas; that’s the point of the law, and it’s the reason the FISA Amendments Act was controversial as a legislative matter. Yes, there have been errors and compliance issues, as there are with any government (or private sector) program. And yes, there was a substantial dialog with the FISA Court over one component of Section 702, in which the court held that component unconstitutional, forced changes to it, and referred to two other incidents in which the government had misrepresented aspects of 702 collection to the judges. But this sort of back-and-forth is little different from the iterative discussion that takes place between, say, the courts and a big city police department over the conduct of searches or, for that matter, the discussion between any agency and the courts that review its activities. They are examples of the mechanisms Congress set up to keep the NSA within the law doing just that.

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1NR

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Cuba DA

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Africa ! – 1NRCuban instability spillsover to Africa – that escalates and goes nuclear Lancaster 2k

(Carol, Associate Professor and Director of the Master's of Science in Foreign Service Program – Georgetown University, “Redesigning Foreign Aid”, Foreign Affairs, September / October, Lexis)

THE MOST BASIC CHALLENGE facing the United States today is helping to preserve peace. The end of the Cold War eliminated a potential threat to American security, but it did not eliminate conflict. In 1998 alone there were 27 significant conflicts in the world, 25 of which involved

violence within states. Nine of those intrastate conflicts were in sub-Saharan Africa , where poor governance has aggravated ethnic and social tensions. The ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been particularly nightmarish , combining intrastate and interstate conflict with another troubling element: military intervention driven by the commercial motives of several neighboring states. Such motives could fuel future conflict s in other

weak states with valuable resources. Meanwhile, a number of other wars -- in Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Angola, Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi -- have reflected historic enmities or poorly resolved hostilities of the past. Intrastate conflicts are likely to

continue in weakly integrated, poorly governed states, destroying lives and property, creating large numbers of refugees and displaced persons, and threatening regional security. The two interstate clashes in 1998 -- between India and Pakistan and

Eritrea and Ethiopia -- involved disputes over land and other natural resources. Such contests show no sign of disappearing. Indeed, with the spread of w eapons of mass destruction, these wars could prove more dangerous than ever .

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UQ – 1NRWill pass – appropriations committee proves momentum, vote count, lack of political means to block, Republicans coming around – ONLY a question of PCHattem 7/7 {Julian, B.A. in Anthropology (The University of Chicago), national affairs correspondent for The Hill, “Senators Back off Plan to Block Cuban Embassy,” 2015, http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/247094-senate-bill-backs-off-plan-to-block-cuban-embassy#THUR}

Senate Republicans appear unlikely to use the funding process to block President Obama’s plan to open a U.S.

Embassy in Cuba this month, despite initial vows to prevent the landmark policy change. A $49 billion funding bill for the State Department and foreign operations that passed through a Senate Appropriations subcommittee was silent on the plan. Efforts to amend it to block the embassy appear politically impossible , subcommittee Chairman Lindsey

Graham (R-S.C.) acknowledged, though he opposes the new embassy as much as ever. “On the Senate side, I’m not so sure we have all Republicans where I’m at in terms of not establishing an embassy,” Graham, who is

running for president, told reporters after the brief subcommittee markup. “I don’t know if the votes are there on our side, quite frankly .” Despite the heated opposition to Obama’s plans from Graham and other

prominent Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), another presidential hopeful, many conservatives have been

more receptive of the change in posture . Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), White House candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and others have welcomed the thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations. The GOP opposition appeared to be in trouble last week when the White House announced it planned to open the embassy in Cuba. The Cuban government said a U.S. Embassy in Havana and

Cuban Embassy in Washington would both open their doors on July 20. Still, Graham’s crusade is not necessarily dead . He is going to seek to add an amendment when the bill reaches the full committee later this week, he

told reporters, though it is unclear whether he has the support for it to stick. “The one thing I’ve anticipated all my career is

make sure I’ve got the votes,” he said. “So I’m going to offer it tomorrow and whether or not we vote on it will be dependent on how the vote count goes.” Unlike

the Senate, House legislation to fund the State Department would block the creation of the embassy, which could be a stumbling block for the administration. A new ambassador to Cuba would also need to be confirmed by the Senate , which could be another hurdle . “It’s just a matter of where the votes are at, and the House has good language, which I support,”

Graham said. “ So this thing is not over yet.”

Will pass – assumes barriers like property rightsTucker 7/14 {Will, researcher at The Center for Responsive Politics, “Property Claims Loom as Issue in U.S.-Cuba Normalization,” 2015, http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/07/property-claims-loom-as-issue-in-u-s-cuba-normalization/#THUR}

Cuba will soon get an American ambassador and a full U.S. embassy in Havana for the first time in more

than half a century. But on the path to normalized relations, there’s a $7 billion potential roadblock. And large U.S. corporations with big lobbying operations

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aren’t taking the lead on this one — individual Americans are. A group of 10 American families has hired a law firm in Alexandria, Va., to take aim at

the issue of property claims in Cuba, of which there are about 6,000 certified by the U.S. government with a total value of between $7 and $8 billion, including interest. When Cuban revolutionaries seized assets owned by foreigners after the country’s 1959 revolution, the U.S. was the largest foreign investor on the island. Many Americans with Cuban assets made claims on their lost property, which then ballooned in value with interest and have been passed down through families. Before June 2015, the Alexandria firm Poblete & Tomargo had just two clients with property claims in Cuba. One is a former American ambassador to Denmark who’s a frequent donor to political campaigns; the other is a family in Omaha, Neb. Then came the Obama administration’s overtures to Cuba in December. The firm has added eight more clients this year, riding the surge of renewed popular interest. Each of Poblete & Tomargo’s clients will pay the firm less than $5,000, according to Jason Poblete, one of the firm’s principals and a former aide to Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) and the House Oversight Committee.The goal for each: get a check from Cuba that sets right the expropriation from many years ago. Before the revolution, Poblete said, “There was a positive relationship between the Cuban and American people…[W]hen the break happened in 1959, it was kind of a shock to all these people. And eventually they had to pack up and leave.” Assets owned by large U.S. corporations were seized, too. One of the companies that had to decamp from the country was Exxon, now Exxon Mobil. The company lost $71 million as Cuba seized its Havana refinery. Office Depot owns a $256 million claim through corporate mergers. But “the overwhelming majority of claims are not corporate or large claims,” Poblete said. And in fact, the large companies don’t seem to be pressing on the issue of property claims. When it comes to Cuba lobbying, most large U.S. corporations and trade associations have focused on easing the embargo. Exxon has never disclosed lobbying on the issue of Cuba at all. A lobbyist for Officemax, later acquired by Office Depot, did work on “foreign relations with Cuba as it relates to company interests involving electric utility” — referring to the company’s property claim,

which involved an electric company — but did so for just one year, 2003. Overall, interest in — and lobbying on — Cuba has soared since Obama’s December announcement . In the first quarter of 2014, there were 15 companies or other clients lobbying on anything Cuba-related. A year later, that number had more than tripled to 51. Some of the entities that newly hired lobbyists on Cuba issues this year include the American Society of Travel Agents, the City of Key West, Corning Inc., the commissioner’s office of Major League Baseball and Halliburton. But restitution for property taken “was an issue nobody was paying attention to,” Poblete said. “The property issue should have been close to the front of the discussion, and it hasn’t been.”

Thanks to the new agreement between the two countries to restore diplomatic relations , the Obama administration is ready to start a discussion about the claims, according to a State Department official. “We have proposed to the Cubans starting such discussions,” the official said. But Poblete believes that Cuba will almost certainly try to get the U.S. to shrink the $7-8 billion figure calculated by including interest owed on the claims. The impoverished island country will

likely argue that it deserves a discount for the hardship it experienced at the hands of the U.S., due to the embargo. Ahead of that debate, Poblete wants to educate Congress and the State Department. “Let me be frank with you, a lot of folks on the Hill had no idea this even existed,” he said. “We’re trying to change that.” Two of Poblete’s & Tamargo’s clients spoke at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on June 18. If getting Cuba to cut a check for their property was the witnesses’ main goal, it didn’t show. For the most part, their testimony veered into the emotional. “I would love to reclaim ownership of grandmother’s house. It’s truly a family legacy and has great sentimental value to us. I don’t know how realistic that is,” Amy Rosoff, one of Poblete’s clients, said at the hearing. Her family lost a 17-room Spanish Colonial house in Havana to the Cuban takeover, according to the Associated Press. “My father and grandmother had their homes, businesses, property and investments stolen

from them. There’s no way to quantify it…their lives were redefined without their consent.” Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, in which it laid out its desire for the U.S. to make progress on resolving claims like Rosoff’s before normalizing relations . The U.S. and Cuba haven’t yet done so, but “ the [State] Department is committed to pursuing a resolution, ” the State official said.

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WW – 1NRConsensus of studies prove PC theory to be trueMadonna et al 12

Anthony J. Madonna Assistant Professor University of Georgia, et al Richard L. Vining Jr. Assistant Professor University of Georgia and James E. Monogan III Assistant Professor University of Georgia 10-25-2012 “Confirmation Wars and Collateral Damage: Assessing the Impact of Supreme Court Nominations on Presidential Success in the U.S. Senate”

The selection of Supreme Court justices is just one of several key powers afforded to the modern presidency. Presidents use a wide range of tactics to set policy , including their ability to influence the legislative agenda and staff vacancies to key

independent boards and lower level federal courts. In terms of influencing the legislative agenda, modern presidents introduce legislation and define policy alternative s (Covington, Wrighton and Kinney 1995; Eshbaugh-Soha 2005, 2010). The State of the

Union Address and other public speeches are important venue s for this activity (Canes-Wrone 2001; Cohen 1995, 1997; Light 1999;

Yates and Whitford 2005), but they are not the only means through which presidents outline their legislative goals. Presidents also

add items to the legislative agenda intermittently in response to issues or events that they believe require attention. This may be done either by sending messages to Congress or through presidential communication to legislators' constituents. While not

unconditional, presidents can use their time and resources to secure the passage of key policy proposals (Edwards and Wood 1999; Light 1999; Neustadt 1955, 1960).

PC finite- legislative wins don’t spillover –empirics, true for Obama, too polarized- newest evTodd Eberly is coordinator of Public Policy Studies and assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland. His email is teeberly@smcm.edu. This article is excerpted from his book, co-authored with Steven Schier, "American Government and Popular Discontent: Stability without Success," to published later this year by Routledge Press., 1-21-2013 http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-21/news/bs-ed-political-capital-20130121_1_political-system-party-support-public-opinion/2

As Barack Obama prepares to be sworn in for the second time as president of the United States, he faces the stark reality that little of what he hopes to accomplish in a second term will likely come to pass . Mr. Obama occupies an office that many assume to be all powerful, but like

so many of his recent predecessors, the president knows better. He faces a political capital problem and a power trap.¶ In the post-1960s American political

system, presidents have found the exercise of effective leadership a difficult task. To lead well, a president needs support — or at least permission — from federal courts and Congress; steady allegiance from public opinion and fellow partisans in the electorate; backing from powerful, entrenched interest groups; and accordance with contemporary public

opinion about the proper size and scope of government. This is a long list of requirements. If presidents fail to satisfy these requirements, they face the prospect of inadequate political support or political capital to back their power assertions.¶ What was so crucial about the 1960s? We can trace so much of what defines contemporary politics to trends that emerged then. Americans' confidence in government began a precipitous decline as the tumult and tragedies of the 1960s gave way to the scandals and economic uncertainties of the 1970s. Long-standing party coalitions began to fray as the New Deal coalition, which had elected Franklin Roosevelt to four terms and made Democrats the indisputable majority party, faded into history. The election of Richard Nixon in 1968

marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of divided government. Finally, the two parties began ideologically divergent journeys that result ed in intense polarization in Congress, diminishing the possibility of bipartisan compromise. These changes, combined with the growing influence of money and interest groups

and the steady "thickening" of the federal bureaucracy, introduced significant challenges to presidential leadership

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.¶ Political capital can best be understood as a combination of the president's party support in Congress, public approval of his job performance, and the president's electoral victory margin. The components of political capital are

central to the fate of presidencies. It is difficult to claim warrants for leadership in an era when job approval, congressional support and partisan affiliation provide less backing for a president than in times past. In recent years, presidents' p olitical c apital has shrunk while their power assertions have grown , making the president a volatile

player in the national political system.¶ Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush joined the small ranks of incumbents defeated while seeking a second term. Ronald Reagan was elected in two landslides, yet his most successful year for domestic policy was his first year in office. Bill Clinton was twice elected by a comfortable margin, but with less than majority support, and despite a strong economy during his second term, his greatest legislative successes came during his first year with the passage of a controversial but crucial budget bill, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. George W. Bush won election in 2000 having lost the popular vote, and though his impact on national security policy after the Sept. 11 attacks was far reaching, his greatest domestic policy successes came during 2001. Ambitious plans for Social Security reform, following his narrow re-election in 2004, went nowhere.¶ Faced with obstacles to successful leadership, recent presidents have come to rely more on their formal powers. The number of important executive orders has increased significantly since the 1960s, as have the issuance of presidential signing statements. Both are used by presidents in an attempt to shape and direct policy on their terms. Presidents have had to rely more on recess appointments as well, appointing individuals to important positions during a congressional recess (even a weekend recess) to avoid delays and obstruction often encountered in the Senate. Such power assertions typically elicit close media scrutiny and often further erode political capital.¶ Barack Obama's election in 2008 seemed to signal a change. Mr. Obama's popular vote majority was the largest for any president since 1988, and he was the first Democrat to clear the 50 percent mark since Lyndon Johnson. The president initially enjoyed strong public approval and, with a Democratic Congress, was able to produce an impressive string of legislative accomplishments during his first year and early into his second, capped by enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But with each legislative battle and success, his political capital waned. His impressive successes with Congress in 2009 and 2010 were accompanied by a shift in the public mood against him, evident in the rise of the tea party movement, the collapse in his approval rating, and the large GOP gains in the 2010 elections, which brought a return to divided government.¶ By mid-2011, Mr. Obama's job approval had slipped well below its initial levels, and Congress was proving increasingly intransigent. In the face of declining public support and rising congressional opposition, Mr. Obama, like his predecessors, looked to the energetic use of executive power. In 2012, the president relied on executive discretion and legal ambiguity to allow homeowners to more easily refinance federally backed mortgages, to help veterans find employment and to make it easier for college graduates to consolidate federal student loan debt. He issued several executive orders effecting change in the nation's enforcement of existing immigration laws. He used an executive order to authorize the Department of Education to grant states waivers from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act — though the enacting legislation makes no accommodation for such waivers. Contrary to the outcry from partisan opponents, Mr. Obama's actions were

hardly unprecedented or imperial. Rather, they represented a rather typical power assertion from a contemporary president.¶ Many looked to the 2012 election as a means to break present trends. But Barack Obama's narrow re-election victory, coupled with the re-election of a somewhat-diminished Republican majority House and Democratic majority Senate, hardly signals a grand resurgence of his political capital. The president's recent issuance of multiple executive orders to deal with the issue of gun violence is further evidence of his power trap. Faced with the likelihood of

legislative defeat in Congress, the president must rely on claims of unilateral power. But such claims are not without limit or cost and will likely further erode his political capital.¶ Only by solving the problem of political capital is a

president likely to avoid a power trap. Presidents in recent years have been unable to prevent their p olitical c apital from eroding .

When it did, their power assertions often got them into further political trouble. Through leveraging public support, presidents have at times been able to overcome contemporary leadership challenges by adopting as their own issues that the public already supports. Bill Clinton's centrist "triangulation" and George W. Bush's careful issue selection early in his presidency allowed them to secure important policy changes — in Mr. Clinton's case, welfare reform and

budget balance, in Mr. Bush's tax cuts and education reform — that at the time received popular approval.¶ However, short-term legislative strategies may win policy success for a president but do not serve as an antidote to declining p olitical c apital over time, as the difficult final years of both the Bill Clinton and

George W. Bush presidencies demonstrate. None of Barack Obama's recent predecessors solved the political capital problem or avoided the power trap. It is the central political challenge confronted by modern presidents and one that will likely weigh heavily on the current president's mind today as he takes his second oath of office.

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Link – 1NR Obama loses PC NO MATTER WHAT – no bipartisanship on surveillance post-freedom-act – and hes at the center of congressional debatesShear, 6/3 -- Michael, NYT, White House Correspondent for NYT, Mr. Shear received a B.A. degree from Claremont McKenna College and a M.A. degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University, 6/3/15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/winning-surveillance-limits-obama-makes-program-own.html?_r=0

In Pushing for Revised Surveillance Program, Obama Strikes His Own Balance For more than six years, President Obama has directed his national security team to chase terrorists around the globe by scooping up vast amounts of telephone records with a program that was conceived and put in place by his predecessor after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, after successfully badgering Congress into

reauthorizing the program, with new safeguards the president says will protect privacy, Mr. Obama has left little question that he owns it. The new surveillance program created by the USA Freedom Act will end more than a decade of bulk collection of

telephone records by the National Security Agency. But it will make records already held by telephone companies available for broad searches by government officials with a court order. “The reforms that have now been enacted are exactly the reforms the president called for over a year and a half ago,” said Lisa Monaco, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser. She called

the bill the product of a “robust public debate” and said the White House was “gratified that the Senate finally passed it.” The president is trying to balance national security and civil liberties to put into practice the kind of equilibrium he has talked about since he

was in the Senate, when he expressed support for surveillance programs but also vowed to rein in what he called government overreach. Mr. Obama entered the Oval Office with what he called “a healthy skepticism” about the system of surveillance at his command. But

Ms. Monaco said that, in part because of his often grim daily intelligence briefing, the president was also “very, very focused on the threats” to Americans. “He weighs the balance every day,” she said. The compromise on collections of telephone records may end up being too restrictive for the president’s counterterrorism professionals, as some Republicans predict. Or, as others vehemently insisted in congressional debate during the past week, it may leave in place too much surveillance that can intrude on the lives of innocent Americans. Either

way, Mr. Obama’s signature on the law late Tuesday night ensures that he will deliver to the next president a m ethod of hunting for terrorist threats despite widespread privacy concerns that emerged after Edward J. Snowden, a former

N.S.A. contractor, revealed the existence of the telephone program. “He owned it in 2009,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former N.S.A. director under President George W. Bush, who oversaw the surveillance programs for years. “He just didn’t want anyone to know he owned it.”

Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the USA Freedom Act “a step forward in some

respects,” but “a very small step forward.” He said his organization would continue to demand that the president and Congress scale back

other government surveillance programs. “Obama has been presented with this choice: Are you going to defend these programs or are you going to change them?” Mr. Jaffer said. “Thus far, we haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the president is willing to spend political capital changing those programs .” In the case of the telephone program, Mr.

Obama’s preferred compromise was originally the brainchild of his N.S.A. officials, who embraced it as a way to satisfy the public’s privacy concerns without losing the agency’s ability to conduct surveillance more broadly . In the lead-up to last week’s congressional showdown , Mr. Obama and his national security team insisted that broad surveillance powers were vital to tracking terrorist threats , while admitting that the new approach to data collection would not harm that effort. White House officials said Mr. Obama was comfortable that history would show that he struck the right balance. “To the extent that we’re talking about the president’s legacy, I would suspect that that would be a logical conclusion from some historians,” said Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary. Mr. Earnest said the compromise addressed anxiety about privacy but still gave the government access to needed records. “This is the kind of rigorous oversight and, essentially, a rules architecture that the president

does believe is important,” Mr. Earnest said. “And that is materially different than the program that he inherited.” Mr. Obama’s advocacy put him at the center of a fierce congressional debate over the surveillance program, which officially expired early

Monday morning before lawmakers approved changes on Tuesday. In the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, railed against the president’s compromise proposal, saying, “We shouldn’t be disarming unilaterally as our enemies

grow more sophisticated and aggressive.” At the same time, Senator Rand Paul , Republican of Kentucky, excoriated Mr.

Obama , saying, “The president continues to conduct an illegal program ,” a reference to a recent ruling by a federal

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appeals court that the original N.S.A. telephone data collection program was not authorized by federal law. What emerged from that debate was a rare bipartisan victory for the president, whose approach was met with approval by Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate. Even some of the president’s most ardent critics in the Republican Party endorsed the approach. “This is a good day for the American people, whose rights will be protected,” Senator

Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, told CNN last week — a rare example of Mr. Lee, a Tea Party lawmaker, agreeing with Mr. Obama. The compromise on the telephone collection program is part of a broader tug-and-pull for Mr. Obama , who inherited a vast national security infrastructure from Mr. Bush. As a candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama was harshly critical of some of that infrastructure, pledging at the time to review every executive order by Mr. Bush “to determine which of those have undermined civil liberties,

which are unconstitutional, and I will reverse them with the stroke of a pen.” Once in office, Mr. Obama did roll back some of Mr. Bush’s

decisions — in one of his first acts as president, he signed an executive order banning torture. But his national security team has also

embraced some of Mr. Bush’s methods, arguing that they are necessary to protect Americans against attacks and to fight threats abroad. Mr. Obama talked about “putting careful constraints” on surveillance even before Mr. Snowden revealed the existence of the telephone program. Later that year, Mr. Obama explained how his thinking had evolved . “I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Mr. Obama said. “My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the

safeguards. But my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks . And the modest encroachments on the privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and

not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing. ” With the passage of the USA Freedom Act nearly two

years later, Mr. Obama must make his new approach work by maintaining a focus on security while doing more to respect privacy. “Certainly,” Ms. Monaco said, “we are going to be focused on that.”

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A2: Dickerson – 2NRNo risk of their Dickerson arg – Obama can’t implement that Dickerson strategy effectivelyBlumer 2013

Tom Blumer is president of Monetary Matters, a training and development company in Mason, Ohio. He presents workshops on money management, retirement, and investing, 1-22-2013 http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obamas-startling-second-inaugural-admission/

Though it was indeed, as the Politico’s Glenn Thrush correctly noted, “the most liberal speech he has delivered as president,” it clearly

disappointed some of those in the establishment press who wanted to hear Obama go for his opponents’ jugulars. That

group includes John Dickerson, who has been Political Director at CBS News since November 2011.¶ Dickerson put on his best game face at Slate after the

speech, but it’s clear from reading his previous 2,000-word battle plan disguised as a column on Friday that Obama didn’t go as far as he would have liked .¶ The column’s headlines called for Obama to “Go for the Throat!” and “declare war on the Republican Party.” In his content, Dickerson claimed that Republican recalcitrance meant that “Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize,” and that the president “can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP.” Slate was so thrilled with the piece that it amped up its “most popular” tease list title to read: “Why Obama Should Seek To Destroy the Republican Party.” Dickerson’s occupation of such an influential perch at CBS and the presence of so many others like him at other news outlets largely explain why last year’s establishment press coverage of the GOP primaries and the general election was so ruthlessly biased against Republicans and especially conservatives.

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