Contents1ac1FYI on What the Plan Does1Inherency Extensions1INH: Need to Update the Law in digital age1Solvency Extensions1SOLV--AT: Law is Indeterminate1SOLV--Court Should Reconcile Fourth Amendment1SOLV--AT: Rollback/Wont Be Enforced1SOLVExecutive Will Comply1SOLV--Solvency: Lower Courts will follow1SOLV--Solvency: The Plan will Snowball1SOLV--Solvency: Supreme Court Decisions are Modeled1Solvency: Court Creates Social Change1Democracy Advantage Extensions1DEM--AT: Other invasions of privacy exist1DEM--Status Quo is a significant intrusion on privacy1DEM--Fourth Amendment Key to Democracy1DEMDemocracy Good Extensions1DEM--Democracy Good ExtensionsPoverty Add-On1DEMAT: People just shouldnt use the internet1Internet Advantage Extensions1INT: Internet Impact Extensions1INT: Internet is in trouble now1Imperial Presidency Advantage Extensions1IMP--Executive Power is Increasing Now1IMPExecutive Power = War1IMPPres Powers = War1IMP--Rights1IMPPres Powers destroy economy1IMPPres Powers = Biopower1IMPAT: Impact Cards Dont Assume Obama1IMP--Solvency for Imperial Presidency1IMP--AT: FISA Courts Solve1IMPStrong Courts Check Pres Powers1IMP: Executive Will Comply with the Supreme Court1Theory Answers2ac1AT: Test Case FIAT (Have to have a test case)1AT: Effects TCourt Mandates Then Congress Does1AT: Over-spec1AT: Ground Specification is Extra-Topical1Disad Answers1Politics DA Answers11ar: Politics: Decisions Announced in May11ar: Blame Deflection11ar: Individual Decisions Dont Matter1Court Politics Answers2ac11ar: Courts Politics AnswersNo Spillover1Spokeo Answers11ar: Robins will win11ar: No Major Settlements1Court Stripping Answers1Hollow Hope DA Answers11ar: Brown v. Board ProvesCourt Creates Social Change11ar: Court Creates Social Change1Legitimacy DA Answers1Legitimacy DA AnswersExtensions: Controversial Decisions Help the Court1Legitimacy DA AnswersIndividual Decisions Dont Matter1Counterplan Answers1Congress CP Answers1Cong CP--1ar: PERMUTATION SOLVES BEST1Lower Courts CP Answers2ac1Lower Courts: Links to Legitimacy DA11AR Lower Courts CPSolvency Extensions11ar: Solvency ExtensionsNo Trickle-Up11ar Extensions: Roll Back11ar: Ext. Rule of Law DA1State Courts CP Answers1CP Competing Off Plan Certainty 2ac1

1acObservation 1: Inherency: The Courts analysis of the Fourth Amendment is outdated with regard to new technologies:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)The Court's analysis of the Fourth Amendment is outdated in regards to new technologies. n35 The Court has held that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in what they disclose to third parties. n36 In U.S. v. Jones, as Justice Alito opined, "[s]ome people may find the 'tradeoff' of privacy for convenience 'worthwhile,' or come to accept this 'diminution of privacy' as 'inevitable.'" n37 Justice Scalia, on the other hand, noted that, "this approach is ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks." n38 The two differing opinions exemplify the public's standing on surveillance in the 21st century.Plan:The United States Supreme Court should recalibrate the Fourth Amendment test in Katz v. United States for domestic internet surveillance to allow what a person seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.Observation 2: SolvencyThe plan text solves and Courts are key to protecting privacy rights over the internet:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)The application of the Fourth Amendment to Internet surveillance has expanded the government's ability to conduct unreasonable searches. The government's power is currently unchecked and must be recalibrated. n173 The Court's interpretation in Katz, that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places, and that people have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" has become irrelevant due to the advances in technology. n174 Understanding that the Internet is, in theory, a place where content flows, and renders nearly everything on the Internet incapable of protection under the Fourth Amendment. n175 Instead of adopting a narrow interpretation, legislatures need to apply the broader rationale behind the Fourth Amendment, which reasons, "[w]hat a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his[/her] own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he[/she] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." n176 The Court must better protect what a person seeks to preserve as private. n177Courts are key to check the executive branch with the Fourth Amendmentself-restraint and Congress fail:Timothy Casey, 2008 (Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure, UC Davis Law Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)The courts must be more proactive in their role in limiting the reach of the executive branch. Both the Pen Register Decisions and the NSA Cases presented Fourth Amendment issues in a context that suggest a greater role for the courts. In the traditional conception of the adversarial system, the court plays the role of neutral arbiter, deciding only the issues framed by the parties, based on the evidence provided by the parties. n276 However, in the constitutional context, and particularly in the context of ex parte proceedings, the courts must protect the unrepresented interests of the People. Courts should assume the additional obligation of assuring that the government does not reach further than permitted by the Fourth Amendment and the relevant statutory structure. If courts are not comfortable accepting this role, and many may not be, then they should freely explore alternative measures to ensure the representation of the interests of the People. The Pen Register Decisions suggest one immediate [*1032] remedial measure. n277 Commendably, a few courts appointed amici to brief the position opposed to the government. n278 The appointment of counsel to represent the interests of the People would identify the separate interests of the collective people and would encourage a more thorough litigation of the issues before the courts. From an institutional perspective, courts must accept their role of enforcing the Constitution against the executive branch by applying greater scrutiny to executive claims of authority. The NSA Cases present the courts with an opportunity to revisit the difficult issue of the state secrets privilege. As discussed earlier, the application of the state secrets privilege should be subject to a balancing test where the significance of the interests at stake in the lawsuit are fairly weighed in the determination of whether the privilege applies. The privilege itself rests on the proposition that some interests, such as national security, are superior to other types of interests, such as the individual claims in a lawsuit. However, where the interest asserted in the lawsuit is not a claim for breach of contract but a claim for breach of the Constitution, the application of the privilege should not be taken lightly. The difficulty in apportioning proper weight to the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment stems from the use of the language in the reasonable expectation of privacy test. Reclaiming the language of the Fourth Amendment implies a different role for the courts because the original language denotes a right, rather than an expectation. An expression of the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment as a right rather than as an expectation necessarily entails a higher degree of involvement for the courts. If we expect to restore significance to the promise of the Fourth Amendment, we must encourage courts to abandon the reasonable expectation of privacy test. We cannot reasonably expect the executive branch to limit itself, nor can we expect the legislative branch to successfully restrain the executive. The Constitution's original promise to the People of a right to be secure cannot survive without a renewed commitment and vigilance from the courts.Advantage 1: DemocracyGovernment surveillance of the internet risks a police statethe internet is a critical threshold:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)Government spying is not a new phenomenon; it has been an ongoing custom since the earliest forms of government. n12 The NSA's spying program constrains one of humanity's most important inventions, the Internet. n13 The United States government crossed a threshold that grants access to limitless amounts of information. n14 They are overstepping constitutional boundaries, n15 and raising the possibility of a police state. n16 By advocating that surveillance is necessary for national security, the government provides an incentive for citizens to bypass the surveillance. n17 Anonymity is an important virtue of the Internet, and destroying it causes more harm than good. n18 Legislators must reexamine current legislation, redefine what constitutes a reasonable search, and balance national security with an individual's right to privacy. Courts must reconcile [*471] modern technology with the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, the judiciary must fulfill their constitutional function by keeping the executive branch in check.And now is key: several democracies worldwide are backsliding away from democracy:Bla Greskovits, 4/3/2015 (Central European University, Budapest, The Hollowing and Backsliding of Democracy in East Central Europe, http://politicalscience.ceu.edu/sites/politicalscience.ceu.hu/files/attachment/event/1113/greskovitshollowingandbackslidingofdemocracy-globalpolicy2015.pdf, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)Focusing on ten East Central European member states of the European Union, this essay explores two major challenges to the quality and solidity of their democracies. The first of these refers to the general European problem of declining popular involvement in politics, termed hollowing of democracy (Mair, 2006). The second challenge is captured by the term backsliding, which suggests destabilization or even a reversal in the direction of democratic development. Backsliding is usually traced to the radicalization of sizeable groups within the remaining active citizenry, and the weakening loyalty of political elites to democratic principles. While the long-term process of hollowing of democracy is less spectacular, the news on backsliding often make it to the headlines. Today analysts and the general public are alarmed by the frequent disruptive protests against unemployment, poverty and uncertainty stemming from austerity, and the occasional remarkable showing of radical Right-wing and other anti-system parties at elections. In several countries of the region, especially those hard hit by the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, governments have also attempted to gain control over free media and other institutions of democratic checks and balances, as well as over the activity of civil society organizations.Democracies solve for human survival:Cheema & Maguire, 1/25/13 (Shabbir Cheema Principal Adviser and Programme Director Division for Public Economics and Public Administration United Nations Department of Economic and Linda Maguire Social Affairs and (Evaluation Specialist United Nations Development Programme, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan005781.pdf, AP)Democratic governance has three distinct advantages over authoritarian regimes. First, democracies are better able to manage conflicts and avoid violent political change because they provide opportunities for the people to participate in the political process of the country. Second, democracies are better able to avoid threats to human survival because the checks by the opposition parties, uncensored criticism of public policies and the fear of being voted out of office. Third, democracies lead to greater awareness of social development concerns including health, primary health care and rights of women and minorities. Developing standards for surveillance restores trust in democratic government:Morton H. Halperin, 5/7/2014 (Senior advisor, Open Society Foundations, I Spy, You Spy: Limiting Government Surveillance of Private Citizens, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morton-h-halperin/i-spy-you-spy-limiting-government-surveillance_b_5269132.html, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)Building on this common understanding, the two governments should agree to initiate a process designed to develop standards and guidelines for surveillance of private persons that each government would commit to incorporating into its own domestic laws. Other democratic governments, both in Europe and across the globe, should be invited to commit to the same goal and join the effort along with other stakeholders, including Internet companies and civil society organizations. The guidelines should require that the rules governing surveillance of private persons be enacted into law and that each government be required to provide a clear and complete explanation of what surveillance is permitted and under what circumstances. The guidelines should cover direct surveillance, searching large data bases, and minimizing the use of personally identifiable information. The guidelines should provide for effective oversight of the intelligence activity consistent with each country's traditions and provide for the right of redress for anyone improperly surveilled. The successful negotiation of such standards will go a long way to restore the trust of democratic governments in each other and of their citizens in their governments and intelligence services.And the Fourth Amendment is key: it is the most vital element of democracy: Iaconeta 13 (Christine, 3/21) Book Review: More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-first Century. American Association of Law Libraries. Professor Iaconeta is a member of the California Bar and an active member of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Law Librarians of New England (LLNE), and NELLCO. She has served on numerous committees and has held leadership positions in these organizations. Currently she is the Chair of the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section (ALL-SIS) of AALL, AALLs largest special interest section with 1200 members. http://www.aallnet.org/Blogs/spectrum-blog/47280.html// LDonn The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring a finding of probable cause before a search can take place. The amendment allows for governmental invasion of privacy but it also requires that it be justified and that the government be held accountable for its actions. Seemingly straightforward when originally drafted by our Founding Fathers, technological advances, changes in police work, and threats to national security have had a profound effect on the Courts Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. In More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-first Century, author, Stephen J. Schulhofer, takes the reader through a concise retelling of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, hoping to reconcile the historically held belief that governmental intrusions into the publics private matters cannot be allowed in a free society; even when so doing my lead to the increased risk of danger and harm to the public. Accordingly, Mr. Schulhofer argues that the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment as it was originally conceived can be, should be and must be adhered in todays modern society. A persons right to privacy and the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects[1] is that essential to democracy.After an introduction that outlines the four myths that fuel skepticism about the Fourth Amendment[2], the author begins, in Chapter Two, by discussing the historical tenets of the Fourth Amendment, outlining the Framers strongly held belief that unconstrained governmental discretion cannot be allowed and that judicial oversight is needed to prevent improper governmental actions. In this chapter, Mr. Schulhofer argues that the present day courts should focus on the principles and values laid out by the Court in early Fourth Amendment jurisprudence when deciding cases, rather than relying on a strict adherence to the specific rules established by the Courts Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. The author calls this adaptive originalism.[3] This concept is explored further in Chapter 3, as well as in the next chapter where he examines the changing nature of everyday police work. In both of these chapters the author discusses the exceptions to the Fourth Amendment that were necessitated by the nature of illegal activity and the need for the police to protect the public from criminal activity while still adhering to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. The author continues to discuss the need for flexibility in Chapter 5, when he discusses administrative searches, those searches that take place outside the realm of traditional police work. In these special circumstances, for example, searches done to insure public health and safety, the Court has relaxed the traditional warrant and probable cause requirements. Although this allows for flexibility, the author argues that this threatens the traditional notions of privacy requiring the need for governmental accountability and oversight. Again, the author is calling for flexibility while still recognizing the need for actions that promote the Fourth Amendments original ideals.In Chapter 6, the author examines the privacy implications resulting from the development of modern technologies, including the effect wiretapping, electronic eavesdropping and increased access to personal information has had on our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Chapter 7 looks at national security and how the events of 9/11 have affected Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. In this final chapter, Mr. Schulhofer discusses the effect the events of 9/11 had on our Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that the assumption that security and prevention of future tragedies outweighs the protections afforded to us by the Fourth Amendment is misconceived. All decisions have risk and to alienate the millions of law abiding Muslims in the U.S. in order to protect us from the few that mean us harm is more damaging. Governmental transparency and checks on governmental power will generate the societal trust needed to better protect our society from the dangers we now face.[4] In conclusion, Mr. Schulhofer argues in the last chapter that despite the many societal advances and changes the Framers couldnt possibly have anticipated when the Fourth Amendment was drafted, the notion of individual privacy continues to be the most vital component of individual freedom and democracy, making the protections offered by the Fourth Amendment are vital in todays society.US democratic law is modeled internationally and sets the foundations for other democracies:Krotoszynski, 2009 (Ronald J. John C. Stone Chair, Director of Faculty Research, and Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law. The Perils and the Promise of Comparative Constitutional Law: The New Globalism and the Role of the United States in Shaping Human Rights. Arkansas Law Review 2009. http://www.lexisnexis.com.ezproxy .samford.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/? 06/24/2015. clj)Only a few years ago, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, of the Supreme Court of Israel, tied these developments directly to the contribution of United States constitutional law stating, "United States public law in general, and United States Supreme Court decisions in particular, have always been, to me and to many other judges in modern democracies, shining examples of constitutional thought and constitutional action." n10 He also noted that "the United States is the richest and deepest source of constitutionalism in general and of judicial review in particular." n11 Further, he acknowledged, "We foreign jurists all look to developments in the United States as a source of inspiration." n12Advantage 2: The InternetThe lack of legal protections to check internet surveillance leads to a chilling effect and prevents the development of an open internet:Jeff Jarvis, 6/17/2013 (staff writer, I fear the chilling effect of NSA surveillance on the open internet, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/chilling-effect-nsa-surveillance-internet, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)I fear the collateral damage the NSA's spying via technology will do to that technology. The essential problem is not the internet or internet companies or even the spies. The real problem is the law and what it does not prevent the American government from doing with technology, and how it does not protect the principles upon which this nation was founded. The damage to the net and its freedoms will take many forms: users may come to distrust the net for communication, sharing, and storage because they now fear with cause that the government will be spying on them, whether or not they are the object of that surveillance. International users properly concerned that they are afforded even less protection than Americans may ditch American platforms. The European Union and other national governments, which already were threatening laws targeting US technology companies, will work harder to keep their citizens' data away from the US. Technologists may find it necessary to build in so many protections, so much encryption and caution, that the openness that is a key value of the net becomes lost. If we trust the net less, will we use it less? Will it become less of an engine for innovation and economic development? Will it be a diminished tool for speech and assembly among citizens? If governments use this event as an excuse to exercise more oversight and control over the net, will that not then, in turn, reduce citizens' trust in the net and their freedom using it? Governments present themselves as the protector of our privacy, but as the NSA story demonstrates, governments present the greatest threat to our privacy as they have the means both to surveil us and to use our information against us. And note well that governments' relationship with the net is necessarily influenced by the net's disruptive force on government: witness the internet's use in organizing protests against governments in Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, and more nations by the day. Isn't a weakened, controlled, distrusted net in governments' interests? Advertisement So far, much of the negative coverage and emotion in this story have centered on the technology companies alleged by Edward Snowden's leaked PowerPoint slides to have cooperated with the NSA. The Washington Post has yet to correct its contention that the NSA and FBI are "tapping directly" into the servers of internet companies, though that simplistic characterization has been soundly denied by Google, Facebook, and others. The Associated Press has given a more nuanced and sensible interpretation of the slides, explaining that some Prism data is the product of warrants served on those companies, producing data from their servers that is delivered by file transfer, or disc in Google's case, and some is the result of apparent wholesale eavesdropping on internet fibre. That tapping into the net's full flow of communications is far more troubling even than the US government's secret warrants. For a savvy description of how that can occur, listen to security expert Steve Gibson's podcast. I've yet to hear internet bandwidth providers (Level3, Verizon, et al) questioned as internet service companies have been about whether and how they are cooperating with the spies. That is a next phase of this story. What the NSA is doing may be legal, made so by the Patriot Act. But even on Fox News, regular contributor Andrew Napolitano has questioned whether its actions and this law are constitutional. That is the key question Edward Snowden and company now put before us: what principles are being violated or upheld by the government's actions? That is the discussion we must have. I see these core principles at stake. First, privacy: in the United States, first-class letters and parcels are protected from search and seizure except by warrant. That should be the case, but is not, for any private communication using any technology: other classes of mail, email, internet telephony, Twitter direct message, or means yet to be invented. Second, the balance of powers: the NSA is overseen by a secret court and gagged legislators. Thus, save for Snowden's leaking, we the people are excluded from the information we need and the opportunity we deserve to keep our representatives and agents in check. A third principle riding atop these is transparency: the notion that government should be transparent by default and secret by necessity (and there are necessary secrets). Today, government is secret by default and transparent by force, whether from whistleblowers and journalists. When government threatens to torture the whistleblowers and prosecute the journalists who share information with us, then that puts a chill on speech and a choke on the transparency citizens depend upon to assure their rights and monitor their governments. The first two are principles enshrined in the US constitution: in the fourth amendment that guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and in the structure of American government itself. The third is a principle whose value I have learned from the net and the power it gives any citizen to speak publicly; to find, organize, or join a public; and ultimately, to choose what is public and what is not. The NSA's actions and the laws that enable them as well as some occasionally overblown conjecture around this threaten to diminish the power and freedom of the net. I worry that the damage is done.The chilling effect is real and spreading: websites are shutting down for fear of NSA surveillance:Mathew Ingram, 8/20/2013 (staff writer, Through a PRISM darkly: Fear of NSA surveillance is having a chilling effect on the open web, https://gigaom.com/2013/08/20/through-a-prism-darkly-fear-of-nsa-surveillance-is-having-a-chilling-effect-on-the-open-web/, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)Just a few weeks ago, the secure email service Lavabit which Edward Snowden used while corresponding with Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald about NSA leaks, ironically shut down because of the founders concern about government surveillance, as did fellow email provider Silent Circle. Now, the well-respected legal discussion forum Groklaw has done the same, driven by what its founder has called the forced exposure of NSA surveillance. How many more web services do we have to lose before NSA chilling effects become a serious drain on the internet we all take for granted? In his note about the closure of his secure email service, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison said that if we knew what he knows about the security of the global email system, we wouldnt use email at all. Pamela Jones, the founder of Groklaw, said in her own closure notice that this warning started to gnaw away at her, and finally she couldnt stomach running her web forum and email list any longer, because of a fear that its entire contents were available to the NSA. The simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how clean we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I dont know how to function in such an atmosphere. Safety in the rule of law? Not so much privacy / spying / eye in computer Not only did Jones say that she couldnt continue running Groklaw because of the fear of surveillance (especially since she has readers and subscribers around the world, and surveillance of non-U.S. citizens is even easier than it is with U.S. residents) but she said the rise of the security state actually seemed to contradict some of the reasons she started the Groklaw service in the first place, or at least to conflict with them, and that made it even more difficult to continue. As she put it: I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint. Some of those who have been commenting on Jones and her decision seem to feel she is over-reacting. But is she? The PRISM documents and subsequent revelations about how much of our online behavior is being captured either for immediate surveillance or stored in some database for future analysis are enough to make even the biggest government supporter think twice, not to mention incidents like the detention of Glenn Greenwalds partner at a British airport and the seizure of his belongings. Who will decide to shut down next? How much of what we value about the internet is in jeopardy because of the sheer scale of the surveillance that is going on all around us? Its one thing to lose a secure email service or a legal discussion forum, but how long until other more mainstream services are affected? And it doesnt have to be outright shutdowns or closures just a series of restrictions or the gradual decline in usage by users who are (rightly) concerned about the information they are putting online or the digital cookie crumbs they are leaving behind them. As Jones points out, the cumulative effect of a multitude of decisions like hers could have substantial repercussions for internet companies (and in fact have already done so) as well as the digital economy as a whole. How many people will want to use an e commerce solution like Facebook is said to be launching if they know every transaction will be indexed and tracked by the government or the NSA? Thats just one example. As Jones puts it: My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree its possible. Im just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I cant stay online personally without losing my humanness if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the worlds economy would collapse, I suppose. I cant really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is over.The internet solves multiple scenarios for extinction:David Eagleman, 11/9/2010 (Neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, Six ways the internet will save civilization, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/12/start/apocalypse-no, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)Many great civilisations have fallen, leaving nothing but cracked ruins and scattered genetics. Usually this results from: natural disasters, resource depletion, economic meltdown, disease, poor information flow and corruption. But were luckier than our predecessors because we command a technology that no one else possessed: a rapid communication network that finds its highest expression in the internet. I propose that there are six ways in which the net has vastly reduced the threat of societal collapse. Epidemics can be deflected by telepresence One of our more dire prospects for collapse is an infectious-disease epidemic. Viral and bacterial epidemics precipitated the fall of the Golden Age of Athens, the Roman Empire and most of the empires of the Native Americans. The internet can be our key to survival because the ability to work telepresently can inhibit microbial transmission by reducing human-to-human contact. In the face of an otherwise devastating epidemic, businesses can keep supply chains running with the maximum number of employees working from home. This can reduce host density below the tipping point required for an epidemic. If we are well prepared when an epidemic arrives, we can fluidly shift into a self-quarantined society in which microbes fail due to host scarcity. Whatever the social ills of isolation, they are worse for the microbes than for us. The internet will predict natural disasters We are witnessing the downfall of slow central control in the media: news stories are increasingly becoming user-generated nets of up-to-the-minute information. During the recent California wildfires, locals went to the TV stations to learn whether their neighbourhoods were in danger. But the news stations appeared most concerned with the fate of celebrity mansions, so Californians changed their tack: they uploaded geotagged mobile-phone pictures, updated Facebook statuses and tweeted. The balance tipped: the internet carried news about the fire more quickly and accurately than any news station could. In this grass-roots, decentralised scheme, there were embedded reporters on every block, and the news shockwave kept ahead of the fire. This head start could provide the extra hours that save us. If the Pompeiians had had the internet in 79AD, they could have easily marched 10km to safety, well ahead of the pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius. If the Indian Ocean had the Pacifics networked tsunami-warning system, South-East Asia would look quite different today. Discoveries are retained and shared Historically, critical information has required constant rediscovery. Collections of learning -- from the library at Alexandria to the entire Minoan civilisation -- have fallen to the bonfires of invaders or the wrecking ball of natural disaster. Knowledge is hard won but easily lost. And information that survives often does not spread. Consider smallpox inoculation: this was under way in India, China and Africa centuries before it made its way to Europe. By the time the idea reached North America, native civilisations who needed it had already collapsed. The net solved the problem. New discoveries catch on immediately; information spreads widely. In this way, societies can optimally ratchet up, using the latest bricks of knowledge in their fortification against risk. Tyranny is mitigated Censorship of ideas was a familiar spectre in the last century, with state-approved news outlets ruling the press, airwaves and copying machines in the USSR, Romania, Cuba, China, Iraq and elsewhere. In many cases, such as Lysenkos agricultural despotism in the USSR, it directly contributed to the collapse of the nation. Historically, a more successful strategy has been to confront free speech with free speech -- and the internet allows this in a natural way. It democratises the flow of information by offering access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Some posts are full of doctoring and dishonesty whereas others strive for independence and impartiality -- but all are available to us to sift through. Given the attempts by some governments to build firewalls, its clear that this benefit of the net requires constant vigilance. Human capital is vastly increased Crowdsourcing brings people together to solve problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the worlds population is involved. We need expand human capital. Most of the world not have access to the education afforded a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who has educational opportunities, uncountable others do not. This squandering of talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of problem solvers. The net opens the gates education to anyone with a computer. A motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the worlds knowledge -- from the webs of Wikipedia to the curriculum of MITs OpenCourseWare. The new human capital will serve us well when we confront existential threats weve never imagined before. Energy expenditure is reduced Societal collapse can often be understood in terms of an energy budget: when energy spend outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. This has taken the form of deforestation or soil erosion; currently, the worry involves fossil-fuel depletion. The internet addresses the energy problem with a natural ease. Consider the massive energy savings inherent in the shift from paper to electrons -- as seen in the transition from the post to email. Ecommerce reduces the need to drive long distances to purchase products. Delivery trucks are more eco-friendly than individuals driving around, not least because of tight packaging and optimisation algorithms for driving routes. Of course, there are energy costs to the banks of computers that underpin the internet -- but these costs are less than the wood, coal and oil that would be expended for the same quantity of information flow. The tangle of events that triggers societal collapse can be complex, and there are several threats the net does not address. But vast, networked communication can be an antidote to several of the most deadly diseases threatening civilisation. The next time your coworker laments internet addiction, the banality of tweeting or the decline of face-to-face conversation, you may want to suggest that the net may just be the technology that saves us.The internet is key to the economy:Gabriela Gonzalez, 9-4-2014 (A million reasons why the internet is good for you,http://blogthinkbig.com/a-million-reasons-why-the-internet-is-good-for-you/, accessed 6-23-2015, Kkb) The internet contributes an average of 3.4% to gross domestic product (GDP) in at least 13 countries worldwide, including the US, the UK, Canada and Spain. Money production through the internet is so high that it is the same as the amount in GDP produced by Canada each year and more than that produced by Australia; and the research only covered 13 countries, not the whole world. The internet creates jobs and for each job created in the technology industry, five more are created in other branches, jobs that are needed to support an entire company. Crowdfunding platforms raised more than $2.7 billion in 2013, providing enough money for over one million campaigns created by ordinary people with big ideas. 95% of the companies in countries belonging to the organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are present online, which increases their sales and improves the customer-seller relationship. The internet has made many things change, and in the search for a formula to reduce piracy, the Netflix effect has come about, something so simple whereby if people have a legal place where they can pay to watch movies, view series and listen to music piracy will fall. According to one study, 40% of people download less pirate copies if they can use a service such as Netflix and similar sites.US economic decline causes global great power warsDuncan 12 [Richard Duncan, former IMF consultant, financial sector specialist for the World Bank, Chief Economist Blackhorse Asset Management, The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy, Page 12, Ebooks]The political battle over Americas future would be bitter, and quite possibly bloody. It cannot be guaranteed that the U.S. Constitution would survive. Foreign affairs would also confront the United States with enormous challenges. During the Great Depression, the United States did not have a global empire. Now it does. The United States maintains hundreds of military bases across dozens of countries around the world. Added to this is a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers and 18 nuclear-armed submarines. The country spends more than $650 billion a year on its military. If the U.S. economy collapses into a New Great Depression, the United States could not afford to maintain its worldwide military presence or to continue in its role as global peacekeeper. Or, at least, it could not finance its military in the same way it does at present. Therefore, either the United States would have to find an alternative funding method for its global military presence or else it would have to radically scale it back. Historically, empires were financed with plunder and territorial expropriation. The estates of the vanquished ruling classes were given to the conquering generals, while the rest of the population was forced to pay imperial taxes. The U.S. model of empire has been unique. It has financed its global military presence by issuing government debt, thereby taxing future generations of Americans to pay for this generations global supremacy. That would no longer be possible if the economy collapsed. Costbenefit analysis would quickly reveal that much of Americas global presence was simply no longer affordable. Manyor even mostof the outposts that did not pay for themselves would have to be abandoned. Priority would be given to those places that were of vital economic interests to the United States. The Middle East oil fields would be at the top of that list. The United States would have to maintain control over them whatever the price. In this global depression scenario, the price of oil could collapse to $3 per barrel. Oil consumption would fall by half and there would be no speculators left to manipulate prices higher. Oil at that level would impoverish the oil-producing nations, with extremely destabilizing political consequences. Maintaining control over the Middle East oil fields would become much more difficult for the United States. It would require a much larger military presence than it does now. On the one hand, it might become necessary for the United States to reinstate the draft (which would possibly meet with violent resistance from draftees, as it did during the Vietnam War). On the other hand, Americas all-volunteer army might find it had more than enough volunteers with the national unemployment rate in excess of 20 percent. The army might have to be employed to keep order at home, given that mass unemployment would inevitably lead to a sharp spike in crime. Only after the Middle East oil was secured would the country know how much more of its global military presence it could afford to maintain. If international trade had broken down, would there be any reason for the United States to keep a military presence in Asia when there was no obvious way to finance that presence? In a global depression, the United States allies in Asia would most likely be unwilling or unable to finance Americas military bases there or to pay for the upkeep of the U.S. Pacific fleet. Nor would the United States have the strength to force them to pay for U.S. protection. Retreat from Asia might become unavoidable. And Europe? What would a costbenefit analysis conclude about the wisdom of the United States maintaining military bases there? What valued added does Europe provide to the United States? Necessity may mean Europe will have to defend itself. Should a New Great Depression put an end to the Pax Americana, the world would become a much more dangerous place. When the Great Depression began, Japan was the rising industrial power in Asia. It invaded Manchuria in 1931 and conquered much of the rest of Asia in the early 1940s. Would China, Asias new rising power, behave the same way in the event of a new global economic collapse? Possibly. China is the only nuclear power in Asia east of India (other than North Korea, which is largely a Chinese satellite state). However, in this disaster scenario, it is not certain that China would survive in its current configuration. Its economy would be in ruins. Most of its factories and banks would be closed. Unemployment could exceed 30 percent. There would most likely be starvation both in the cities and in the countryside. The Communist Party could lose its grip on power, in which case the country could break apart, as it has numerous times in the past. It was less than 100 years ago that Chinas provinces, ruled by warlords, were at war with one another. United or divided, Chinas nuclear arsenal would make it Asias undisputed superpower if the United States were to withdraw from the region. From Korea and Japan in the North to New Zealand in the South to Burma in the West, all of Asia would be at Chinas mercy. And hunger among Chinas population of 1.3 billion people could necessitate territorial expansion into Southeast Asia. In fact, the central government might not be able to prevent mass migration southward, even if it wanted to. In Europe, severe economic hardship would revive the centuries-old struggle between the left and the right. During the 1930s, the Fascists movement arose and imposed a police state on most of Western Europe. In the East, the Soviet Union had become a communist police state even earlier. The far right and the far left of the political spectrum converge in totalitarianism. It is difficult to judge whether Europes democratic institutions would hold up better this time that they did last time. England had an empire during the Great Depression. Now it only has banks. In a severe worldwide depression, the countryor, at least Londoncould become ungovernable. Frustration over poverty and a lack of jobs would erupt into anti-immigration riots not only in the United Kingdom but also across most of Europe. The extent to which Russia would menace its European neighbors is unclear. On the one hand, Russia would be impoverished by the collapse in oil prices and might be too preoccupied with internal unrest to threaten anyone. On the other hand, it could provoke a war with the goal of maintaining internal order through emergency wartime powers. Germany is very nearly demilitarized today when compared with the late 1930s. Lacking a nuclear deterrent of its own, it could be subject to Russian intimidation. While Germany could appeal for protection from England and France, who do have nuclear capabilities, it is uncertain that would buy Germany enough time to remilitarize before it became a victim of Eastern aggression. As for the rest of the world, its prospects in this disaster scenario can be summed up in only a couple of sentences. Global economic output could fall by as much as half, from $60 trillion to $30 trillion. Not all of the worlds seven billion people would survive in a $30 trillion global economy. Starvation would be widespread. Food riots would provoke political upheaval and myriad big and small conflicts around the world. It would be a humanitarian catastrophe so extreme as to be unimaginable for the current generation, who, at least in the industrialized world, has known only prosperity. Nor would there be reason to hope that the New Great Depression would end quickly. The Great Depression was only ended by an even more calamitous global war that killed approximately 60 million people.Advantage 3: Imperial PresidencyThe judiciary is currently letting the executive branch run amok in intelligence surveillance, the plan is necessary to restore the check against the president:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)One of the core principles of the United States Constitution is the system of checks and balances. n237 The judicial branch has been extremely hesitant to oppose the government with regard to intelligence surveillance. n238 In In re Application of F.B.I., the FISA Court approved the collection of telephony metadata on U.S. citizens and interpreted the NSA's surveillance practices as indistinguishable from a pen register. n239 In similar fashion, an Idaho court held, in Smith v. Obama, that a citizen seeking an injunction against NSA telephony metadata collection has no reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to her cellphone data. n240 Other courts dismissed similar actions on the basis that plaintiffs lack standing. n241 For example, a District Court in Washington, D.C. held that the plaintiff lacked standing, because "[h]is generalized fear that his communications are being intercepted 'is insufficient to create standing.'" n242 Opponents of current wiretapping and surveillance legislation have garnered little support from the courts because national security concerns have prevented revisions to surveillance regulations. n243 At the same time, the executive branch's authority in this area has been greatly expanded following 9/11. n244 The 9/11 attacks resulted in "the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack on American soil," and left the nation in a state of terror. n245 The government has [*495] an obligation to protect citizens from another attack. n246 Nonetheless, there must be a balance between the constitutional rights of the individual and the government's surveillance practices. n247 The judicial branch must fulfill its constitutional function by serving as a check on the authority of the executive and legislative branches. n248 The FISA court has failed to restrain the power of intelligence agencies over the past two decades. For example, the FISA court approved 20,909 warrants, approximately thirty-three surveillance warrants per week, from 2001 to 2012. n249 During that span, FISA court judges denied only ten applications and approved over 500 business record warrants, which also include bulk metadata from phone and Internet providers under section 215. n250 Most notably, the FISA court "substantially modified" 376 of the 417 business record warrants for 2011 and 2012. n251 It can be reasonably inferred that the modifications by the court show that the FISA court is doing everything it can to approve warrants for the NSA, because the court does not reject them completely.The presidencys powers are massively expanding now and Congress isnt providing a check on them:F.H. Buckley April 2014 (is Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law and author ofThe Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. http://spectator.org/articles/58138/ once-and-future-king, 06/23/15 , clj)Gutzon Borglum knew what he was doing when he picked the site for the future Mount Rushmore. The areas 1.6 billion-year-old granite is thought to erode only a single inch every ten millennia. Barring a detonation at the hands of our jihadist foes, the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt will still look serenely down at future visitors of South Dakotas Black Hills when the America of the twentieth century is as remote as we are from the pharaoh whom built the first pyramid. If only our Constitution had been carved out of the same sturdy material. American liberty has not been eroding so much as crumbling away these last five years. Increasingly burdensome and intrusive legislation, persecution (and sometimes prosecution) of political enemies by the executive branch, a swelling national debt: Its been a bad few years, to say the least. But the biggest threat to the bedrock of our freedom is the presidency itself, the crown government of the almighty chief executive, which is completely at odds with the republican principles of our Founders.Forget what your high-school civics teacher told you: Since our founding, America has actually had three different constitutions. The first, the one that the Framers gave us, established congressional government: The House of Representatives, voting by state, would almost always choose the president, and the executive branch was exceedingly leanstarved, even. Then we had so-called Jacksonian democracy: The president, chosen by the people, enjoyed the legitimacy of the only person elected by the nation as a whole. This was the constitution of separation of powers, in which the legislative and executive branches shared the responsibility for governing, and in which a strong president might be forced to bend before an implacable Congress.We now live under a third constitution, one that enshrines an all-powerful executive. The president has slipped off the petty, outdated constraints of the past. He makes and unmakes laws and spends trillions of dollars without the consent of Congress. Even the gravest of decisions, whether to commit our country to war, he makes alone. His ability to reward friends and punish enemies exceeds anything weve seen before. He isrex quondam,rex futurusthe once and future king. And all of this seems irreversible.The arc of American government has bent from monarch to monarch, from George III to Obama. To be sure, Im not the first person to detect a whiff of royal perfume amid the effluvium of our executive branch. Liberals such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who drooled over Jack Kennedy but excoriated Richard Nixon, have always been quick to decry executive overreach by Republican presidents, even as they celebrated the assertion of presidential power when their fellow slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And, indeed, the role of the president has been expanding, and that of Congress receding, for many years now. But weve seen a clear move recently toward a new conception of our nations highest office, and of government itself. The president now enjoys the power to make law. Never mind that this is inconsistent with the separation of powers, that Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution specifies that All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States. One might have expected the speaker of the House or the leaders of the Senate to defend their domain. They have not. In fact, Congress has done more than just quietly acquiesce to its own obsolescence. It has aided and abetted the expansion of presidential power by drafting major legislation in the most general terms, allowing the details to be penciled in by federal agencies under executive supervision. This can be seen as a grant to the president of legislative powers, the regal prerogative the Framers so feared.Unrestrained presidential powers risk nuclear war: Forrester, 89 (Ray, professor @ Hastings College of the Law University @ University of California and former Dean of Law School @ Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Cornell, George Washington Law Review, August 1989, l/n)On the basis of this report, the startling fact is that one man alone has the ability to start a nuclear war. A basic theory--if not the basic theory of our Constitution--is that concentration of power in any one person, or one group, is dangerous to mankind. The Constitution, therefore, contains a strong system of checks and balances, starting with the separation of powers between the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The message is that no one of them is safe with unchecked power. Yet, in what is probably the most dangerous governmental power ever possessed, we find the potential for world destruction lodged in the discretion of one person. As a result of public indignation aroused by the Vietnam disaster, in which tens of thousands lost their lives in military actions initiated by a succession of Presidents, Congress in 1973 adopted, despite presidential veto, the War Powers Resolution. Congress finally asserted its checking and balancing duties in relation to the making of presidential wars. Congress declared in section 2(a) that its purpose was to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations. The law also stated in section 3 that [t]he President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated. . . .Other limitations not essential to this discussion are also provided. The intent of the law is clear. Congress undertook to check the President, at least by prior consultation, in any executive action that might lead to hostilities and war. [*1638] President Nixon, who initially vetoed the resolution, claimed that it was an unconstitutional restriction on his powers as Executive and Commander in Chief of the military. His successors have taken a similar view. Even so, some of them have at times complied with the law by prior consultation with representatives of Congress, but obedience to the law has been uncertain and a subject of continuing controversy between Congress and the President. Ordinarily, the issue of the constitutionality of a law would be decided by the Supreme Court. But, despite a series of cases in which such a decision has been sought, the Supreme Court has refused to settle the controversy. The usual ground for such a refusal is that a "political question" is involved. The rule is well established that the federal judiciary will decide only "justiciable" controversies. "Political questions" are not "justiciable." However, the standards established by the Supreme Court in 1962 in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, to determine the distinction between "justiciable controversies" and "political questions" are far from clear. One writer observed that the term "political question" [a]pplies to all those matters of which the court, at a given time, will be of the opinion that it is impolitic or inexpedient to take jurisdiction. Sometimes this idea of inexpediency will result from the fear of the vastness of the consequences that a decision on the merits might entail. Finkelstein, Judicial Self-Limitation, 37 HARV. L. REV. 338, 344 (1924)(footnote omitted). It is difficult to defend the Court's refusal to assume the responsibility of decisionmaking on this most critical issue. The Court has been fearless in deciding other issues of "vast consequences" in many historic disputes, some involving executive war power. It is to be hoped that the Justices will finally do their duty here. But in the meantime the spectre of single-minded power persists, fraught with all of the frailties of human nature that each human possesses, including the President. World history is filled with tragic examples. Even if the Court assumed its responsibility to tell us whether the Constitution gives Congress the necessary power to check the President, the War Powers Resolution itself is unclear. Does the Resolution require the President to consult with Congress before launching a nuclear attack? It has been asserted that "introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities" refers only to military personnel and does not include the launching of nuclear missiles alone. In support of this interpretation, it has been argued that Congress was concerned about the human losses in Vietnam and in other presidential wars, rather than about the weaponry. Congress, of course, can amend the Resolution to state explicitly that "the introduction of Armed Forces" includes missiles as well as personnel. However, the President could continue to act without prior consultation by renewing the claim first made by President [*1639] Nixon that the Resolution is an unconstitutional invasion of the executive power. Therefore, the real solution, in the absence of a Supreme Court decision, would appear to be a constitutional amendment. All must obey a clear rule in the Constitution. The adoption of an amendment is very difficult. Wisely, Article V requires that an amendment may be proposed only by the vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress or by the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states, and the proposal must be ratified by the legislatures or conventions of three-fourths of the states. Despite the difficulty, the Constitution has been amended twenty-six times. Amendment can be done when a problem is so important that it arouses the attention and concern of a preponderant majority of the American people. But the people must be made aware of the problem. It is hardly necessary to belabor the relative importance of the control of nuclear warfare. A constitutional amendment may be, indeed, the appropriate method. But the most difficult issue remains. What should the amendment provide? How can the problem be solved specifically? The Constitution in section 8 of Article I stipulates that "[t]he Congress shall have power . . . To declare War. . . ." The idea seems to be that only these many representatives of the people, reflecting the public will, should possess the power to commit the lives and the fortunes of the nation to warfare. This approach makes much more sense in a democratic republic than entrusting the decision to one person, even though he may be designated the "Commander in Chief" of the military forces. His power is to command the war after the people, through their representatives, have made the basic choice to submit themselves and their children to war. There is a recurring relevation of a paranoia of power throughout human history that has impelled one leader after another to draw their people into wars which, in hindsight, were foolish, unnecessary, and, in some instances, downright insane. Whatever may be the psychological influences that drive the single decisionmaker to these irrational commitments of the lives and fortunes of others, the fact remains that the behavior is a predictable one in any government that does not provide an effective check and balance against uncontrolled power in the hands of one human. We, naturally, like to think that our leaders are above such irrational behavior. Eventually, however, human nature, with all its weakness, asserts itself whatever the setting. At least that is the evidence that experience and history give us, even in our own relatively benign society, where the Executive is subject to the rule of law. [*1640] Vietnam and other more recent engagements show that it can happen and has happened here. But the "nuclear football"--the ominous "black bag" --remains in the sole possession of the President. And, most important, his decision to launch a nuclear missile would be, in fact if not in law, a declaration of nuclear war, one which the nation and, indeed, humanity in general, probably would be unable to survive.

FYI on What the Plan DoesIn the status quo, email users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from addresses of messages or IP addresses of websites they visitthe plan would change that:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)By nature, the Internet is a public network. n214 Therefore, anytime someone uses it, they are knowingly exposing information to the public. n215 Courts have consistently held that senders and recipients of standard mail have no reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to information "put on the outside of mail, because that information is voluntarily transmitted to third parties." n216 Similarly, "e-mail and Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from addresses of their messages or the IP addresses of the websites they visit." n217 A Verizon customer has no reasonable expectation of privacy because they are giving their IP address voluntarily to Verizon. n218Bulk collection of Internet metadata does not currently constitute a search under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)The NSA asserts that the identifiers are limited to identifying persons associated with foreign terrorist organizations and should be allowed because it is vital to NSA's counterterrorism mission. n197 However, evidence has pointed to the contrary. n198 A report to the government in 2009 showed that as of January 15, 2009, a staggering 1,935 of the 17,835 identifiers approved by the designated NSA officers were based on a reasonable, articulable suspicion. n199 Although this appears to be a clear abuse of discretionary authority under 1861, [*490] the NSA argues that the bulk collection of Internet metadata is similar to a pen register and does not constitute a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. n200Inherency ExtensionsINH: Need to Update the Law in digital ageFourth Amendment interpretations must be updated to the digital age:Mason C. Clutter, 2014 (National Security and Privacy Counsel to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, DOGS, DRONES, AND DEFENDANTS: THE FOURTH AMENDMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE , George Mason Law Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)As technology evolves and expectations of individual privacy morph, so too must the law. Unfortunately, Congress is failing to keep up with technological advances, and the courts are forced to refer to our founding document for guidance on the government's use of new technologies. The Fourth Amendment protects "persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." n1 We know that a man's home is his castle and one of the most private and protected spaces under the law. But what protection do citizens have from intrusion by electronic devices and other "enhanced searching technologies" that can see, smell, and hear through walls and track one's physical location and electronic communications? Can law enforcement use these technologies against us outside of our homes? The law is always a bit stickier when we step outside of the home and into "public."

Solvency ExtensionsSOLV--AT: Law is Indeterminate(--) Extend our solvency evidencerecalibrating the 4th amendment provides better guidance to future courts than the current Katz test.(--) Reclaiming the language of the 4th amendment provides greater clarity and guidance:Timothy Casey, 2008 (Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure, UC Davis Law Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)The increased capacity for electronic surveillance and the need to employ new technologies require a critical reassessment of the existing legal structure. In essence, it is time for another paradigm shift. n17 We must abandon Katz's reasonable expectation of privacy and adopt language that accurately reflects the significance of the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment. The interests that courts since Katz have described in terms of a reasonable expectation of privacy should be expressed in terms of personal security and the right to be secure. At first blush it may appear that replacing the reasonable expectation of privacy with the right to be secure is merely a game of semantics, but the use of specific language is important, and reclaiming the language of security will provide greater clarity and guidance in our analysis of Fourth Amendment issues. n18(--) Breaking away from the reasonable expectation of privacy standard in Katz generates legal clarity:Timothy Casey, 2008 (Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure, UC Davis Law Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)A clean break from the reasonable expectation of privacy standard will generate clarity by (1) reducing the blurring effect of a reliance on a normative standard, (2) adopting a conception of Fourth Amendment protection from governmental intrusion that comports with the realities of modern technology, and (3) linguistically separating the different notions of privacy in our current legal lexicon.(--) Courts will follow precedentthey feel an overwhelming obligation to do so:Fallon, 2005 prof. of Constitutional Law @ Harvard, Harvard Law Review, April 2005, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 1787; LexisThroughout constitutional history, Supreme Court Justices have assumed with near unanimity that they are legally authorized and sometimes bound to follow precedents, sometimes even when prior cases were themselves erroneous at the time of their decision. n149 Indeed, I know of no Justice in the history of the Supreme Court who has persistently questioned [*1822] precedent-based decisionmaking. n150 Even leading constitutional originalists - those who maintain that courts otherwise ought to decide cases in accordance with the original understanding n151 - have accepted the authority of judicial precedent, including past decisions that could not themselves be justified under originalist principles. n152

SOLV--Court Should Reconcile Fourth AmendmentCourts should reconcile the Fourth Amendment with modern technology:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)Modern courts seek a proper application of the Fourth Amendment adapted to modern technology. n294 The next step is for the courts to understand that technology is rapidly evolving, and that they must be flexible to find a proper solution. This is about accountability. The Constitution is something 'we the people' placed on the government. n295 On November 18, 2014, legislators had the ability to curtail the NSA's surveillance program. n296 Senator Patrick Leahy's [*500] bill to limit the NSA's telephony metadata collection program was up for a vote, which needed sixty votes to pass. n297 It was the hope of the American people that our government will respond to the encroachment it has allowed thus far. Unfortunately, Leahy's USA FREEDOM Act of 2014 fell short of the sixty votes needed to pass. n298 The votes were divided among party lines, with the exception of a few votes on each side. n299 Most view the outcome as a major loss for privacy advocates, because the Patriot Act has not been curtailed in any way. n300 However, the rejection of the USA FREEDOM Act has the potential of being a major win for privacy advocates.SOLV--AT: Rollback/Wont Be Enforced(--) No rollback: three reasons:Schacter, 1995 (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School, ARTICLE: METADEMOCRACY: THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF LEGITIMACY IN STATUTORY INTERPRETATION Harvard Law Review, JANUARY, lexis, Accessed 2/18/2013, rwg)Even if some of the strongest cynicism about legislative behavior and motivation is overstated, several aspects of the pluralist process nevertheless suggest that statutory override cannot cure all that ails the essentialist model. First, legislatures are frequently too busy, overextended, or inert to respond to an objectionable judicial interpretation. n54 Indeed, there is little reason to believe that legislators systematically monitor judicial interpretations of statutes. n55 Second, [*606] statutory override is an imperfect substitute, and controversial as a normative matter, because the current legislature may have different preferences from the enacting legislature. n56 Third, even when legislators do respond to a particular judicial interpretation, the process does not necessarily end. The new statute might require interpretation, and the process may simply continue. n57(--) Strike down efforts in Congress failcant get enough Congressional support to strike down Court decisions: Lawrence Baum, 2003 Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, [The Supreme Court in American Politics, http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi /full/10.1146/annurev.polisci.6.121901.085526;jsessionid=n1HzQqZJALRe]It is also worth asking why the Court fares so well in Congress. As noted above, few of the Court's most controversial interventions in the past half century have been directly reversed. Nor has Congress enacted any of the numerous bills to remove the Court's jurisdiction over areas in which the Court has aroused congressional anger. A large part of the explanation lies in the difficulty of enacting legislation in a process with so many veto points. That difficulty is especially great in an era like the current one, which lacks a strong or stable law-making majority. In such an era, interventions are likely to have significant support in government regardless of their ideological direction, and even decisions that strike down federal laws may enjoy majority support. The line of decisions since 1995 that has limited the regulatory power of the federal government (e.g., Alden v. Maine 1999, United States v. Morrison 2000) constitutes the most significant judicial attack on federal policy since the 1930s. But since 1995, Congress has had Republican majorities except for the bare Democratic Senate majority in 20012002. In that situation, any significant action to counter the Court's policies has been exceedingly unlikely.

(--) Other branches will complyfear of public backlash guarantees:McFarland, 2008 New York University Annual Survey of American Law editor (Michael, New York University Annual Survey of American Law, "Derivative Citizenship: Its History, Constitutional Foundation, And Constitutional Limitations," 63 N.Y.U. Ann. Surv. Am. L. 467, l/n, accessed 2/18/2013, rwg]The idea that courts should decline review because they do not want their decisions to be ignored by the political branches is misguided. Congress would rarely risk the public backlash that would come with ignoring a Supreme Court directive. n240 President Nixon, for example, would have found it all but impossible to refuse to provide Congress with his Oval Office tapes. n241 Redish even argues that courts gain from challenging the political branches. n242 Courts, and especially the Supreme Court, are viewed as the final arbiters of the Constitution, and public support will frequently be on their side if they choose to challenge Congress or the executive. n243 Thus, the institutional reasons for granting deference to Congress provide little support for the plenary power doctrine.(--) Politicians will enforce the counterplantheyll act if the statute is gone away for all time:Treanor & Sperling 93 William - Prof Law at Fordham. Gene - Deputy Assistant to President for Economic Policy. PROSPECTIVE OVERRULING AND THE REVIVAL OF "UNCONSTITUTIONAL" STATUTES, Columbia Law Review, Dec 93, lexisFirst, full examination of the revival issue demonstrates the interactive nature of the relationship between judicial invalidation of statutes and majoritarian decision-making. Judicial review is not purely external to the legislative process: the very act of judicial invalidation powerfully shapes subsequent legislative deliberations. Belief in the finality of judicial judgments is so pervasive that, when a statute is struck down or when a judicial decision establishes a rule of law under which a statute is unconstitutional, its opponents frequently act as if the statute were gone for all time. At the very least, even if political actors realize the potential for reversal, the finding of unconstitutionality alters the way in which they spend their political capital. As a result, rather than seek to repeal a statute that appears to be, for all practical purposes, a nullity, they devote their political resources to other - more clearly consequential - matters. Revival in such circumstances can produce a result contrary to what the political process would have produced in the absence of the initial judicial decision.SOLVExecutive Will ComplyExecutive will comply with Supreme Court decisions:TODD S. PURDUM, 2004 6/29/2004 (THE SUPREME COURT: THE PRESIDENT; In Classic Check and Balance, Court Shows Bush It Also Has Wartime Powers, Accessed 7/26/2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/world/supreme-court-president-classic-check-balance-court-shows-bush-it-also-has.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm, rwg)Some historians were not surprised by the court's decisions. Alonzo Hamby, a scholar of the presidency at Ohio University, noted wryly that ''once upon a time, it was not assumed that presidents necessarily had to pay attention to Supreme Court decisions.'' In the 1830's, when the Supreme Court declared the government's forced removal of Indian tribes from their lands illegal, President Andrew Jackson famously dismissed the ruling by the chief justice by saying: ''John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.'' Mr. Hamby said, ''But in the world we live in now, it's literally impossible for a president to ignore a Supreme Court decision, no matter how wrong or dangerous he may think it is.''

SOLV--Solvency: Lower Courts will follow(---) Doesnt matter if lower courts dont follow--the plan is modeled and solves for democracies in other nations: thats the Krotoszynski 09 evidence.(--) Judges almost always follow the courts leadmultiple reasons:Lawrence Baum, 2003 Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, June [The Supreme Court in American Politics, http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/ doi/full/10.1146/annurev.polisci.6.121901.085526;jsessionid=n1HzQqZJALRe]Once we know more about the implementation of the Court's decisions in absolute and relative terms, the most important question might well be why implementation is as successful as it is. The Court's limited concrete powers would seem to aggravate the difficulties faced by all organizational leaders, so why do judges and administrators follow the Court's lead so frequently? Within the judiciary, part of the answer undoubtedly lies in selection and socialization processes that enhance agreement about legal policy and acceptance of hierarchical authority. Even the Court's limited powers may be sufficient to rein in administrators, especially in the era of broad legal mobilization that Epp has described: Groups that undertake litigation campaigns to achieve favorable precedents can also litigate against organizations that refuse to accept those precedents. Both judges and administrators may reduce their decision costs by using the Court's legal rules as a guide. In any event, the relationship between the Court and policy makers who implement its policies may be an especially good subject for studies to probe the forces that reduce centrifugal tendencies in hierarchies.(--) Parties almost always adhere to Court rulings:Fallon, 2005 prof. of Constitutional Law @ Harvard, Harvard Law Review, April 2005, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 1787; Lexis(b) Authoritative Legitimacy and Its Limits. - Today, nearly all Supreme Court rulings possess a high degree of authoritative legitimacy, whether in the strong or the weak sense, at least with respect to [*1831] the parties before the Court. n195 In plainer terms, the parties almost always obey the Court's rulings. No logical necessity undergirds this state of affairs. In the past, General Andrew Jackson famously defied a judicial ruling. n196 So did President Abraham Lincoln. n197

SOLV--Solvency: The Plan will Snowball(--) LEGAL PRECEDENTS SNOWBALL:Tsai, 2005 Assistant Prof. of Law @ University of Oregon School of Law, 2005 (Robert, Iowa Law Review, March 2005; 90 Iowa L. Rev. 1095; Lexis)It is always risky to attempt predictions based on a reading of signs. The history of law, like human history generally, is a set of contingencies. Unforeseen events can cause a disruption; a series of small interpretive choices and popular reactions can add up to a quiet legal revolution. More important, law's appearance can be deceiving. Still, legal symbols do reveal [*1160] gestalts - the particular interaction between law's manifestations and the beliefs they express.

SOLV--Solvency: Supreme Court Decisions are Modeled(--) Extend our Krotoszynski 09 evidenceother democracies model the Supreme Court decisions.(--) Domestic litigation in the US is modeled by other nations:Van Schaack, 2004 Assistant Prof. of Law @ Santa Clara University School of Law, Vanderbilt Law Review, November, (Beth, 57 Vand. L. Rev. 2305; Lexis)Nonetheless, domestic civil litigation in the U.S. plays a part where criminal prosecutions are not feasible or forthcoming and where perpetrators are subject to personal jurisdiction here. By exposing the whereabouts of abusers, civil suits can spur or shame the U.S. government into invoking administrative n133 and/or criminal remedies against identified perpetrators. n134 For example, information gathered in connection with civil lawsuits has assisted the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) in pursuing actions against abusers for visa fraud. n135 Likewise, the commencement of civil litigation in the U.S. can trigger similar judicial responses in the home countries of defendants. n136

Solvency: Court Creates Social Change(--) Plessy and other race based decisions prove: the stamp of approval from the Supreme Court has powerful societal consequences:Lassiter, 2005 Assistant Professor of History, University of Michigan, Michigan Law Review, May, 2005, 103 Mich. L. Rev. 1401Klarman largely substantiates his claim that the Plessy Court's civil rights decisions represented "plausible interpretations of conventional legal sources" and accurate reflections of white public opinion, and therefore the corollary that "these rulings were not blatant nullifications of post-Civil War constitutional amendments designed to secure racial equality" (p. 9). But this does not necessarily confirm his broader thesis about the minimal effect of the Plessy-era decisions on the path of history. Klarman's belief in judicial minimalism downplays the import of having the institution of the Supreme Court - and not just southern vigilantes or political demagogues or even Progressive-era reformers - extend the federal government's stamp of constitutional approval to a formal legal system that operated on the basis of the systematic racial subordination of African Americans. [*1411] "Jim Crow legislation was generally more symbolic than functional," according to Klarman, because "white supremacy depended less on law than on entrenched social mores, backed by economic power and the threat and reality of violence" (p. 82). But surely it is not simply a coincidence that a relatively stable racial order marked the four decades between the turn of the twentieth century and the beginning of World War II, the same era during which the Plessy Court's validation of legal segregation and black disfranchisement remained operative. Nor is it incidental that substantial black activism and corresponding white violence marked the fluid and unsettled racial climate that existed during the decades before the Supreme Court's endorsement of segregation and disfranchisement in the late 1890s, and also during the period after the federal judiciary began to chip away at both policies beginning in the 1940s. n35 The Supreme Court's overt willingness to tolerate state-action subterfuges that enforced anti-black discrimination through race-neutral facades also helped to shape the legal underpinnings of racial inequality and provided a segregationist road map for southern (and northern) policymakers throughout the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1920, the Court issued a series of rulings that invalidated forced peonage laws, grandfather clauses, separate-and-unequal luxury accommodations in railroad cars, and city ordinances mandating residential segregation. n36 These cases, which Klarman aptly characterizes as "concerned more with form than substance," were therefore "easy to circumvent" as long as legislatures continued to pay lip service to constitutional principles (p. 62). For example, beginning in the 1920s the NAACP mounted an aggressive assault on residential segregation, which emerged as a decidedly national phenomenon as a result of urbanization in the South and the First Great Migration of blacks to the North. But the federal courts upheld restrictive racial covenants under the doctrine of private property rights until the late 1940s, and they have never seriously challenged "racially motivated but facially neutral zoning" (p. 92) and other public policies that offer ample evidence of state action. n37 In the area of criminal law, the [*1412] Supreme Court expanded the scope of due process during the interwar period to rescue black victims of grossly unjust trials, but these individual (rather than class-action) cases did almost nothing to remedy the structural racism that pervaded the southern legal system (pp. 117-35, 152-58). During the New Deal era, the justices did signal a greater willingness to consider the state action dilemma in cases involving the all-white primary in Texas and the failure of Missouri to provide a substantively equal law school for a black applicant in the Gaines litigation brought by the NAACP. n38 The civil rights group ensured that voting discrimination and substantive equality in public education would remain on the judicial agenda during and after World War II, the turning point in Klarman's story.

(--) Court decisions produce massive societal ripple effects: Brown v. Board of education proves:Yeazell, 2004 professor of law @ UCLA, 2004 (Stephen, Vanderbilt Law Review, November, 2004, 57 Vand. L. Rev. 1975; Lexis)One doubts that Robert Carter, Thurgood Marshall, Spottswood Robinson, Jack Greenberg and the rest of the legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education n1 spent much time thinking about mass torts. Nonetheless, it is entirely appropriate that a commemoration of their achievements include not only that topic but also international human rights and health care, as well as the more expected ones of education and social welfare. Brown was part of a revolution, and revolutions often have collateral effects as important as their immediate consequences. The civil rights movement followed the same pattern. [*1976] As an immediate consequence, that movement brought us school desegregation. Follow-on effects included desegregation of public facilities. These were important milestones in U.S. society. They achieved specific changes, but they also made possible the second civil rights revolution - the legislative actions that have, in the last four decades, transformed U.S. society. Beyond race and civil rights, Brown created several ripples, two of which provide the focus for this Essay. First, Brown and the civil rights litigation movement helped create a renewed belief, not just in the law, but more specifically in litigation as a noble calling and as an avenue for social change. That belief lies open to challenge, and it can leave students and lawyers frustrated at the distance between the aspirations that brought them to law school and the world of practice as they perceive it. But whether or not it is well-founded, this belief, with roots traceable to Brown and civil rights litigation, has endured for several generations. Thus, Brown reshaped the aspirations of lawyers in ways that are still important.

Democracy Advantage Extensions

DEM--AT: Other invasions of privacy exist(--) Extend our Alhogbani evidence from the 1acthe internet is a crucial threshold that grants access to limitless amounts of information.(--) Extend our Iaconeta evidencethe Fourth Amendment is key to democracymeaning their other rights violations dont matter.DEM--Status Quo is a significant intrusion on privacyCurrent balancing test is out of whackit is a significant intrusion on privacy rights:Abdulmajeed Alhogbani, 2014 (J.D. Candidate, The Catholic University of America, 2016, CommLaw Conspectus, GOING DARK: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, Accessed 6/23/2015, rwg)The NSA asserts that the current government surveillance scheme is a special case because national security is at stake and the program is part of a counter-terrorism effort. n226 Therefore, the NSA must provide a compelling case and "[i]t is obvious and unarguable that no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the nation." n227 The government must balance individual rights against the immediacy of the threat and the efficacy of the NSA's surveillance [*493] program. n228 The current level of surveillance constitutes a significant intrusion on privacy rights.Reliance on warrantless searches in the digital age has massively increased:Mason C. Clutter, 2014 (National Security and Privacy Counsel to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, DOGS, DRONES, AND DEFENDANTS: THE FOURTH AMENDMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE , George Mason Law Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/24/2015, rwg)The public's reliance on technology has reached new heights. Today, one has a difficult time functioning in society without the use of technology, like e-mail, ATMs, and smartphones. At the same time, law enforcement's reliance on technology to conduct criminal investigations is growing at an exponential rate without adequate and standardized safeguards in place to regulate the government's use of such technology. From dog sniffs to domestic surveillance drones, from your front porch to the open road, warrantless searches are being conducted every day.

DEM--Fourth Amendment Key to Democracy4th Amendment essential to democracy Crowley 5/2013(Don, Law and Politics Book Review). Sponsored by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. Review: MORE ESSENTIAL THAN EVER: THE FOURTH AMENDMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Department of Political Science Professor, Uni