I affirm Resolved: A just government ought to prioritize civil liberties over national

security.
Definitions:
Merriam Dictionary defines Civil Liberty as freedom from arbitrary interference in
one's pursuits (as in expressing thoughts, practicing a religion, or pursuing a living)
by individuals or especially by the government.
Value: Liberty
This liberty is not the warrantless free natural liberty but that of civil liberty.
Heyman, Steven J. "The First Duty of Government: Protection, Liberty and the
Fourteenth Amendment." Duke Law Journal 41.3 (1991): 507-571.

If no is subject to any external restraints, then one no one can have any security
against the invasion of his liberty by others. Thus, to secure their liberty and to
obtain the other benefits of social life, individuals enter into society and agree to
obey its laws. In so doing, they give up a part of their natural liberty-the
unrestrained right to act as they think fit-but gain something more valuable: "civil
liberty," which is the liberty that belongs to individuals as members of society.
Criterion: Minimizing violations of privacy

Schneier 6 Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer for Counterpane Internet

Security, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law
School, Program Fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute,
Board Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Advisory Board Member of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2006 (The Eternal Value of Privacy, Wired,
May 18th, Available Online at http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html,
Accessed 05-22-2006)
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real
choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign
physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny.
Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police
surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should
champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
Contention 1: Privacy necessary for other Civil Liberties.
Two internal links
First, Surveillance tips over the domino of privacy which leads to the fall
of other CLs.
Neil M. Richards, Professor of Law at the Washington University School of Law,
former law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, holds a J.D. and an M.A. in

Legal History from the University of Virginia, 2008 (Intellectual Privacy, Texas Law
Review (87 Tex. L. Rev. 387), December, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions
via Lexis-Nexis)
The core of intellectual privacy is the freedom of thought and belief. The freedom to
think and to believe as we want is arguably the defining characteristic of a free
society and our most cherished civil liberty. n118 This right encompasses the
range of thoughts and beliefs that a person might hold or develop, dealing with matters that are
trivial and important, secular and profane. And it protects the individual's thoughts from scrutiny or
unwilling disclosure by anyone, whether a government official or a private actor such as
an employer, a friend, or a spouse. At the level of law, if there is any constitutional right that is absolute, it
is this one, which is the precondition for all other political and religious
rights guaranteed by the Western tradition.
Second, Rights must come first or they will always be violated in the name
of security
George Kateb, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, 1992, The Inner Ocean:
Individualism and Democratic Culture, p. 5
unless rights come first they are not rights. They will tend to be
sacrificed to some purpose deemed higher than the equal dignity of every
individual. There will be little if any concept of the integrity or inviolability of each
individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the vague fixture
will be preferred. The beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated
as a person who is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even
though in the name of human dignity, is to injure human dignity.
All I wish to say now is that

There are two impacts:

First is the loss of personal autonomy and liberty
Privacy is a gateway right; it enables all of our other freedoms.

PoKempne 14,
Dinah, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, The Right Whose Time Has Come
(Again): Privacy in the Age of Surveillance 1/21/14 http://www.hrw.org/worldreport/2014/essays/privacy-in-age-of-surveillance
Technology has invaded the sacred precincts of private life, and
unwarranted exposure has imperiled our security, dignity, and most basic
values. The law must rise to the occasion and protect our rights. Does this
sound familiar? So argued Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law
Review article announcing The Right to Privacy. We are again at such a juncture .
The technological developments they saw as menacingphotography and the rise of the mass circulation press
appear rather quaint to us now. But the harms to emotional, psychological, and even physical security from

Our renewed sense of vulnerability comes

as almost all aspects of daily social life migrate online . At the same time, corporations and
unwanted exposure seem just as vivid in our digital age.

governments have acquired frightening abilities to amass and search these endless digital records, giving them the
power to know us in extraordinary detail. In a world where we share our lives on social media and trade immense
amounts of personal information for the ease and convenience of online living, some have questioned whether
privacy is a relevant concept. It is not just relevant, but crucial.

Indeed, privacy is a gateway right

that affects our ability to exercise almost every other right, not least our freedom to
speak and associate with those we choose, make political choices, practice our
religious beliefs, seek medical help, access education, figure out whom we love, and
create our family life. It is nothing less than the shelter in which we work out
what we think and who we are; a fulcrum of our autonomy as individuals.
The importance of privacy, a right we often take for granted, was thrown into sharp relief in 2013 by the steady stream of revelations from United States
government files released by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, and published in the Guardian and other major
newspapers around the world. These revelations, supported by highly classified documents, showed the US, the UK, and other governments engaged in
global indiscriminate data interception, largely unchecked by any meaningful legal constraint or oversight, without regard for the rights of millions of

The promise of the digital age is the effortless, borderless ability to share
information. That is its threat as well. As the worlds information moves into cyberspace, surveillance capabilities have grown commensurately. The
US now leads in ability for global data capture, but other nations and actors are likely to catch up, and some already insist that
more data be kept within their reach. In the end, there will be no safe haven if privacy is seen as a strictly domestic
issue, subject to many carve-outs and lax or non-existent oversight. Human Rights Watch weighed in repeatedly
throughout 2013 on the human rights implications of Snowdens revelations of mass surveillance, and the need to
protect whistleblowers. This essay looks at how the law of privacy developed, and where it needs to reach today so
people who were not suspected of wrongdoing.

mass surveillance poses a

threat to human rights and democracy, and once again, the law must rise to the
challenge.
that privacy is globally respected by all governments, for all people. Global

Second is totalitarianism
Infringements on liberty must be rejected at all costs or we forfeit to
totalitarianism.

Petro, Toledo Law Review, 1974 (Sylvester, Spring, page 480)

However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in only one thing: liberty." And it is always well
to bear in mind David Hume's observation:

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at

once." Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of
no import because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road
leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration . Ask
Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Dijas. In sum, if one believed in freedom as a supreme value and the proper ordering

every invasion of
freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit .
principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then

Contention 2: Rights key to life

Life key to rights is backwardslife and death are not inherently good
except for the things we enjoy about them which the status quo erodes

Nagel 12

[Thomas, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University,

Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, Mar 26, 2012, Pg.1-3]

If death is an evil at all, it cannot be because of its positive features, but only
because of what it deprives us of. I shall try to deal with the difficulties surrounding the
natural view that death is an evil because it brings to an end all the goods that
life contains. We need not give an account of these goods here, except to observe that some of them, like
perception, desire, activity, and thought, are so general as to be constitutive of human life. They are widely
regarded as formidable benefits in themselves, despite the fact that they are conditions of misery as well as of
happiness, and that a sufficient quantity of more particular evils can perhaps outweigh them. That is what is meant,
I think, by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The
situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to ones experience, make life better; there are other
elements which, if added to ones experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not
merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience

are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight
is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.
I shall not discuss the value that one persons life or death may have for others, or its objective value, but only the
value it has for the person who is its subject. That seems to me the primary case, and the case which presents the

the value of life and its contents does

not attach to mere organic survival: almost everyone would be indifferent (other
things equal) between immediate death and immediate coma followed by death twenty
years later without reawakening. And second, like most goods, this can be multiplied by time: more is
greatest difficulties. Let me add only two observations. First,

better than less. The added quantities need not be temporally continuous (though continuity has its social
advantages). People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the
resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as continuation of their present life. If
these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years
could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences.
I do not deny, of course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime;
the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking.
Nevertheless these inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, though discontinuous,
existence.
If we turn from what is good about life to what is bad about death, the case is completely different.

Essentially, though there may be

what we find desirable in life are certain states,

conditions, or types of activity. It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences that we
consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being
dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable.1 This asymmetry is important. If it is good to
problems about their specification,

be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is a good of which Bach had more
than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a
larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it .

Utilitarian ethics sacrifice the individual at the altar of maximization of

general utility making the grossest rights violations both inevitable and
frequent
Christopher H. Schroeder, Professor of Law, Duke University; Visiting Professor of
Law, UCLA 1985-86, 1986, Columbia Law Review, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L.
Rev. 495
The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has
aptly termed the "distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism," 58 the criticism that, despite its famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one

," 59

utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of

values. Various versions of utilitarianism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over
pain, or the satisfaction of desires. 60 Whatever the specific formulation, the goal of maximizing some measure of
utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual. It reduces the
individual to a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but
does not count for anything independent of his monitoring function. 61 It also
produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize
utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account, the individual is expendable.
Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting only pleasure and pain permits
the grossest inequities among individuals and the [*509] trampling of the few in
furtherance of the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any
individual radically contingent. The individual's status will be preserved only so long
as that status contributes to increasing total utility. Otherwise, the individual can be
discarded.

Impact: destruction of the value to life

Violating rights in the name of survival destroys the value to life

CALLAHAN 1973 (Daniel,

institute of Society and Ethics, The Tyranny of Survival, p.

91-3)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative
power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and
political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the
right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for everlarger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded,
without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States
(1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the
Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid,
heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of
survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable
value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques
Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival
of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing
children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by

which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even
more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown
a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving
populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for

There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not

willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which
it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively
survival a "tyranny of survival."

invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at

my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern

for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore,
suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential
tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all
other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a
destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing . We come here to the fundamental moral
the hands of its enemies. But

dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any

if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a

right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival
without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them
worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then
there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival . It would
and all human achievements, and

be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.