Nov-Dec PF Topic Analysis: The War Between Cybersecurity and National Security

October 21st, 2025

Audrey Han

Resolved: The United States federal government should require technology companies to provide lawful access to encrypted communications.

BACKGROUND

The new PF November/December topic is a matter of balancing message security and encryption with the growing need for national security. Currently, many of the major messaging and communication apps like Signal, Wire, and Telegram all have powerful end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a communication method that scrambles data on the sender’s end, only unscrambling it when the message reaches the recipient’s device; by doing so, the contents of the message and the data of the users are not accessible by anyone else. This is often why apps like Signal are considered to be apps of extreme security: messages become unreadable to anyone but the sender and intended recipient, which allows them to be protected from 3rd party security breaches.

However, this security is often a double-edged sword. To law enforcement, E2EE can be an obstacle, as even under search warrants, service providers are unable to produce readable content. Therefore, individuals have to consent and can even control whether or not their communications are subject to lawful surveillance and searches.

Past attempts to gain better access to online communication have mainly surrounded the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was passed in 1994 and aimed towards telephones. Post-CALEA, telephone companies were forced to redesign their architectures to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital phone calls. In 2005, it was expanded to include Internet providers and also services like Skype, and the FBI tried to take advantage of this momentum to push for it to apply to all online messaging methods, but failed multiple times.

What are some common arguments that might apply to this topic?

AFF:

Global Coop:

In the status quo, it is extremely difficult for other countries to collaborate with the United States in terms of global cybersecurity because of dissonance when it comes to accessing data. If other countries want to request any data from US companies, they rely on Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties(MLATs), which require US government intervention to get the information from US providers through courts. Unfortunately, with the US court and government serving as a middle ground, it would often take an average of 10 months to even accumulate the data. This was because the Department of Justice’s Office of Internal Affairs would get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of requests, with the delay becoming so severe that international law enforcement individuals could not get the data they needed in time to help with investigations. Not only is the delay detrimental for cases of international terrorism and security, but countries would often not even bother to go through MLAT at the end of the day.

An attempt was made to support this issue through the CLOUD Act, which enables foreign law enforcement to directly access US data from service providers, but only under the condition that the country enters a series of executive agreements with the United States. However, only two countries, the United Kingdom and Australia, have executive agreements with the US today.

If we affirm, that makes it easier to collaborate with international agencies on global terrorism. Two main links here:

First, empirically, we have seen that when treaties like the CLOUD Act were passed (which gave faster, more direct access), they fundamentally altered the way foreign law enforcement agencies were able to share and access digital data across borders, with the United Kingdom transmitting more than 20,000 orders directly to US tech companies in a single year. The whole point revolves around how the CLOUD Act removes legal barriers, allowing it to speed up and increase access to electronic information held by US-based global providers. The affirmative fiat would essentially do the same thing: eliminate messy and lengthy lawsuits by giving immediate access to digital data.

Secondly, even without looking at past successful attempts at mobilizing the transfer of digital data, past studies demonstrate that digital evidence actually underpins the majority of crimes and is an essential part of the investigation. Unfortunately, the legal process to access the data serves as a bottleneck and becomes a major roadblock. Furthermore, the fact that the United States does not have a uniformly accepted law or policy for all companies creates several inconsistencies, making it difficult to decide how far privacy extends, and other legal framework clashes make it so that efficiency in transmitting data is significantly undermined. If we were to give all companies one uniform policy that applies everywhere in the majority of cases, there would no longer be as many dissonant clashes over what data is legal to share: every bit of data must be accessible, after all.

The impact of this can be scaled to any degree, depending on what kind of judge you are hitting. The affirmative offers a wide plethora of different impacts, which is unique since so many current events rely on cybersecurity and digital data.

Firstly, terrorist organizations are turning to digital platforms to spread their propaganda, target vulnerable populations, plan attacks, train, and incite others to engage in violent attacks. This is especially relevant in the status quo as while some may argue that terrorism is decreasing, this can be accounted for by the fact that the Taliban organization has officially become the main state actor in Afghanistan. While the quantity of deaths is decreasing slightly, the spread of terrorism and radicalization is at an all-time high, thanks to increases in digitalization. The impact of terrorism can be deaths, sexual assault, femicide, targeting of marginalized communities, if you wish to run a Structural Violence framework, or the standard nuclear war and extinction impact.

Other stock impacts could include: drug cartels, who use social media and also encrypted platforms to coordinate logistics, communicate, and control victims. Child traffickers, who use the dark web, encrypted communication devices, and the Internet to find victims, coerce them, and communicate with each other.

Positive Modelling

This argument centers around the belief that the United States is, and has the potential to be, a better model against authoritarianism. In the status quo, the uniqueness lies in 2 statements. To begin, data protection laws are currently very varied at the state, city, and even local levels. There is no comprehensive national privacy law (until you affirm). Next, empirically, this uncertainty and lack of a broad framework have caused tensions with other global leaders like the European Union, which has caused a prolonged US-EU “data dispute”.

These two together indicate a multitude of implications. Firstly, the United States is losing its foothold when it comes to cybersecurity, as it has been found that a lack of lawful access leads to weakening in cybersecurity, as law enforcement agents get stumped, and that countries in the European Union and around the world dislike unrecoverable encryption, which is what some US tech companies provide.

As a result, the United States loses footing in the global cybersecurity world, as it has been found that inconsistency means that we are at a disadvantage globally, which leads to countries like China and Russia taking advantage of the US weakness. In fact, the status quo is clearly not enough, as China has already begun to pass repressive cybersecurity laws that are influencing other countries. With a focus on restrictive content and state-controlled media, China’s cybersecurity laws are distinctly authoritarian.

If current cybersecurity law leaders like the EU, Australia, etc, were enough, we would not see the rapid decline of democracy and the rise of digital authoritarianism in the world as we do today. It is evident that current action is not enough. The only way the United States gains the ground to stand on to combat the spread of digital autocracy is if it gains better cybersecurity laws itself, which is simply impossible to occur under the status quo. The United States needs a clear, unified jurisdiction on data sharing and access in order to become a positive model and fight back against China and Russian influence.

The impact of this argument can be found in a classic human rights abuse, and if you want to scale for greater impact, argue that allowing world powers like China and Russia to gain greater influence in the world worsens the great power competition, which link-chains to nuclear war.

AI Monopoly

In the status quo, AI is growing at an extremely rapid rate, reaching rates of development and advancement beyond our control. The current AI Safety Clock reads 29 minutes to midnight, largely due to the threat that uncontrolled artificial general intelligence (UAGI) plays, because of the fact that it can function without human oversight. In fact, the impact of uncontrollable AI is already beginning to take root, as it has been shown that many large-scale language learning models were shown to be fully capable of making decisions to blackmail or even kill researchers to avoid being shut down.

The reason this is occurring is due to the fact that most of the jurisdiction surrounding regulation on AI is happening at a state level, and it is not enough. Due to the fact that there is no legal reason for private corporations to provide data, and national-level regulations that are stricter and harsher on loopholes don’t even exist, companies can continue developing AI at this dangerously fast rate. To strengthen the link of this argument, consider the fact that in the status quo, tech companies refuse lawmakers' demands for encryption access.

Affirming is the only action that would give the US government greater control and managerial supervision over the development of AI, giving us a check before anything escalates to uncontrollable measures. Otherwise, big companies would just continue to evade and dodge state rules.

The impact of uncontrollable AI is how rogue intelligence leads to extinction.

NEG:

Backdoors

In the affirmative world, we are basically allowing the creation of encryption backdoors to exist for all companies. Yet, one of the biggest issues is that if you’re giving the government a way to “backdoor”, or access data, that reduces safety for the company overall, especially since hackers or malicious actors can also find the same backdoors.

Empirically, when the government truly needed to obtain access to private data, they were able to successfully do so, even without the existence of an encryption backdoor. For example, when Apple resisted giving the FBI access to the texts of the San Bernardino shooter, the FBI was able to hire a firm that cracked the security regardless.

In order to understand how encryption works, it must be established that, at its core, encryption revolves around a series of mathematical operations. Secure encryption will use highly complex formulas and operations to ensure that there are private keys to encryption that allow only the recipient of the message to read it.

However, by affirming, it pushes for the creation of backdoors. In context, this would be designed or pre-planned weaknesses in the encryption algorithm. Historically, introducing backdoors has been a very dangerous ordeal. In 2006, the National Security Agency introduced a backdoor that would allow it to access encrypted content. Yet, no information could stay secure forever, which was revealed when Edward Snowden leaked all of the information to warn the public about the mass surveillance the United States government had on its citizens. At the end of the day, a backdoor for one is a backdoor for all.

Historically, backdoors linked to the government have resulted in hijacking and data theft. Juniper Networks, a company specializing in cybersecurity, had backdoors in its code that held connections to a faulty NSA algorithm. The very same backdoor was used by Chinese hijackers.

The impact of backdoors is severe. Terrorists have empirically used backdoors to gain access to data; an increase in terrorism means an increase in human rights violations, homicides, etc. Overall, giving countries like China greater access to our data can start a cyber arms race, which can lead to nuclear war and imminent extinction.

Loss of Trust

The uniqueness of this argument lies in the fact that in the status quo, the United States and China, both global superpowers, are locked in a neck-to-neck battle for dominance over technological innovation. In a world where technology, AI, and innovation drive society, whichever country secures a lead will tip the scales in its favor.

Unfortunately, the existence of backdoors leads to a severe loss of trust from domestic and international consumers. Empirically, after Snowden revealed that the government had the capability to conduct mass surveillance on texts, video calls, etc, through backdoors, there was a significant erosion of public trust in the government.

In 2023, ten years after the whistleblower incident occurred, the impacts of the leak can still be felt. 30% of people felt the need to restrict themselves and hide information from the government. In general, Americans grew more hesitant in expressing their opinions and felt a growing urge to silence their voice, leading to an indirect decline in democracy. You can add a hidden link here by arguing the negative consequences of the decline in democracy in the United States is uniquely terrible because the United States built its image after the First and Second World Wars that it was supposed to a model of democracy. The entirety of the Cold War was the United States’ attempt to drive out communism in the world and replace it with democracy. In fact, the democratic backslide in the US causes less favorable views globally and a decline in influence. With a decline in US influence, we will see countries like China, Russia, North Korea, etc, taking advantage again to spread authoritarianism, with democratic decline having negative impacts all around the world.

Repeat the authoritarianism impacts of the affirmative arguments!

Another link you can use when you craft this contention is that the mere perception of mass government surveillance leads to mass distrust.

However, democracy isn’t the only thing lost. In the immediate aftermath of Snowden, Forrester Research, just one tech company, reported that the estimated losses could be up to 180 billion dollars because consumers were growing increasingly wary of US tech companies, not wanting to invest or spend their money anymore.

Internationally, the consequences were widespread. Countries like France, Germany, and Brazil withdrew funding from foreign projects, no longer wanting to partner and store data in US tech companies due to cybersecurity fears. It was not a coincidence that not long after Snowden, China began making leaps and bounds in quantum computing.

In the affirmative world, it can be argued that by providing government access to data, it completely destroys any domestic and foreign trust in tech companies. Specifically, the impact through the foreign trust link is extremely detrimental because foreign investment is absolutely essential to technological innovation.

By affirming, we are giving China the leg-up to winning the innovation and tech race. The impacts are fatal and terminal: nuclear war and extinction.

Negative Modelling

This is the opposite of the positive modelling argument: by creating the standard that it is okay for the government to have access to private data, this will encourage countries to create invasive laws that ultimately lead to a global democratic backslide.

The uniqueness of this argument is in light of democratic decline globally, in the status quo, we are seeing growing measures of democracy in several countries, warranting a stronger fight to preserve resilience. Therefore, now more than ever, it is imperative that we take advantage of the momentum to combat authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, the affirmative prevents this from happening. Firstly, advocating for the creation of backdoors justifies government access to data. In the status quo, the US is a dominant force in setting technological standards. Therefore, it has been found that weakening encryption directly encourages other countries to provide the same open access to their data.

In fact, directly after the Snowden leak, China began to use it as justification for their propaganda and their own cyber-surveillance, which is known to be much more severe and widespread. Independently, Russia, a country known for its scarce Internet freedom and tight state control over media, also justifies its surveillance through “lawful access”, as the Yarovaya Law relies on government backdoors to function.

Data privacy is a key democratic value, and freedom from surveillance is essential to democratic resilience. Normalizing legal access to private data has empirically led to a rise in authoritarianism.

Cite the same impacts for a rise in authoritarianism.

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